The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (11 page)

What is it you love, when you’re in love? His clothes, his books, his toothbrush. All of the manufactured, formerly alienated commodities are magically rehabilitated as aspects of the person—as organic expressions of actions, of choice and use. After Eugene Onegin disappears in book 7, Tatyana starts visiting his abandoned estate. She looks at his pool cues, his library, his riding crop, “And everything seems priceless to her.” “What is he?” she asks, poring over his books, examining the marks left by his thumbnail in the margins.

So, too, do scholars now pore over the articles that once belonged to Babel. One historian has annotated the inventory of belongings confiscated from Babel’s Moscow apartment, his apartment in the Great Nikolo-Vorobinsky Lane. (In her memoirs, Pirozhkova writes about how impressed she was to learn about the existence of the Great Nikolo-Vorobinsky Lane, whose name literally means “Great Lane of Nikolai and the Sparrows”; Babel told her the street was named after the nearby Church of St. Nikolai-on-the-Sparrows, which had been built “with the help of sparrows, that is to say, in order to raise money for its construction, sparrows were caught, cooked and sold.” This was totally untrue, as
Vorobinsky
actually came from an archaic word for “spindle,” only coincidentally sharing the same adjectival form as “sparrow,” but Babel could spin a story out of anything.) Can one glimpse the person, in the list of objects?

Binoculars—2 pr.

Manuscripts—15 folders

Drafts—43 it.

Schematic map of the motor transport network—1 it.

Foreign newspapers—4

Foreign magazines—9

Notebooks with notes—7 it.

Various letters—400 it.

Foreign letters and postcards—87 it.

Various telegrams—35 it.

Toothpaste—1 it.

Shaving cream

Suspenders—1 pr.

Old sandals

Duck for the bath

Soapdish—1

The fifteen folders of manuscripts vanished, along with the nine others seized from Babel’s dacha. As for the personal items, they were held for three months before being surrendered to the state as “revenue.” According to receipts, the binoculars eventually brought in 153 rubles and 39 kopeks, but there is no record of what happened to Babel’s rubber duck.

When I try to remember how I ended up spending an entire summer in Samarkand, I am reminded of an anecdote about the folk hero Nasreddin Hoca. Walking along a deserted road one night, the story goes, Nasreddin Hoca noticed a troop of horsemen riding toward him. Filled with terror that they might rob him or conscript him into the army, Nasreddin leaped over a nearby wall and found himself in a graveyard. The horsemen, who were in fact ordinary travelers, were interested by this behavior, so they rode up to the wall and looked over to see Hoca lying motionless on the ground.

“Can we help you?” the travelers asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” Nasreddin Hoca replied, “it’s more complicated than you think. You see,
I’m
here because of
you
; and
you’re
here because of
me
.”

The scene immediately conjures itself: the road at nightfall, a dog doubtless barking somewhere, the smell of damp soil, the sound of approaching horsemen, and finally the faces peering over the wall, concerned and mildly astonished. This story encapsulates the riddle of free will in human history: a realm where, as Friedrich Engels observed, free wills are constantly obstructing one another so that, inevitably, “what
emerges is something that no one willed.” Nobody, least of all Nasreddin Hoca, willed for Nasreddin Hoca to end up lying in the graveyard that night. Nobody forced him there, either—yet there he was.

The chain of events that eventually deposited me in Samarkand was set into motion by my decision to study Russian literature: in itself an impulsive decision, not unlike jumping over a wall and ending up in a graveyard, although things on the whole worked out for me. Still, learning Russian takes a long time, and time passes so slowly in college. After two years of what felt like endless study, I still couldn’t pick up a Russian book and read it. I couldn’t understand a Russian movie without subtitles. If I tried to talk to Russian people, they stared at me like I was retarded. I decided that the only solution was to actually go to Russia.

In the spring of my sophomore year, I applied for a grant for a study abroad program in Moscow, and for two jobs: one as a personal secretary to a frozen-foods exporter from Peru who was negotiating with a Moscow-based supermarket chain, and the other as a researcher for the
Let’s Go
travel guides in Russia. The outcome of these applications wasn’t exactly bad, but it wasn’t anything I had willed, either. I got a travel grant—for half the amount I asked, not enough for the program tuition. The Peruvian entrepreneur said I could be his secretary—pending submission of a “recent full-body photograph.”
Let’s Go
offered me a job—in Turkey, because they said my Russian wasn’t good enough for travel in Russia. My Turkish, by contrast, was good enough for travel in Turkey. The previous year,
Let’s Go
had sent a young man who spoke no Turkish at all and who had consequently, as the result of a never fully explained “misunderstanding,” gotten beaten up by a pimp in Konya, after which he had a nervous breakdown, which was minutely documented in
Rolling Stone
magazine as part of an exposé.

I tried to make the best of things. I wrote a polite refusal to the Peruvian, I used the grant money to arrange a two-week stay in Moscow with some destitute academics, and for the rest of the summer I took the job in Turkey.

The poshest of the Turkish itineraries—Istanbul and the Aegean coast—was assigned to a Turkish-born archaeology graduate student called Erhan, who got himself kidnapped somewhere near Ephesus, only it then turned out that he hadn’t been kidnapped at all but had gotten married; nonetheless, he never came back to Boston, and never sent in any copy, either. My family was in an uproar—not about Erhan, because we didn’t know about that at the time, but because I had been given such a dodgy itinerary: the disputed territory of Northern Cyprus; the Mediterranean coast, where the Eurotrash discos ended only as you approached the Syrian border and had to start looking out for the terrorist PKK; and the backwaters of Central Anatolia. My mother claimed never to have heard of half the cities on the list.

One city was called Tokat, which literally means “a slap in the face.” This is also the title of a famous manifesto by the Russian futurists: “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”—or, as it is known in Turkish, “
Toplumsal zevke bir tokat
.” The “Ottoman slap”—a technique developed in the Ottoman army, where punching was considered bad form—is known as
Osmanli tokat
(or, more grammatically,
Osmanli tokadi
), and if you enter this term in YouTube you will see hundreds of videos of Turkish people getting slapped in the face, mostly by other Turkish people, although also, in one case, by a monkey. My mother had particularly bad feelings about my going to Tokat.

When I got to Ankara, where I stayed at my grandmother’s apartment, I gradually realized that my mother had taken steps to ensure my safety. She somehow convinced my aunt Arzu, an officer in the Turkish National Intelligence Organization,
to have me followed after sundown: not by an actual intelligence officer, but by one of their chauffeurs. I met my pursuer one night in Gaziosmanpa
a, where all the foreign embassies and five-star hotels are. I was wandering around an enormous, depressing nightclub called No Parking, trying to determine the price of an Efes Pilsner, when a man in a suit tapped my shoulder and informed me that my car had arrived.

“But I didn’t call a car,” I said.

Nonetheless, explained the man in the suit, the car was there. It had perhaps been sent by a distinguished lady, possibly some kind of a relative.

“She gave a very detailed description of you.” And, giving me a once-over, he repeated: “A very detailed description.”

I followed him outside. Another man in a suit was standing beside a parked car. When I understood who he was, and why he was there, I felt so beleaguered that I burst into tears.

“Please don’t upset yourself, miss,” the driver said, opening the door to the backseat.

I climbed in. We drove back through Gaziosmanpa
a, past the bulletproof glass cubicles in which soldiers were reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes, back to Kavakldere, where my grandmother lived. The driver addressed me only once, at the big intersection outside Swan Park. In Swan Park, vendors sell bags of almond crackers, which you can eat yourself or feed to the swans. As a child I was fascinated by these crackers, which do not contain almonds, but are shaped like almonds. This was my first lesson in metaphor versus metonymy. Here, stopped at a red light, the driver half turned to face me.

“Would you like an apple?” he asked.

“No thanks,” I said.

“I picked these apples myself,” he said. “With my own hands, from my own garden.”

From a plastic bag on the passenger seat, he produced a small apple.

The apple was hard, green, and misshapen, like the answer to some pointless riddle.

I left Ankara early in the morning, before my grandmother woke up. I left a note telling her not to worry, that I would call her soon. I did not specify my destination. Nonetheless, when I got off the bus in Tokat, I was personally greeted by the municipal water inspector. A melancholy bureaucrat with a mustache, he spoke of my aunt Arzu with great respect, and took me to visit the waterworks.

As I discovered over the next weeks, my aunt Arzu had mobilized a diverse group of contacts to look out for my welfare. One evening in Kayseri, the Turkish pastrami capital, I was collected from my hostel by a sergeant in the army. The sergeant drove me to a military kebab restaurant on top of an extinct volcano called Mount Erciyes. Skiing Turks, who I believe are not numerous, go there in the winter. At this time of year there was no snow on Erciyes. Outside the windows of the military restaurant, the sun was setting on some grazing sheep, dyeing them pink, like big dense clouds of cotton candy. It was strange to eat lamb while watching these pink fluffy sheep.

The sergeant asked about my studies. When I said that I studied literature, he asked whether I was reading the works of Ya
ar Kemal (a famous Turkish novelist who wrote his first short story during his military service in Kayseri). I was not reading the works of Ya
ar Kemal.