Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (8 page)

J

J
OSIK
, J
OSHELE
, J
OSEPH
.
We sat down next to the windows overlooking the plaza. I said to L
INDA
, “This is where you exclaim ‘I’ve never seen such a luxurious place before!’”

She glanced up from the menu. “Are you sure you have the money for this?”

“L
INDA
, I spent more than a year amassing the capital for this novel, thinking about a restaurant like this one (or even finer) and a redheaded girl like you. The budget for the dinner scene is more than adequate, as you’ll see. It’s only eight p.m. We’re just getting started.”

L
INDA
said, “I want to write you a letter.”

As if instead of a white tablecloth between us there were kilometers of arid landscape, desert dunes. She insisted. “There are some things I want to tell you.”

She wanted to gaze directly into my eyes via the immediacy that only epistolary communication can confer. Allow me to introduce here the first one she wrote that night.

Her first letter, as if from afar.

Hello J
OSIK
:

This morning I’d been having intense thoughts about a bag of oranges. It’s been about half a year since I’ve eaten an orange. When you told me about your plan, I thought you’d be able to buy lots of them. I don’t mean that was the only reason I agreed to go along with you, but sometimes I dream about baskets brimming over with oranges. I
would go to Morocco just for the oranges. From any port on the Black Sea we’d be there in five days. We could also eat our fill of bananas. You grew up surrounded by fruit, that’s why you’re such a good person. I realized this when we were strolling through the garden. I suffer from vitamin deficiencies in the spring; my gums bleed. Even my hair loses its shine. Your teeth are good, too, like a movie star’s. We’ll make a very good couple in Crimea. I like your plan more and more. Thanks to which I remembered oranges.

Bye.

Nastia

I.
The morning after our dinner at the Astoria, Maarif brought me a second letter from L
INDA
. She never explained why she was writing me again so soon. Apparently Maarif had made a jealous scene, which she brought to a close by punishing him with the task of serving as messenger boy between us. (And thus, after the vulgar fashion of a vulgar love triangle, was the plot thickening.)

Her second letter was full of lies.

Hello J
OSHELE
:

I have to tell you the truth about my nose. My real last name is Katz. I had a grandfather named Kats or Katz who went to America to make his fortune . . .

It couldn’t be true! My pursuit of S
OSHA’S
Hebrew tresses had brought me directly to a Katz! He was from L
VOV
: Bruno Schulz, Sholem Aleichem, an unexpected twist. I continued reading: . . .
came back ten years later and without so much as going home to give his children a kiss went to the
VILLAGE
tavern and spent eight hours there, not once stepping outside for a breath of air. He gambled away all his savings at cards, and then, with nothing else
to wager, his house. That same morning, before day had dawned, someone killed him out of pity. He didn’t have enough years of life left to go back to Chicago and save up the money to pay that debt. My grandmother nailed an ace of spades to the coffin and paid two gypsies to lead the funeral procession, throwing out playing cards to the crowd. It was a terrible vengeance. When I think that a quarter of my blood is Hebrew . . .

Oh, for God’s sake, only a quarter . . . But her lovely story was false. She had invented it to mortify Maarif and solidify her relations with me, a foreigner. As if to say: “Look, I’ve stolen lots of things.” She was going to Y
ALTA
with me; that was what I gathered from this message. Her decision was irrevocable and she had chosen this extravagant means of conveying it to me.

K

K**.
She had the translucent skin of a nocturnal animal. And the way she walked: as if she were trying to steal into the enemy camp, find the silken tent of the sleeping khan, and plunge the silver-handled dagger into his chest. I preferred her to other women because she looked straight into the depths of existence and would formulate questions that were as clear and hard as blocks of ice. Would I be capable of killing someone in order to steal, of killing in cold blood? Clean interrogations, straight from a mind that spun in the void, entirely uncontaminated by any practical matter. She evaluated the possibility of taking drugs or committing suicide in the same way. When we were traveling through Central Asia, I knew she was fully capable of stepping off any train at any unknown stop and disappearing into the
STEPPE
. I, lying on my cot, the train already back underway, gazing out at the scorched grass in stupefaction.

At first K** didn’t want to know I was a writer. The weighty tomes of my Vasari had impressed her, the vast collection of T
HELONIOUS
M
ONK
records, the K
LIMT
reproductions in my room, but since she thought too much she projected herself far from the insignificance of my articles, the sporadic evidence of certain publications of mine left lying about. When one day the mail brought a magazine containing a story I’d written about our stay at a mountain lake, this was her reaction: “It must be an однофамилец”—
odnofamilets,
someone with the same name—“no?” Which left me speechless. There is no way to
object to so simple a refutation. If someone denies your identity, he says to you, “You are not you,” and there exists no way of effectively demonstrating the contrary. Show your birth certificate, your identity card? Come on! These are mere pieces of paper. The solemn heart of the matter is that you are not you, you are anyone else but you. I could not convince her that this story was mine, that I was a writer—a beginner, yes, but a writer. Afterward, meditating on it, I reached the conclusion that she was right: the writer was someone else, not me. Wasn’t Nabokov, to give an example, someone else? We arrive in a world overflowing with books and are told to believe they’ve been created by people who are called Nabokov, Conrad, Borges, individuals who evidently had nothing to do with the appearance of books that, nevertheless, we attribute to them. K** would not have believed their assertions, their protests to the contrary, either; if she’d managed to convince me, why wouldn’t she have convinced them, too? As a result, I’ve lived all these years without being a writer. When this
ENCYCLOPEDIA
is published I will not be its author, only an
odnofamilets,
someone whose last name I share. Perhaps one day the magic of publicity will succeed in merging us into one and the same man, and then my face alone will suffice to accredit me as a writer, a solution that will be valid only as far as the marketing campaign extends: beyond that I would never be able to prove my condition ontologically. (For K**, the idea of God was not an effect of the existence of God.)

K
LINGSOR’S
L
AST
S
UMMER
(see: ⁄
LTIMO VERANO DE
K
LINGSOR
).

K
LIMT,
G
USTAV.
In the sense that a mane of hair in the hue known as red ochre held great meaning for me. I’d taken a long while to develop this passion but it had the impact of a sudden awakening when it finally
bloomed within me, as when we’re no longer hoping for anything from a boring opera and then, in the last act, a backdrop is lowered with a beautiful waterfall or a Chinese pagoda. To discover the splendor of red hair was to set foot for the first time upon the sands of a terra incognita: a new displacement of the soul which, within my sentimental education, acquired the worth of a pilgrimage to Tibet.

I.
At a spot along Nevsky Prospekt, L
INDA
, who, as I would later learn, was named Anastasia Stárseva, was waiting for me. She’d been playing the
FLUTE
in the portal of the Kazan Cathedral and T
HELONIOUS
stopped to listen to her. Moved, he thought of the M
AGIC
F
LUTE
and his adolescent years, and allowed himself to be carried off by the
FLUTE’S
trill, the human warmth of its metallic resonance. When he reopened his eyes onto that morning—Saint Petersburg, the cathedral’s colonnade—he discovered in surprise that a halo surrounded the flautist. Then he took a closer look and was left mute with astonishment. This was L
INDA’S
skin. As if it had been deliberately stretched across her cheeks in such a way as to retract, while she blew into the
FLUTE
, without forming any wrinkles, assimilating itself into the depths. Only a slight intensification of tone to a deeper red gave away the work of that skin, the subcutaneous flow of blood. (In winter, cheeks like that, brushstrokes of bright red applied by the
HARD FROST
, embellished the vestibule of a movie theater where we’d taken refuge to warm up: the vivid bloom of a naive doll’s painted face. Then a gradual return to a pale pink that bespoke such freshness, a quality that belonged to the centuries before the habit of sunbathing became widespread, and that was very well suited to the still life V** and I comprised, stretched out on the bed: the sheet’s heavy folds, the leaden gray of a vase, the inchoate drift of our disarticulated limbs, dark against pale.)

After a short pause, the flautist attacked a march with great resolve—the happy tremolo—then almost immediately interrupted her playing to remove her warm woolen cap. A luxuriant mass of red hair, rolled into locks thick as snakes, fell in cascades over her back, shoulders, chest. (
Oh how well doth a fair colour and a brilliant sheen upon the glittering hair! Behold it encountereth with the beams of the sun like swift lightning, or doth softly reflect them back again, or changeth clean contrary into another grace. Sometimes the beauty of the hair, shining like gold, resembles the colour of honey; sometimes, when it is raven black, the blue plume and azure feathers about the necks of does, especially when it is anointed with the nard of Arabia, or trimly tuffed out with the teeth of a fine comb; and if it be tied up in the nape of the neck, it seemeth to the lover that beholdeth the same as a glass that yieldeth forth a more pleasant and gracious comeliness.—The Golden Ass,
Being the Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, translated by William Adlington.) Monk stops short, fears he will lose his footing and topple into the abyss at his feet, and quickly raises his eyes beyond this splash of red ochre, locating the bridge with its winged lions, the canal’s gray parapet, to rest them there a while, the girl forgotten in the depths of his peripheral vision. His calm regained, he courageously resolves to focus his gaze on her once more: the apparition of Venus on the seashell, a chorus of little angels, their cheeks puffed out, blowing. A vision that filled Monk with indescribable tenderness: the great God who has placed another portion of that B
READ
. . .

I wonder if T
HELONIOUS
would ever have discovered L
INDA
if not for the miracle of that music. Be that as it may, he decides to follow her. He watches her pick up the hat full of small change, then separate the
FLUTE
into three parts and return them to their case; he watches
her take the arm of her friend in the overcoat and walk away from the cathedral toward Nevsky Prospekt . . .

K
VAS
.
Russia is an old country with strange fermented beverages and barrel staves lying in the mud. I jump from stave to stave to keep my boots from getting dirty, while dogs bark behind fences. At the corner—this city on the Volga where I’ve come to spend a few weeks, these low brick buildings—the same woman as yesterday is pouring out
KVAS
.

L

L
ENIN
(
the swine
). “A man’s at the door for you, quite the
BRODIAGA
,” R
UDI
murmurs in my ear.

I went out to the lobby. The rain had stopped and the day was still as bright as it had been at six that evening. I recognized my baggage handler’s checked jacket and black cap.

“Dimitri!”

“(It’s Kolia.)” “Kolia!” I turned to the doorman. “He’s a friend.”

“However did you find me? What a surprise! Come in and join us; no one will mind.”

Touched that I hadn’t put him out in the street, he lied, “I’ve been thinking about you all day.”

“Say no more,” I patted his back in an expansive gesture as if I were the owner of many a десятина of land and muzhiks in abundance.

The duchess studied him from behind the nonexistent monocle of her asperity. To the already questionable fact of having agreed to share a table with strangers was now added the inclusion of this personage, who bore a distinct resemblance to the sort of family man who ducks out of the house to fritter away his salary drinking wine next to fences.

Maarif, however, gave no sign of discontent. He had remained silent since his arrival. Now he was watching the general, who ate with ancestral appetite, as if he were just back from a difficult maneuver in the Sea of Barents. Maarif observed him ingesting the lustrous morsel of an anchovy, a small and agile dolphin lost between the general’s
crunching mandibles, his wire-rimmed glasses in the foreground shooting off alarming sparks and belying the faint smile on his lips. His thick fingers. Another little fish. A long swig of A
QUA VITAE
,
vodochka
. (And the army of workers and peasants clambering over the bars of the Winter Palace, overthrowing the two-headed eagle.) Which was more or less what Maarif said, something like: October was not in vain, the fight to eradicate the weed of insatiable gluttony. The leader of that revolution, comrade . . .

At the sudden explosion of the word L
ENIN
, Kolia’s eyes went blank as if a great rage had possessed him. He leapt to his feet and began striking his glass with a fork: “
Gentlemen!
No, Господа (
Gospoda
)! And forgive me if I offend anyone by calling you that. Be aware that I cannot speak the word with any degree of assurance, and without a feeling of falsity, but I refuse to insult you with the word товáрищ”—
tovarish
or comrade
—
“though perhaps the general . . .”

“No, that’s fine.
Gospada!
As in the old days:
Gospada ofitseri!”
(Meaning “
Señores oficiales!
” or “Esteemed officers!”)

a) The
IMPERIUM
in full-blown identity crisis. The TV had opened up the debate on how to address strangers in the street. There were certain hesitations regarding
gospodin—
its literal meaning, “master,” sounded offensive to some ears—and, too, over
citizen,
which conferred the stigma of not being a
tovarish: “
Release that billy club, citizen, you are under arrest.” Some had opted for судар (
sudar
)
—
“sir”—which was far too nineteenth-century, while the simplest people, vendors in the bazaars, had decided to stick with a term that left no room for doubt: мужч
на (
muzhina
), meaning, simply and plainly,
man.
Since all these forms of address entrained the insecurity of wearing someone else’s finery, I had seen polite, well-bred people recite each one in sequence, beginning with the stigmatized
tovarish
and ending with the laughable
gentleman.
(For years the phrase “Russian
gentleman
”
had been winning all competitions for who could come up with the shortest joke. “Once there was a Russian
gentleman . . .
”
And that was it. That was the joke.)

“
Gospada!
L
ENIN
. . . No, it’s incredible. If I told you that L
ENIN
. . . Well . . . The great deception,
gospada!
Have you all heard about the letter that was kept secret from us? Listen: there exists a letter from Marx in which he explained that the Communist experiment could not be carried out in our little Mother Russia. A letter perfidiously concealed from us by the Russian Marxists, by the
bolcheviki,
may the devil take them! And think about this,
gospada!
Everything around us was L
ENIN
. A veritable scourge. The Metro, the main avenues, the streets of the most insignificant
VILLAGES
, the young L
ENINIST
pioneers who went on to swell the ranks of the L
ENINIST
Komsomol. I’m astonished not to find here, at the entrance to this lovely restaurant, a plaque stating that L
ENIN
had lunch here on the afternoon of December 6, 1903, upon his return from exile in Siberia. And the falsehoods we were told about the penuries he supposedly experienced there! Ah, but they never explained how people lived in the
VILLAGES
during the time of the
CZARS
. Allow me to inform you: a veritable land of Cockaigne. A golden age when the peasants greased the axles of their wagons with butter . . . Ah, well . . . I was acquainted with the terrible Siberia of the Gulag. I was born in a forced labor camp and grew up among prisoners of conscience, for I was a real victim of the system,
gospoda!
I don’t want to spoil your dinner, but think about that. This young man . . . When I heard this young fellow say his name . . . I . . .”

b) Kolia turned out to be one of those philosophical
BRODIAGAS
who wander about the
IMPERIUM
. For a short period he had lived at the Nikolaevsky Station (Vronsky and Karenina: the morning mist) where he spent months reading these terrible truths while sipping
TEA
from the samovar of an out-of-service passenger car. He had descended into
the entrails of the deception, penetrating its deepest geological strata, and discovered a vast deposit of busts of L
ENIN
, the caryatids upon which the vault of the
IMPERIUM
rested. Every day new truths were published about the brief meter and sixty centimeters that L
ENIN’S
body had measured: we had learned of the lover who died of typhus in 1920 (that part we’d suspected: Nadezhda Krupskaya was just too horrible), his dreadful taste in literature . . .

“And believe me,
gospada,
the years I spent in Afghanistan, where I risked my precious life—
ta-ta-ta-ta-ta
! Run, Kolia!—chased by desert bedouins . . . I’d crossed the border in secret and was carrying a very important dispatch to our man in Kabul. And was constantly chased by those bedouins on their ships of the desert that look slow but in fact are very fast, those camels . . . Ah, why fatigue you? Your poor and humble servant successfully got past three enemy blockades, arrived at our embassy in Kabul on the verge of collapse, and managed to say ‘I have an important dispatch from Moscow’ before falling limp against the grille. Then the sentry looked out at me from between the heavy bars and shouted, ‘Show your identification,’ and what he meant was my party card: ‘Demonstrate, in some way, your loyalty to the regime.’ Imagine my amazement,
gospada!
I who was fighting in defense of little Mother Russia, and here these followers of L
ENIN
, the swine . . . In a word, I was taken prisoner by the bedouins and spent five years in captivity. I learned to speak their language. Of course . . .”—and he stared fixedly at R
UDI
, our waiter. “Salaam!” he proffered and made a deep genuflection, for he hated R
UDI
and therefore didn’t mind humiliating himself with that false demonstration.

“You’re mistaken, Kolia,” I told him. “R
UDI
is Moldavian, a land of magnificent wines. I don’t see why . . .”

But Kolia had recovered his composure. “Yes, well, you’re right. It’s just that those scallywags from the Caucasus have invaded our
cities . . . But that’s not worth talking about. Instead, let’s toast our glorious army.”

“A toast!” I shouted, too, like a Muscovite.

L
IFT
.
The people of Russia suffer from a compulsion to inventory the cosmos and make everything within it intelligible. The Bolsheviks, fervent adepts of social engineering, loved definitions so exhaustive that they left all meaning entirely dessicated. Every Metro car bore a plaque in minuscule text: “How to make use of the Metropolitan underground rail system.” The elevators (called
LIFTS
in Russian, too), those “infernal machines,” are also equipped with extensive instructions. Those for the elevator in my building read like this (as I waited for the lift I would read the text again and again, hypnotized):

REGULATIONS FOR USAGE OF THE

PASSENGER ELEVATOR

(Weight Limit: 500 kg or six persons)

1. This elevator is intended for the transportation of passengers, furniture, and other objects of quotidian use.
   

2. To summon the empty car, activate the button located next to its entrance on every floor, on the external side. After the call button has been pressed, wait for the car to arrive.
   

3. When the car arrives at the floor from which the call was made, the doors of both the elevator shaft and the car will open automatically.
   

4. Enter the elevator or place your cargo inside it without delay. If the doors close too soon, it will be necessary to press the call button again.
   

5. After entering or completing the loading of cargo into the car,
   press the button (situated on the panel in the interior of the car) for the desired floor. The doors will close automatically and the car will begin to move. In case of surcharge, the
   SURCHARGE
   light will illuminate on the control panel and the car will not begin to move.
   

6. Upon arrival at the desired floor, the doors will open automatically.
   

7. Should the elevator function defectively, press the
   STOP
   button for an emergency stop.
   

IT IS FORBIDDEN

8.
To attempt to accelerate or in any way tamper with the movement of the automatic doors, and to lean against them.

9.
To attempt to open the doors when the car is in motion.

10.
To attempt to open the doors of a malfunctioning elevator on one’s own. Such a procedure is extremely dangerous.

11.
To open the trap door in the roof of the elevator.

12.
For preschool children to travel on the elevator without being accompanied by an adult.

13.
To load the elevator with flammable liquids or objects of large dimension.

14.
To smoke in the elevator.

Let us take good care of the elevator. Do not permit mischief by children, vandalism by adolescents, or mistreatment of the elevator by adults!

(I always thought that one piece of chilling advice was missing:
When the doors of the elevator open, please ascertain that the floor is there prior to entering
.)

More about elevators: “The Angel of the Bridge,” by John Cheever.

L
IGHT OF OTHER DAYS, THE
.
In close-up a movie screen is not the homogenous canvas we imagine from our seats in the ninth row but a sheet of polyvinyl riddled with minuscule orifices almost invisible to the eye. Thus we see only a small percentage of the projected image; a great part of it passes through these tiny orifices and lands in the terrifying void behind the screen. When the brick wall that stands back there reaches a certain level of saturation, a process of spontaneous emission of all the films projected over the years takes place. Since the force of this emission rarely exceeds in energy that of the primary emission—the one from the projector—the phenomenon was only quite recently discovered. In the mid-seventies, Kliuchariov and Alimushkin, two
BRODIAGAS
who’ve now become famous, chose to spend a cold winter night in an abandoned movie theater on Nevsky Prospekt. At three in the morning, unable to sleep because of the excess of light that flowed across the screen, they discovered a phosphorescent flickering of inverted forms on the polyvinyl. The inexplicable nature of the phenomenon meant that the secret had to be kept for almost two decades. This fortunate interdiction spared us extensive monographs on the lousy movies of the 1930s and the agitprop films of the 1920s. Now, in 1991, titles from 1918 “and on” (that is to say, and earlier) have begun to appear. The face of one beautiful woman in particular persists against the white background.