by Jocelyn Parr
That Sasha seemed to have found his footing again gave me some comfort. There was a part of him that wanted to save art and a part of him that wanted to abandon it completely. It was the first part of him that started to like the position at the new gallery. Being there had brought him back into the conversation he had missed. He didn’t know his old friend Dimitri had been hired at the same time as him, but the fact that he had changed the job completely. They’d moved in different circles when they were at art school, but Dimitri had been like Sasha: suspicious of Lenin’s attempts to influence art.
Politicians don’t know shit about art, Dimitri said to Sasha, speaking the language of Sasha’s heart.
Dimitri had his hands in everything, Sasha thought. Dimitri this, Dimitri that. Dimitri, Dimitri, Dimitri. The hermitage was being gutted, said Dimitri, and Sasha was infuriated.
Just last week, two Raphaels were sold to an American millionaire, Sasha relayed to me, one night after he’d just started.
Don’t we need the money? I said.
They’re Raphaels!
The first thing he planned to do at the gallery was turn up the heat. The cold was ruining the paintings. That he had plans made everything better.
Sasha and I seemed to have resolved our differences, reuniting after those first weeks of winter when we’d felt so far apart. We stayed up late talking and had sex before falling asleep. Sometimes I would wake in the middle of the night, breathless and afraid, but then I would curl myself around Sasha’s warm body and, like that, fall back asleep.
If I couldn’t fall asleep, I’d lie in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to the building at night. The walls were so thin it was almost possible to hear conversations in the neighbouring apartments, and if the hallway doors had been left open, the sound of the kitchen — the clatter of late-night cooking — rattled down to me. Sometimes Sasha could feel my restlessness and he’d seem to call out, from the depth of his own exhaustion, saying, What’s wrong? Why aren’t you sleeping? And I’d come close to him, whispering in the dark, that I didn’t know, that I was okay.
But I did know. I was plagued by all that I’d learned from Luria and worried about the institute and the exhibit, about what I’d been asked to do. What kind of report could I write, what kind of honest could I be? How could I keep going when I’d lost all sense of direction? I wanted Sasha’s momentum to be mine.
Even if Sasha didn’t initially see the value of his work, it cheered me to see him find his way because it suggested that I would, too. His hands roughened up, got calloused. He swapped stories with his friends about the art they were hanging and complained about the curator, and all this made him more rugged, more durable, as if he’d finally grown up.
Although Dimitri was an old friend, it wasn’t until he and Sasha worked together at the gallery that they got close. Their first install was so straightforward, they had been able to do it on their own: a collection of paintings, all of them reasonably sized. The curator, who Sasha never said much about, had walked them around the gallery saying that the show was standard — the paintings would be hung at eye level, a standard distance apart, nothing fancy. After the install was over, they had all the time in the world. While the show was up they were more like security guards than art handlers. They floated through the gallery when it was open, talking to the occasional visitor, then took long breaks to smoke and drink in the loading dock, where they could watch the weather without having to be in it.
When that show ended and they were getting ready for the next install, a new guy was hired. In contrast to Dimitri, Sasha thought Lukas was only okay. He was young, officious, slow speaking. He’d come over from Spain, and planned to go back. Like Dimitri, Lukas had worked in the gallery associated with the art school, so he was an expert in things Sasha had never had to think about: walls, hardware, forklifts, and the kinds of pulley systems they’d need for big shows. Old walls in Moscow had three layers to them: stone, then a layer of wood or wire, and then a layer of plaster to finish. Plaster doesn’t stick to stone, Lukas had explained. The softer layer gives the nails a place to go.
He’ll be useful, Sasha said, since I don’t know shit about that stuff.
Lukas’s father was a party member back in Spain, where the war was with the anarchists not the capitalists. Everything about Lukas was foreign to Sasha, but especially the fact that Lukas admired his own father.
These people who never depart from their parents’ views of things: are they stupid or just really lucky? What’s home life like if you never disagree with your parents? mused Sasha.
You didn’t disagree with your parents, I said.
Sure I did, he said, chucking me under the chin. How do you think I married you?
More often than not, the loading dock conversation involved the future of art. Dimitri was into an idea that Sasha wanted to think about more carefully. Because they’d come from the same place — same art school, same medium, same resistance to change — what Dimitri had to say about art’s future mattered to Sasha. That, and Dimitri was older. Dimitri was interested in what it might mean for art to reach the end of representation altogether. Rodchenko, according to Dimitri, hadn’t pushed things far enough. Dimitri agreed that art shouldn’t be decoration; art for art’s sake was over. But it shouldn’t even be representative.
At the gallery, Sasha started to get what he’d been missing from his time at Osorgins’. A conversation that mattered to him had started up again.
At home, Sasha’s brushes had been taken out of their boxes, the tubes of paint and jars of oil reunited, as if readying themselves.
It was around that time that M—, the pianist, moved out of the room down the hall. It wasn’t unusual in those days for people to disappear suddenly, and that’s how it was with M—. One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t. In his youth, M— had studied at the Moscow Imperial Conservatory and had often bragged of his friendship with Nikolai Rubinstein, something Sasha and I knew was impossible, given that Rubinstein had died of tuberculosis in Paris some decades before M— was even born. We entertained the lie, though, because it was like entering another person’s fantasy and it was harmless and we could do it together. Later, it turned out that although Nikolai Rubinstein hadn’t taken much interest in M—, Nikolai Bernstein, the neurophysiologist, had. All of this surfaced the way all communal knowledge did in those days: in snippets overheard or rumours shared in the hall or in the kitchen as one waited for a pot to be cleaned or the hot plate to be freed up.
Everything ends in neurology these days, said Sasha.
Ask our neighbours yourself, I said, but I knew he wouldn’t. He avoided contact with them as much as I did, maybe more.
They’ll be explaining the blue sky according to neurology soon enough, he said.
He was smoking at the balcony again, the first cigarette of the day.
So tell me, he said.
Bernstein had studied athletes at first, but later turned to virtuoso pianists. The mystery of parallel octaves was that piano instructors at the conservatory didn’t know how to teach the technique. Students who tried to learn by the instruction take it slow, then speed it up, suffered tremendous muscle pain in their backs, arms, and hands. Bernstein solved the mystery by attaching small light bulbs to the performer’s arms and then recording their performance on a moving celluloid film. M— had been one of those performers.
It sounds like an art piece, said Sasha, exhaling.
I smiled at the thought, and at how often our conversations went this way, with me explaining an experiment and Sasha calling it art.
They discovered that the movement required of parallel octaves simply cannot be achieved at slow speeds. The momentum forces a vibration that permits the hand to lead the arm and not the other way around.
Yeah, said Sasha, I remember a piece like that. A film. Didn’t we see it together?
I didn’t remember.
With a gymnast and light bulbs? I think it was Pudovkin. Or maybe it was a docu
mentary of those same experiments?
I knew I should know who Pudovkin was. Sometimes Sasha accused me of living in a bubble, and when he mentioned names like Pudovkin I knew he was right. I knew of him, but if I’d been required to guess what he did, I wouldn’t have guessed filmmaker.
So it couldn’t be taught, said Sasha, butting the cigarette out.
Exactly.
Until it could.
He shut the balcony door.
No, I said. They couldn’t teach it. It had to come from within.
But they could teach a way to let it come from within, he argued.
M—’s room stayed empty for months, which was strange, given the housing crisis that had overtaken the city by then. Normally a room wouldn’t stay empty for a day. That’s why we assumed M— was coming back.
Did you notice that he only ever played Liszt? asked Sasha. I hadn’t. I knew as much about musicians as I did about filmmakers.
M— didn’t come back, though. I wished so hard that he would, kept looking for him in the kitchen, strained to hear his playing. That was why, when a new man moved in, I had the feeling that I’d conjured him because he took up the piano and played all the same songs.
Do you hear that? I asked Sasha.
The Valses oubliées, said Sasha.
Liszt, right? I asked.
Sasha leaned his head to one side and nodded absently. It was summer by then, and the noise of the city competed with the noise of the building. We toyed with the idea that M— was back, but then M— had been a good pianist and the new guy wasn’t. He repeated the same section over and over, so the pieces came out like thwarted thoughts, incomplete and disconnected. Ideas too isolated to ever mean anything.
Now, when I hear the Valses oubliées, I expect to hear it the way I heard it then. Deformed and disjointed, with great leaps. If, by chance, I happen upon the pieces performed as they were intended, I hear the notes in a strange way such that some phrases are layered and thick with memory and others sound so thin to me, as if they don’t belong at all.
By the end of April 1928, I was close to finishing the exhibit. It was the memorandus that loomed and the damn report I would have to distill from it, a report that would cast me as the arbiter of who or what Bekhterev had been. Everything! I wanted to say. I was as hesitant to complete the work as I had been to start it, afraid of what it would or wouldn’t mean and, more than that, of the chasm that would appear in my life once the work was done. The struggle to make sense of a man who had been more enigma than I’d known consumed me. I felt as if I still knew so little, and I kept hoping for something more to say, a missing fact or hidden narrative that could protect us both — preserve his vision, prolong mine. I wanted there to be a way to write the truth of him as I’d known him, but writing’s relationship to objective truth seemed to be unravelling the more I tried to do it. Against all my years of training, against everything I’d learned from Bekhterev himself about the knowable material world, in the spring of 1928, as the river’s layers of ice broke up and washed downstream, as every remnant of winter seemed to melt away on a single day, as the city became water, I had to ask myself what I truly knew.
I was upstairs going through Bekhterev’s notes one afternoon when I heard someone on the stairs and looked up to see Bogdanov standing in the doorway. The way he stood there so politely told me he knew I’d become shy of him. He was there to say they could test my blood type. The way he put it suggested it was then or never, though the timeline I would have preferred would have been more along the lines of not yet. He sensed my hesitation and gave me room to breathe, asking how my work was going, if I’d made the progress I’d hoped. I heard myself tell him that I’d come across something strange, a puzzling characteristic of Bekhterev’s brain cells, and that the mystery of it was bothering me. He took this as an invitation, coming closer and so, in part because I thought it couldn’t hurt to have a second opinion and in part because I wanted to direct his attention away from me and onto something else, I led Bogdanov in to see the slides, showing him the peculiar jaggedness that marked the cells of Bekhterev’s brain. I mused that they seemed to be distended somehow.
He said, Yes, yes, they are just that. Hypersaturated, one might say.
Yes, I said, but why?
I don’t know.
And I heard Bekhterev’s voice just then, saying that what Bogdanov did was not real science, and then Bogdanov asked again whether or not I wanted to have my blood tested. I wanted to blurt out my absolute refusal, but instead I said I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Why? he asked, looking wounded. The answer wasn’t only Bekhterev’s dismissal of Bogdanov’s work, though that was part of it; it was also that the idea itself had always been about Bekhterev, designed, really to elicit his reaction, his concern, a feeling that he was more like a father to me than my boss. What point was there to it now? But I didn’t say any of this and instead followed Bogdanov down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into his institute. I berated myself for being so juvenile, but then which was the juvenile part — my desire to elicit Bekhterev’s concern or my present fear? As we walked through the waiting room and into the place where I had once found Bogdanov,I concluded that the test couldn’t hurt, and who else was left for me to trust anyway, who else but this maniac and his pseudo-science?
He’d been telling me about his wife, having forgotten that we had met all those months ago, telling me that she was a nurse, which I knew. And then suddenly I was seated and she had persuaded me to unfold my arm for her, exposing that soft blue network of veins at the fleshy fold of my inner elbow. The alcohol she swabbed across my skin tingled. Bogdanov stood to the left of the chair, she to the right. He wanted to distract me, so he told me about a character he’d met in prison, hoping to make me laugh, though it frightened me instead.
You’re all right, he said as the blood was sucked from inside me. I felt that the loss of blood created a vacuum in me, an empty space that would collapse in on itself should nothing come to replace it. A part of me was being taken, and I would never get it back. The room swam with great patches of black and purple, and Bogdanov nudged me, saying take this, eat it, words so liturgical in nature I couldn’t refuse them, though had I been clear-headed I would have rejected the words and the candy and everything else besides. As the sugar melted on my tongue, I revived.
How many types are there? I asked Bogdanov’s wife.
Five, she said, confidently.
The next day, I resolved to bring the memorandus to some sort of resolution. I would get clear on Bekhterev’s politics, as though such a thing were possible with a man as complex and intractable as him. I returned to the piles of paper Bekhterev had left behind, and a diary I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at. The diary was small with a soft black leather cover and gold-leaved pages so thin they could have been transparent if held up to the light. I sat for a moment feeling the cold of the black leather. Then it was time, and I opened it up, flipping through casually at first. I noticed right away that it bore witness to the frantic quality of Bekhterev’s time in Moscow and the relative quiet of his time in Leningrad. His travel plans were noted in the following fashion:
M — P
P — Y
Y — P
P — M
Y meant Yaroslavl. S meant Samara. P was Petrograd, though sporadically he would cross out the P and replace it with L, as if suddenly remembering it was Leningrad. Soon enough he’d forget and revert to the P. He never went anywhere else.
In his wife’s hand there were dinner plans; in his hand, there were conferences; in hers, the dates when they would be at the dacha, these written in a weighty dark script as if saying they were incontrovertible. In his hand, appointments at the military school; in hers, a list of things to bring back from Moscow, toys usually. In her hand, the chapter by chapter deadlines for the book he’d been writing when he died; in his, the final deadline from the publisher, which wasn’t until the following year, meaning a manuscript
was somewhere, though who knew where. Nothing in the diary surprised me. In fact, I was comforted: the life Bekhterev had itemized corresponded to the one I had witnessed. That is, until I registered a name that recurred, a name written in light pencil, as if after the fact, the name of a psychologist, about whom Bekhterev had spoken once, and had written disparagingly.
His problem with psychology was that it believed in consciousness above all else. He called it a subjective science, and this was a criticism. Consciousness is regarded as the fundamental and inalienable stamp of the psychic activity not only of oneself, but also of others. That psychology relied upon the so-called introspective method as fundamental in the investigation of inner or psychic processes made it suspect. Above all, Bekhterev was a materialist, and nothing about the psychological approach could be measured. All this made the biweekly appointment with the psychologist an anomaly. It had occurred on Thursday afternoons, and I thought back through the Thursdays of the year past, but they were indistinguishable from any other weekday afternoon — Bekhterev was usually out, at the hospital I had assumed, incorrectly.
And so, along with the spring melt, and the movement of the river, and the collective sigh of the city returning to life, I went out, above all to meet the psychologist.
My visit would have been entirely without consequence, except for the intrusion of a secretary, and the mention, upon seeing me and knowing my connection to Bekhterev, of Asja. Asja lived most of the time in those days in the sanatorium connected to the building, a place she eventually told me she’d chosen for herself on account of her wildness, though on the registration form she’d described herself as having a case of nerves. The visit to the doctor, it turned out, had been a visit to see Asja.
When I got to her room, I introduced myself as Bekhterev’s student, and she said my name immediately, her eyes bright and smiling, and got up to embrace me. That she could be so open and so immediately welcoming surprised me so much that tears sprang to my eyes, and I found myself almost wounded by the warmth with which she’d greeted me. To be hugged so genuinely, to see such happiness in her eyes — all of this was so unlike every other part of my life. She looked to be about ten or fifteen years older than me, but terribly frail, so thin I’d felt her bones collapse when we’d embraced.