The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (36 page)

We were all living in San Francisco by then. Keren and Ilan were sharing an apartment with Matej and Daniel in Noe Valley. I had moved to Twin Peaks, where winds howled all day and all night, and giant clouds rushed across the street as if in a hurry to get somewhere, occasionally revealing dramatic views of the city. The others all made fun of me for moving there—Ilan called it Wuthering Heights—but I didn’t care. I barely saw any of them anyway, once I stopped talking to Matej.

That spring, Keren wrote me an e-mail announcing that she was pregnant. Several months later, she invited me to a going-away party for Matej: he was apparently moving back to Croatia for good. “I know you guys still aren’t speaking, but it seems absurd not to invite you,” Keren wrote. I didn’t go to the party.

Nearly a year passed before I next saw Keren. She and Ilan had moved back to Stanford when the baby was born, and we met for lunch one day when I was on campus to use the library. We walked from her apartment to a French café on California Avenue, the kind of bourgeois establishment we never used to frequent. It was one of the almost oppressively perfect days that succeed one another at Stanford in the spring and fall, so uniform that they might have been manufactured on an assembly line. We sat outside at a table in the sun. Conversation turned to the subject of René Girard, who had recently been elected to the French Academy.

“Good for him, I guess,” I said.

“Yeah,” Keren said unenthusiastically, picking at her salad. “But part of me thinks it’s grotesque and obscene, given what happened to Matej.” As I was debating whether to ask what she meant, Keren’s daughter, Malka, who was teething, began to make discontented noises. Keren absentmindedly stuck a finger in her mouth. As Malka was happily sucking at Keren’s finger, an unknown middle-aged woman descended upon us, beaming: “What a beautiful baby! Whose is she?” Not waiting for an answer, she peered into my face: “Is she yours?”

What weird people there are in the world, I thought. Why would
Keren’s
finger be in
my
baby’s mouth?

Keren identified herself as the mother, which made it her turn to have her face peered into. Finally the woman walked away across the street, still beaming. Curiosity overcame my reserve: “So what’s Matej doing now, anyway?” I asked.

That was when I learned that Matej had dropped out of Stanford more than a year ago. He had given up first drinking, and then smoking. He had sold or given away all his belongings, and applied to a theology program in Zagreb. Upon the conclusion of this program, he had entered a monastery on a small island in the Adriatic. Keren and Ilan had received one communication from him, an e-mail describing the scenery on the island.

“He says it’s beautiful,” Keren said.

I found myself thinking back to a long-ago conversation, when I had told Matej that he was a destructive element in the lives of others. He had surprised me by not objecting. “What can I do?” he had asked, and it sounded like a real question.

Now he had done something—like a novelistic hero, he had achieved a deathlike conversion, renounced narrative. There was a chapter in
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel
that explained it perfectly, a chapter on the secret affinity between the novelistic
vaniteux
and the religious ascetic. The “strange strength of soul,” which enables Julien Sorel to scale such brilliant heights in his romantic and political life, Girard writes, is exactly the same as the strength called upon by the man of God to resist his worldly desires. One renounces insincerely, to get what he is renouncing, while the other renounces sincerely, to become closer to God, but the motion is identical. This kinship also links the demonic Stavrogin and the saintly Myshkin: “Like Stavrogin, Myshkin acts as a magnet for unattached desires; he fascinates all the characters in
The Idiot
,” Girard writes. “We can understand why the Prince and Stavrogin have the same point of departure in the author’s rough draft.”

I was still in a daze when I got to the library. It was a day for surprises: sitting at the front desk, larger than life, was
Miguel, who was supposed to have died of cancer at least four years ago. “Long time no see,” he said, beaming.

“It’s fantastic,” I stammered. When I got to the stacks I kept staring dumbly at the call numbers, unable to determine whether PG 3776.B7 came before or after PG 3776.B27. Eventually I found myself back downstairs, logged into a computer terminal, writing a pointless e-mail to Matej. I told him that I had been strongly impressed to learn that he was in a monastery, and that I wished him luck. To my amazement, a reply arrived the following day. “Dear Elif,” Matej wrote,

Thank you for your kind wish. I wish for you all the things I wish for myself. I have been living at the monastery for about four months now. I joined the order of discalced Carmelites, whose full name is: the Order of Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel. In the monastery I’m in charge of setting the tables and cleaning the dining hall. Until a few days ago I was the substitute, but now I’m already the main mess boy. You can see that, as usual, I make quick progress . . .

The main mess boy—I shook my head in wonder. Was he Fabrizio in the charterhouse or Julien in the seminary? Would we all live to see Matej be made cardinal?

The following year, Fishkin actually tracked down the Carmelites’ website and found several photographs of Matej taking his vows, together with two other novices: one looked like a twelve-year-old schoolboy, while the other, who had a shaved head and wore a heavy metal cross, resembled a repentant convict. One photograph showed a somehow obtuselooking friar pulling the black habit over Matej’s downcast head; another showed the three novices standing outside in the sunlight, Matej squinting with a familiar, irritable air.

The last photograph, however, captured Matej in an expression I had never seen before, the eyes watchful, the mouth set in a somehow childish line. It had been taken at such close range that I recognized, with a jolt, a birthmark on his neck that I had half forgotten. As a child, Matej had once told me, he used to lock himself in the bathroom, desperately searching in the mirror for differences between his face and that of his father, whom even at that time he resembled to a remarkable degree; he would invariably find the differences, and reduce himself to tears with the thought that he was certainly a prince, lost forever to the throne.

On my third day in Florence, I tore myself from Dostoevsky long enough to visit Santa Croce, to see Dante’s cenotaph. The cenotaph hadn’t yet been constructed in 1817, when Stendhal famously visited the basilica and was awestruck by the tombs of Alfieri, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo: “What men! What an amazing group! And Tuscany can add to their number Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch . . .” Happening next upon Volterrano’s frescoes of the four Sibyls, Stendhal was utterly overwhelmed:

I was already in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I saw it up close—I touched it, so to speak. I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations . . . leaving Santa Croce, I experienced palpitations . . . my spirit was exhausted, I walked in fear of falling.

In the mid-1980s, based on a decade-long study of 106 tourists admitted to the psychiatric ward at Florence’s Santa
Maria Nuova hospital, Italian scientists identified a new psychopathology:
la sindrome di Stendhal
, a state triggered by beautiful works of art and characterized by “loss of hearing and the sense of color, hallucinations, euphoria, panic and the fear of going mad or even of dying.” Unmarried European men between the ages of twenty-five and forty were found to be particularly susceptible. The average hospital stay was four days.

Walking over the tombs of knights and scientists, among my fellow tourists—still-recognizable humans who had been transformed into semi-robotic zombies, hypnotized by the screens of their digital cameras—I kept a close eye on the men in the unmarried, European, twenty-five-to-forty-year-old category, looking for signs of Stendhal’s syndrome.

In a coincidence that Girard would appreciate, a Brazilian neurologist recently diagnosed Dostoevsky himself with Stendhal’s syndrome. The diagnosis was based on both the “impressions left in the novel
The Idiot
, which was practically all written in Florence,” and Anna’s testimony of Dostoevsky’s reaction upon seeing Holbein’s
Dead Christ
in Basel the previous year. The great proto-existential novelist had spent fifteen or twenty minutes standing before the painting, riveted in place. “His agitated face had a kind of dread in it,” Anna wrote, “something I had noticed more than once during the first moments of an epileptic seizure.”

In
The Idiot
, Dostoevsky has Prince Myshkin encounter a reproduction of the
Dead Christ
in Rogozhin’s house. Myshkin, too, is bowled over by what appears to him to be Nature itself made visible “in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has clutched, crushed, and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws . . .” As Joseph Frank has observed, “no greater challenge could be offered
to Dostoevsky’s own faith in Christ the God-Man than such a vision of a tortured and decaying human being.”

The location of Dostoevsky’s house in Florence was pointed out to me by an old Stanford classmate, the poet Eugene Ostashevsky, who had been living for the past two years on the Via Guicciardini: the Maison Idiot formed a permanent feature of his jogging route. Eugene and his wife, Oya, were now preparing to leave Italy for good, and, on the evening after our visit to Santa Croce, Max and I spent several hours helping them vacate their apartment. Having filled several suitcases with old clothes and shoes, we set out to carry them to a metal bin some blocks away, for donation to the Church. “An archbishop will be wearing this someday,” Eugene remarked, stuffing a woman’s tangerinecolored leather jacket into a plastic bag. On the streets the air was heavy and hot. Max, who had been given a suitcase with no handle, was gamely clutching it to his chest. At dinner afterward we all drank a good deal of Chianti, which, with the heat and the exertion, went straight to my head. Among my confused recollections of the evening, I remember Eugene saying that if he were to start out as a college student again, right now in 2009, he would study Islamic fundamentalism, because that was the richest and most significant cultural phenomenon in the contemporary world.

“Really?” I asked. “You mean you wouldn’t do literature?”

He stared at me. “You mean you
would
do literature? Knowing what you now know?”

I thought about it. “I’m too shallow to study Islamic fundamentalism,” I said. “You know . . . if it isn’t a thing of beauty . . .”

“Well, it is, in its way, a thing of beauty—it has beautiful aspects.” He said something about the mathematically beautiful complexity of terrorist informational networks. I found myself staring at the ceiling, at a stain that resembled a disembodied nose. “. . . like Dostoevsky,” Eugene was saying then, and I tuned back in. “It’s exactly the same thing.”

I struggled to regrasp the subject of the conversation. “You mean like
Demons
?”

“Like
Demons
. ‘If he believes, he doesn’t believe that he believes, and if he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe,’?” Eugene said, quoting a line spoken in the novel by Kirillov. “And not just like
Demons
 . . .”

Islamic fundamentalism was the Grand Inquisitor and the Underground Man, it was what the existentialists called “awful freedom,” the reinvention of irrationality by marginalized people, just in order to spite science. I tried unsuccessfully to imagine my life devoted to the study of Islamic fundamentalism.
If I cared, then I didn’t care that I cared, and if I didn’t care, I didn’t care that I didn’t care.

As we were leaving, Eugene gave Max and me a copy of his new book,
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza
. I immediately remembered DJ Spinoza, Eugene’s alter ego, from my early years at Stanford, when Eugene had only recently left. I remembered a party in a very narrow apartment in San Francisco, inhabited by two Germans, one of whom wore a strange nose ring that gave him the perpetual appearance of having to blow his nose. I saw a girl actually reach over and try to wipe it off with a napkin, but it was a nose ring and therefore made of metal.

I spotted Matej at the counter, pouring a drink. “I want one, too,” I said. He sloshed some gin and tonic in a plastic cup and handed it to me. We were standing in the doorway of the back stairs, drinking in silence, when an enormous, extremely drunk Russian approached us with a menacing expression.
He marched directly up to Matej, as if he intended to walk right through him, stopping only when he was almost touching him with his belly.

“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” he demanded truculently.

Matej shrugged, stepping almost imperceptibly aside; he had a catlike talent, probably perfected over long years of practice, for evading potentially violent situations.

“Do you know DJ Spinoza?” the drunk man roared.

“No,” Matej said sharply. “I know
Spinoza
.”

From Eugene and Oya’s apartment, Max and I walked back across the Arno to the sublet we had found through one of Eugene’s friends—a minuscule, slope-ceilinged apartment on the top floor of an ancient building on the Via Vigna Vecchia. We collapsed into the tiny twin beds and fell asleep almost immediately. I dreamed of DJ Spinoza. In my dream, his initials stood for “Don Juan Spinoza.”