by Jocelyn Parr
What I want is some way for art to free itself from all of its traditions, Dimitri was saying. An art without paint and canvases. I want a way to overcome the abyss between representation and that which is represented. How can they become one? Art and life, one thing? Art for everyone. No more poems. No novels. Fuck paintings. Just art’s very tensions in the day-to-day labours.
Wasn’t that Lenin’s position, I asked, earning an impressed look from Sasha.
I guess I’m coming around, said Dimitri. Why would we need a gallery for art, when art should be what we have in every single moment of the day? Art and anti-art as the same thing. Does it make sense to you? he asked.
I’ll think about it, I said.
Dimitri’s interest in what I thought seemed genuine, but then what I had to say never sounded very interesting. There was an earthquake in Yalta, I’d report, or there was a blackout in our neighbourhood last night, or the markets in the Ukraine have no food.
Dimitri would turn to me, appearing to change gears — like a truck racing downhill suddenly navigating a turn. I could see the effort it required. And he made the effort, which was admirable, but he rarely completed the turn. He’d nod in acknowledgement of the turn, and then keep going downhill, forging his own stubborn path.
Not art for consumption, but art as life itself? he’d ask, loosely trying to knit my questions into what he’d been talking about before. He’d try to see how the earthquake, the blackout, the food shortage, could be art.
In a sense, what Sasha was discovering was that being an artist might necessitate not making art.
I made it to the hospital in under an hour, my heart racing and raging, full of love and fear. In what seemed like the farthest reaches of the building, I finally found Sasha sitting in a rolling chair, pathetic and crumpled up between Jack and an old woman who’d fallen asleep, her body curled over to one side. The two of them looked like fugitive workmen, as though they’d put on the appropriate gear — canvas pants, heavy boots, thick sweaters, and the requisite work belts — but then gone to the bar, or back to bed. That they were so clearly unharmed tipped my feelings towards rage. As soon as I entered the room, Jack stood up to leave. I sat where he’d been sitting and immediately regretted it — his spot was warm with his gross, sticky heat, and I had to look up at him to talk. He stood there for a second, his hands shoved so deep into his pockets it was as if they were full of rocks and pulling his shoulders ever forward.
What they should have been doing at Max’s that night was figuring out the block and tackle. If even one of them had been in the military they would have known how to tie a proper knot. A thicker knot was not a better knot.
Well, take care, said Jack, standing there, hovering.
A man wearing a dark overcoat sat opposite us, pretending to examine a pamphlet that read Guard against infection! in heroic red lettering. A microscope, a needle, a stethoscope, and a tool I didn’t recognize emboldened the outer corners of the front and back pages.
Want anything else, asked Jack, before I go?
Jack reached behind me for his jacket. He gave Sasha a look I couldn’t quite read and then skulked towards the door.
Sorry, called Sasha when Jack was at the door.
Jack glanced at me briefly, his head bent forward in line with his shoulders.
Well, he said, casting his words in our general direction, listen to the doctor. Rest. Lots of ice and whatever.
The man had lowered the pamphlet completely and was watching us with interest.
Jack took care of me, drawled Sasha.
He’s on a lot of medication. The doctors said he can go, said Jack.
Yes, I said to Sasha, I can see that.
Well, Jack said again, and walked out the door.
I turned to Sasha.
Can’t we leave? he asked. He looked so pale and pathetic. As I bent to unlock the brake on the chair, I caught a whiff of stale alcohol.
When I’d rolled him through the hospital doors, I said, Let’s get you out of this thing, and walked around to pull him up. He peered out to the parking lot in the direction of the taxi stand.
No one’s even here yet, he whined.
The sky had turned an unnatural orange and russet, and full of a thick dark cloud that I realized was smoke. I think you’ll feel better if you stand up, I said.
I feel fine.
The hills must be on fire, I said, and his gaze followed mine.
Get up, I said. You can stand on one foot just fine.
That morning, they had hoisted up the largest piece, and as they were congratulating themselves on being able to raise it off the ground, it fell, directly onto Sasha’s right foot. The piece had crushed several bones, including those in his little toe. It would be months before he would be able to walk on it properly, and he wasn’t even to attempt crutches for at least a month.
Upon returning home, Sasha decided that the best thing he could do would be to return to his art.
You’re going to be reassigned, I said, exhausted already by the thought of Sasha back at home all day long.
I’ll do art until then.
The far corner of our room became his workspace and though he left the windows open all day long, the smell of the oils seeped into every article of clothing and seemed, almost, to soak into every paper and book. I found oily linseed shadows on notebooks and fabrics throughout our room and sometimes down the hall and into the communal kitchen. On dish towels. Smeared in a line across one square pane of our glass-windowed bookshelf. On the cover of Akhmatova’s Anno Domini MCMXXI. On me.
Yet in that month-long period when he could not walk, I never saw a single painting.
What happened to your painting of Jack? I asked one morning.
I painted over it, he said. It wasn’t working.
The paints were mixed. The oil, as I said, was everywhere. But he hid his canvases behind a sheet.
Tell me something about what you’re doing.
I can’t, he said.
What is the idea?
I don’t think I can express it in words, that’s why it’s art, he said.
Do you believe that? I laughed.
I used to, he said.
He didn’t know how to start again. Dimitri had fucked it all up, he said, made painting seem ridiculous. But painting was all that Sasha knew.
Over the course of the summer, I began to wonder with more and more frequency who I was. I seemed to be losing touch with people, or losing touch with my capacity to connect with other people, and the feeling was so pronounced that I soon wasn’t sure if I’d ever been able to know anyone or be known by them at all. Rima seemed pregnant all of a sudden, but of course in those days it was hard to notice when the body changed shape, especially when one dressed as Rima did, as most party women did then, in loose-fitting shifts that gave nothing away, until suddenly, they did. Her hands started to hold her belly, tracing it the way pregnant women do. I don’t want a screaming child, she told me, but I couldn’t tell why she said it, with that tone of regret, when she seemed so happy.
I scrutinized her expression for too long, perhaps, because she teased me, saying, Stop looking at me like that! I’m not an alien! And I pulled back, looked away, and then looked back quickly, laughing, though the feeling — that I was an alien, not her — persisted.
So you’ll put it in a nursery, I said. Isn’t that what they do these days? I wanted to ask her, as I might have if we had been younger, who I was, but we seemed too old for existential questions now. They were a luxury that the child would force us to forego.
In the last week of August, the forests outside Moscow burned to the ground, dark smoke billowing into the city as though it were the end of time. Through the layers of thick cloud whose colours ranged from dark plum to burned orange to a dense and dangerous grey, the sienna sun crossed the sky. Old people died from breathing soot. When I washed at the end of the day, the white basin streamed with blackened water as my face and hands came clean.
&nbs
p; And then, Bogdanov died. A boy had come in who was sick with tuberculosis and malaria. All of the blood exchanges had been going so well. Bogdanov had been getting younger. Krasin, his friend, had continued to flourish after his blood transfusion, so it must have seemed obvious that Bogdanov could help the young boy. His parents were present. By then it was so common to see people coming and going for these sorts of transfusions that I don’t even remember exactly when this was. The procedure was standard: Bogdanov and the young boy had exchanged about six hundred cubic millilitres.
The boy survived.
Bogdanov was given a state funeral, perhaps on the request of Stalin — one could imagine such a thing — since Bogdanov had been Lenin’s sworn enemy and, possibly by implication, a friend of Stalin’s, and with the final phase of Bogdanov’s work at his institute dedicated to the health of the Soviet elite, the politiburo could claim him as an ally. In the elegy Bukharin gave, he began by acknowledging the rift between Bogdanov and the Party, which he described as a party of fighters in a harsh and beautiful time whereas Bogdanov had been an artist of thought — the truest kind of artist, in other words. Bogdanov had thought of the body itself as art, and of the body’s organs as both internal, like the liver, and external, like a machine or tool, or, indeed, the blood, which could intercourse from one body to another, linking two bodies in perpetuity. And, in death, Bogdanov had returned to his own fight which had always been a principled one, ever since his earliest days. Bukharin quoted from Red Star and made reference to the portents of that book, in which industry eventually destroyed the planet Mars, forcing its inhabitants into an exile, which might also be an extinction. Bukharin described Bogdanov’s death at a moment of blood exchange as a death earned in deepest battle, fighting as he was for the idea of the thing, the art. No effort of thought can gather and organize the parts of a shattered body into a living whole. Philosophy cannot work miracles. That was Bogdanov.
Bukharin didn’t mention that Bogdanov had stayed true to another principle of his, which was that the Revolution should never have happened, that it was a rotten movement, rotten at its core. Rumours circulated that Bogdanov had committed suicide, but by then I’d had it with the rumours. I’d had it with feeling, too, and so refused to grieve his death because, suicide or not, I decided that Bukharin was right about Bogdanov and his battles, and this was one he had chosen.
Looking back, the news of Bogdanov’s death did something to Sasha, freezing him in time like Lot’s wife, always looking back, or the mythical Orpheus, whose failure to look forward had lost him his true love forever. It took some time for Sasha to be able to walk again, and even longer before he dared go outside. When he did start going outside, he started coming to the institute. At the time, it seemed a positive step, as though he were returning to our world, limping his way into the future. He always told whoever it was that he’d come with the idea of picking me up, so he’d hang around my bench for a while, or sit in the front waiting area, or even hobble around the semicircle of exhibits, lingering (according to Sergei) on the exhibits of the musicians. Sometimes they reported that he had been cheery or in a talkative mood, and at other times he came across as insular and cold. Although he told my colleagues that he was coming to see me, his timing was uncanny: he missed me so regularly I started to wonder if it were intentional.
This was the period I’ve come to know as Sasha’s inner migration. I wondered what he was thinking, but no amount of questioning led anywhere.
What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? he’d ask, rebuffing my questions. Or, even more exasperated: I don’t hate this place, Tatiana. I’m not going to bomb the building of the General Committee of the Bolsheviks. I’m not. I like them. Nice guys over there at the General Committee, committed to their work. We agree on a lot of stuff, me and them. We agree. Who wants the filth of commercialism? Not us. Who wants humiliation before the capitalists? Not us. Who wants the good, no, glorious future for our homeland? Us! And who is willing to suffer the pains of the meanwhile life? Us. We want to suffer together. It is the good suffering. The best. Let us suffer! See? We agree. And even if in other places an artist can be free of the black raven that might come after you at daybreak, in those other places, all the artists starve. Look at me, I’m walking again, healed by our miraculous health system, and soon I’ll be working again.
He’d learned the right things to say.
Sasha, who had always been so opinionated, stopped arguing with me. Even when we were together, sitting side by side on a park bench or across from one another at the small table in our apartment or curled up against each other all night long, I had the feeling that he had turned his back to me and would never face me again. I wondered what he was doing in that private world of his. I wondered what fantasies he was constructing, what life he was living. Sometimes I would ask, but he wouldn’t say. Later, he would accuse me of living in my own little world, and I would think we had fallen out of love.
Now I feel differently. Now I see that what happened to us happened to everyone in a way. People stopped trusting each other. So they’d say he’d left one shore and not yet landed on another.
I started staying later and later at work. At night, when Sergei was shutting the building, I’d hear him approaching my bench. He rapped his knuckles against the lab tables as he walked, the sound echoing throughout the room. Staying late? he’d ask. I always said yes.
On one of those nights, I came home to a pitch-black apartment. In the corner by the window, a radio I didn’t know we had was on. A woman was interviewing the leader of the local Pioneers.
Tell me, she said, about your recent activities. The man being interviewed cleared his throat. His voice sounded respectable and strong, but I knew differently because I knew him. He was a skinny man with a thin, wispy beard, a hypocrite. He worked as a cobbler and overcharged for everything and everyone, except card holders. There were so few official card holders by then — even I wasn’t one — so he was making a profit and claiming to be better than that. I’d seen his apartment once when I still ran errands for the Pioneers. Large, warm, well-lit: it was better than any other apartment I’d been in and obviously the result of well-placed friends. On the radio, he was describing a local initiative to close down the bars.
Again? asked the interviewer, a whine in her voice.
In the dark, a radio sounds like abandonment, I thought. I walked across the room to switch it off.
That was when I noticed Sasha, passed out on top of the bed. The dark of his profile made the rest of the room seem less so. He’d fallen asleep waiting for me. I turned on the bedside light. He didn’t stir at the click of the switch. He was lying on his back with his mouth open slack. His breathing was languid, light, and practically soundless. He’d pulled up his shirt before he started and, having exerted himself, passed out straight away. His hand was still draped loosely around his penis. He hadn’t even taken off his pants. It was the laziest kind of pleasure. I cleaned him without tenderness, then covered him up. I’d been working, and this was what he’d been doing.
You’re pathetic, I whispered. I never told him that I’d seen him that way. It would have been like admitting how low I’d sunk, as if, in seeing him like that I’d become pathetic, too. It would have been better if I’d caught him with another woman.
I turned on all of the lights then, and lifted the sheets off Sasha’s canvases. Every last one was blank.
I looked at him as I had looked at countless people of his type in the streets: the selfish, spoiled rich who had lived their whole lives eating madeleines and macarons from France and now wanted pity from those of us who worked. I looked at him and could not find, anywhere in me, pity. He was too velvet-skinned, too delicate. He was drowning and wanted to drown me, too, but I refused to go under.
In the morning, I opened the balcony doors and let the cold wind blow over him. Then I went back into our room and picked up all of his canvases and threw them off the balcony.
What the hell are you
doing? he cried, struggling to sit up in bed.
You’re not doing anything with them, I said.
When I left, I had the impression that when I locked the door I was locking him away from me, and that eventually I would have to free us both. Whatever art he was doing, it didn’t involve painting.
I thought of Sasha as being out of date. He was only a few years older, but everything about his upbringing had prepared him for a time that could never exist again. I wondered if our society would be better off without him, or if I would be better.
It finally happened that I ran into Sasha at the institute one afternoon, and so we walked home together, or rather, I was following him home from the city, scouring the ground as I went. He had healed well enough that he could walk faster than me, especially when he was in a vile mood, which he was that afternoon. So I followed him, looking for shards of glass that I could kick: I’d shunt them hard with the toe of my shoe and not even care how close they got to Sasha, who was walking straight on with his head held high. I was sick of his crap. He entered the apartment first. Even though it was summer and the days were long, our apartment was perpetually dark. Sasha had left a lamp on, its incandescent bulb flickering an orb onto our small table. I thought to blame him for wasting energy but couldn’t be bothered. Sasha leaned against the bookshelf and lit a cigarette, not even opening the door to the balcony. I sat down at the table, waiting.
You think you’re a special case, he said to me.
I considered my strategy.
You think that you’re on the right side, aware that, sure, things aren’t perfect and sure, they could be better, but you’re on the right side because you’re on the scientific side.