Mother Russia (9781590209028)
Page 19
United States of America Ministry of Trade,
Export Section
United States of America Embassy, Moscow
Soviet Foreign Ministry
United States of America Foreign Ministry
Chief Editor, The New York Times
Chief Editor, Pravda
I am extremely touched (even, I’ll say it openly, teary) at your offer to waive payment of the four dollars and seventy-five cents not to mention mailing, but I would very much appreciate an additional burst of information on what kind of waiver it is you want me to sign and what exactly your advertisement about a satisfied client behind the Iron Curtain would say, because (and here is the sticking point) I’m not at all sure you will want to represent me as saying what I really think, which is that Singer ruined sewing. You surely understand (then again considering your moral isolation perhaps you don’t) that being published in any way shape or manner in the West is a sensitive (to say the least) affair here and even yours truly who has been certified has been grilled for what appeared between the lines when one of my zingers to Utile Leonid Ilyich turned up in your adorable New York Times. Do Americans read too between the lines? The funny thing about my letter appearing in the New York Times was that I never sent it to the New York Times. But that’s another story. I did send it to some (you’ll excuse the expression) newspapers here but they Bled it where they file all my letters, which is under P for poubelle. This (I’ll admit it) infuriates me, though if I had a grain of sense I’d pull my foxes more tightly around the very neck once kissed by (do you recognize the name?) S. Yesenin the night before he slashed his milk-white wrist, and take comfort from the company I keep. Face it, Dostoyevsky was also not published and today isn’t all published. Dear passionate Yesenin was considered (before he slashed his beautiful wrist) a counter revolutionary and God knows what after. Mayakovsky was written off as a political hooligan. It required twenty or thirty years for us to get back our lovely Bunin and dear cryptic Bulgakov and beloved (though not by everyone) Platonov. Mendelstam and Voloshiri and Gumilev and Klyuev and Zamyatin and Remizov will (God willing) be returned to us some day, but if they must wait for publication so should I, except when it comes right down to it wait is what I can’t, which is why I keep shooting off my zingers as if they were tracer bullets. As for the import license, I really have no idea how one goes about getting such a thing since generally speaking that kind of operation requires a working (if that’s the word I’m looking for) knowledge of the bureaucracy which I, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) have so far avoided. But all is not by any means lost. There is a new roomer in our attic with pale nails who looks as if he knows his way around, and I will see if he can help. He has an interesting face too, an unholy combination of worldliness and naiveté, almost a kind of sane zaniness. Something happens to a person’s face after the age of twenty for which he is (don’t you agree?) responsible. But that’s another story. The (new as we have taken to calling him) attic has big plans of his own to develop a kind of cotton-tipped toothpick designed to replace the key as the principal ear cleaner. The reason I pass this tidbit on to you is that if the Q-Tip (as he calls it) isn’t already licensed in the United States of America you will want to look into it I can’t agree by the way with you when you suggest that the world has no existence except in terms of the objects we perceive in it because if what you say is (which I don’t for an instant believe) true, nothing would have an existence except in its being perceived and the world (it follows, doesn’t it?) would dissolve into an anarchy of individual perceptions. But from my point of view, which is to say from the second floor of the now last wooden house in central Moscow (since the next to last is being torn down), there is a curious order that runs through our perceptions, almost (and here I sense you shuddering) as if there is an underlying order to the universe, which takes me right back to the illusion I spoke about in my previous letter. Anxious to hear from you, I remain someone who regrets that time isn’t a straight line but rather a circle or more properly a cycle made up of anniversaries and birthdays and occasions manqué which keep rolling around again to tease us with what might have been.
Mother Russia
Post Scriptum: It is reassuring, even (dare I say it?) comforting, to be once again in direct contact with the Mister Singer to whom I originally wrote. I do hope you weren’t too hard on dear Mister Prolnor for intercepting your letters. Do send my best, bordering on cordial, greetings to him whoever and wherever he is. I wonder if it would be imposing upon your fabled generosity to ask you in your next letter (assuming there is a next letter), to describe in great detail inasmuch as it fascinates me, your fingernails.
20 April
My dear (though I’m beginning to have second thoughts about original) Mister Singer,
Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section
United States of America Ministry of Trade,
Export Section
United States of America Embassy, Moscow
Soviet Foreign Ministry
United States of America Foreign Ministry
Chief Editor, The New York Times
Chief Editor, Pravda
Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine
Chief Editor, Time magazine
Chief Editor, L’Express
E. Kennedy
I am honestly sorry to hear about your nail being pinched in the elevator door. Is it the kind of thing where you can sue the building, or are you the building? Soak the bruised nail in brine and wear a piece of malachite so it won’t happen again, though the malachite must be given, never bought, for it to be at all effective. The rest of your nails sound conventional enough, though the way you clip them indicates you have an identity problem (maybe even a crisis) which is par for the course in an industrial society where we more often than not lose a sense of who we are and tend (if I have it light) to see ourselves as others see us, which is why we are all of us so different depending on whom we are with. As for your kind comments, they were generous and I appreciate them, really I do. I am embarrassed to admit I’m not at all sure if I’m an existentialist because I don’t really remember what existentialism is. Funny as this sounds I learned it a dozen times if I learned it once, but each time I forget what I learned so that all I remember is that I understood it once but I can’t for the life of me remember what I understood. I am an observer (there you are right on target) but only in the sense that your (I believe she was a fellow American) A. Toklas was an observer which is to say she liked a view but she liked to sit with her back turned to it Here it is the only way to look at things and stay sane. Chez vous I suspect it is the same. But back to the business at hand, yes I would be willing to sign your waiver and I don’t see who will be hurt if you tell the world you have a client in Moscow, though I would be careful if I were you and even if I weren’t about using the phrase Iron Curtain because it would offend a great many people (myself included) who see more lack of difference than difference between what’s on either side of this curtain. I’m not sure I understand why you are running into problems with the export license since it is hard for me to imagine that anybody in his or her right mind (assuming as I do that there are still people around who are in their right mind) would consider the Shuttle Race vital to the security of the United States of America. Perhaps I’m missing something here but do you manufacture anything other than sewing machines? Is the Shuttle Race interchangeable with some crucial piece of machinery on one of your phallic missiles or (what do they call them?) oh yes, jeeps? I must admit I have not actually taken time to look into the problem of acquiring an import license on this end, mainly because I have been terribly preoccupied with the activities of the attic with the pale nails I told you about who is trying (as a favor to me really) to show up as a plagiarist one of our well-known authors who shall for the moment remain nameless, though if the attic succeeds you will surely be reading about it in your darling New York Times. I promise though to take up the matter of the import license and
to write to you as soon as I have any word. Until then I remain someone who greatly resents the fact that any vanguard feels it has the right to substitute its revolutionary consciousness for the consciousness (revolutionary or not) of the masses, of which I am a member.
Mother Russia
Post Scriptum: It strikes me rereading this that the difference between the written and the oral is that in the written you get no sense at all of my silences. Half a millimeter separates sentences but I crawl across the gap like a microscopic inch-worm, sometimes in an hour, sometimes (if I am preoccupied) in a day. Without a sense of my silences what can you know about me? Ha! Without my silences I am all talk. But that’s another story.
2 May
Dear Mister Singer,
Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section
United States of America Ministry of Trade,
Export Section
United States of America Embassy, Moscow
Soviet Foreign Ministry
United States of America Foreign Ministry
Chief Editor, The New York Times
Chief Editor, Pravda
Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine
Chief Editor, Time magazine
Chief Editor, L’Express
E. Kennedy
J.-P. Sartre
A. Malraux
B. Russell
S. de Beauvoir
Amnesty International
For God’s sake, forget the Shuttle Race, I don’t want it anymore. You remember my attic with the pale nails I told you about, well he’s been arrested. He was telling the truth in Red Square when they pounced on him. He is innocent and his arrest only proves what I always said, which is that innocence isn’t pertinent anymore. I haven’t the time to send you details of how he got where he got but only ask, even beg, you: HELP.
Mother Russia
Post Scriptum: I should have seen the handwriting on the wall when the blue-coated brutes let Vladimir Ilyich escape. But that’s another story.
26 May
My very dear Mister Singer,
Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section
United States of America Ministry of Trade,
Export Section
United States of America Embassy, Moscow
Soviet Foreign Ministry
United States of America Foreign Ministry
Chief Editor, The New York Times
Chief Editor, Pravda
Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine
Chief Editor, Time magazine
Chief Editor, L’Express
E. Kennedy
J.-P. Sartre
A. Malraux
B. Russell
S. de Beauvoir
Amnesty International
Chief Psychiatrist, Soviet Ministry of Health
Chief Psychiatrist, United States of America
Ministry of Health
World Health Organization, Mental Department
Vladimir Ilyich (I apologize profusely for not explaining) is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, my parrot who flew the coop when the boys in blue with their sad sagging eyelids and expressionless mouths were searching for certain manuscripts which prove a certain author is a plagiarist. As for my attic, he was, I found out after several weeks of nosing (do you say the same thing?) around, in an insane asylum, which is an institution the less said about the better. A very greasy doctor with a mental stutter who directed one of these state hotels once told me in all seriousness that the great combats in the world are not between Capitalists vs. Communists or haves vs. have-nots or heads vs. hearts or blacks vs. whites or young vs. old or warm vs. cold or south vs. north or even men vs. women but (are you ready for this one?) oral vs. anal. This is not so of course because as every sane person knows the great combats in the world are between those who try and those who don’t My attic tried and for his trouble was hauled off to the loony bin on the grounds that an attempt to uncover a truth is prima facie evidence of insanity, when everyone knows that insanity is really a question of where the majority is. Here I know horn painful personal experience they can lock you in the bin and throw away the key for being too calm or too passionate or too sexy or too sexless. What (I put it to you) are irritability, neurasthenia, neurosis, hypochondria, anxiety, insomnia, agitation, absent-mindedness, eccentricity except manifestations of normality, but our hyenas of psychiatry (and I suspect yours too) take the absolutely scandalous view that people create the problems they enjoy not coping with and then lock them up for not coping. God help each and every one of us when we live in an epoch where eyebrows are raised it you are imaginative enough to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. Well, I’m doing everything under the sun to get my attic out of the bin, which is why I don’t understand at all your attitude about it being inappropriate for Singer to interfere in the internal affairs of another country. There is only one country in the world and we are all (God help us) in it I’ve practically chained myself to my old Remington and fired off zingers to (among others) the head of the Soviet Academy of Science, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the Prosecutor General and my old slow-witted school chum who is, believe it or not, none other than the Secretary General of the Central Committee, little Leonid Brezhnev. So far all to no avail and I am getting desperate because (dear God, how can I explain it to you so you will understand?) my attic hasn’t been charged with any crime, he has simply and utterly been swallowed by a building that seems to have more shadows than others. All this (I give you my word of honor as a Libra) because he knew something that was true and tried to tell others about it, because he tried to walk on water, move mountains, work up a sweat from a noneconomic activity, which now that I think about it is something you, dear Mister Singer, could do too. Hoping against hope that you can bring this matter to the attention of someone who can help I remain more than ever convinced that (in the words of our angelic Mendelstam) the earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens.
Mother Russia
Post Scriptum: Rereading your letters I can see you really don’t understand my comment that the only way to observe life is to sit like A. Toklas with your back turned to it Why I think this is because more often than not observing tends to distort what we are trying to observe and hence renders it unobservable. Like for instance a television camera at a mob scene, or better still a blind man trying to feel the shape and texture of a snowflake with his fingertips. From whence Bows my theory that we are permitted (even obliged) to participate. But no just looking. But that’s another story.
14 July
Mister Singer,
Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section
United States of America Ministry of Trade,
Export Section
United States of America Embassy, Moscow
Soviet Foreign Ministry
United States of America Foreign Ministry
Chief Editor, The New York Times
Chief Editor, Pravda
Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine
Chief Editor, Time magazine
Chief Editor, L’Express
E. Kennedy
J.-P. Sartre
A. Malraux
B. Russell
S. de Beauvoir
Amnesty International
Chief Psychiatrist, Soviet Ministry of Health
Chief Psychiatrist, United States of America
Ministry of Health
World Health Organization, Mental Department
R. Nixon, President of the United States of America
L. Brezhnev, Secretary General of the
Central Committee of the Soviet Union
I ask you to excuse this long delay in answering your last burst but I have my hands (and come to think of it my heart) more or less full with my attic with the pale nails. He has emerged, thanks God, from the building with more than its share of shadows, in what condition I won’t tell you, suffice it to say that he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk except in his sleep. He ra
n a fever which is gone now during which he tossed and turned and ranted on about coming from the future or the past (I’m not sure which) and shattered eyeglasses and bucks never stopping and riding animals he was afraid to identify. The single thing that I understood was that they had tricked him (I’m still not sure how) into telling where he had hidden the original manuscripts, which was in a snake pit in a village near Moscow where an apprentice hustler raises vipers to sell to the militia, which is something my attic did when he was just starting out. As soon as he was up and around, he took the electric train to the suburbs to make sure the manuscripts were gone, which I don’t need to tell you they were, for which I was frankly just as happy because it meant the affair was finished, only it wasn’t. It wasn’t because (and this I only just found out) the attic went to an American journalist he knows to get him to publish chez vous the truth about the plagiarist, but the journalist said that rumors of the plagiarism have been around forty years and without proof (which is to say without the original manuscripts) there was nothing to be done. But he (if I have the sequence right) told the attic he could put him in touch with someone who might be able to help him get the manuscripts back and the attic, with his skin now paler than his nails and all the time writing notes instead of talking, said all right, though there was more involved in organizing the meeting than simply agreeing to it The attic had to write a particular phrase on a particular wall, something about how he’s seen the future and it needs work (whatever that means) after which he would find behind a radiator in the lobby of a public building a slip of paper giving him the time and place of the rendezvous, and it is here that the story will interest you, Mister Singer, because the rendezvous turned out (at least so the attic says) to be with the new Moscow representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a man with a shiny bald scalp and long pinky nail who said his name was Kolwradenor, which he jokingly explained stands for Kolchak-Wrangel-Denikin-Organizers of Counter Revolution. Kolwradenor (are you still with me, Mister Singer?) took the attic for a walk in a park where they couldn’t be overheard and told him that although there was no possibility of regaining possession of the lost manuscripts he (which is to say Kolwradenor) had friends who could fabricate the manuscripts. To which my poor attic scribbled on a pad that you couldn’t prove a truth with a nontruth. To which Kolwradenor replied that the lost manuscripts had been fabricated too. I will admit to you, I weep as I write this. The lost manuscripts were fabricated! As for my attic, he removed his broken heart from the presence of the Singer Sewing Machine Company representative, who from my attic’s description sounds like none other than Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi, the seventy-first incarnation of God, and also Melor, a certain KGB interrogator, all wrapped up into one. For a long while I thought my attic was off his rocker and inventing all of the above. You, my dear sheltered Mister Singer, will probably think we’re both stark raving, my attic and me, but we finally figured it all out and here it is: Your CIA and our KGB are the same organization, there is no other explanation for it And Kolwradenor-Melor-Chuvash is their Moscow bureau chief. Which has the advantage of cutting down on overhead and salaries and permitting a degree of coordination that wouldn’t be possible it they had separate offices. Being a businessman yourself you will appreciate the cost-effectiveness of the scheme immediately. It was Kolwradenor (I’ll bet my remaining parrots) who organized it so we would all wind up in the same house and then dropped the fabricated manuscripts in our collective laps. Why? I can hear you asking. My guess is that it wasn’t to expose the plagiarism (what does he care about plagiarism?) but to set the bosses on the Politburo against each other. I’m as certain of it as I am that I am perfectly sane that your CIA meant for it to be discovered that the manuscripts were fabricated, and that it was the falsity which would cause the dissension, since one side would assume the other had fabricated the evidence in order to discredit it. Melor of course was simply playing the game and doing his best to avoid the dissension by preventing the manuscripts (which he knew were fabricated) from surfacing. My attic asked Kolwradenor what his bosses would do to him now that he had failed and he claims Kolwradenor replied that since the combat in the world is the Intelligence people vs. Everyone, he had nothing to worry about inasmuch as it is the intelligence people who decide between themselves who will win what round, the important thing being to keep the game going. All of which (you can imagine, can’t you?) left my attic in quite a fragile state, so much so that he wrote across Kolwradenor’s door with some kind of cream he squeezed from a tube that he hoped in his next incarnation he would again be a victim. On his way back here the attic spotted by chance in a pharmacy window a new product called the cotton toothpick, which turns out to be the very same Q-Tips I told you about (do you remember?) some letters back. It seems they are quite poor specimens inasmuch as there is not enough cotton at the points, which are in any case dangerously sharp. A thousand applications is what the publicity boasted, but there was one they never imagined in their wildest moments. The attic (poor dear) was very agitated, he kept asking how can you prove a truth with a nontruth? and writing that there were some things in the world which he couldn’t bear to hear. Right there in front of my eyes (do you have a strong stomach, Mister Singer?) he punctured his ear drums with the sharp tips of the cotton toothpicks. First one, then the other. He didn’t bleed very much you’ll be relieved to know, but it was extremely painful and he did make himself deaf, which has a certain symmetry because the only one in the world he really wants to hear isn’t able to speak. The newfound deafness drove him into a depression from which he seems (thanks God) to be finally emerging, though he still doesn’t touch wood. He has started learning to lip-read and only yesterday, smiling in a way I had never seen him smile before, he handed me a note saying something about how if Q-Tips come can vaginal deodorant spray be far behind. Trusting you too, dear Mister Singer, will be a victim in your next incarnation I remain