It is only the significant pause which follows that alerts me I am expected to respond, and distracts my attention from the scene outside his office window. For several minutes I have been watching two children as they tramp stiffly off into the distance. They lead me to think of my daughter, and to wonder if she misses my visits.
Here, we are on the outskirts of the city, where the new suburbs dwindle into prairie, and prairie into winter sky. The children, stuffed into bulky snowsuits, totter along, their arms stiffly extended like tiny astronauts foraging on the frozen cinder of a spent star.
Suburban tots often come to explore these splendid spaces. I have navigated them too, in my imagination, warm behind a double pane of glass. I find it strange that this blank sweep of land terrifies some of my fellow inmates and that they feel the need to keep their blinds down night and day. I like it. It makes me think of Russia.
“Yes?” I say finally, a little late, but nevertheless meaning to politely encourage him.
“Mr. Caragan, I thought when we met last Wednesday we agreed there would be no more letters.”
The man has me there. But I am an impulsive fellow and that was Wednesday. By Thursday I felt I owed him some kind of explanation as to what had moved me to write the first three letters. “That’s true,” I admit, “that was the understanding.”
“But?”
I shrug.
Dr. Herzl spreads a sheet of paper on his desk. His fingers rub diligently at the fold marks. When he is satisfied everything is shipshape, he begins to read to himself. I note a barely perceptible flicker in his upper lip. When he finishes, he looks up at me sharply. An old tactic that I recognize immediately. “This doesn’t make much sense to me,” he says.
“No?”
“Excuse me,” he says, pausing. “I’m not a critic…” The doctor smiles to signal me that this is an offering from his store of inexhaustible wit. “But I find your language rather… formal, stilted,” he says at last, finding the words he wants. “As if you are under great strain, as if you are trying to keep a lid on your feelings when you write me these letters.” He searches the page. “For instance, there’s this: ‘I answer in writing because my thought will thus be more fully expressed, and more distinctly perceived, like a sound amid silence.’ Doesn’t that sound a bit unusual to you?”
“There’s quotation marks around that.”
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t write that. There’s quotation marks around that.”
“Oh.” The doctor hesitates. “Who did write it then?”
“Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon.”
A doubtful look passes over his face. He suspects me of pulling his leg. Dr. Herzl considers me a great joker, albeit an unbalanced, a lunatic one.
“It’s true,” I assure him.
“I am not familiar…”
“So who is? But then, you don’t need to be,” I say. “I explained it all in the letter. It’s all in there. I used Gershenzon as an example. I was trying to help you see why I write -”
I am interrupted. “Yes, I’m sure. But you understand – fourteen pages in your tiny handwriting – I only skimmed it.”
“Of course.” I don’t know whatever led me to believe he would profit from the story of the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence. Or that anyone else would, for that matter. When I told Janet, who is young, an artist, and believes herself to be in possession of a sensitive soul, about the series of letters exchanged between Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanovitch Ivanov while they recuperated in a rest-home in Russia, she said: “I don’t get it. What’s a corner-to-corner correspondence?”
“It was called that because each of the correspondents was in opposite corners of the same room. That’s why it was called the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence,” I said, ending my obvious explanation lamely.
“They couldn’t talk? What was it, throat cancer?”
“No, as I said before, these guys were poets, philosophers, men of letters. Remember?” I prodded. “It was just that they felt more comfortable, surer of themselves, when writing. They had time to reflect on what they wanted to say, to test their ideas. To compose.”
“That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard – writing to someone in the same room,” she said. “That sort of thing just gets in the way of real feelings. It’s a kind of mask to hide who you really are, and what you’re all about.”
That was her final judgment, and from Janet’s considered decisions there is no appeal, as I have learned to my sorrow. Still, I was almost in love, and at that precarious point one imagines it is important to be understood. So at our next planned meeting, two days later, I took along with me a passage I had copied from one of Gershenzon’s letters. It was to demonstrate to her the subtleties which are the province of the written word, and, more importantly, to signal her what was going on in my mind.
“You see, honey,” I said, trying to explain what Gershenzon meant to me, “he felt out of step with things going on around him. He might have said to old Ivanov: ‘Viacheslav, what’s the matter with me? I don’t feel I belong, I don’t feel right. Why is it I don’t think what other people think, or feel what other people say they feel?’ He could have put it that way. He could have, but he didn’t. What he did do was write:
This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.
Of course, when I looked up from the page, it was only to discover that Janet had gone to the bathroom to apply her contraceptive foam.
“I hear that you’re still refusing to see your wife,” says Dr. Herzl, introducing a new topic.
“That’s not entirely true. I said I wouldn’t see her alone. If she brings our daughter with her, well, that’s a different story.”
“Why won’t you speak with your wife alone?”
“I explained that in my second letter -”
“Why don’t you explain it to me now. Face to face, without the pretences of these letters.” There is a measure of asperity in the good doctor’s voice. From the very beginning I knew he didn’t like me. I do not have a confessional nature and he holds that against me.
I stare back stolidly.
“Is it because you’re ashamed? Is that why you won’t allow your wife to visit?”
“Yes.” There is little harm in agreeing with him. He has made up his mind on this point long ago.
“Ashamed of what? Your affair? Or what you did at the gallery?”
Why not? “Both,” I affirm, blithely shouldering a double load, the tawdry fardels of sexual guilt.
“Speaking of the gallery,” says Dr. Herzl, “your wife agrees with me. She believes that the depiction of the penis was what triggered the incident there.”
“She does, does she?”
“She thinks you felt it was undersized. She says you’re prone to read a disproportionate significance into that sort of thing.”
This is so like Miriam that I offer no complaint against this preposterous interpretation of my actions. I had my reasons.
Dr. Herzl clears his throat. “How am I to understand your silence?”
“The suggestion is to
o silly to grace with a comment.”
“How did you feel when you did it?”
“Cold.”
“I see,” says the doctor, letting his fingers wander through the paper on his desk. “Well, I believe we’ve made some progress. We’ve begun to talk to one another, at any rate. Now is as good a time to stop as any.” He closes my file. Perhaps the fact that it bulges with my correspondence reminds him. “You do see that writing letters is a way of avoiding the problem?” he asks hopefully.
“I want to see my daughter. You tell Miriam to bring Cynthia here.”
“I’m sorry,” says Dr. Herzl. “Mrs. Caragan says that would be impossible.”
In my room I lie down on my bed and speculate how Miriam is making out. I know she is not starving. I am on full salary while incapacitated. The teachers’ federation knows how to negotiate a collective agreement, and insanity is paid its rich deserts.
As far as the other things go – the neighbours’ whispers, the long, woeful faces of acquaintances – the proud prow of Miriam’s clipper can cleave those mundane waters. And her real friends, the ones that never liked me, will be intent on keeping her busy, or, as they would prefer, “involved.”
For a number of years I was “involved” too. Miriam demanded it. She was terribly concerned that we didn’t trade our ideals for a mortgage, that we didn’t become ordinary people. The flight from ordinariness kept me on a pretty strenuous schedule. I’d get home from the high school where I teach something called social studies just in time to grab a cheese sandwich and receive a briefing while the paint dried on my placard. Then we’d all load into a Volkswagen van owned by a troll with a social conscience, a short, hairy guy who made pieces of knotty-pine furniture capacious and sturdy enough to stand up to hard use by the giants I assumed were his clients, and drive off to let our opinions be known.
But about four years ago, when Miriam and I were fighting about Cynthia, and I was drinking even more than I was just before I got tossed in here, I gave up being involved and began my own journey; and there is no way that I’m going to give Miriam the chance to coax me back to Canada, now that I’m safely here, on the borders of Russia.
There’s an irony, too, in how my travels began. They commenced at one of Miriam’s protest rallies. About a dozen lonely souls were picketing a Liberal Fund-Raising Dinner – the reason why I now fail to recollect. It was the usual dispirited occasion. I was a little drunk and bored. The cars kept pulling up to the front of the hotel and discharging Liberals who slunk tight-lipped through our righteous gauntlet. One particularly incensed woman of our number kept demanding to know whether the Liberals were dining on macaroni and cheese that night. “Are you?” she shrilled in their faces. “Are you eating macaroni and cheese tonight?” The implication being that her own feisty spirit was sustained solely on that starchy, plebeian fuel.
It was all going more or less our way until a large, ruddy, drunk, middle-aged Liberal turned a passionate eye on our assembly. He was very angry. He seemed to have missed the point about macaroni and cheese. He thought we were objecting to our country! “Hey, you bastards!” he bellowed, while his wife tried to drag him into the lobby. “I love my country! I love Canada!” he yelled, actually striking his chest with his fist. “And if you don’t, why don’t you get out! Why don’t you go to Russia if you don’t like it here?”
The poor man’s obvious sincerity touched me as much as his logic bewildered me. Why did he presume those people had any interest in going to Russia? Didn’t he know it was Sweden they wanted to get to? Volvos, guiltless sex, Bergman films, functional furniture. Hey, I wanted to shout back, these people would prefer Sweden! And realizing for the first time where my wife and her friends were bound, I admitted I didn’t want to go along. I was the one the gentleman was addressing. Although at the time I didn’t know my longing was for Russia.
Oh, not the Russia he meant. Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky’s saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy’s Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in “God Sees the Truth But Waits.” A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?
I had set a timid foot on that Eurasian continent years ago when, as a student in a course on European literature in translation, I had read some of the Russian masters. I returned because I was unhappy and because I sensed that only in Russia does unhappiness find a meaning. Like Aksionov, who suffered in place of the real murderer and thief, I felt a hundred times worse, a hundred times more guilt. I don’t suppose I let it show much. I punished Miriam by putting our daughter’s framed photograph on the end table, by drinking too much, and by being rude to people she wished desperately to impress.
Still, I was faithful to her in a purely technical sense until I met Janet several months ago. Janet is a young artist who supports herself as a substitute teacher; we met in the staff-room of my high school. At the end of that particular day, a bitterly cold one late in November, I spotted her waiting at the bus stop, looking hypothermic in the kind of tatty old fur coat creative people buy at Salvation Army thrift stores. I offered her a ride. She, in turn, when I had driven her home, offered me coffee.
I think it was the splendour of the drawings and paintings lending life to her old, decaying, high-ceilinged apartment that attracted me to her. Perhaps I felt she could salvage any wreck and breathe life into it, as she had that apartment. Here, I thought, gazing at the fire on her walls, is a Russian soul.
I asked if I could come back another day to make a purchase. She assured me that I could, that she would be delighted. I returned, bought a drawing. Returned again and carried away a canvas. Simply put, one thing led to another. We became lovers. Regularly, on school-days between three-thirty and four-thirty, p.m., she screwed me with clinical detachment. If I close my eyes I can see her hard little jockey-body rocking above me, muscles strained and taut (I could pluck the cords on her neck) as she mutely galloped me hither and thither, while I snorted away under her like old Dobbin.
That it was nothing more than a little equestrian exercise I lacked the courage to see.
Dr. Herzl makes a point of telling me how pleased he is that there have been no more letters since last we met. He sits behind his desk, bathed in pale March sunshine and self-assurance. I am struck by his aseptic smile and unlined face, hardly the face of a man privy to so many sorrows. More than most men, certainly.
Out of the blue he asks: “I think we’re ready to talk about the Opening. And Janet. Don’t you?”
“We could.” I clear my throat and look at my hands. They’re very soft. The therapists here have tried to encourage me to take up handicrafts. However, if I cannot make boots like Tolstoy I will do nothing in that line.
“I’m interested to know the reasons why you posed for her. Particularly in light of what subsequently happened, it seems an odd thing for you to do.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“But you did nevertheless.”
“Obviously.”
“Why?”
“Because she said she needed to sketch from life, and now that she wasn’t a student she didn’t get the opportunity. She couldn’t afford to pay a model.”
“So you wanted to help her with her work?”
“Yes.” I knew how much it meant to her. Even then I knew what she was: a gifted, intense, ambitious girl, who was also a little bit stupid about things that had nothing to do with her art, and therefore did not concern her.
I can see by the look in the doctor’s eyes that he is about to chance something. “Could it have been that modelling was a way of safely exposing yourself? Exposing yourself without having to fear consequences?”
“No.”
He presses his hands together. “Why did you take such violent exception when you learned that the sketches were to be shown?” he asks softly.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Because she didn’t tell me,” I say. I am unable to keep the anger out of my voice. “I saw it on a poster. ‘Janet Markowsky: Studies in the Male Nude’.”
“Any other reason?”
“Sure. This is a small city. I’m a teacher. Somebody would recognize me. How the hell could I walk into a classroom after every kid in the school had gone down to take a gander at old Caragan’s wazoo?”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“And you don’t know kids. Anyway, it was the principle of the thing. Don’t you see?” My hands have begun to tremble, I trap them between my knees.
“Were you disturbed that there were drawings of other men?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I went to Janet and I said, ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing to me? I can’t take this right now. Please, take the sketches out of the show.’ ” It was a bad time for me. Cynthia’s birthday was coming up and every year she gets older, the more her face haunts me.
“And?”
“She said she was very sorry but this opportunity had suddenly presented itself. A small gallery had an immediate opening because the artist slotted had decided to show in Calgary. Janet said she hadn’t time to produce new work. She had to go with the drawings. With what she had. ‘Janet,’ I said, ‘I’m a teacher, put a moustache on me. Anything!’
“ ‘I can’t touch them,’ she said. ‘I could screw them up really badly. You never can tell what you’ll do when you start mucking around with things.’ ”
“I phoned Ms. Markowsky yesterday and I asked her a question,” says Herzl severely.
“What question?” I am surprised.
“I asked her if you wanted her to change the penises. It was just a hunch,” he says, very much the clever, smug detective. “She said you did. She said you wanted them made bigger.”
I put my head in my hands. I should have known it. The little bitch is the type to make sure she gets even. She won’t forgive me for ruining her Opening. Herzl, the moron, gave her the clue she needed to do it. Not that I really mind. “I wanted a moustache,” I say tiredly.
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