Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia (3 page)

B
OSCAGE
(
or
F
OREST, CONIFEROUS
). We can lose our way in the
FOREST
. “Once, as children, we went into the
FOREST
for mushrooms and got lost. We shouted and shouted . . .” A person might wander for hours among identical trees without finding the way out, the moss on the tree trunk, the newly cut stump. Real wolves lurk there, heads thrown back in a howl, and that little hummock of bones is all that remains of an unfortunate passerby. There’s the story of the little girl in the taiga who was killed by mosquitoes that sucked out her blood. People go into the forest in summertime to gather mushrooms and wild berries. Preparations for this journey are the same as those made
for excursions to the beach during my childhood: thermoses, insect repellent, and the soup tureen, a solemn ritual we must undertake with absolute seriousness.

“Russia has the greatest reserve of timber-yielding trees in the world . . .” We read this and other facts of much interest in the pages of
The Russian Forest,
a novel by Л. Леóнов [L. Leonov] that is as heavy as a wooden tenpin. In spring, immense rafts of logs are formed, which never reach their destination but sink to the bottom of the great rivers of Siberia. For Russia, too, is a consumer nation, but only of raw materials. This metaphysical consumerism does not require the laborious elaboration of bulky products or tiresome marketing campaigns, but merely the cutting down of countless hectares of virgin forest or the pumping of great quantities of petroleum, only to burn it off, just like that, without putting it to further use. If the
ESTEPA
(
or
STEPPE
) represents the field of action, of deployment, the forest is where the Russian nation turns in times of danger.

The
BOSCAGE
is cold, dark, and silent, an aspect it lends to Russia itself, which, seen from afar, may resemble a “dark wood,”
una selva oscura
.

B
READ FOR THE
M
OUTH OF
M
Y
S
OUL
(
see
: P
ANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE
or
P.O.A.).

B
RILLIANT
C
ORNERS.
When he least expected it and in the least appropriate places, T
HELONIOUS
would sometimes suffer a serious relapse of his malady. For example, the face of a woman with whom he was having an animated conversation would suddenly go flat, recede to an inaccessible distance and blur as if a ghost had passed in front of it. The image that a few moments earlier had been his talkative friend would first regress into an accumulation of features
that still, for a second, preserved a vague familial resemblance to their owner, then come apart into a chaos of basic geometric figures. At that point, T
HELONIOUS
would intuit that this was a woman’s face; he would distinguish the clean outline of an oval (different from a circle because its perimeter is not equidistant from the center), two opalescent spheres (the eyes?) covered with a thin film (the eyelids?), the lashes (short, stiff hairs = bristles), the mouth, reducible to the figure of a broken ellipse. As if he were studying an X-ray, a purely geometric outline, the stroke of charcoal on canvas. Only then, as he went along losing points of contact, to be left wandering across immensities of blank plaster, immersed in a silence that was shattered, visually, by intense red flashes, sudden proximities, blooms of flame blindly spinning. Desperate, T
HELONIOUS
tried to grasp hold of the two red half-moons that were patiently modulating words with secret urgency: he followed that vermilion flutter with apparent attention, aware that he was the person being addressed by this discourse that now, thousands of kilometers away, he could no longer grasp. With great care, fearful of losing his footing, he approached slowly, advancing along the narrow path of two rosy protuberances (almost certainly the cheeks), reordering this assortment of geometric figures that, evidently, formed part of his world, and that might plausibly be composed into a woman’s face, seeking to determine the nature of that patch of red, now immobile in a pout of reproach. “But weren’t you listening to me?” And since at that very moment he had discovered, finally, what it was (a pair of lips) and then immediately recognized their owner, the sound switched back on and with it, as if by magic, the meaning of the spiel she had just directed his way.

His malady was the product of a logical breakdown in the natural and involuntary gift of seeing. He was aware of the way we distinguish objects by the contrast between surface and background, the drop-off
in light values around the edges, the intricate process of correlation required to endow the naked primary blocks that appear
at first sight
with meaning. He knew how, in slow evolution, those blocks acquire practical significance, the connotation of a known object: “a fireplace poker” and then not simply a poker but a magnificent poker, the patina on its bronze. In that sense, T
HELONIOUS
found himself as distant from other humans as mankind is from the blackbird: the blackbird that has no history, not the slashed sleeves of a Renaissance tunic nor the voluptuous blooms of Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau. T
HELONIOUS
could, at will, slip through the cracks of sight, descend into a total decomposition of the image, and then ascend back up to admirable syntheses, reaching a point where he saw the world as we will see it several centuries from now, for our way of seeing is also subject to an evolution and every era introduces changes into the world’s appearance. Two years earlier, T
HELONIOUS
had admired some watercolors by Dührer—Alpine vistas made during the painter’s first journey to Italy—that, according to the caption, were the first landscapes in the history of European painting. Some of the sights T
HELONIOUS
enjoyed after his terrible seizures might also have been the first glimpses of an art yet to be created. In the visions bestowed by his malady were present all of modern art’s moves toward blankness, beginning with an entirely impressionist luminosity and passing through the coldness of cubism and the abstractionist aphasia to disappear into a polychrome whirlwind, entirely unforeseen. Except he’d lost control over his gift and let himself “see” in unexpected ways while remaining blind to simple sights, utilitarian visions. He would stop, entranced, before the irregular striping of a fold of satin, given over to the pleasure of studying it, endowing it with a meaning inaccessible to ordinary men. He would concentrate on things that might appear trivial but that meant everything to him: the beauty of a double row of buttons, the sunflower
color of a friend’s silk blouse, the slow curves of the chairs in a café . . . Then, overcome by an emotion that cannot be narrated—the true and absolute importance of those lines—he would fall, dragged down by vertigo and left blind, the world decomposed into tessellations, and he deep within them, groping for clarity, desperate.

But there was L
INDA
, to save him.

B
RODIAGA
(БРОД
ГА: lit., wanderer). The garden beneath my window was like a scaled-down replica of the world I would one day resolve to venture into. I had only to abandon the blank page on my desk and go forth, advancing from tree to tree, my house receding into nothingness amid the birches. What was the breadth of this world? Immense: all Russia. The Volga, and Astrakhan on the Volga, and Samara, its fluvial docks with their barges of watermelons. Vast spaces overrun by the Russian soul; there one could dilute oneself without leaving a trace, lose all track of one’s identity and earn kopecks enough for a meager dinner by unloading watermelons until nightfall, barefoot on that dock. I was not, in fact, Russian but I was well aware of the
BRODIAGA
life that several of its writers had led and though it wasn’t the type of experience I believed to be important at the age of twenty-three, whenever I felt tempted to make a radical change in the course of my existence I entertained intense thoughts of the striped watermelons of Astrakhan.

To be a
BRODIAGA
is a state that separates us from the fragile edifice of the day’s order, coffee at breakfast, a poorly remunerated job.

Quand tous mes rêves se seraient tournés en réalités, ils ne m’auraient pas suffi; j’aurais imaginé, rêvé, désiré encore. Je trouvais en moi un vide inexplicable que rien n’aurait pu remplir, un certain élancement du coeur vers une autre sorte de jouissance dont je n’avais pas d’idée et dont pourtant je sentais le besoin.

Which is to say:
If all my dreams had become realities, that wouldn’t have been enough for me; I would have kept on dreaming, imagining, desiring. I found an inexplicable void within myself that nothing could have filled, a certain movement of the heart toward another type of satisfaction that I could not conceive of but for which I felt the need.
(Letter from Rousseau to Malesherbes, January 26, 1762)

At this point in our reflections, we’re ready to throw ourselves into vagabonding, to
brodiazhnichat.
Naturally the world abounds in empty-headed
BRODIAGA
—and ordinary men—who don’t interest us, but I’ve met several contemplative or скиталцы вроıауа and occasionally we’ll see one of them being interviewed on TV. For the
BRODIAGA
has other eyes that enable him to see very deeply and discern the hard nut of existence. I’ve never gone beyond mere admiration of the garden’s foliage, but the fear of madness is there and does not diminish: a perfectly sane person can end up a
BRODIAGA
. Lev Tolstoy took his first step at the age of eighty-two and, inevitably, at the very start of the long journey, died.

C

C
ALLIGRAPHY
.
One day during an essentially sterile summer a woman friend had the following note delivered to me: “Don’t think for one moment that I’ll bear a grudge for what you’ve done. I’ve forgotten it already and am off to my parents’ house. I hope your anger will have passed by the time I come back. Many kisses from the one who loves you. T**”

At ten o’clock in the morning when I was still wondering whether to get up, meditating in my bed about how to waste the hours of that day, she’d already had time to do her morning jump-rope exercises, water the begonias on the balcony, put on her only summer dress—the one with red polka dots—and take a minute to write me that little note. How could a person capable of composing such a note be incapable of doing anything in the world? “Don’t think for one moment that I’ll bear a grudge for what you’ve done. I’ve forgotten it already and am off to my parents’ house. I hope your anger will have passed by the time I come back. Many kisses from the one who loves you. T**”

Her
CALLIGRAPHIC
writing was a further demonstration of the ease of her movement through a universe as precise as a clockwork mechanism, blindly guided by discipline. This was the source of her unvarying good humor. I could never achieve such handwriting. T** was, even so, a fine, upstanding woman who had all the grace of her flowery capitals. Her note made me happy (I’d come to love her a great deal) and saddened me at the same time.

I went down to the garden.

“Know what? I always thought
CALLIGRAPHY
was an antiquated practice, from the days when my father was studying it by the Edward Johnston system and all around us were beautiful P
ACKARDS
whose looping contours are like
CALLIGRAPHY
compared to today’s cars, which look like printed block letters. To discover a thing like this”—and I showed my lady friend the little note from T**—“is highly disconcerting, believe me.”

C
ATWALK
(
see
: P
ASARELA
).

C
HOCOLATES
(S
WISS
).
At the neighboring table, a uniformed general was gallantly attending to his companion, a lady who, I later learned, had amassed a fortune administering a meat provisioning facility. I invited them to join us, that we might all be the merrier for it: Muscovite simplicity.

Within the first half hour they’d already given evidence of astonishing appetites: raw silk kimonos, solid silver flatware,
DACHAS
with cedar-lined bathrooms and heated swimming pools, hunting parties with packs of hounds and beaters preceding them across the terrain, their heedless way of chewing, their formidable drive—in forty-eight hours they could have been sunbathing in Portugal . . . Or so the general informed me.

“Think about that, young man”—delivering a slam of his fist to the table. “In forty-eight hours we could have been sunbathing in Portugal. With our tanks . . .”—he leaned toward me. “In the blink of an eye. Let’s drink to that!”

“For Heaven’s sake, calm down! Who remembers all that now?” the lady administrator, who bore herself with the aplomb of a duchess, reproached him.

“Who remembers? All of Europe! They trembled at the sight of me! An officer of the Red Army!”

And he, meanwhile, had trembled at the wheel of a beautiful black sedan he had occasion to drive across a small European country, barely
on the map. The motor’s muffled vibration, his officer’s glands functioning at full speed. He took the lady executive by the hand and cast a dreamy gaze into her turquoise blue eyes: “That car was as good as a Russian woman (wonderful, sturdy, well-built).”

a) Ready, in a word, to take up his position in the Archipelago contaminated by
evil
. When Russian troops laid siege to Berlin in 1945, Central Command had already received several reports concerning a disturbing Red drift toward the enemies’ cushier digs: a petty predilection for trophy watches that gave a fuller sense of time than the stubby Russian models. Millions of soldiers who, at war’s culmination, brought home the seeds of movies not filmed in the Dovzhenko studios. It became necessary to subject them to detoxification in the snowy fields of Siberia. (Remember how Raskolnikov comprehends the depths of his guilt as he watches the blue sky through the tiny window of his cell in the Siberian prison camp?)

“Well, a car is a car,” he added, to cover his broad back. He gave me a sidelong glance. “I think the Lada won a stage of last year’s Paris-Dakar. What’s more, our airplanes are among the best in the world and at this very moment we have three men in the cosmos.” (Three men continually offering this salvation to the Russian people, a last-gasp argument for faith in the nation.)

I was about to add something but we were distracted by the creak of the swinging doors: R
UDI
with the
CHOCOLATES
. A beautiful box, lilacs blooming across the lid. An assortment of bonbons.

“With liqueur?” queried the duchess, set on edge by this unexpected apparition.

“An assortment,” the writer explained, untying the satin ribbon.

The duchess, who at her many congresses and high-level meetings must have dispatched more than a thousand such boxes, informed us, “Of all the bonbons in the Union, my favorite are from Chelyabinsk.”

Chelyabinsk? The city with a soccer team in the national league and a
uranium-enrichment combine? I spoke of Swiss
CHOCOLATES
but the duchess had been in Geneva and eaten her fill of them. The impression she had retained was a negative one. “I’m not sure, perhaps it was too much milk; very soft, as well. The finest
CHOCOLATES
are made here, in the Union.”

L
INDA
passed the box around. The general, who, without yet actually having done so, was talking about throwing our rock crystal goblets over our shoulders, selected a bonbon and plopped it into the executive’s champagne (he had heard that ladies like this), whereupon she grew stony-faced, for the gesture struck her as being in dreadful taste. The general, who’d anticipated a different reaction, shrank in his chair and made several superfluous movements with his hands: he straightened his tie, the sort of tie a
VILLAGER
would wear, pulled down the sleeves of his military jacket, and twiddled his enormous cuff links, made of gold. His life was an endless thicket of false steps and it was clear that at this moment he hated the lady executive, whose disapproval of anything she found in poor taste was without appeal. She must have learned her manners at Party meetings, for she also severely reprimanded the general for crossing his knife and fork over the plate instead of setting them down in parallel: that trifle. She conveyed this to him in a brief pantomime, like a space ship captain under zero gravity conditions, lightly picking up the offending flatware and replacing them on the plate in the correct manner. Then she told him in a whisper everyone could hear, “Do you understand? I will not even mention the bonbon in the champagne. I’m not one of the sluts you soften up with chocolate bars then take back to the barracks.”

Her aplomb somewhat restored, the executive picked up the box of bonbons and studied its provenance. “Greek bonbons? I’ve never heard of Greek bonbons,” and she bit into a particularly delicious kind (which I’d already tried), filled with strawberry liqueur, and lied. “They’re quite bad, too. You should have ordered the chocolates from Ufa; those are very good.”

L
INDA
, who was also turning out to be rather an expert on
CHOCOLATE
, added: “That’s because those other countries add too much milk; in the
OCCIDENT
they try to save on everything. The Union’s
CHOCOLATES
are purer. Unfortunately, they’re hard to find these days; we no longer have an adequate supply of cacao . . .”

The executive agreed with this, and explained, to my astonishment (I, who’d taken it for granted that the
IMPERIUM
possessed the world’s most extensive cacao plantations), “We’re not importing it from Brazil because of the trade gap.”

C
OLLAPSE OF THE
I
MPERIUM
.
As a uniquely privileged witness, the manservant hidden in the stables who recognizes the trembling emperor—despite the matronly cosmetics used to disguise his face—and watches him saddle the thoroughbred for his flight, I, who came from territories beyond the sea, watched the beggars proliferating in the metro stations and discovered—my heart in my throat—purple graffiti that denounced the cruelty of the
IMPERIUM
, all the spilled Russian blood. I saw my own years of savings devoured by runaway inflation; I dined for three dinars one evening and breakfasted the next morning for a thousand. I learned to live without the security, the hope, the center of the universe that was the Doctrine, and every day awoke with a smaller portion of soul, seeing more clearly, yes, but diminished ever further by the awareness of my error, the years gone by in vain, all that I had wagered on a false emperor. I was attacked in my own home by men sent from the Sassanid Empire in search of gold; I leapt into the void with my hands bound, like a Hindu prince escaping from his alcazar as it crashes down in flames around him, then fleeing at full gallop, hugging the neck of his steed. And my despair was such that I was tempted to traffic in weapons for the
IMPERIUM’S
southern wars and I dealt in the electron, the yellow stone, provided to me by two blond and insolent merchants from the Baltic.

I watched the
IMPERIUM
fall,
saw its soul depart from its body through a thousand tiny cracks, saw that immense, enraged, and fearsome body emit wheezes of impotence until it collapsed, inert, abhorred, a shapeless sprawl on the ground, the occasion for photographs taken by tourists playing the triumphal hunter: one foot on the bear’s prone mass, fingers in a V.

C
ONTEMPLATION OF THE IMPURE
.
The naked body horrifies the aesthete.
This garret was undoubtedly ideal for P.O.A., the orphaned lightbulb high above, the translucent washbasin, the creaking floorboards. I lowered L
INDA
onto a brass bed next to the window. The girl, at last feeling the effects of the considerable quantity of champagne she had drunk, went on talking as if in a dream, enumerating the reasons for her negative response (but by now incapable of actually changing anything). I looked out the window, scrutinizing the wet ribbon of the canal and a few seagulls wheeling across the gray sky. I leaned out over the ledge a little farther. Yes: the bridge with the winged lions
²
was visible from here and I could mention it in my novel.

I loosened the buckles on her ankle boots and managed to get each one off with a single tug. I sat her up and tried to straighten her torso but her head swayed weakly on her limp neck. I raised her arms and pulled off the dress. When I had her in my hands at last, L
INDA
fell backward. Her inner framework, the ribbed structure that gave volume to her body’s core, was now visible. Lamentably, she was only a woman. A naked body crossing through space in a bra and pink panties. I sat down in front of her and devoted one long hour to the study of her feet, the pink folds in their soles. How could such prettiness include these rough cracks, these calloused stumps? In despair, I moved on to the legs where I breathed easier—a nice roundness to the knees—and then continued slowly upward, her perfect figure installing itself smoothly in my memory, fitting itself into the emptied ideal of L
INDA
E
VANGELISTA
. In the distance her breasts began, the deep
anatomical recesses, the dazzling whiteness of her neck, the red swirl of hair on the pillow. I cannot endure the sight of a naked woman for very long: no one can. That’s why we always elude this moment, submerged in the shadows of close proximity, the single, blind, tactile continuum that is all women, the same basal heat. I subjected her (subjected myself) to this scrutiny because I sought to destroy any feeling of love that might otherwise contaminate the purity of my experiment. I examined her slowly, through the wee hours of that morning, piece by piece: the ceaseless play of valves, the measured flow of secretions, the unending skin like the surface of a Klein bottle, without a single point of rupture, artificiality, anything modeled by the hand of man.

It was getting lighter by the moment. A fly buzzed around and flew into the windowpane. L
INDA
turned over and I stood up in alarm. The black dot of the fly alit next to the girl’s neck. I fixed my eyes on the distended skin of the twin beanies that were her breasts and as I approached to observe them better—those purple nubbins, the serosities beneath the skin—I retched and was momentarily overcome with vertigo. I wobbled back on my heels unable to tear my eyes away, irresistibly attracted by one of those pores, and realized in horror that I was falling toward it in trigonometric increments. Then I passed through the black hole and opened my eyes onto a white clarity.