Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Page 2

  AX (see: HAND AX).

  B

  BABIONKI (бАбИОНКИ). There are, of course, women—or mujeres as I might prefer to call them—in Muscovy, but there are BABIONKI, as well, and these latter are superior. They wear their hair in a tight bun at the back of the neck and can generally be found in the bazaars, haggling at the top of their lungs, arms akimbo, over the price of a kilo of figs. They are very sweet albeit somewhat hardened by life in the IMPERIUM. Not every woman, I hasten to clarify, is worthy of the title. Both nerve and temperament are prerequisite. BABIONKI are much more commonly found among women of the people, though a number of female intellectuals, slightly derailed by the novels of Françoise Sagan, are also BABIONKI, as if consubstantially. When, upon arriving at a rendezvous in fine spirits and with every intention of sailing carefree through an inconsequential romantic interlude (our erudite commentary on Aubrey Beardsley at the ready), we discern, behind an elegant pair of glasses, the glint of a pair of BABIONKI eyes, it is highly advisable to retract the hand—though it may be halfway on its journey toward the skirt—indefinitely postpone this particular siege, and slip down the back stairs, giving thanks to merciful God all the while for the warning.

  As a biological entity (they give suck to their offspring, which is a highly irrational mode of conduct) the BABIONKI eluded the rigid state control exercised by the IMPERIUM. In consequence, they’ve been the victims of perfidious defamation campaigns. But the BABIONKI, as “free men,” до одного места about that—which is to say, les importa un rábano or, in other words, “they don’t give a radish” (or a “fig” or a “good goddamn”).

  BADEN-BADEN. I wanted to visit the apartment not far from the Astoria that F.M. once rented, now a museum. My visit coincided with that of a group of high school students who were studying Преступление и наказание (Crime and Punishment, the only one of F.M.’s books that is required reading in the schools). They were there for a class outing that included: a) the itinerary of RASKOLNIKOV prior to his crime; b) the slum where the pawnbroker and her half-sister Lizaveta lived; c) Hay Square, and a tour of the writer’s private world: whipped cream for breakfast, the (very ugly) stippled wallpaper in his study, the goose quill from which sprang the imaginary life of Dmitri Karamazov, the heavy oak desk—indirect cause of F.M.’s death (“he ruptured an aneurysm trying to move it,” the guide informed us in a whisper)—the pendulum clock stopped forever at four a.m., January 28, 1881 . . .

  A scant hour later I abandoned the museum feeling completely empty. It was always the same story. A few years earlier, I, too, had redone my room in a wallpaper that was frankly appalling. But I hadn’t managed to extract anything from its infinitely repeated design, whereas F.M., as all of us know, did. How to explain such widely differing results for two writers who both proceeded from such essentially similar wallpaper?

  I. Next to the coat check, on a counter, the twelve volumes of his complete works were on sale. I paused to leaf through a copy of the diaries in the vain hope of chancing upon some answer to my question. As I was preparing to depart, I was intercepted by a very neat elderly little man wearing a woolen vest of 1953 or 1957 vintage who clicked his heels in military fashion.

  “Allow me. I see that your interest is real. When I encounter a visitor who is truly interested, I take the trouble . . . You can see . . .”—and he held out a binder with the following inscription, in gilded letters, on its cover: Dostoyevsky, F. M., Dossier. “To tell you the truth, no one commissioned this investigation, not officially, so to speak . . . But please, forgive me, may I invite you to . . . That is, if you happen to have the time, of course. Perfect. Not far from here, just around the corner, as they say. An ideal spot for discussing the matter.”

  We emerge onto the street. Just a slight movement of our shoulders allows us to go back twenty, fifty, a hundred years with no difficulty whatsoever: to break through the threshold’s flimsy partition and cross cleanly over an entire historical period. (Heavy, thick, larval: a cannonball’s blind trajectory.) We descend into a tavern on Vladimirskaya Ploshchad: warm beer and drunkards sprawled on the tables, off to a decidedly bad start on their day. We take over a table beneath a large barred window, our heads at street level. Hundreds of feet pass by interminably as we sit conversing below.

  “I would like to make one thing clear from the beginning. What I’m going to tell you is not, to any degree, the product of my imagination. Fyodor Mikhaylovich spent four years in the Omsk prison camp, the кáторга, I understand that well. The sinister influence, the indelible mark it left upon the young writer’s soul . . . For when else did Dostoyevsky develop his scandalous affinity for games of chance: enormous sums of money wagered, hands still clutching the playing cards at dawn? A vice, please keep in mind, that in my day would have earned him a far lengthier prison sentence, or even расстрел, as you are surely aware.”

  (But of course! Rasstrel, the pretty word: the convict barefoot in the snow, the signal, the nine flashes of gunpowder!)

  “Well then, my fine gentleman, after all these years, what is the result today? That this compulsive gambler, lover of roulette and all forms of gaming, has a museum devoted to him in Saint Petersburg, and three more across the Union. Just think of that! But better yet: listen to me, sir, judge for yourself to what point . . .

  “‘Dostoyevsky, F. M., born in Moscow on 30 December, 1825. From his earliest youth . . .’ No, let’s skip that part and go straight to page 20: ‘During his first trip abroad, in 1853, already an adulterous spouse (María Dimitrieva, his first wife, lay dying in Tver), F.M. evinces an excessive affinity for gambling.’ Listen to this: in BADEN-BADEN, his lover (Apollinaria Suslova, the Polina of Игрок, The Gambler) writes in her diary: ‘F.M. plays roulette constantly and in general his conduct is far from responsible.’ That very same night she adds, ‘F.M. has lost a lot of money and is very worried. We are left without funds for the journey.’ Can you imagine? Truly catastrophic. I shall go on: F.M. spends three days in BADEN-BADEN, from 21 to 24 August, 1863, gambling at the casino. He wins 5,000 francs, a fabulous sum for that era, which he loses the same night. That year he gambles in Wiesbaden and in Rome. Finally, after his return from Italy, he bankrupts himself entirely in Hamburg. A note in Miss Suslova’s diary confirms it: ‘Received letter from F.M. yesterday. He has lost all his money gambling and begs me to send him more funds. I have no money either. I just gave everything I had to Mme. Mir. I’ve resolved to pawn my watch and chain.’

  “Shameful conduct! And can you believe that this report of mine has been circulated to various powerful entities with no result whatsoever! You cannot imagine the harm it does us, this worship of false idols. I saw those children, God’s little angels, innocently, without anyone to warn them . . . Well, and the worst of it, what is truly horrendous . . .”

  The old man leans toward me and descends to a whisper. “A true story: a case of child perversion in a bath house. A subject on which the greatest silence has been preserved but which, nevertheless, was a secret well-known to many in the eighties of the last century. Strajov, his most intimate friend . . .”

  I cut him off. “Excuse me, I don’t believe I have any interest in this.”

  “But it’s true! The most important part of my report! Count Tolstoy certainly knew about it. To be perfectly honest, I myself . . . at times (for I am no saint). Certain slender twelve-year-old backs . . . Напрасно сударь, совершенно напрасно! (You are making a mistake and you’ll regret it!)”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Certain supple, bare twelve-year-old backs . . . frail, honey-hued shoulders” (Lolita, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov—or Набóков, if you like).

  I stormed to my feet, head spinning, cheeks on fire. Barely keeping my balance, I headed for the exit. In the doorway, unable to restrain myself, I turned and shouted back at this Humbert: “But this is a vile slander, a filthy донóс! Clearer than water! Aren’t you ashamed! And t
here I was, hearing you out without an inkling of your true intent! To defame the memory of a great writer thus! Listen . . . A viper, that’s what you are. A viper who lurks waiting to inject others with your venom. How low can a man . . .” Et cetera.

  BIBLIOSPHERE. We can imagine it as an immense spherical structure, Ptolemaically centered on every man-reader. Its thin walls—thick as a single page from the Bible—harbor all texts that have been written and all those being written at this moment (including this one), their surface ceaselessly expanding. The vastness of the BIBLIOSPHERE, its cosmic diameter, in no way slows the velocity of access to its texts, for any journey across it is mental and instantaneous. After a more or less exhaustive exploration of the BIBLIOSPHERE a writer who is less than shrewd may enter a perilous state of ecstatic dejection, having deduced that nothing new can be created. A dynamic intelligence—one we might qualify as Copernican—will understand that we must return to the scholastic practice of the gloss, acknowledging the BIBLIOSPHERE as an authority. All that remains then is to discover the generative nature of the BIBLIOSPHERE, its capacity to create texts out of itself. Bacon writes, in The Masculine Birth of Time or Three Books on the Interpretation of Nature, “A pig might print the letter A with its snout in the mud, but you would not on that account expect it to go on to compose a tragedy.” The theorem of the British Museum proposes virtually the same thing: “If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all of the books in the British Museum” (Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World ). Or, to simplify things a bit, the monkeys might limit themselves to the thirty-five volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Indeed, why not suppose—again, Copernicanally—that literature is no longer the province of mankind, that the fictional corpus will henceforth emerge by spontaneous generation from the depths of the BIBLIOSPHERE: originality of style, exquisite composition, the stamp of genius all the results of a roll of the dice, or rather, an automated spin of the painstakingly labeled spheres of a combinatorial optimization machine.

  BOGATYR (БогАтыРь: mythic warrior). We might call him a colossus out of a medieval epic poem of heroic deeds. He represents the немереная (incomparable) force of the Russian nation. Many secretly know themselves to be BOGATYR, a conviction for which no evidence whatsoever is required. One need only sprawl next to the wood stove, drink KVAS, be large-bellied and wide-shouldered, and remain imperturbably in that reclining position until the fateful day arrives: the day when little Mother Russia is in need.

  In everyday life, the term has been put to unfortunate use as the name of a chain of shops that deal in plus-size menswear.

  BOOGIE SHOES. Now, as I stand before the Astoria’s gilded logo, I must say a special word of thanks to VASARI, the Italian shoe manufacturer, who have provided me with an excellent pair of my first alligator shoes with reinforced soles. They are exceptionally comfortable; the foot “sleeps” within them. Ideal for undertaking my search for LINDA.

  At moments of discouragement, I would come to a stop in the middle of the Nevsky Prospekt and contemplate my shoes from above: their perfection, the solid stitching along their seams, was confidence-inspiring, OCCIDENTAL. A weight would fall from my shoulders at such moments, I would breathe deeply and go on my way, more certain of my own talent, more convinced I would be able to bring my project to fruition as long as I was wearing these formidable shoes, so fully aligned with the stars, so perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist, so delicately musical. (Yes, incredibly enough: this whole rich gamut of sensations.)

  I. Mere contact with certain objects of a reality not abandoned to its free play but organized according to strictly hierarchical criteria of quality and class inculcated me with a strong notion of authenticity, of absolute worth, a mental alteration that, over time, redounded to the benefit of previous efforts to correct my careless ways.

  I will illustrate this with an example. On one occasion I spent several days contemplating the purchase of two pairs of shoes, both made of genuine leather and both in the very latest style, but each in a different color: one gray, the other blue. Gray and blue! The possibility of buying them (I had the money), reinforced by the other and even more hallucinatory possibility of choosing between two pairs of new shoes, not at all flashy, magnificently well made, occupied my mind for a week. In the end I acquired neither pair, but I had enjoyed the pleasure of taking them, albeit abstractly, into my life’s eccentric orbit, which, in the wake of that experience, came to revolve around truly notable things, things guaranteed by certificates of authenticity to belong to this new world that had taken so long—it was so far away and I was beyond the reach of its gravitational pull—to draw me toward it, but that, once I was beneath its influence—like those wandering comets that pass by the solar system only to remain confined forever within it—was a world I could never abandon, dazzled by the brilliance of its genuine elegance. Then, after that profound contemplation of the symbols of this new religion—the shoes resting on a velvet cushion, their little altar protected by a bell jar—and in full knowledge of what this step would mean for me, I began to make use of the fork, and my former affinity for eating with the knife alone, and far more rapidly than anyone else at the table, came to seem (and in fact is) a barbarity of which, inexplicably, I had previously remained unaware. I don’t mean I’d never heard any criticism of the practice; only that I was incapable of acknowledging or attributing significance to it. The same thing happened with other innocent vices, less graphic ones that are more difficult to explain (such as the habit of urinating into the sink, which can be very convenient for those of average or above-average stature), which, when I finally became conscious of them, struck me as equally serious.

  BOSCAGE (or FOREST, 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.

  BREAD FOR THE MOUTH OF MY SOUL (see: PANIS ORIS INTUS ANIMAE MEAE or P.O.A.).

  BRILLIANT CORNERS. When he least expected it and in the least appropriate places, THELONIOUS 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, THELONIOUS 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, THELONIOUS 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.