Wakefield (19 page)

He doesn't, but laughs anyway. He doesn't care what she says as long as he can keep looking at her. Tiffany turns away from her sister and jumps into Milena's conversation.

“Milena just loves surveys. In her country no one ever asked her opinion about anything. She was eleven during the Velvet revolution, Havel and all that. She's a
velveteen
”

Apparently Susan is used to this kind of family-issues avoidance by Tiffany. Milena continues to elaborate her theory of post-Communist beauty.

“The founding myth of Bohemia is very interesting. The tribal ruler was a woman, the Princess Libuse, and she was forced by the nobles to take a husband, which caused all the women to revolt. They call it the War of the Maidens, and it lasted for many years, but unfortunately the men prevailed and established a dynasty that ruled for six hundred years. Because of the importance of women in Czech history, beautiful stone women decorate almost all the buildings in Prague. That's why we invented Art Nouveau,” she smirks, elbowing Tiffany. “When I was a little girl I loved these stone ladies, and I wanted to look just like them when I grew up.”

Susan looks disgusted by her chickenshit sister and Art Nouveau. “Are you saying that Czech chicks grow up beautiful in order to compete with a bunch of buildings?”

“What's wrong with that? Stone women can be naked year round because they're not bothered by cold and snow. In the Czech Republic we have only one or two months of summer to enjoy being naked.”

“Milena loves to be naked,” confirms Tiffany.

The guy with the clipboard holds it against his chest, as if holding in his about-to-explode heart. He's hypnotized.

“Shoo,” Susan tells him. “Go away now.”

He doesn't know what to do.

“That's all,” says Tiffany. “That's all we have to say.”

Milena winks at him. Reluctantly, he drags himself away backward, like a supplicant. The next big thing. Wow.

“You chased away my admirer!” Milena pouts.

“There are always more where he came from.” Tiffany bumps her shoulder. The two of them are like a couple of young thoroughbreds.

Wakefield doesn't want them to gallop away, but he really does need an hour alone to prepare for his talk. It's getting late.

He excuses himself from the booth, but Susan won't budge.

“I'll just stay here and drink until you come back. Don't worry, I'm an excellent drunk driver.”

“I'm not so sure,” her sister warns. “I can drive all of you. Milena's getting pretty shit-faced and I just love it when she's like that. She'll do anything.”

Milena pulls up her skirt under the table. “I'm not wearing any panties!” she announces cheerfully.

Twinge of desire. No, he really must go upstairs for a while. Alone. He does like his wide range of choices, options, and possibilities, though. It's as if in giving him a deadline for starting the race for his “real” life, the Devil gave him a prelife of delights, like the best parts of all kinds of great movies. Just as quickly as he rejoices, he sees the downside. If all the great alternatives occur in the prelife, what happens after the starter shot? Will the range perversely narrow, leaving him not with the likes of Maggie or Susan, but choices between, let's say, working forever in a slaughterhouse or serving breakfasts in an insane asylum. No women, no great restaurants, no glittery cities, no beautiful cornfields … just his back on an eternal treadmill. The Devil's sense of humor is not like ours. We laugh about anything, including ourselves, but the Devil has a cruel surrealist streak.

Because of the controversial nature of the exhibition, the museum has hired private security guards to augment city police for the opening. When Wakefield and his tipsy sirens arrive, there is a cordon of uniformed police and beefy guys with walkie-talkies and bulges under their jackets in front of the building. Wakefield goes through a metal detector and receives his Speaker badge. Doris is there on the other side of the checkpoint, and she takes him to the green room backstage. They are accompanied by two muscular guys in suits who scan the empty hall before unlocking the door to the green room. Doris sighs. “Private security. We had to. Regular museum security people don't even have guns. I hope it doesn't bother you.”

Wakefield drinks a soda, then goes out to peek at the crowd from behind the curtain. One bodyguard walks in front of him, the other behind. Wakefield takes a look; the auditorium is full, at least fifteen hundred people. He sees his friends in the front row. Milena has stuck her long legs out in front of her. The short skirt and what he knows isn't under it give him a momentary thrill, but it's followed by a stronger feeling of fear.

As senior curator, Doris takes the stage to begin her introduction to the exhibition. She speaks carefully, noting how difficult it has been to select the works, which represent so many countries and so many, often conflicting, points of view. She explains that the process was unbiased, and that the museum hopes that it will foster understanding and, more important, tolerance. There is a scattering of polite applause. Then she launches into her introduction of the speaker.

“Mr. Wakefield is a man known to many of you as one of this country's best travel writers. He is also an accomplished speaker celebrated for his poetic insights and surprising improvisational style. What you may not know is that he is also a student of architecture and a sensitive observer of human societies. I saw on the noon news today that the symbolic Bridge at Mostar, said to connect or divide East and West, a bridge that withstood two world wars and many local conflicts, was blown up. You may wonder why we have hired a poetic travel writer to speak here tonight. The answer may or may not flatter Mr. Wakefield. We simply could not think of anyone better able to see our exhibition in the afternoon, relate its images to those we have seen in the news this week, and provide us, additionally, with his own impressions of travel in the Balklands. Some poets travel at the speed of light. I think we found one.”

Wakefield walks to the lectern and receives brisk applause. His bodyguards, wearing night-vision goggles, stand in the wings, scanning the darkened theater. He can't see the audience, but he can sense its energy, a fifteen-hundred-headed beast holding its breath.

When the applause dies down, Wakefield addresses the beast.

“Comrades!”

Laughter, hissing, boos.

“Workers, soldiers, peasants!”

More laughter, louder hisses, an angry voice: “Fuck Communism!”

“The other day on the Nature Channel—

I always wanted to start a speech

‘the other day on the Nature Channel'

that being the only nature

we know these days

‘nature' a channel among many

next to the People Channel and the Disaster

Channel that would be news

and the Sci-fi Channel and the Mystery Channel—

the other day on the Nature Channel

I saw that a perfect ball of iron

spewed by the earth on an island near Madagascar

several thousand years ago

was hollowed out by a man and his sons

who moved inside of it

and were promptly declared gods

by the natives who were allowed inside

the ball once a year to get drunk

and worship something called Aurak

which was a huge petrified fish

that zapped them when they touched it

and for having that experience

they paid the ball carvers in fish

goat meat grapes and lizard kebobs!

And that was not long ago

just after the Second World War

when American planes failed to deliver

Paradise and the local cargo cult failed.

It was at about the same time that in

faraway Romania

Professor Teleskou's mother was in labor”

A murmur of stunned surprise at mention of this name. Voice: “Who killed him?” Wakefield has been counting on this reaction: the assassination of Professor Teleskou, though he was Romanian and not strictly speaking a party to the current conflicts in the Balklands, was considered by some in the Wintry City to mark the
real
start of the war. The issues of land, nationality, race, blood, ancestral rights, and religious feuds, explored in his writing, resonated for partisans of both sides. Teleskou had separated the myths and legends from the nationalist propagandists' uses of them, and that was widely believed to have been the reason for his murder. Their superstitions unmoored, the fanatics killed him.

“In labor Mrs. Teleskou

watched a huge bomb

fall from the sky and level the Church

of the Immaculate Conception

where their neighbors had taken shelter

and she gave birth to a baby

who would survive the war

survive communism

become a world-renowned scholar

and nearly survive the twentieth century!

A miraculous plume of smoke attended his birth!

and the priest of the destroyed church

who also miraculously survived

blessed the baby in the Orthodox rite

and declared the baby divinely pleasing

and thanked the young mother for having delivered

beauty amid the ugliness of war!

He is a pleasant sight unto God, he said.

But under the smoldering church

there was the ruin of an older pagan temple

and beneath that chained to the bottom of a well

was a dying monster.

It was the Beast of Hatred

still alive and calling for the flesh of babes

from underneath the ruins.

Architecture, like Gaul, is divided into three parts

the part that comes courtesy of the Nature Channel

the part that comes thanks to the War Channel

and the part that comes from the Imagination Channel

and these three architectures

the architecture of nature

the architecture of ruins

and the architecture of the imagination

are the sons of Disaster.

The mother giving birth in the ruins

is my mother and your mother

our mothers who warned us not to go near ruins

when we were children but where else could we go

where else could
you
go

when the whole town was a ruin

and the whole country you lived in was in ruins

and the world you were born into was a ruin

and the school Professor Teleskou went to

the Elementary School of the Ursulines

renamed the School of the Red Star

was the ruin of a convent under which ran

tunnels connecting one ruin to another

tunnels that were also tombs

and that had been used in the Middle Ages

to escape from invaders

into the woods where one was safe in the arms

of the nature channel

and the shapes of those ruins

were as fantastic as the legends of your people

who sang them in the ruins of their hovels

to put the world back in some order

after the sky and earth gods the sons

of Disaster had their way with the world!”

Wakefield pours water from the carafe under the lectern into the glass and the sound is pure; every drop is felt by his listeners. Transcendent silence! He thinks he sees Milena's long legs in the front row, luminous in their liberty, freed from the ruins of the Old World.

“So when the professor was a boy

he became an expert at making temporary

houses in the shadows of cemeteries and crumbling

walls where he took his first love”

Here Wakefield steps on the shaky ground of a biography he's inventing, but no discontent greets him, so he goes on.

“and there they lived for hours safe inside each other

and that was the architecture of adolescence

which builds shelters of mystery for the unfolding

of its own mysteries

and that—to be perfectly honest—is the only

architecture I care for

and that—if you are honest—

is the only architecture you care for

that shelter-building adolescence pursuing only its love

away from governments police borders and pride of ownership.”

This utopian sentiment is met with inaudible but palpable derision by a few, a very few souls in the room; possibly the artists who have traveled from Europe to present their work here; they have pride of ownership and are wary of utopias.

“I would like to see a collaborative

project of urban adolescents of all ages

and from all countries

describing the shelters they have made

for their desire from the ruins of their cities.

What is the eruption of the marvelous

if not the eruption of desire

that rearranges landscapes according

to its fancy

knowing that all architecture

is born of Disaster.

Within every building there is another

known only to desire-driven adolescents

even official buildings

of the state and of the police

where the tormented wait in endless antechambers

under great vaults with trembling forms in their hands

even there you will see a young sergeant or clerk

find a secret place to gratify her imagination

and there is no building on earth that has not been

rebuilt by the imagination to contain

shelter from bright lights nooks of darkness

chapels of selfhood chambers and vaults

for the song of
axis mundi!

One year after the dictator Ceausescu

ordered the old center of Bucharest demolished

Byzantine churches and stately homes

the coldest winter in the history of the Carpathians

froze all the rivers and the lakes

and in the spring when they thawed

an intact fourteenth-century basilica floated

down the Danube and headed for the Black Sea