Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (17 page)

U

Ú
LTIMO VERANO DE
K
LINGSOR
(K
LINGSOR’S
L
AST
S
UMMER
or
K
LINGSORS LETZTER
S
OMMER
).
Stripes of light fanned out over the sea, and there was a wind. When we stopped our P
ACKARD
, L
INDA
kicked her feet over the edge of the door (the window was down), and jumped out onto the gravelly clifftop. Through the telescope mounted on the terrace of our
DACHA
, we had discovered mountain lilac in that small meadow across the bay. We had analyzed it minutely in the disturbing proximity granted by the telescope’s prisms, and this cliff had seemed an ideal place to go and view lilacs. In my dossier I had located a military map of the littoral, a военная карта or
voennaya karta,
and studied various means of egress. We could get there by car, though my
karta
warned of a dangerous stretch of road. I showed it to L
INDA
: “the lovers’ precipice,” the name by which cartographers would henceforth label that anonymous spot in honor of our deaths.

L
INDA
wanted to bring Bovary’s old lorgnette (she bought it in that antique store in Saint Petersburg), but I explained that we had to look at the lilacs with our naked eyes: the lenses would put too great a distance between pupil and meadow. “Anyway, tomorrow’s going to be cloudy, you’ll see.”

And, in fact, we had only those stripes of light. L
INDA
went first, dreamily swaying along, our picnic basket dangling from her arm. That day, for the first time, she was wearing a new dress made of delicate pink
ORGANDY
, with a full skirt and ribbons lacing up in
back. I’ve mentioned this already: I had the money, the time, the inclination, so why wouldn’t I indulge myself with such an outing? Or rather, wasn’t this expedition, to admire the lilacs the best of all possible day trips? I followed her, walking across the grass, my eyes on her nimble heels. For this special occasion I had selected a pair of Bermuda shorts with red and blue whales on a white background that represented the foamy sea. Each time I put one foot forward, I couldn’t keep from glancing down at my thighs, covered by that fabric, which was simple but full of meaning for me. We had cut down on the ornamentation, streamlined the voluminous slashed pantaloons, eliminated the gold and freshwater pearls, but
conceptually . . .
were not my capacious movements a repetition of those of a Byzantine cardinal—the officiant’s chasuble, the richly jeweled cross—proceeding toward the altar?

We sat down on the grass and I explained to L
INDA
that when the form of a flower—the silken petals, the stiffness of the stalk—emerges from the depths of chaos to exist for a certain number of hours and then decompose, we witness the consummation of an event that unveils a law, a norm. Beauty tends to appear in what is ephemeral, momentary; the brief life of the lepidoptera, the ice formations that a
HARD FROST
sketches across the windowpane
. . .
The monstrosity of a crag, a rocky outcrop—its formlessness—is perennial; it exists unaware of the vertigo of entropy or finds itself so far removed from it in time that entropy itself seems insignificant (the inhuman amount of time necessary for the friction of a piece of cloth to transform this crag’s mass into fine sand). Extremely powerful forces exert their pressure from below on the magma of the material world and condition the emergence of perfect forms, casting them into certain preexisting reticulations capable of endowing these clots of energy with form. I believe in the existence of a unique crystal, a universal network that
holds within it the memory of the world; its discernment is anterior to our existence and as inexorable as the periodic table of the elements. I perceive two orders, one natural or divine and the other human. The natural goes about modeling a rose, a calendula, from the material it has at hand, and it is up to man, made of the same atoms and modeled within the same grid, to admire this beauty and confirm his own
identity
with the flower. True, there do exist differences in grain and resolution. A painstaking education, certain experiences, will diminish the margin of error and adjust your soul to respond to the slightest stimulus. Hence aesthetic pleasure is no more than an extremely precise and mathematical agreement between the vision of this flower and the model for it that we possess or perhaps—to make use of a more flexible schema—the model that can be created on the basis of leaves, petals, stem, and variations, though certainly within a narrow range of texture, degree of fuzziness, circumference, and consistency. And, as we go along, we adjust what we see to what we intuit or imagine. We should rejoice over this, rejoice that the good Lord has not tried out all variants, though I believe that he sometimes goes on intuition, that he, too, does not know
a ciencia cierta
(with scientific certainty) what the results will be.

L
INDA
: But in what way, then, does a change of time period influence taste? How does one explain a phenomenon such as fashion?

T
HELONIOUS
: In the sense of an evolution or progress in taste? Not at all. The alphabet is very limited and not all combinations are possible or—and this amounts to the same thing—discernible by mankind. This limitation is the path of order, what saves us from madness. Our corporeal reality, our bipedal nature, introduces rigid invariables. God—the highest freedom—is therefore conceived as an entity without a body, not physical. And this incorporeal existence allows him to imagine all possible combinations of the universe. To us humans, he
has allotted the few variations of the flower, the toga, jewelry, orders that permutate within a certain periodicity. A while ago I spoke to you of slashed pantaloons, the ingenious play of their multicolored billows of fabric, that feast for the eyes. Well, do you see that shadow, as if a cloud were passing over the meadow right now? Raise your eyes, I wanted to give you a surprise.”

Over our heads, caught in the same air that surrounded the cliff, floated the striped mass of a Montgolfier
.
L
INDA
stared at it. For many seconds. The time it took for the long, segmented shadow of a rope ladder to extend down across her eyes, held wide in amazement. The final rung struck the ground with a dull thud. Someone, a celestial monster, the hot air balloon’s crewman
,
was inviting us up into his basket. L
INDA
turned to me. The irruption of the great form of this balloon over the smooth canvas of our conversation had left her speechless. Finally she seemed to grasp it. “How is it that we didn’t see it flying toward us? It came so suddenly, just like that!”

“It lifted off from the beach at the foot of the cliff,” I answered, shouting up toward the basket, “It’s all right, Kolia, I’ve got the cord.”

Kolia had thrown down the anchor, which I managed to wedge between some rocks. The ladder swayed in my hands. I went up several steps and invited L
INDA
to follow. Once we were comfortably installed, I dislodged the anchor, opened the throttle on the gas and we rose into the air. “It’s important to be able to invert one’s point of view,” I explained to L
INDA
. “A few moments ago we were seated down below, observing the perfection of the lilacs from the distance of our ocular globes. Now, suspended in this hot air balloon with its red and yellow stripes like the eyes of a deep-sea fish that allows itself to be pulled along by the ocean’s currents, we can contemplate the meadow, appreciate how small that crag really is, see Kolia’s black cap
against the red patch of our P
ACKARD
as he carries out my instructions to drive it back to our D
ACHA
. So, then: what can we use this vision of the meadow dotted with flowers for? What ornament can it inspire in us?”

“For Christ’s sake, I
OSIF
. They’re just flowers!”

That time she was right.

V

V
ANILLA ICE
.
Motionless on the chair, with nothing in her stiffness to recall her former pliancy, L
INDA
presented her profile to me, the splendid colors of her face against the indigo of the sea. When she heard my question, she took a century to turn around and even then her eyes, as if imbued with all that blue, reluctantly followed the slightly less torpid movement of her head, lingering over the beach’s pebbles, the gray mass of the breakwater, the white seagull perched on the café terrace, then sweeping the air over my head and finally locating me, as if with difficulty, resetting her gaze to zero, readjusting the beauty of the background to the immobile and insignificant figure of the writer.

“Some ice cream?”

She seemed to recall something, gave me a mischievous grin, and burst into speech: “As for ice cream—and I certainly hope you’ll only order the kind that’s made in those old-fashioned molds that come in every possible architectural form—whenever I eat one of those temples, churches, obelisks, or rocks, it’s like a quaint geography I must take a moment to contemplate before transforming the monument of raspberry or vanilla into a refreshing coolness in my throat. My God, it wouldn’t surprise me if you found Vendôme columns made of chocolate or raspberry ice cream at the Ritz, and then you’d need several of those, like votive columns or towers erected along an avenue in celebration of the glory of Coolness. They also have raspberry obelisks that rise here and there in the scorching desert of my thirst, whose pink granite will melt in the back of my mouth to slake me better than any oasis
could
. . .
Those peaks of ice cream at the Ritz sometimes resemble the Monte Rosa, and sometimes, especially when they’re lemon, I don’t mind if they’re not shaped like a monument but are as steep and irregular as a mountain painted by Elstir.”

At last she had spoken. Her voice was still uncertain, but without a doubt she had now cast off her
SIREN’S
tail. And she’d managed to surprise me with this disquisition extracted from the B
IBLIOSPHERE
. She knew I would appreciate the care with which she had selected it, the fact that it was by Proust, of whom I’d spoken so frequently. Immediately I remembered that one of K
LIMT’S
redheaded models was called Albertine (like Proust’s heroine). And delighted by the happy coincidence and because at that moment I saw the waiter approaching from the back of the café with our frozen concoctions, I shouted out in jubilation, “V
ANILLA
I
CE
.” (Which also happened to be the name of one of my favorite singers that year.)

The waiter was carrying the tray at a dangerous angle, though the glass dishes remained glued to its mirrored surface as if by some prodigy. I intuited that the inclination the waiter was imparting to the tray as he walked between the tables was inversely proportionate to the weight of the cups it bore, and that the waiter’s brain was working like a well-oiled machine, in full mastery of his corporeal organization: the second-to-second disposition of his arm with the napkin draped over it, the suction pads of his right hand that gripped the tray so firmly, and his head which, a moment before the daring spin, announced the angle that both the tray and his torso would assume. Skills, wiles, acquired over years of intense rowing across the sea of clients, yet of which his waiter brain had not the slightest awareness. L
INDA
, to my astonishment, had given signs of possessing a more refined mechanism, capable of registering concepts, whole passages, such as the one she had just declaimed. I had tried to provide her with a guide to this apprenticeship,
one of such logical force and powerful conviction that it would render the truth of
frivolity
irresistible, mathematically deducible, without need of any act of faith. Now I was ready to put her to the test, determine the degree of
humanity
that L
INDA
had achieved after three weeks of intense apprenticeship, attempt an operational definition of her intelligence (or
humanity
).

(In “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” A. M. Turing proposes the following:

[T]he “imitation game” . . . is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make similar remarks. We now ask the question, “What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?” Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”

I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to program computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have
more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

Which is to say: [This game] is played with three [participants], [the machine] (A), [a human] (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game is for the interrogator to determine which of the other two is the [human] and which is the [machine].
. . .
It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification [so A, naturally, will answer without any kind of limitation].
. . .
In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. [
. . .
] The best strategy for B is
. . .
to give truthful answers.
. . .
[If] an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning [most people will agree that the machine has demonstrated intelligent conduct].

Had she shed her
SIREN’S
tail? How stable was she on her new legs? Was she ready for the
CATWALK
? Was it Anastasia or L
INDA
standing before me, her memory cells full of newly renovated information?

V
ASARI.
The existence of important galleries of art in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy conditions the appearance of a certain sort of perfectly mimetic being: girls with an intellectual air about them, glasses, stockings that end above the knee, a slim portfolio clutched against the bosom as if replete with poetical compositions. During one whole summer I was intrigued by the frequent appearance of a woman beneath my window who would walk past with all the imposing presence of a condottiere depicted in oil paint. It took me two months to identify her as a fruit
seller at a nearby bazaar, a coarse and ill-tempered creature. On another occasion I found myself in the cafeteria of a large research institution and noticed, among the members of the public present there alongside me, a gentleman with just the sort of precisely trimmed beard that is worn by a physicist who does top-secret research (atomic bombs, military lasers). The movement of his right hand through the air resolved all questions with academic exactitude, giving particular emphasis to certain phrases. I imagined: “The half-life of U-235 worries me,” or “We must use the positron accelerator to bombard the nucleus with gamma particles.” When I walked past him on my way out the door, I heard him confess the truth: “I’m telling you one more time: no yeast at all! None! A ten-liter demijohn, some cherries, and some sugar. That’s it!” Later I often saw him in a neighboring bar tossing back glasses of cheap rosé, gripped with the firm hand of the lathe operator that he was.

I.
The organizing eye. (In the
Confessions
of Saint Augustine [Book X], this important clarification:

Ad oculos enim proprie videre pertinet, utimur autem hoc verbo etiam in ceteris sensibus, cum eos ad cognoscendum intendimus. Neque enim dicimus, ‘audi quid rutilet,’ aut, ‘olefac quam niteat,’ aut, ‘gusta quam splendeat,’ aut, ‘palpa quam fulgeat’: videri enim dicuntur haec omnia. Dicimus autem non solum, ‘vide quid luceat,’ quod soli oculi sentire possunt, sed etiam, `vide quid sonet,’ ‘vide quid oleat,’ ‘vide quid sapiat,’ ‘vide quam durum sit.’ Ideoque generalis experientia sensuum concupiscentia (sicut dictum est) oculorum vocatur, quia videndi officium, in quo primatum oculi tenent, etiam ceteri sensus sibi de similitudine usurpant, cum aliquid cognitionis explorant.

For seeing belongeth properly to the eyes; yet we apply this word to the other senses also, when we exercise them in the search after
knowledge. For we do not say, “listen how it glows,” “smell how it glistens,” “taste how it shines,” or “feel how it flashes,” since all of these are said to be seen. And yet we say not only, “see how it shineth,” which the eyes alone can perceive; but also, “see how it soundeth,” “see how it smelleth,” “see how it tasteth,” “see how hard it is.” And thus the general experience of the senses, as was said before, is termed “the lust of the eyes,” because the function of seeing, wherein the eyes hold the preeminence, the other senses by way of similitude take possession of, whensoever they seek out any knowledge. —
Translated by Edward Bouverie Pusey.)

II.
I could never explain to myself the strange fascination that particular painting exerted on me, the strong attraction of the interlaced fingers, the languor of the powerful arms, captured in a relaxed and almost feminine pose. I’d discovered him at the end of the gallery, poised atop his lunar landscape like a rare species of lepidoptera, a gigantic Vanessa atalanta. His sadness, the blue marble of the landscape, those crystalline blooms, spoke to me of an ascent to a distant star: the exhausting journey, an extremely long effort rendered futile by the lunar desolation. They told me in the museum—or maybe I read it somewhere—that he represented a dejected or defeated demon. Was he the victor in full ascent or the victim of a fall? Unable to resolve the enigma I bought the best reproduction available—the one with dimensions closest to the original’s immensity—and hung at the foot of my bed.

In the morning, as I emerged from long dreams, I would open my eyes in the room’s semipenumbra and was invariably surprised by the presence of the
daemon
there. His coffee-colored torso and curling mane, the greens and blacks of that landscape, always posed the same question. Was this a lofty victory, though with no air to breathe in the void that surrounded him, or was he back on the earth, downcast,
unable to break away from the pull of its formidable mass? One morning I leapt out of bed and without looking even once into his eyes went to the bathroom for my Solingen straight razor and resolved the question in the best way possible. The sad eyes, the weight of disgrace, the lunar despair—all that was rolled up and stowed away on top of the bookshelf. I cut out the bloom of octahedrons to his left and had it framed, a fragment of the most exquisite mineralogical exuberance. This painting, I decided, was far more suggestive than the other one, and for years, as I contemplated these unfathomable gems, entranced, I grew more convinced that this was the true and only contribution of Bruvel, the mad painter, to my formation: the
human
(in the old sense of
concern for the human
) was absolutely unnecessary. I was entirely wrong about this, I could not have been more wrong. As we shall see.

V
IEW OF FALLING SNOW
. It had been snowing since ten that morning. I asked the male nurse for a
TEA
and sipped it slowly without taking my eyes from the window, surrendering myself to the hypnotic power of the light snow that, agitated by the wind, seemed to ascend in inverse sequence, upward toward the distant floodgates of the heavens.

For the silence of this hospital room, for my legs encased in plaster, and for the depth of the sky, I had Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky, wounded at the Battle of Borodino: the unbearable splendor of our cosmic insignificance. The obvious existence of a baleful God who, with a single slash, had severed all the delicate threads of my story. Which of the two bodies touched the striped awning first? The small packet that was P.O.A. or my own eighty kilos of weight?

Downward: “A long way down since the time you had everything,” which was another idea for a title, perhaps a more precise one. How long does it take a snowflake to fall from the sky? A month and a half? Two months?

When I awoke it had stopped snowing and I learned that I’d been here for sixty days. I also discovered a woman I did not know next to my bed. A young woman with hard features, her hair cut in layers at the back of the neck. It was L
INDA
. By now I could reach this type of conclusion very quickly. But her face was worked in shades of gray, as if bleached. Only the green of a pair of very expensive emerald earrings stood out, earrings I didn’t recall having seen her wear before.

“They cut off my ponytail,” I explained.

She turned to display her own bare nape.

I said, “I almost can’t
see,
Anastasia. Because of the fall, apparently. I haven’t suffered any attacks since I’ve been here. But why has it taken so long for you to come? Where have you been all this time?”