Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (16 page)

And my God, she was a real talent. She made wonderful pen and ink sketches, she played the guitar magnificently, and she sang
ROMANZAS
with a voice of velvet (we often sang duets together). At the age of eighteen she was a paragon of many virtues, and I felt powerfully attracted, beckoned by her perfume, still intact beneath its seal.

(Ah, but between me and that seal were interposed the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the international conspiracy, the burning bush of suspicion!)

Her parents couldn’t have been more kind. The stooped Jewish watchmaker who was her father, in fact, held an important chair at my Institute and her mother was a woman of dazzling beauty and a skilled kosher cook who imputed no religious significance whatsoever to what, in her mind, was the purely cultural rite of a family of cosmopolitan intellectuals, lovers of painting and good jazz.

“An intelligent woman with wonderful parents,” easily classifiable and without any visible problem. Except for the hair. It was so abundant she couldn’t find a way of tying it back that would keep its tendrils from escaping and she tried a thousand different styles without success. Though I never saw her in braids, which might have come undone all too easily, her hair flying in the wind once more.

The other serious problem (I’m almost forgetting) was the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, Tel Aviv, and, finally, the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, which was everyone’s problem. The
IMPERIUM
was closed, sealed off like a tin can full of food, and there was no way out, no little key glued to the bottom or even, incredible as it may seem, any
dynamite to blow it up with. We were all suffering there
kak sardiny v bochke
(like sardines in a barrel: Russia is an immense country, “like a barrel”) and sitting at the piano her father sighed, and in the kitchen, kneading crackers without salt, her mother cursed.

Now, I—though only in half-measures, we might say—was a foreigner. Should the need arise, I could perfectly well go to the Kremlin, ask for the key, insert it into the lock, turn, and, click! рванут (vanish), with the enchanted princess wrapped up in a Persian carpet, the hair that might otherwise betray her sheared off as a precaution.

This perverse plot, hatched in the centers of international Zionism, was explained to me by my friend K**. “They’re setting a trap for you,” she warned. “Who has ever seen a Jew, of his own volition, hand his daughter over to a Gentile?”

(This is a long story, hard to tell, and sad.)

Indeed, I had received indications of an inalterably favorable disposition toward my person: prolonged discussions, the
TEA
grown cold, snow against the windowpanes. Rare volumes from the family library were loaned to me and during my visits the television was never switched on. I still have a pen and ink sketch of me done during one of those soirées. How can I doubt that she had fallen madly in love? The soft, amorous lines of that drawing are there to confirm it.

But why complicate things now, in memory? I had made several forays beneath S
OSHA’S
skirt, stretched the elastic of her panties, breathed in her fresh scent
. . .
But though it was patently absurd, the information about the cruelty of the old Jews who had sacrificed millions of their own in Oświęcim in the deliberate aim of obtaining the territory of the State of Israel came to contaminate that scent. I thought I perceived, amid the vetiver and lavender of her white garments, other stronger aromas: that of calculation, malice, the dilated pupil glinting behind the monocle.

(Now there remains only the night of my rejection, that terrible night, the motor of this story.)

Sources:
Antiquities of the Jews,
Flavius Josephus.

S
PITTING
(see:
EXPECTORATION
).

S
TEPPE
(see:
ESTEPA
).

S
UMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
.
In Rotterdam, T
HELONIOUS
visited a gaming arcade that led him to reflect on the possibility of a technological solution to karma, a mechanical portal to the state of pure pleasure. In short, the consummation of the entirely
frivolous
objective of human progress. To cross through the paradises imagined by Baudelaire without need of recourse to
OPIUM
.

This would achieve the goal of permanent well-being and crown the double helix of
TECHNOLOGICAL
development which, starting from the bottom, from the chill darkness of the cave, would appear in flashes that each marked the invention of a brilliant mechanical device, the blue and red nodules that sought to make our life more pleasurable: the spoon that could be used for scraping, a javelin in flight, Archimedes’s screw, Fulton’s piston
. . .
Achievements, it had now become clear, that were decidedly useless, that did no more than pave the way for the appearance of the
SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
, the fulfillment of what the Oriental mystics called the
alibi,
the creation of reality by means of an image. (Within just a few seconds T
HELONIOUS
elaborates a complex cosmogony and seeks a final form for this idea of the world as the result of a game of Virtual Reality. A universe wherein the only discernible objectives—insubstantial,
frivolous
—would be to pair off into couples, accumulate wealth, enjoy good health and good humor,
or what amounts to the same thing: to make your way through the labyrinth, find the seven keys, rescue the enchanted princess.)

I.
To Enter the Garden of Delights.
For now, in this Rotterdam arcade, we have to pass through the primitive and intermediary stage of helmets and goggles. Once a high degree of miniaturization of the devices—to the molecular level—has been achieved, we will be able to introduce the minuscule generator of visions into the cerebral tissue. Then our lives will consist exclusively of the unending melodrama of
the world I’ve always longed for.
Our visions will take on physical consistency so that when projected before us they float “as far as the eye can see,” and as we’re about to go around a corner, we’ll know we will find another perfectly real street on the other side, with automobiles circulating and pedestrians hurrying past, which is to say that we’ll know this same tableau will rise before us and that the end of that street will move away into infinity as we move forward, like the line of the horizon. (And isn’t the line of the horizon the floating limit of a virtual field?) A game without locked doors or forbidden passageways. At the end of the staircase there will always be a room, and in it a bed, and on that bed, beneath an open window, the woman of our dreams. When, sated by these endless pleasures, we lose all notion of the falsity of this perfect world then we will never be able to leave, for we will entirely have forgotten the little doorway by which we came in.

II.
To Live in the Garden of Delights.
To walk naked through the Garden is to have no contact with this real world where you and I live. Therein is a paradise of vivid colors and simple forms, the pure and archetypal pleasures that in our earthly life we do no more than clumsily brush against. The concrete skin of an actual young woman is a mere imitation, an inexact copy of the cheeks of that same young woman as she exists in our thoughts. To live in the Garden is to cross
over the abyss that divides these two from each other. (You, in the case of P.O.A., are not exactly the woman I desired, merely her
incarnation.
)

I could recognize the woman I dream of and even reproduce her in the camera obscura of my mind, which confirms my thesis. Each of us would end up elaborating his own private world and thousands of parallel worlds would come to exist, the worlds intuited by Saint Augustine. I imagine a multitude of Gods, all reclining in dark rooms and thinking of us. (T
HELONIOUS
, R
UDI
, Kolia are no more than characters in a world created by me, a lone God.) And these parallel worlds cannot be reached or entered by others (the solitude of the Creator). Therefore:

a) The dreams where we see alien worlds are glimpses of the nearby presence of a neighboring God; they can be explained as a result of interference with the signal.

b) The multiplicity of worlds could also be explained as the tree diagram of someone who peoples his world with characters from fiction; the hair-raising and voracious Pac-Man, or the no less hair-raising bipedal models (men) who, when the moment arrives, sometimes generate other worlds, and so on into infinity. (All we can do is imagine the original form of that Creator of ours: either bipedal—“in the image and likeness”—or without any point of resemblance to his creations, the nebulous divinity of an unimaginable anteworld.)

c) In that latter case, we are, to him, creatures as horrible as the sanguinary entities who tirelessly pursue us through Pac-Man’s virtual labyrinths.

III.
To Awaken in the Garden of Delights.
We’ve forgotten our former human existence and thus conclude that we have always lived in
the Garden. One day, the serpent whispers the terrible truth in our ear; we break through the membrane, open the door, and discover our own nakedness.

When the veil is drawn back, we take those who control us from the center of the universe or the center of ourselves by surprise. (Isn’t it amazing that we have such a peculiar vision of our own bodies? We see a hand covering a sheet of paper with irregular marks and our view of that image is blurred by a protuberance just beneath the eyes—which we call a nose. Aren’t we concealed within this body? Isn’t it true that we “inhabit it” and spy on the world through its eyes like Ulysses’s men through the blind sockets of the Trojan horse?)

IV.
To be Cast Out of the Garden of Delights.
But every world has its real ending, like a program infected by a virus that will activate at 00:00 hours on Judgment Day. The Creator has allowed us to glimpse this truth, which presupposes an ending to our pleasant existence (the flaming sword) and the beginning of the anguished scientific quest (the iron balls Galileo threw down from the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Let us begin, then, to wander through a labyrinth overflowing with “prehistoric” skeletons that are nothing but the false evidence of a theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that we are the product of a simple confluence of natural factors. This fallacious “scientific” theory only manages to delay our arrival at the true solution, the
SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE
, for as long as the undoubtedly true hypothesis of an act of creation is refuted by the rigged proofs of a process of “evolution.” The only merit of the scientific progress that ensues is to clarify the development of
TECHNOLOGY
and the arrival at the
SUMMA
: the belief in ghosts, the creation of reality by the image, the achievement of the
imagined
paradise. The return to the
Garden.

T

T
EA
.
An inexpensive infusion readily available to all,
TEA
enjoys great popularity across the I
MPERIUM
, where the practice of taking
TEA
with little cookies and homemade jam is widespread. The distinctly foreign climate required for the cultivation of
TEA
saved it from becoming a Siberian crop, “very much our own,” along with the potato and the tomato which are both obviously and notoriously indigenous to Russia. The best
TEA
was imported from Ceylon in tins decorated with landscapes of verdant rolling hills. Bad
TEA
was perfidiously hacked atop the mountains of Georgia. Muscovy never had any particular problem with tea, at least not during my stay in the country. Other less innocent infusions, characterized as delicacies (дэликатэссэн)
,
were frowned upon for the aspersion of inefficiency they cast upon the
IMPERIUM
. For a period of five years, cocoa was entirely absent from the stores. The People’s Comissariat organized a vast defamation campaign featuring a poster with these lines by G. K. Chesterton (translated into Russian, of course):

T
EA
, although an Oriental,

Is a gentleman at least;

Cocoa is a cad and coward,

Cocoa is a vulgar beast.

Followed by a brief text in boldface: “It is a well-known fact that as a boy Volodia Ulianov (L
ENIN
) loved
TEA
. During his childhood in Simbirsk . . .”
et cetera
.

T
HELONIOUS
M
ONK
.
As if I were called T
HELONIOUS
M
ONK
and she were L
INDA
E
VANGELISTA
.

I knew how to lead a false existence under those names; we had only to believe in our metamorphosis, leap onto the magic carpet of a perfect life, and contemplate from there the ciphers that denoted a bad year, any bad year—1990, 1991—as if it were 1819 or 1099 or some other historically significant combination of numerals, viewed from a distance.

Folded up inside T
HELONIOUS
—a name that sounded like a Nordic mammal, followed by M
ONK
, the dull thwack of its tail against the water—I was acquiring an incredible facility for generating limpid musical phrases, melodies that found their place in the teeming universe of songs that seem to have a natural life of their own, as if they’d been resonating through the air since the beginning of time. One such song had loaned me the necessary tone for this history. Two melodies that alternated throughout the composition: an initial one that came unstrung like a series of glass beads clinking against a rock crystal vase (perfectly reproducible with an arpeggio on the celesta), followed by another, pregnant with hope, that waited half a beat after the final
la
of the silver bell to break into the torrential whirl of a spring thaw: blue ice floes floating past, the cry of seagulls audible in the tune raised by the brass ensemble, the anguished lamentations of the English horn (the landscape, its Faustian distances).

That was the motif for the sunny, careless days. When I recount the genesis of this novel, my visit to the (C
HINESE
) P
ALACE
, the music subsides into the graceful contours of a violin pizzicato, the sun and its shimmering reflection on the canals, the tender green of the gardens, a merry lightness that also serves as background to T
HELONIOUS’S
hopeful stroll along Nevsky Prospekt in search of L
INDA
. The crucial moment of recognition when the face of L
A
E
VANGELISTA
peers out from the
features of a busker playing the
FLUTE
is signaled by a return of the initial phrase, which then takes flight, the opening of a window . . .

I.
Let us conceive, therefore, of a very expensive book, product of an advanced
TECHNOLOGY
, whose pages are capable of determining what paragraph the reader’s eyes will alight upon. Your stereo would simultaneously produce a certain melody, a central theme with its corresponding variations, written expressly for this novel. There might be other books, as well; that remains to be seen. We would have examples of L
INDA’S
silvery voice, M
ONK’S
hoarse and melancholy laughter, cars racing through the streets of Saint Petersburg, the distant whisper of rain against the flagstones. (In fact, the computer software for this novel has been duly developed, and the interested reader can receive by return mail a CD with the
soundtrack
of P.O.A., its principal theme a continual bass line from which all other motifs ramify, restrained violins at moments of tension. It’s called
The M
ONK
.
) I visualize poor M
ONK
fighting against a malady that, page after page, plunges him further into the unfathomable abyss of an excess of lucidity. A terrible thing. Lend me your ears: second introduction to
The M
ONK
.

M
ONK
suffered from a strange malady.