“Fat Boy?” I asked. “That might not be good for sales in Japan.”
Bondarenko pondered this. “Da,” he said grudgingly. “Da. Horaahs, we should leave its name to the Americans. They are marketing geniuses.”
As they argued about the price and other details of the transaction, Georgi circled the spacious room, then ordered another drink. It was about five o’clock, and several men had come to the bar, all of them Italian or German. Georgi, it seemed, was accentuating the fact that besides the barman, Bondarenko was the only Russian in the place. At the bar he caught Bondarenko’s attention, then touched the bulge in his pants caused by his loaded pistol. Increasingly dismayed by this ritual of intimidation, I said that I needed to make a phone call.
When I returned ten minutes later, Bondarenko was gone, Ziparelli sat alone at the table, and Georgi still stood by the bar. “Ah, my friend,” said Ziparelli. “Will you join me for dinner?”
Though Georgi made me uncomfortable, my fascination with Ziparelli and curiosity about business in post-Soviet Russia prompted me to accept the invitation. After moving to a secluded part of the dining room, we spent two hours eating, drinking, and talking. At first Georgi sat at the bar. Then he moved to a table beside the French doors from which he could protect us.
Our meal began in a Russian way, with vodka, black caviar, and dark rye bread, then moved through roasted potatoes, lamb chops that were better than any I’d had in Moscow during my previous visits, a mediocre Italian red wine, a salad of cucumbers and sliced tomatoes, espresso, and a powerful Armenian brandy that I was content to breathe rather than swallow. As the meal progressed, Ziparelli trusted me with more revelations about his experience as a golfing machine. He had learned about Kelley’s book from an American he’d met in 1982, and with the six-piece swing it inspired, had begun to win amateur championships in Ireland, Great Britain, and Europe. For twelve years, he’d tried to perfect the “machine feel” that Kelley celebrated, but never with complete success. Over the lamb chops, he confided that despite his complete dedication to his master’s principles, he couldn’t hold all of the swing’s components in his mind at once. “My feeling of the swing is partial,” he said with a sad expression. “I have not achieved instant simplification. Therefore, I am still hypercuboidal.”
“Hypercuboidal?”
“Almost a hypercube. A pitifully three-dimensional hypercube. Murphy, I am only a tesseract.” He leaned toward me, and lowered his voice to a whisper. “If we can hold something as complex and dynamic as a golf swing in perfect awareness, in all its parts, inch by inch from start to finish, we come closer to the fourth dimension.” He paused for emphasis. “And then we might go across. For a microsecond, perhaps, or a millisecond, or maybe for one hundreth of a second. That is the way it will happen.”
Golf has a genius for evoking such passions, but I thought he might be putting me on. “What will it feel like?” I wondered.
“It will feel good!” he said, with a smile that enlisted his entire face. “You will never be the same after that. After one glimpse, your body will know it. Have you studied Salvador Dalí’s Christus Hypercubus? Dalí is my teacher, too.”
After vodka and several glasses of wine, and this evening of spirited conversation, I felt empowered to ask how he was able to spend so much time doing research on the fourth dimension. “My glorious papa,” he answered without hesitation. “He has given me a fine endowment.”
“But you’re a businessman, too. Aren’t you importing golf clubs from Russia?”
“You mean Bondarenko? That is not business! I will buy his warheads for my friends and use them for tax deductions. You know how that works. Playing golf here, you must be familiar with tax codes.”
“I don’t have offshore accounts, if that’s what you mean. But I do have a trust fund.”
“So, my friend, what is your occupation?”
I told him about the book I was writing and asked if he’d heard of Golf in the Kingdom. When he said that he hadn’t, I told him about Shivas Irons. He was certain at once that Irons was almost hypercuboidal and began to quiz me about him.
But our talk was interrupted constantly by his need to demonstrate Kelley’s system. Once he stood without warning, hissing and pumping his fist like a piston, and wouldn’t sit down until I pulled at his shirt. When our waiter had cleared the table, he rose again without embarrassment to reveal secrets of knee action, backswing, and pivot. And over brandy he insisted twice on showing me Kelley’s “power-package loading action,” each time standing to cock his wrists, turn his hips, and swing his arms in vigorous arcs. Though a group of Germans objected to these demonstrations, sometimes reproaching him loudly, the Russian barmen and waiters seemed not to mind. On this evening, the Moscow Country Club displayed a typical Russian tolerance for exuberance at evening meals.
“Look!” Ziparelli scribbled this equation on a napkin:
“It gives the velocity of a ball hit with a driver. What will it be with Bondarenko’s warhead?”
“Where did you get that equation?” I asked.
“From another great book. Ah, Murphy! The Search for the Perfect Swing. A book as great as Kelley’s. It shows that a golfer is a double pendulum. Do you know a golf shaft’s rate of vibration?”
When I said that I didn’t, he drew this equation beside the one for ball velocity:
*
“Golf,” he sighed. “There is no end to it.”
Never had I witnessed such a joining of obsessional behavior with unembarrassed flamboyance. Ziparelli’s elastic personality reflected his elastic physique. Both had enough stretch to accommodate compulsivities that would cripple most of us. I asked who raised him. “A glorious aunt and tutors in Roma, all of them supervised by the best father in this world,” he replied with gusto. And where did he live? “Roma in the winter, or on the Amalfi coast. Near Marbella in the spring, and Lake Constance in the summer. And now Septembers in Moscow! It is a good life. There is enough freedom to pursue my theories. Enough money to perfect my swing. Enough time to reach the fourth dimension.”
“Who were your tutors?” I asked.
“Swiss. Like my aunt. They were very strict, but loved me very much. They made me fluent in four languages and taught me calculus and the history of science. They were disciples of Rudolf Steiner.”
“Ah, Steiner! That’s how you came to the fourth dimension?”
“Absolutely not!” He was adamant. “I came to it twenty years ago, before Kelley, when I was eighteen, through Salvador Dalí himself. He was a friend of Papa’s. He told me to meditate on his Christus Hypercubus. If I could visualize the tesseract—the three dimensional-cross upon which Christ is crucified—as a true hypercube, I would then be in hyperspace. This he told me. This I believe. This I will do.” He slapped the table, then added, almost as an afterthought, “With the help of Homer Kelley, and his Star System of Geometrically Oriented Linear Force.”
I didn’t want to tell him that I’d met a stunning young woman in London to whom Dalí had given similar advice as he was making amorous advances. Dalí was famous for such remarks, and she’d taken it to be a joke.
The room was almost empty, and Georgi approached the table. Like Ziparelli, he had what seemed a two- or three-days’ growth of beard. They talked for a moment in Italian. Then Ziparelli said apologetically that they had a meeting in Moscow, a meeting he couldn’t miss. “But will you meet me tomorrow?” he asked. “We will play again!”
“How can we get in touch? Tomorrow I have a meeting with someone I’ve been trying to see for years. It’s impossible to postpone it.”
“Well perhaps the day after,” he said with disappointment. “You can reach me at the Metropole for the next three days.” He stood abruptly, signaled the waiter to cover our bill, and walked away with his long, rolling stride. Georgi followed him closely, glancing in all directions to ensure that no danger was lurking.
* For the first equation: v=velocity of the ball immediately after impact; U=velocity of
the clubhead immediately before impact; m=mass of the ball; M=mass of the clubhead; e=the coefficient of restitution. For the second equation: f=times per second; M=the mass of the clubhead; m=the mass of the shaft; L=the length of the shaft from the point of clamping to the head; E=an elastic property of the material of the shaft; I=a quantity which depends on the precise cross-section of the shaft, and which represents its ability to resist bending. From Alastair Cochran and John Stobbs, The Search for the Perfect Swing. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968), Appendix I.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BORIS RYZHKOV LIVED in a secluded stretch of birch forest near the village of Peredelkino, about an hour’s drive from the middle of Moscow. His two-story log house, which he shared with a few of his students, had been his family’s dacha since the nineteenth century and his home for more than twenty years. Like other dachas of the Russian intelligentsia which had survived the revolution and Stalin’s purges, it had architectural touches from different decades. Among these were paneled doors from the 1890s, a faded 1920s art deco tableau in its kitchen, a tiled oven from the 1960s, and (according to Nadia) Finnish bathroom fixtures of the 1980s. It was Ryzhkov’s ancestral home, monastery, academy, and fortress. With a few exceptions, only his dearest friends, relatives, and students were allowed on its premises.
For five years, I had tried unsuccessfully to see him. Nadia’s entreaties, recommendations from two other mutual friends, and my letters hadn’t moved him to give me an audience. Ryzhkov was that rarity of contemporary Europe and America, an intellectual who was also a practicing mystic, and he had no aspirations for celebrity or a cult following. He was known to Russian religious scholars as an authority on Islamic, Jewish, and Russian Orthodox mysticism, and among the intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg as a leading light of hesychasm, the Russian way of contemplative prayer. His reputation had also spread to Central Asia, where his essays were read by Christians, Jews, and Muslims alike, and to the Caucasus. But strictures of the former Soviet regime, his failure to publish in English, and his desire for anonymity had kept him invisible to Westerners. He had refused to see me in 1989, and again in 1992, but had relented at last two weeks before this trip to Moscow. However, this visit might be brief. A woman with a sultry voice and heavy Russian accent had warned me on the telephone that I shouldn’t expect a long conversation. Ryzhkov would have other visitors on the evening we were scheduled to meet.
Driving in my rented car along the dirt road that led from the motorway to his property, I felt a growing discomfort. Nadia had told me that he was deeply suspicious of most contemporary speculations regarding mystical experience and the occult. The gurus and healers now appearing on Russian television dismayed and sometimes disgusted him. He considered Russia’s neglect of its great pre-Communist philosophers a national tragedy. And he scorned the game of golf. It was hard to know what he thought about my search for Shivas Irons.
On this late September afternoon, the slender white birch trees that bordered the road had lost more than half of their leaves, and the shadows they cast made it hard to see all the ruts and potholes. Two cows forced me to stop as they trotted into the forest. A broken-down truck lumbered past, looking as if it might collapse any minute. And I had to stop a second time as a girl with pigtails crossed the road in pursuit of a stout red-faced woman in a head scarf who might have lived in the time of the czars. This Russia seemed a century away from the modernizing streets of Moscow I’d left just an hour before.
It was five o’clock when I reached his property. A battered, dust-covered jeep and 1960s Mercedes stood in a turnaround area beside the road, and I parked my car between them. The birch trees glowed in the autumn light, and shadows were forming in blue pools around them. I got out of the car, zipped up my windbreaker, and opened a rickety wooden gate set into a picket fence. The steep wood-shingled roof of Ryzhkov’s house was visible at the end of a leafy path, and just beyond it, half-hidden in a thick stand of pine trees, stood the building Nadia had described, the tall stone tower that housed Ryzhkov’s necromanteion.
As if she’d been waiting, a woman walked toward me through the trees, a hand raised to her shoulder in greeting. She was Russian, I guessed, about thirty years old, and came from a different era than the babushka I’d passed on the road. “Good evening,” she said in slightly accented English. “You’re Murphy?”
Blond hair fell just past her ears, framing a slightly upturned aristocratic nose, suspicious blue eyes, and a mouth with an arched upper lip that suggested both toughness and refinement. Her white blouse, sandals, and faded blue jeans, as well as her stylish makeup, reflected the eye for Western style prevalent among privileged Russian youth of the 1990s. She wasn’t the kind of person I’d expected to meet. I’d pictured the people near Ryzhkov to look more ascetic.
“Hello,” I said. “Yes, I’m Murphy.”
As she led me toward the house, she said that Ryzhkov would be occupied for another ten minutes. Pointing to a wicker armchair near the front door, she asked if I wanted a cup of tea.
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’m happy to wait. It’s a beautiful evening.”
“You are a friend of Nadia Kirova.” She framed her question as a statement. When I said that I was, she looked me up and down with what seemed to be amused curiosity, then turned and went into the house.
Though the armchair was set about twenty feet from the house, I could hear voices that were sometimes accompanied by a squeaking that sounded like rusty hinges. Perhaps Ryzhkov was giving his visitor lessons in hesychast prayer. I tried to picture the man. Nadia had told me he was about fifty-five, and well built. Growing up in Tashkent in a Russian family, he’d mastered Greco-Roman wrestling because his father, a powerful Soviet official in Uzbekistan, had deemed it necessary if young Boris was to hold his own with the Muslims. You could tell that his nose had been broken more than once, she’d said. He didn’t look like a scholar or mystic, but more like a working man. From the moment I’d started hearing about him, Ryzhkov had seemed intimidating, but the impression was heightened now. I thought of the Winter Palace and other buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg designed to humble Europeans. By keeping me out on the porch like this, he might be instinctively following the old Russian custom of putting foreigners in their lesser place.
Ten minutes passed. Shadows were lengthening in the trees, and a deeper quiet was settling over the property. The murmur of voices continued, broken occasionally by periods of silence and the slightly hypnotic squeaking I’d heard when I first sat down. Would he have much time for our meeting? Fortunately, we wouldn’t need an interpreter because he was fluent in English after a year at Cambridge studying Islamic religious texts.
More time passed. The woods were darker now, and the sky that was visible through the canopy of birch was turning to deeper shades of blue. Besides the murmuring in the house, the only sounds I could hear came from the gentle rustling of leaves and an occasional distant cowbell.
Then there were footsteps inside, louder voices, and the sound of a door banging shut. I stood. The woman who’d greeted me stepped onto the porch and, with a look of quiet anticipation, said that Ryzhkov was ready to see me. I felt a wave of anxiety as I followed her through the door.
“He will be here in a moment.” She pointed to a chair near a glowing floor lamp. “It was cold outside. It is almost winter. By now you must want tea.” Her features were even handsomer in the muted light than they’d been a half hour earlier. When I accepted her offer, she left the room through an old paneled door through which I glimpsed a long wooden sideboard under an art deco tableau.
I removed my jacket and looked around me. Every window was shuttered, and the high, slanted ceiling was dark. The only light came from the lamp at my side, which was crowned with a tasseled shade that appeared to date from the nineteenth century. About six feet away, at the other end of a rug that could have been made in Bukhara or Samarkand, there was a rocking chair. It must have caused the squeaking I’d heard.
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br /> There were voices in the kitchen now. The woman was talking to someone who sounded like a teenage boy—in French, it seemed, though he responded in Russian. I continued to scan the room. One wall was made of the thickly calked timbers that comprised the house’s exterior, two were made of yellow pine, and the fourth was covered for much of its length by a tile oven that almost reached the fifteen-foot peak of the ceiling. Near the rocking chair were two stacks of pillows that looked to be from Afghanistan, and on a round wooden table by the lamp was a green trinket box with Persian designs, a silver drinking horn from the Caucasus, a large magnifying glass, and several books. From their covers, I could see that two of the books were in Russian, two in Hebrew, two in German, and one in Arabic.
The woman returned with a tray that held a pot of tea, a tall silver-handled glass, and three bowls with condiments. Placing this elegant array on the table beside me, she suggested I drink the tea Russian-style, with blackberry, raspberry, or gooseberry jam.
She left and I filled the glass. In the next room there was another exchange, this time entirely in French, then receding footsteps. A door shut. Someone called from a distant part of the house. Then it was silent again. After flavoring the tea with jam, I sipped it carefully, held it for comfort to my chest, and rehearsed the questions I’d framed. But at that moment—without warning—Ryzhkov entered the room. “Don’t stand up,” he said as I put down my tea and started to rise. “I am sorry. Today there are many visitors.” He settled carefully into the rocking chair. “At last we meet,” he said in a rich, slightly accented baritone. “I have read your letters, and Nadia’s, and Yerofeyev’s, and Kapitsa’s.” He looked me up and down. “You have waged a good campaign to see me! But I don’t know if I can help. You know, I am completely ignorant about golf.”
Though I sensed by the way he sat down that he was protecting an injury to his back, he gave an immediate impression of physical vigor. His cheekbones and jaw were well defined, his closely cropped brown hair had no grey in it, and his skin had the telltale glow of regular exercise.
The Kingdom of Shivas Irons Page 20