Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (19 page)

Y

Y
ALTA
.
Sometimes I woke up to find myself possessed by the idea of boarding a plane and flying to Y
ALTA
. The irascible beauties I walked past every day in the Metro flowed south during the summer to toast their bodies in the sun, in a mood that could not be improved upon. A complete sampling of all that was on offer in the I
MPERIUM
—a world that extended from the luminous green of the subtropics to the white of the polar circle—deployed on deck chairs within a few meters of the sea. And me there, strolling along the shore, registering the astonishing diversity of E
URASIA
, which is to say, of much of the planet: pale blondes from the Baltic, Ukrainians with thick braids and honeyed skin, unsleeping Kazakhs, graceful Tartars; the daughters of hunters and reindeer herders who adorned their simple Taiwanese bathing suits with shamanistic trinkets and would often come down to the beach wearing slippers trimmed in otter skin: the cold breath of the tundra.

I.
Y
ALTA
is the nervously scribbled note, the sweet little foot. I knew women who, over the slow fire of a twilight on the beach—coarse sand inside their dresses—would isolate every fracture in an unhappy marriage, rubbing salt into the wounds of their lives. Late at night, I would hear the sighs and ayes that floated across the boulevards of Y
ALTA
and think of Ивáн Бýнин (Ivan Bunin)—one of the sources for this entry—the writer who transported me to a new perception of the Russian language, which included “gentle breezes,” damp petticoats, burning thighs. In the 1936 short story “The Caucasus” an officer arrives on the shore of the Black Sea, in search of his adulterous wife.

Он искал ее в Геленджике, в Гаграх, в Сочи. На другой день по приезде в Сочи, он купался утром в море, потом брился, надел чистое белье, белоснежный китель, позавтракал в своей гостинице на террасе ресторана, выпил бутылку шампанского, пил кофе с шартрезом, не спеша выкурил сигару. Возвратясь в свой номер, он лег на диван и выстрелил себе в виски из двух револьверов.

He looked for her in Gelendzhik,
in Gagry, in Sochi. The day after he arrived in [Y
ALTA
], he went for a morning swim in the ocean, then shaved, changed his underwear, and donned a military jacket that was white as snow. At lunch on the terrace of the hotel restaurant he drank a full bottle of champagne, drained a cup of coffee laced with chartreuse, and unhurriedly smoked a cigar. Then he went back to his room, lay down on the sofa, and fired two pistols into his temples.

Z

Z
IZI
.
In Paris, they called her Z
IZI
, short for Zinaida Pavlovna. She had been a lady-in-waiting to the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and in 1918 she fled straight from Tsarskoye Selo, the V
ILLAGE
of the C
ZARS
, to France. One limpid Monday in 1923, penniless, in despair, she went to a tryout for models at the haute couture salon of monsieur D**. The designer watched her move toward him, born along smoothly on those foreign legs of hers, gliding soundlessly as a swan: her grace, the fingers she extended in greeting as if they were alien things that did not belong to her. Monsieur D** dismissed all the little shop girls and seamstresses who had modeled for him until then. This was the start of another Russian period no less important than the one organized by Diaghilev years earlier. Understand? The exhaustion of trench warfare, gas creeping along the lowlands, the thrust of bayonets, the disaster of General Samsonov’s defeat on the Prussian front, the famine that stalked Saint Petersburg during the winter of 1919; a tremendous effort of nature and the intersecting tensions of history, all were necessary, all were translated into the elegance of the former Russian nobility on the
CATWALKS
of Paris: fashion modeling transformed into an art. You could cause exactly the same furor today, Linda, I imagine it perfectly. These Russian women, so strikingly beautiful; you, my angel, so perfectly in accord with my ideal of beauty . . . Russian beauty.

I.
I notice ripples of light reflected on the canvas cloth beneath which I am slowly sipping a lemonade—Y
ALTA
, the sea, L
INDA
there beside me—and half-close my eyes. (At the next table, two Mongolian
girls begin speaking in their harsh and unmistakable language, full of tongue clicks and hypnotically rolled
r
s. I follow that avalanche as the hare does the serpent’s rattle. I know perfectly well that if chance had sent me off to live in captivity in Inner Mongolia I would eventually have kissed the hard lips of the younger one, would have tapped her white teeth with the nail of my index finger, untangled that hair, wiry as a horse’s mane.)
Full of life, now, compact, visible
(Whitman). (
Lleno de vida hoy, compacto, visible
.) Me.

José Manuel Prieto
was born in Havana in 1962. He lived in Russia for twelve years, has translated the works of Joseph Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova into Spanish, and has taught Russian history in Mexico City. He’s the author of
Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire
and
Rex
. He currently teaches at Seton Hall University and lives in New York City.

Esther Allen
teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has translated a number of books from Spanish and French, including the Penguin Classics volume
José Martí: Selected Writings
, which she edited, annotated and translated. She has been a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, has twice been awarded Translation Fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been decorated by the French government as a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.