He says: You’re not in a hurry, are you? Let’s get acquainted, get to know each other, be friends. I’m in a frightful hurry, I say, where is the nearest taxi stand? It’s past midnight, everything around us is locked up and parked, surrounded by dreary railroad fumes, and farther out, where I can see people’s faces, it’s also not so lovely: “Gorilla calls and parrot screams,” as the jingle of my student days goes. Those congregating outside are a liberal’s wet dream: transvestites, prostitutes, fresh arrivals, and the disadvantaged with difficult childhoods and even more difficult prospects for old age.
I run toward my saviors, the hookers and the trannies; the man runs after me, continuing our conversation:
“My name is Joaquinto. Are you a miss or a missus? I propose we immediately get to know each other, talk and spend some time together. You’re not in a hurry, are you? Wait, here is my phone number. Take it, please. Why don’t you want my phone number? Why don’t you want to get to know me? What are your reasons?”
It’s hard to explain right off the bat what my reasons are. Sometimes it’s hard to find the right words, Joaquinto.
Finally I manage to break free. I see the taxi line! At the head of it is a hunchback of slight stature, quizzically raising his finger at everyone in line: One? Two passengers? In New York airports there is always a dispatcher like this, shoving a slip of paper in your hand, guiding you to the right taxi, keeping the peace in the queue. Who knows—maybe it’s the same here?
It’s my turn; the hunchback raises one finger and immediately begins to wrestle my suitcase and purse from me. A slight altercation—I manage to hang on to my purse while he tightly grabs hold of my suitcase and drags it the five feet to the car. His hand shifts shape from a raised finger to a cupped palm: Pay up, lady. Me: Oh no you don’t, you little crook. You don’t get shit. I don’t pay for service that was imposed on me. Besides, I only have large bills.
An ugly scene follows: the hunchback, screaming and spitting, lunges after me into the car, I push him away with my foot, he pulls at the car door, I wrestle it free and slam it shut; shrieking and cursing accompanies the car as it finally pulls away. On my grave I’d like the following inscription, please:
She also wrestled with Quasimodo in Paris
at midnight
and won.
Okay, we’re on our way.
“How do you want me to go?” asks the driver, a product of the collapse of colonialism.
“Pardon…? Just—get me there, please. Whichever way. To my hotel.”
“No, but how would you like to go? Fast? Or…?”
Things just aren’t getting any better. I don’t even want to know what options are available to me here. A lady gets into a taxi, gives the driver an address. What questions could there be? What else can one expect from a lady at a train station?
We arrive. The driver looks at the euro notes I hand him, sulks.
“I don’t have any change,” he says.
That won’t work, Buster. I’ve taken taxis from the airport in Jerusalem, and even from Sheremetyevo in Moscow, God help me. I get it. No change? I can wait until it appears. I turn on my inner Buddhist.
We sit.
We wait.
Three minutes later he miraculously finds a five-euro note in his back pocket. I guess change really does come from within.
Hurray! I’m almost there. A lovely concierge at the hotel—a gorgeous man from Morocco who looks to be a student at the Sorbonne. He doesn’t need my passport, or my credit card, or my reservation number: it’s all good. Here is your key, here is your elevator, sweet dreams!
I insert the key card into the lock with the blissful feeling of having finally arrived safely, against the odds, of finally stepping off the ship onto terra firma, where Boris and Asya are no longer a threat. I press the door handle down and step into the room. A soul-piercing scream. It’s occupied! For a second my eyes are exposed to an unexpected performance: a huge black man is pounding some lady. Or a mademoiselle. Or God knows what.
Finally, having obtained a new set of keys from the concierge, I find myself in the privacy of my hotel room; I lock the doors, kick off my heels, power up my laptop, and open a bottle of wine. My hands shaking, I pour Bordeaux generously into the soft plastic cup provided by the hotel. In a split second the cup tips over, the entire contents splashing onto my laptop keyboard. The laptop survives for three minutes and, just before dying, tries desperately to tell me something. It first changes languages, however this results not in letters, but in mysterious symbols I didn’t know existed. I keep desperately trying to press the buttons as Russian letters turn uncontrollably into zodiac signs, waves, stars, ships, and crescent moons. And then the window with the text curls up as if into a tube and slides away.
Drift, wait, and obey.
Without
What if there were no Italy? What if it simply never existed—no such geological configuration in the shape of a boot? Perhaps it was flooded in Noah’s days. Or perhaps it collapsed as a single block, with its Alps and Apennines, with its rosebushes and lemon trees, and—why not—along with Sicily and Sardinia, into blue waters during an earthquake, the sea formless and empty, only the Holy Spirit hovering above the salty abyss. Where would the Albanians, who steal laundry from clotheslines, steer their rubber boats? Let’s pull out a map and duly look: the closest laundry is hanging in Corsica—too far to swim, and the locals might respond with a knuckle sandwich, although there wouldn’t be any locals, would there, and no Frenchmen, either, only Gauls, unconquered and thus never having been ennobled by the Romans. Ipso facto, farther west there would be no Spaniards and no Portuguese, only wild Iberians, most likely under the reign of the Moors. Obviously there wouldn’t be any Romanians or Moldovans, and Chișinău would be inhabited by an altogether different tribe, perhaps one unable even to mix lime paint in a bucket or to replace a windowpane. The English language as we know it—that is, with its almost sixty percent of words derived from Latin—simply wouldn’t exist. And there wouldn’t be any Latin letters, either; we’d write everything with Greek ones, although I’ll grant that, practically speaking, the difference is small.
Greeks would be everywhere, there having been no Romans to conquer them—though that would, most likely, have been done, with great satisfaction, by the Persians once Alexander the Great died. Persians are pretty clever engineers; they are wonderful at building bridges and know how to irrigate, so no need to worry about pavements and water supply. The post office would also run smoothly, especially when serving the royal family. But when it comes to marble statues, mosaics, encaustic painting, and small bronze statuettes, things don’t look so good. No doubt the Greeks can invent anything, make anything, build, write, and paint anything, but what about the small matter of taste? Persian style can be somewhat heavy-handed. Lapis lazuli. The battle of a king with a lion. Golden floor-length robes and hats piled high reflecting the ethos of Ivan the Terrible’s court. Same goes for social mores. Abuse and tyranny, dark anger bubbling underneath: “Everyone! On your knees, bow with your forehead to the floor!” Keep all the women under lock and key and no funny business; drill a hole in the prisoner’s shoulder blades and thread a rope through it. And where is political thought? Consuls, proconsuls, the senate, political parties, the patricians, the plebeians, and, last but not least, the Republic? Where is Roman Law? Helloooo? Where are the orators? The historians? The theaters? Would the Persians really give a crap about the accrescent hum of an assembling crowd, the crepuscular sky above the amphitheater, the sweet scent of the oleander, the last bit of light from Venus, the evening star that’s not really a star at all? About historical scrolls, the adversarial legal system? Would they be captivated by Ciceros, or, given the absence of such, by Demostheneses; would they come to respect them and create public forums where any deadbeat can let his big mouth run? Impale, impale on a stake, clean the forums with quicklime, and
farewell, civil rights leaders and advocates. Where are the baths, the flowing summer robes, the shaved chins, the terraced villas? Where are respected women, worthy mothers of worthy citizens? What about honoring agreements? Projects for the common good? Poetry, where is the poetry? Satire!!! Would a Persian tolerate satire? Or privacy of correspondence? Or doing sports in the buff? Or a relaxed attitude toward the gods?
Subtract from our culture the Roman and Gothic styles; subtract arches, vaulted structures, keystones; take away city planning, gardens, fountains, all European cities, castles, fortresses, spires, humpback bridges, colonnades and atriums; erase Saint Petersburg from the picture and shake its ashes from your hands as if it never existed. Send it all to hell in a handbasket. Off with the Renaissance. Giotto, Michelangelo, Raphael—shoo shoo shoo. Forget about pictorial art—it was but a dream. Down with opera, singing in general, just puncture your eardrums. Pour away the wine, you’ll be drinking barley hooch from now on.
Tear up Dante, erase the Mona Lisa, raze the Vatican to the ground. There are no Catholics, no popes, no antipopes, no cardinals, no religious hypocrites, no Galileo or Giordano Bruno and none of their tormentors, no Guelphs and Ghibellines; there’s no Western Roman Empire, and then no Eastern one, either, for there is no West. Absolutely no West at all. There are no brutal gladiators and no poisoning seductresses. There are no Seven Hills of Rome; the stripy Siena Cathedral does not exist; the blue expanse of Tuscany can’t be seen from any window. It’s not crimson bellicose Mars, not diamantine Venus up there in the sky.
Nothing, nothing exists—there is no pasta, no Fellini, no pizza, no bel canto, no Pinocchio, no Sophia Loren, no teary-eyed Maksim Gorky in Capri, no Cipollino the Onion Boy, no Neapolitan mastiffs, no Carrara marble, no carnivals, no pesto sauce, no Romeo and Juliet, no mozzarella, no cappuccino, no eruption of Mount Vesuvius, no perdition of Pompeii, no Italian mafia, no Italian fashion, no Mussolini, no Armani, no Pontius Pilate, no Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. The leaning tower of Pisa isn’t leaning; the sinking town of Venice isn’t sinking. There is no Catullus’s sparrow. There is no one to discover America. No one to build Moscow’s Kremlin.
Gogol has nowhere to run from the encroachment of Mirgorod, no sunny haven where he can lie supine, arms stretched out, gazing for hours into the blueness of the sky, purifying his dark, northern, frosty soul from the debris and detritus of his pale, sluggish, fat-assed homeland. “It’s mine! No one can take it away from me! I was born here. Russia, Saint Petersburg, the snow, the scoundrels, the office, the university, the theater—it was all but a dream! He who has been to Italy will say farewell to other lands. He who has been to heaven will not want to come down to earth….Oh, Italy! Whose hand will pluck me from here? Oh, the sky! Oh, the days! It’s not quite summer and not quite spring, but better than any springs or summers that exist in other corners of the world. Oh, the air! I can’t stop drinking it in. There are skies and paradise in my soul.”
Without Italy, there are disputes in matters of taste. Money does stink. You can speak ill of the dead.
And all roads lead to nothing.
Faraway Lands
A letter from Crete to a friend in Moscow
Green clouds, the foul air of the fatherland, and especially its heart—Moscow—are behind us, and so here we are, giddy with joy and from lack of sleep, drinking ice-cold white wine and looking out at the sparkling desert of the sea, not caring to know anyone below Odysseus. And here is one, bringing us fried fish and tzatziki, as well as some horta (boiled bitter greens, in case someone forgot what horta are), and the pearly gates are once again open to us for two weeks. Perhaps we didn’t sin all that much in the previous year.
The role of gatekeeper this time was played by Aegean Airlines, which sold us tickets for a laughably small sum but omitted a caveat, and of course there was one. The night before our departure we got an email: Your flight is not tomorrow afternoon as you had hoped, dear passenger, but at six in the morning. And you’ll have a twelve-hour layover in Athens, with nowhere to lay your sleep-deprived head. Nothing to be done but sorrowfully sprinkle that head with ashes, throw some stuff into our suitcase, and race to the airport at three in the morning.
But somewhere along the way the Creator had mercy on us, and in Athens we were able to rebook our tickets for an earlier flight to Heraklion; not only did our luggage arrive safely, but we even got the rental car we’d reserved, although, as we arrived earlier than expected, the car wasn’t ready and there were still spiderwebs on the back seat, a visual manifestation of the ongoing European economic crisis.
The crisis was also evident at familiar places and store counters. The paucity of choices at the supermarket, the joy of the greengrocer on seeing us—he almost kissed me, touched by my repeat custom, and I left his shop weighed down by bags full of vegetables and oranges for only three and a half euros in total.
Our hotel was half empty: a handful of mothers with children under ten. Maybe the season hadn’t really started yet, but in years prior it was difficult to find a table with the view of wisteria. (Or was it jasmine? Palm trees? Rhododendron? Our friend Pasha would be appalled at my ignorance if he ever sobered up.) But now you can sit and peck at your paltry complimentary breakfast wherever you want: for instance, they rationed only one thinly sliced cucumber per meal. That is, one cucumber for all the hotel’s guests. Cross my heart. Fortunately, I had brought my own for dieting purposes, at a cost of seven or eight euro cents; and besides, I didn’t want to pilfer the provisions of the owners—stingy Stavros and his German wife. They also didn’t set out any boiled eggs—what if no one ate them?—but if you asked, they obliged. I got a whole egg, and had I asked for two, I would have gotten two: Come quick, dear friend, this is a land of plenty. “Live your myth in Greece.”
I’m sticking to my self-imposed Ramadan by eating canned turkey at night; I loathe it, and this particular brand has an unnatural look to it: petal-like pieces in some sort of preservative brine. But at least it’s not pork or garlicky salami, which we used to gorge on in our more zaftig days. There aren’t any Greek strawberries in the markets, they must all have gone to the markets of Moscow. Would a Frenchman eat truffles in lean times? No, he would sell them to a rich oil sheik instead.
Yesterday we went to a seafood place and ordered a whole platter of various fried fish. Twenty-nine euros for two, everything fresh out of the wine-dark sea. There were two sea breams, mother and daughter; a piece of swordfish; some sardines, which by default smelled of their wood-smoked fate; two unidentified fish; and a few giant prawns. All this was drizzled with lemon and delicious homemade olive oil—so long, diet—and garnished with green salad leaves. Turns out greens are yummy if they are fresh picked and not as they’re served in the Fatherland. They’re meant to be crunchy and not to sluggishly wrap around your teeth. Oh, there was also a side dish, but we, as you’ll understand, had to abstain. The side dish was rice.
* * *
—
Yesterday’s dinner meditations compared the behavior and motivations of a Russian to those of a European. Here is a classic theme: the drinking man. European literature, cinema, and anecdotal observations all paint the same picture: a lonely middle-aged soul in a bar, drinking alone but with dignity (which sometimes excuses his bluish nose, blotchy cheeks, trembling hands, and ancient scarf) at a table or at the counter, solitarily looking into his glass; if he does raise his eyes, perhaps only looking wistfully and forlornly like Pierrot, he doesn’t stare, doesn’t catcall, doesn’t grab anyone’s ass. He drinks slowly, staying past last call. He is contemplating his loneliness, we surmise, the meaninglessness of existence, the impossibility of emotional attachment, and the passing of the more-or-less good ol’ days. My poor old mother, ma pauvre vielle mère, as well as the long-gone young lady in white bloom. If he has a dog, it’s also as old as the sea, and he’s sure to bring it, as the dog is always allowed.
Imagine! A dog allowed in a bar! Because European canines don’t jump up on people, tearing their pants and humping their leg—no, they lie under the table with toothless dignity and sightless wisdom, mirroring their owner’s quiet heartache. One of the best stories about this is Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”—although there is no dog, the solitude is total and complete.
My sister was right in observing that the female hypostasis of the lonely European is a lady over forty, often bitter, having coffee and a dessert alone in a pastry shop at lunchtime. Inescapable sadness in her eyes: her feminine charms are no longer in demand, there has been no happiness, or perhaps, having deceived, it drained away like water through a sieve, and there lies ahead an endless desert, where even an encounter with a camel’s prickly thorn is not guaranteed. We saw one woman just like this in Baden-Baden, in a pastry shop where we stopped for apple pie (with the shyness and audacity of a horny teenager at a brothel). She was sitting by the window—a plate with the ruins of a mille-feuille beside her—looking out into nothingness with such intensity that she was burning through all the oxygen in her line of sight. We saw another one like that in Florence—she was drinking espresso at a table outside in the square, that is, smack in the middle of the biggest crowds, the maze of flower beds, under the shining sun, in the midst of the vortex.
The Baden-Baden lady was hopelessly unattractive, and her heart couldn’t soar over this wall of unsightliness, barrenness, and social leprosy. And as it couldn’t soar above it, neither could anyone make their way through it, even if they tried. The Florence lady was not young—over sixty, but still capable of traveling solo. Varicose veins hadn’t yet carved up her legs, her nose hadn’t yet turned into a strawberry from a daily drinking habit; still, she was separated from this sunny world by her age, which she visibly hated and cursed, and in hating her age, she raged against the sunny world around her.
Aetherial Worlds Page 16