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At that moment, which hardly
lasted a second, Ansky decided that he didn't want to be a soldier, but at the
very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he
was a soldier.

•

The next three
years he spent traveling. He was in Siberia and at the lead mines of Norilsk
and he crossed the Tunguska Basin escorting engineers from Omsk who were
looking for coal deposits and he was in Yakutsk and he traveled up the Lena to
the Arctic Ocean, beyond the Arctic Circle, and he accompanied another group of
engineers and a neurologist to the New Siberian Islands where two of the
engineers went mad, one of them peacefully, but the other dangerously, so that
they had to liquidate him immediately on the orders of the neurologist, who
explained there was no cure for that kind of madness, especially in the middle
of such a blindingly white and mentally unsettling landscape, and then he was
at the Okhotsk Sea with a supply detail carrying provisions to a detachment of
lost explorers, but after a few days the supply detail got lost too and ended
up eating all the provisions for the explorers and then he was in a hospital in
Vladivostok and then in Amur and then he saw the shores of Lake Baikal, where
thousands of birds flocked, and the city of Irkutsk, and finally he chased
bandits in Kazakhstan, before returning to Moscow and attending to other
affairs.

And
those affairs were reading and visiting museums, reading and walks in the park,
reading and the almost obsessive attendance at all kinds of concerts,
theatrical evenings, literary and political lectures, from which he drew many
valuable lessons that he was able to apply to the freight of lived experience
he had accumulated. And it was around this time that he met Efraim Ivanov, the
science fiction writer, at a literary cafe, the best literary cafe in Moscow,
or rather on the terrace of the cafe, where Ivanov drank vodka at a table off
to one side, under the branches of a giant oak that stretched up to the third
floor of the building, and they became friends, in part because Ivanov was
interested in Ansky's outlandish ideas and in part because Ansky displayed, at
least at the time, unqualified and unreserved admiration for Ivanov's science
writing, as Ivanov liked to call it, rejecting the official and popular label
of fantasy writer. In those days Ansky thought it wouldn't be long before the
revolution spread all over the world, because only an idiot or a nihilist could
fail to see or sense the potential it held for progress and happiness.
Ultimately, thought Ansky, the revolution would abolish death.

When
Ivanov told him that this was impossible, that death had been with man from
time immemorial, Ansky said that was precisely it, the whole point, maybe the
only
thing that mattered, abolishing death, abolishing it forever, immersing
ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment,
abolishment, abolishment.

Ivanov had been a
party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner
of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without
much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to
the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and
Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhechnikov. This went
over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten
poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same
year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither
extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

In
1910 Ivanov was what is called a promising writer, of whom great things were
expected, but Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov had been exhausted as templates, and
Ivanov's artistic production came to a dead halt or, depending on one's
perspective, a point of collapse, from which he couldn't extricate himself even
with the new blend he tried in desperation: a combination of the Hoffmanian
Odoevsky and the Walter Scott disciple Lazhechnikov with the rising star Gorky.
His stories, he had to acknowledge, were no longer of interest to anyone, and
this took its toll on his finances, and above all his self-regard. Until the
October Revolution, Ivanov worked sporadically for scientific journals, for
agricultural journals, as a proofreader, as a salesman of electric lightbulbs,
as a clerk in a lawyer's office, all without neglecting his work for the party,
where he did practically everything that needed to be done, from writing and
editing pamphlets to procuring paper and serving as a liaison with like-minded
writers and some fellow travelers. And he did it all without complaint and
without giving up his long-established habits: his daily visit to the watering
holes where
Moscow
's
bohemia gathered, and his vodka.

The triumph of the revolution
didn't improve his literary or work prospects, rather the reverse. His labors
doubled and not infrequently tripled and sometimes even quadrupled, but Ivanov
did his duty without complaint. One day he was asked for a story about life in
Russia
in 1940. In three hours Ivanov wrote his first science fiction tale. It was
called "The Train Through the Urals" and it was told from the
perspective of a boy traveling in a train the average speed of which was one
hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The boy described everything that passed
before his eyes: shining factories, well-tilled fields, new model villages
comprising two or three buildings of more than ten stories each, visited by
cheerful foreign delegations that took careful note of the advances so as to
adopt them in their own countries. The traveling boy in "The Train Through
the Urals" was on his way to visit his grandfather, a former Red Army
soldier who, after having received a university degree at an age when most
students had long finished their studies, headed a laboratory devoted to
complicated research shrouded in the deepest secrecy. As they left the station
holding hands, the boy's grandfather, an energetic sort who didn't look more
than forty although of course he was much older, told the boy about some recent
discoveries, but his grandson, a boy after all, made him tell stories about the
revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention,
something his grandfather, an old man after all, was happy to do. And that was
all. The story's reception was overwhelming.

The first to be surprised, it must be said, was the writer
himself. The second was the editor, who had read the story pencil in hand and
didn't think much of it. Letters arrived at the magazine's offices asking for
more contributions from Ivanov, that "unknown," that "promising
voice," "a writer who believes in tomorrow," "a writer who
inspires faith in the future we're fighting for," and the letters came
from Moscow and Petro-grad, but also from combatants and political activists in
the farthest corners of the country who identified with the grandfather
character, which kept the magazine editor up at night, since he, a dialectical
and methodical and materialist and in no way dogmatic Marxist, a Marxist who as
a good Marxist hadn't studied only Marx but also Hegel and Feuerbach (and even
Kant) and who laughed heartily when he reread Lichtenberg and had read
Montaigne and Pascal and was relatively familiar with the writings of Fourier,
couldn't believe that of all the good things (or, to be fair, the few good
things) the magazine had published, it was this story, cloyingly sentimental
and with no scientific basis, that had most moved the citizens of the land of
the Soviets.

Something is wrong,
he thought. Naturally, the editor's sleepless night was a night of vodka and
jubilation for Ivanov, who decided to celebrate his first success in
Moscow
's worst dives and
then at the Writers House, where he dined with four friends who resembled the
four horsemen of the Apocalypse. From then on Ivanov was asked only for science
fiction stories, and after carefully scrutinizing his first, which he had more
or less tossed off, he repeated the formula with variations, drawing on the
riches of Russian literature and various chemistry, biology, medical, and
astronomy publications that he accumulated in his room just as a moneylender
accumulates unpaid promissory notes, letters of credit, canceled checks. In
this fashion his name became known in every corner of the
Soviet
Union
and he was soon established as a professional writer, a man
who lived solely on the income of his books and who attended meetings and
conferences at universities and factories and whose works were fought over by
literary magazines and newspapers.

But
everything grows old, and the formula of the bright future plus the hero who
helps to bring about that bright future plus the boy (or the girl) who in the
future (which in Ivanov's stories was the present) enjoys the fruits of the
whole cornucopia of Communist inventiveness also grew old. By the time Ansky
met Ivanov, the latter was no longer a sales success and his novels and
stories, which many considered precious or insufferable, no longer aroused the
enthusiasm they had in earlier days. But Ivanov kept writing and he
kept
being published and he kept bringing in money each month for his arcadian
visions. He was still a party member. He belonged to the Association of
Revolutionary Writers. His name figured on the official lists of Soviet
creators. On the surface he was a happy man, a bachelor with a big, comfortable
room in a house in a nice Moscow neighborhood, a man who slept every so often
with prostitutes who were no longer young and with whom he ended up singing and
weeping, a man who ate at least four times a week at the writers' and poets'
restaurant.

Inside, however, Ivanov felt
that something was missing. The decisive step, the bold stroke. The moment at
which the larva, with a reckless smile, turns into a butterfly. Then came the
young Jew Ansky and his peculiar ideas, his Siberian visions, his forays into
cursed lands, the plenitude of wild experience that only a young man of
eighteen can possess. But Ivanov had been eighteen once, too, and not by a long
shot had he experienced anything like what Ansky described. Perhaps, he
thought, it's because he's Jewish and I'm not. He soon rejected that idea.
Perhaps it's because of his naivete, he thought. His impulsive character. His
scorn for the conventions that govern life, even bourgeois life, he thought.
And then he began to think about how repulsive adolescent artists or
pseudoartists were when viewed from up close. He thought about Mayakovsky, whom
he knew personally, with whom he'd spoken once, perhaps twice, and his enormous
vanity, a vanity that likely hid his lack of love for his fellow man, his lack
of interest in his fellow man, his outsize craving for fame. And then he
thought about Lermontov and Pushkin, as puffed up as movie stars or opera
singers. Nijinsky, Gurov. Nadson. Blok (whom he'd met and who was unbearable).
Remoras on the flanks of art, he thought. They think they're suns, setting
everything ablaze, but they aren't suns, they're just plunging meteors and in the
end no one pays them any heed. They spread humiliation, not conflagration. And
ultimately it's always they who are humiliated, truly humiliated, bludgeoned
and spat upon, execrated and maimed, thoroughly humiliated, taught a lesson,
humiliated utterly.

For
Ivanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsible
person with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when to
listen and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonably
learned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessive
enterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relatively
cool-headed, a man with common sense. Someone who didn't talk too loud or start
polemics. He had to be reasonably pleasant and he had to know how not to make
gratuitous enemies. Above all, he had to keep his voice down, unless everyone
else was raising his. A real writer had to be aware that behind him he had the
Writers Association, the Artists Syndicate, the Confederation of Literary Workers,
Poets House. What's the first thing a man does when he comes into a church?
Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesn't cross
himself. All right, that's allowed. We're modern. But the least he can do is
bare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and don't take
off their hats even when they're beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably,
what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: they
laugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud.

And
yet what Ansky had to offer was too tempting for Ivanov to pass up, despite his
reservations. The pact, it seems, was sealed in the science fiction writer's
room.

A
month later, Ansky joined the party. His sponsors were Ivanov and one of Ivanov's
ex-lovers, Margarita Afanasievna, who worked as a biologist at a
Moscow
institute. In
Ansky's papers, the event is likened to a wedding. It was celebrated at the
writers' restaurant and then they made the rounds of several
Moscow
dives, hauling along Afanasievna, who
drank like a condemned woman and who very nearly lapsed into an alcoholic coma
that night. In one of the dives, as Ivanov and two writers who had joined them
sang songs of lost loves, of glances never to be returned again, of silken words
never to be heard, Afanasievna awoke and, with her tiny hand, grabbed Ansky's
penis and testicles through his trousers.

"Now
that you're a Communist," she said, avoiding his eyes, her gaze fixed on
an indeterminate spot between his navel and his neck, "you'll need these
to be of steel."