Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (18 page)

“I’m leaving, T
HELONIOUS
.”

“Dear God, no. Call me José, J
OSEPH
, if you want.”

“
Well, I’m going to New York, J
OSEPH
.
”

“Speak Russian, Anastasia, for the love of God. Don’t you understand? I was one step away from death. And what’s more
olvídalo
(in the clear sense of
forget about that
). There’s nothing in the O
CCIDENT
either. I’ll explain this to you in detail if you like. A voice whispered in my ear and I heard it very clearly, as I’m hearing you now. I wept in rage, thinking about how to proceed with our journey, get more money. I was never that rich, I lied to you, all those stories about Chinese merchandise and chartered cargo ships
. . .
but a young boy’s voice said to me, in a whisper ‘A long way down since the time you had everything.’ It was like being kicked in the head. It’s a lengthier title than B
READ FOR THE
M
OUTH OF
M
Y
S
OUL
, but even more apt.”

“No. I knew you were right when I saw you stretched out on the awning.”

“But I didn’t
see
anything as I was falling. I thought I would have time to study the trigonometric increment of the lines, but I didn’t
see
anything. Only the final impact. That’s what awaits us. I was impatient to tell you.”

“That’s ridiculous, T
HELONIOUS
. What about
As I Lay Falling
? I could find two or three other good titles . . .” L
INDA
suddenly broke off and raised her palms to her temples.

“Are your temples throbbing?”

“Yes . . . No . . . Look . . .” she went on. “Aren’t your striped pajamas the same pattern as the fabric of that awning? Weren’t you trying to make me see precisely that sort of thing? As if when you fell . . .”

“My God, you’re right! I hadn’t noticed it.”

“. . . you became organically integrated into its pattern. Seeing you down there with your arms outstretched, like a starfish against the rippling seabed, I understood everything. It was a very eloquent ending. I thought you’d arranged it all. Even if you didn’t, you should thank R
UDI
for it.”

“But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam.”

(
But not New York, Nastia; at least Rotterdam
. Anastasia was making the same mistake as everyone else in Muscovy. A momentary and foreseeable error. There were many worlds within
frivolity.
I had tried to expand the perception she had of her beautiful little boots, to segment them into the fifteen lacquered nesting dolls of their softness, their texture, their pretty silver buckles,
et cetera,
although—I now saw with absolute clarity—it had been naive of me to anticipate that Anastasia would develop in that direction. In reality, she would never succeed in living in both worlds (that of heightened vision
and
that of the most sublime
frivolity
) with the requisite intensity or abandon. The boots she was wearing, so comfortable, polished with such great skill, did not touch her soul. She would never paddle happily in the sea where I’d moved with such ease. The time when I interrupted her dissertation on ice cream, shouting
VANILLA ICE
in jubilation—which was not the
flavor that the waiter was bringing us but the joy I felt at being able to bring together, in my novel, the name of that rapper with a passage taken from Proust—she was left in a state of utmost incomprehension, and since I could provide no satisfactory clarification of the reasons for my happiness, she came to believe that I’d shouted
VANILLA ICE
because his music interested me as much as T
HELONIOUS’S
did and that these two artists’ respective achievements allowed for some element of equivalence. I mean that it cost her a great deal of effort to discern what was present, what was rapidly taking place before her eyes, and though I had confidence that a woman of her talents would succeed in doing so at some point in the future, the most I could boast of, in the specific case of L
INDA
, was my success in making her adopt a lighter outlook on life, one that overlooked all the duties she’d always thought it necessary to carry out. You’ll tell me that she was an atypical case, out of sync with the times, someone into whom the Doctrine and its central theses had sunk deep roots. Agreed. In essence, this was the cause of her current decision. She had come very far, though without undergoing any radical change. She’d suddenly begun to abhor her gray former life and was dreaming of a career as a model. She was going to New York.)

“Or wherever. To leave Russia.”

“Kolia told me he’d like to go into the forest and never return. A day like today, with a
HARD FROST
, so that the snow covers his tracks. He’s been talking about this all morning. He says he would lie down on a fallen cedar and let himself die of the cold, you know? Like those poor
BRODIAGAS
we saw in the south. He also told me that when people leave the north they carry the bodies of their dead away with them. The perma
FROST
keeps them intact.”

“Wait,” L
INDA
interrupted me, visibly upset. She stood up, almost knocking the chair over. “I’ll bring you some water.”

Five minutes later I heard a car engine roar to life beneath the window. It was true: she was going to New York. By way of good-bye she’d said, “Wait,” clearly in the sense of my own summer sermons. I wept. I’m not ashamed to confess it. Tears rolled down my cheeks, uncontrollably. (Then, on the chair, I found a little bit of the
LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS
, the video of our fateful
CATWALK
.)

When we switched on the TV the next morning we learned of the fall of the
IMPERIUM
. I felt no emotion whatsoever. I merely noted that Mikhail Sergeyevich, the last emperor, had sent us a message that was full of meaning (apparently he, too, was in on the secret of
FLUORIDE
). The following is, undoubtedly, a fact of
general interest,
and I mention it here so that it may pass into history:
The last emperor met with a rock band (a very bad one, the Scorpions) hours before reading his resignation speech on television.
A most astute gesture on his part, no doubt.

In essence, this had been a time as old as any other. (Darius, king of the Persians; Chang Hua, the first Chinese
ENCYCLOPEDIST
; the Russian explorer Афанáсий Ник
тин [Afanasy Nikitin] who made the long journey to India in 1466.)

V
ERSE
.
In Russia they do write blank
VERSE
, as well, composed for declamation as a litany, the singular emotion of a monotonous buzz in the ears. Nevertheless, people on the street will acknowledge only what rhymes, and everyone knows long sequences of
VERSE
by heart. A young female trolley conductor whom I took back to my room one night with very clear intentions stood on the bed and declaimed the reasons for her refusal of me, which were taken from a long poem by Т
тчев (Tyutchev). Dumbstruck, I desisted from my endeavor, for I could not oppose a woman who contained so much poetry. When at last, exhausted and out of breath (we’d ingested a good deal of
AQUA VITAE
), she went to the bathroom to take her clothes off, I already
had another subject for an indispensible book: “Moscovy for Beginners.” Declaiming long stanzas of rhyming
VERSE
is nothing, don’t be impressed; it’s a juggler’s art, the same sort of popular erudition as a knowledge of many different dance steps would be for other more immediate peoples whose vision is less permeated by literary culture. Essentially, my trolley conductor, the nurse who took care of a friend, the gentleman who read me his deplorable
VERSE
for five full Metro stops, or the
BRODIAGA
I saw in an underground passageway trying out cadences and rhymes with movements of his head—when I asked him as I went by if he was writing
VERSE
, I turned out to be correct: he read me the one he’d just composed (heavy spikes of wheat, white birch trees) and offered to write me two salutatory stanzas at fifteen rubles per word—essentially, all these
VERSIFIERS
were, in the end, very elementary, uninformed, crude, whatever else you like.

V
ILLAGE
(see:
AGRICULTURE
).

W

W
HEN ME YOU FLY
, I
AM THE WINGS
(S
I HUYES DE Mí YO SOY LAS ALAS
—E
MERSON
).
Someone, a woman you met in a pension in Y
ALTA
, an inconsequential summer romance, suddenly initiates a correspondence and the very first letter leaves you disconcerted by her refined mastery of the epistolary art.

In Russia, words retain a force that has been lost in the O
CCIDENT
. I’ve received letters that could be published without the addition of a single comma, and yet which I knew to have been written in a frenzy of jealousy, in a single sitting, at a kitchen table amid pots of jam. A kitchen I imagined perfectly: the house lost in the immensity of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the point thousands of kilometers distant to which her astral existence had displaced her and from where she was sending me these letters like radiograms containing her coordinates, the chronicle of her very dull life: the hated husband, the fearful gloom of the world outside. The fortuitous intersection of our orbits in that pension in Y
ALTA
had activated all her reserve systems—which had been awaiting the signal of an embrace for years—and now she was sending me detailed reports on all her functions: “You won’t believe me, but I haven’t stopped thinking of you since that night we spent at the lookout. My heart . . .” Nineteenth-century formulae that retain all their power in Russian, a language well suited to descriptions of delicate states of being such as nostalgia, the absence of a beloved, the unbearable sorrow of a rupture. A system of categories that slammed into me with the crushing force of a sudden crash to the ground after
slipping on a banana peel. In her letters I found fresh ideas, truths I myself had taken a very long time to discover, and her citations evinced an intimate mastery of such topics as music, sculpture, and the arts in general. (I’d had a friend, E**, who would sometimes speak to me in perfectly calibrated verse, stringing together miraculous improvisations on whatever it was she wanted to say to me at the moment: “Take the teapot from the fire, would you be so kind?” “Do me the favor of toasting up a slice of that nice bread!” and “Don’t you agree we should make the most of the sunshine and go out for a stroll?” and so forth. To receive three perfect letters from this woman, letters I’ve kept all these years, barely surprised me at all, for it was clear that her breast harbored great quantities of literature in the rough. But the truly curious thing was that I’d also received admirably well-written letters from simple bookkeepers, nurses, attendants at child-care facilities. All of them exceptionally skilled at dashing off five handwritten pages, the complete naturalness of the epistolary novel, a genre I’d always thought of as rather too clever, somewhat forced.)

I’d picked up this letter at the porter’s lodge as I was on my way out to an appointment. In the café, I asked K** to give me a second, tore open the envelope, and began reading. The woman described our visit to the lookout the evening before my departure and asked if I still loved her, if I remembered the starling chirping in the hedge that woke us in the morning. Her letter contained such tenderness, such promises of eternal fidelity, such certainty that I’d been desperately needed during the days since we’d last seen each other, that for a second I weighed the possibility of taking a plane, traveling 5,000 kilometers, and living with her for a while in her log cabin, lighting the woodstove in late afternoon, shoveling snow from the doorstep. Hurriedly I began my response on a paper napkin, “As you can see, I haven’t even waited to get home before answering your letter.” But when I raised my eyes to
find the right word, the turn of phrase that would say precisely what I felt, I encountered the astonishment on K**’s face and my plan vanished in an instant. What sense would it make to travel so far when I have a woman right here within reach,
et cetera
?

W
ONDER
, S
TEVIE
: T
HE
S
ECRET
L
IFE OF
P
LANTS.
Through my capillaries ran the sap of a hundred thousand melodies, green globules that sometimes passed through the alkaline barrier of the cell walls and burst forth upon my lips in the form of song. Many of these particle-songs had names that were incapable today of reactivating the nervous centers of those intense sessions of listening—“B
OOGIE
S
HOES
,” “T
HE
S
ECRET
L
IFE OF
P
LANTS
”—now more or less forgotten but that, during my adolescence, had been the key to deciphering the messages of truth we receive from the world’s
RADIO
broadcast centers. At night, immobile in the penumbra of my room, I twirled the receiver’s dial tirelessly until the galvanic discharge of
That’s the way, oh-hoh, un-huh, I like it, oh-hoh, un-huh,
came pouring through, and I would shake my leg like a frog in an experiment, kicking out reflexively in response to the electric shock, and raise my head, eyes full of life. I should have explained all of this to L
INDA
.

I.
In Y
ALTA
, we rented the
DACHA
of a former member of the Politburo
,
a small mansion next to the sea with a lovely little terrace for the sunsets. One afternoon, as I was relaxing on its warm tiles, an unforeseen sublimation occurred, the random union of certain molecular strings, and a clean and beautiful melody blazed forth in my mind. I hummed it twice without being able to believe my good fortune, leapt to my feet, and intoned an involuntary recitative, droning in a full and resonant voice—the voice of another man who lived in my bosom and spoke through my mouth—phrases that alluded to the beauty of the view, the warmth of summer, L
INDA
and myself. I was like an automat
that had connected itself all on its own to the world centers of
RADIO
broadcasting and I laughed and apostrophized, emitting spine-tingling threnodies, ululating in diabolical tones. That was me, you must all believe me, singing out a sea of well-being.

This unexpected
rap-
ture awoke L
INDA
who came out to the terrace. “L
INDA
,” I cried in jubilation, “I have the solution! To hell with P.O.A. Just one song! It’s genius! It’s fantastic! We’ll sell a hundred thousand copies this year! Listen!”

L
INDA
heard me out for a long time without understanding. She didn’t know a thing about jazz or Brazilian litany, or syncopation: her primary cultural stock consisted of long phrases performed on the oboe. Finally she slipped her verdict into a pause for breath: “Gregorian or plain chant.”

I went on for five more stanzas before the light of that revelation stopped me short.

“Precisely. Gregorian chant. The beginning and the end. Do you think that’s proof of an exhaustion of all forms? Great, perfect. Look, I know something about this, too.” (I whistled the entire first movement of Vivaldi’s concerto in E minor for bassoon and orchestra, impeccably.)

L
INDA
listened, flabbergasted. “Truly you astonish me. Wherever did you hear such good music?”

“But I told you about my CD collection. The best performers in the world: Horowitz, Kissin, Richter, almost all of them Russians (or
Jews,
whichever you like), though the point is not to linger over that. To go forward or
. . .
backward. Think of it: in one Handel concerto there are at least ten tunes that could be massive
hits.
When the violins attack the second movement”—I whistled it, inspired—“don’t you hear a number one song on the
Billboard
top one hundred? This melody would be perfect for those
VERSES
by Blake:

The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,

The humble Sheep a threat’ning horn;

While the Lily white shall in love delight,

Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.

Then a block of energetic brass, blowing their hearts out . . . I have goose bumps! Two or three more repetitions of the chorus, then the song ends on a very high note and the brass cut off at one fell swoop. Nothing could be easier . . . No, L
INDA
, for the love of God! Those E
URASIAN
sonorities; I’d lose all my money. Bring me some lined paper, please. I’m tired of recording ballads I never manage to work through to my own satisfaction. Now that you’re here and you know about music (though not precisely the kind required) . . . But listen: don’t you hear? It’s not a matter of the word that becomes music as it joins the rhythm, but the inverse process: the music coming undone into strips of words, the unconscious surfacing of strings of melody in their virgin state which, when intermingled and subjected to
TECHNOLOGICAL
processes, acquire the consistency of song. And we could add in that snatch of folk tune you were humming just now, that
ROMANZA
—why not?”