Wakefield (15 page)

Wakefield is indignant. “These are not the old gangster days. You go to a lawyer, sue the woman, this is America.”

The cabby smiles ruefully. “What America you come from? This is old days now. Gangster from Communist, from Russia, Ukraina, Romania, worse than Al Capone.”

Wakefield pays him the extra ten dollars.

His large room on the eighth floor, though newly renovated, still feels old-fashioned, with windows that actually open and a gorgeous view of the lake. When he looks out he sees an astonishing sight: hundreds of yellow cabs parked like a flock of birds on a cement pier on the shore. Beside each cab a driver is bent in half on a prayer mat. Rush-hour commuters whiz past them on the freeway; their prayers fly over the lake toward Mecca; gangsters from ex-Communist countries terrify their families; their cheating meters are fast.

After a long, dreamy soak in the huge lion-clawed bathtub, Wakefield descends to the lobby to have a drink. He finds a seat in a deep leather booth and lazily examines the Deco fresco adorning the walls, and the huge mirror behind the long mahogany bar.

Sipping his whiskey, he calls Zamyatin on the cell phone.

Ivan is in his cab conveying “precious cargo” to the airport. In Ivan's lingo, precious cargo means one or more beautiful women.

“I'm in a city oppressed by your people, Zamyatin,” Wakefield tells him. “It seems that the ex-Commie mafias are taking over where Al Capone left off.”

“So what am I supposed to do about it? Come over there and kick ass? (To Precious Cargo: Pardon me, language like this makes me ashamed of myself.) Listen, my beautiful person, if you pay my ticket, I come be your translator, Superman. (To Cargo: My friend, you see, has complex on saving the world. I only want to save money.…) Call me again when you need good, sane person talk, right now I must explain road to Precious Cargo. Okay, my friend?” Zamyatin is talking funny English for the sake of his precious cargo.

Wakefield hasn't had much time to make many friends. He has quick, extravagant encounters, thousands of acquaintances, But there is only one person he can call in the middle of the night. Ivan doesn't sleep much anyway, and is always (gruffly) glad to hear from him, and Wakefield has become dependent on his frankness, which never wavers. He could call Zelda at 2
A.M.
, but she'd interpret it as a “cry for help” and would offer not advice but “therapy.”

Wakefield once confided to Ivan his fetish for hiding and secret spaces. “Your ‘harmless habit' as you call it, is a gold mine,” Ivan had said. “You have notebooks on secret hiding places? That's money in the bank,
bozhe moy
, you could be a cat burglar, a diamond thief, a James Bond spy … And there's also personal profit, watching all those people fucking!” Ivan got very excited about this hidden potential.

Wakefield told him that he was interested simply in forgotten space created by renovation and disuse, but the more he explained, the more poetically elaborate the concept became. “This architectural amnesia is the real estate of poets, born of layering, history, forgetting. It can only be inhabited stealthily after it's found; it cannot be rented or distributed. It would be immoral to profit from it. You may not get this, Ivan, but there is a kind of altruism involved here, an experimental altruism. I don't hide in order to spy on people: I hide to fill the forgotten places that need to be filled in some way. People believe in house spirits, in ghosts, in all kinds of presences that they claim to dread but actually crave. I see myself as a kind of household deity, a
spiritus locus
, if you will. Beyond that, I don't want to think about it. I am simply a cartographer of lost space.”

Ivan had shrugged and redirected his energy to a person of the opposite sex.

It's gotten dark now and Wakefield remembers he's still hungry for that hot dog. All space is “lost space,” there is no charting it, Magellan's job has grown huge in speeded-up time. He looks around for a sympathetic face at the bar, but there are only stiff young executives gazing at themselves in their giant martinis.

After a night of dreamless sleep, bathed and shaved, wearing his all-purpose jacket and his heavy wool overcoat (thank you, Zelda), a cup of very black coffee in hand, Wakefield waits in the lobby for Susan, his contact from the World Art Museum. He has the feeling that he knows her because they have been e-mailing each other about the gig and their messages have become friendlier and more revealing with each round. He knows that she is a second-generation American, of Serbian-Bosnian descent, who might have been named Fatima or Nina, but her newly naturalized parents wanted her to have a head start in America. She grew up “Susan” and became a curator and administrator for the World Art Museum, currently holding an exhibition of Communist-era dissident art, for which Wakefield is the opening-night keynote speaker. He knows that she is also a vegetarian. Her parents are conflicted about everything, including her current job, because she has plunged with such gusto into the intricacies of the world they left behind, but also proud because they believe she has transcended their past and become a refined American person, a Museum Susan. Since the start of the war in Yugoslavia, there has been tension between her Serbian father and Bosnian mother. She wrote him about her neighborhood, its eight Orthodox churches, two Greek, two Russian, the Serbian, the Armenian, two Romanian, and two mosques for the Albanians and the Bosnians,
and
two Polish Catholic churches. She attended none of them when she was growing up, because her father, who'd been a Communist party official, was an atheist, but not long before the war started he suddenly got religion, began going to the Serbian church, and joined a nationalist group. Wakefield also knows that she's single and she's had boyfriends who horrified her parents.

Wakefield imagines that she is petite, with long, dark hair and brown eyes, and is a sloppy dresser. He is also certain that she'll be late. He is surprised when she shows up on time, a slender, short-haired blonde, elegantly hip, her tight-fitting jeans a designer brand, her tan sweater cashmere, and her peacoat pure Goodwill. Her fur-lined booties are Finnish. Her black leather gloves are Italian, and the rabbit-fur hat with earflaps is Russian. Wakefield instantly imagines her naked, the pert breasts, the soft, spa-massaged skin, the trimmed (possibly red) pubis, the long, flexible toes, the tight boyish buttocks. So much for electronic intimacy.

Nor does their cyberacquaintance help the initial awkwardness of meeting in person. Driving her vintage VW bug to the museum, Susan is thoughtful as she explains that the exhibit, which brings together artists from the various warring zones of the Balklands, has become the subject of heated controversy in the past week. She tells Wakefield to expect pickets at the opening when he goes to deliver his speech.

“Oh, bring it on!” Wakefield says. “I enjoy a good fight.”

“It's personal for me. My parents have barely talked to each other since the war started back home, but I thought that they might come to see my big moment. But they won't come to the exhibit. I was actually hoping that maybe you could talk them into it,” she says sheepishly.

“Me? I don't even know them.”

Susan laughs. “Well, that's the weird thing. They have read your articles for years in
National Cartographic
, the only magazine they get, and they think that you're some kind of god. When they heard that you were coming for the show, I could tell they wanted to see your performance, but they can't admit that they both want the same thing. Maybe if you asked them personally …”

“I'll think about it.”

She surprises him with a very old-world kiss on the cheek. Suddenly, the warmth of their exchanges over the past few months becomes apparent to both of them. Oddly enough, they
are
friends.

The museum is closed to the public this day, so Wakefield gets a private tour from Susan and the senior curator, Doris, an older African-American woman with a kind face and snow-white hair.

The introductory essay in the catalogue, written by a rather florid Serbian poet, explains that the ex-Communist Balklands, consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, are a part of the world where pre-Christian myths are still alive in the memories of the peasants, and that when the people aren't fighting, life in these countries is sweet, like certain mild goat cheeses. Elements of the art on exhibit can be traced to ancient Greece, but there are also Turkish and Slavic influences. The communist governments attempted to erase this mythical and historical memory, but artists rescued the degraded residue of the past and combined it with contemporary elements in order to protest the authoritarianism of these governments. Most of the work in the show was created at great risk before 1989, but some pieces are more recent: for instance, a sculpture of Pan welded from scraps of the shredded Iron Curtain. The Pan of legend came from Thrace, present-day Albania. Included in the catalogue is a lively statement by an artist who spent fifteen years in a prison camp.

Our worldview balances precariously on a head of cabbage, like the Native American world on the back of a turtle. Imagine this: a person trying to stand on a rolling cabbage, like a circus clown on a ball, while trying to retrieve a torch burning just out of reach! The Cabbage! This all-important vegetable is essential to any understanding of the Balklands. It is the flower of Eastern Europe the way garlic, as Salvador Dalí said, is “the moonflower of the Mediterranean.” Like the onion, it is perfectly postmodern: it has layers which when peeled off reveal only more layers. Naturally this criterion privileges the onion, which has only layers and no real core, and as St. Sylvester so admirably put it: “God is like an onion because he is good and he makes you cry.” The cabbage is not lachrymogenic and it does have a hard core which I, for one, love to eat raw. Nonetheless, it has enough removable skirts to please the most hardcore relativist. The cabbage is bombastic—one might compare it with a provincial bureaucrat swollen with self-importance. This bureaucrat-cabbage is a familar Balkland type, left over from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and it has survived through communism to the present day. That such a creature, the Cabbage-Bureaucrat, persists is an homage to the infinite subterfuge and cunning of our world. In the age of the Iron Curtain, the Cabbage was supreme. During communism when only the elites dined on meat and fish, the primacy of cabbage, with its court of turnips, parsnips, and potatoes, was unquestioned by the people. In metaphor and reality, the Cabbage was on the throne, served by a faithful retinue of inmates
.

Susan watches Wakefield read, waiting for his reaction.

“This guy is a genius,” he murmurs, feeling a little unbalanced himself by the rolling cabbage and swift metaphorical currents of the prose. “Maybe I should look at some art now.”

Susan directs him to a wall-size painting entitled
Pigs
. A crowd of superpiggy pigs is gathered at the base of a mountain of cabbages. The painting is accompanied by a lengthy text projected on the opposite wall, and Wakefield wonders if every picture in the show is really worth a thousand words. The artist's statement reads:

The slaughter of the Pig was the climax of the year, representing the payoff for the peoples' toil. At Christmas, even city dwellers would join together with the peasants for the slaughter and feasting. My painting asks: “How are Socialist pigs different from Capitalist pigs?” The correct answer is: “Ourpigs are different because they are SOCIALIST pigs.” Pigs are not cabbage, pigs are meat, and represent progress, therefore socialism, therefore the future utopia. Cabbage was our reality, pigs our dream. A story when I was a child said that during the barbaric days before communism, a capitalist pig ate the testicles of a baby left outside a peasant hut. The baby grew up to be a great worker who married a beautiful and loyal Party commissar who was willing to put the Five-year Plan above the bourgeois pleasure of sex
.

Other works in this room portray pigs in many media. There is a photograph of an aproned housewife displaying the carcass of a pig for inspection by a man in whose face is reflected envy, greed, and disgust, as if the man is thinking that the situation might be reversed: the pig offering for inspection the disemboweled housewife.

“Give me a nice pork loin from the supermarket anytime,” Doris observes, delicately.

“I don't eat meat myself. It drives my folks crazy.” Susan rolls her eyes. “I stopped eating it in junior high, and it was the main thing we fought about until I moved out of the house. Eat, eat, eat, eat pig! It was like an obsession. My dad called me an ungrateful slut one time, he was so angry, and I was like, why is somebody who doesn't eat meat a slut? He just kept screaming, ‘Slut! Slut!' so I came to the conclusion that this is just the logic of our people … as you can see from this stupid war now.”

“Oh, honey, don't take it that way,” Doris says kindly, “don't take it to heart. Poor folk work their fingers to the bone their whole lives to put meat on the table, and they can't see how you can just turn down their food. It's like turning
them
down, it hurts their feelings.”

“I guess I
was
turning them down,” Susan admits.

The next exhibition room, themed “Another Traditionalism,” is given over to the works of those Balklanders whose religion forbids the consumption of pork. The focus is on sheep instead, treated with the same hunger and awe, but in a less realistic style. The sheep in these works are quasi-abstract. There is, for instance, a ceramic globe under a sapphire spotlight, its surface decorated with what looks like elaborate script, but the “writing” is, on close inspection, really scores of sheep being sacrificed by figures holding tiny gleaming knives.

The next room contains a particularly complex sculptural object, a grotesque hybrid of cabbage, pig, and sheep, from which flutters a banner inscribed We Had an Avant Garde! We Are Durably Modern! Between the reality of cabbage and the dream of meat, Surrealism has erected a flag.