by Jocelyn Parr
S— continued, but I don’t remember everything he listed. There was something about the way he recited the items — in a kind of drone — that made them totally forgettable. The number eighty-seven rolled off his tongue in the same tone as the bar of soap, the pistol, the old woman, the hard-boiled egg. When he came to the end, it took me a moment to realize he’d stopped.
How do you do it? I asked.
A warmth came into S—’s eyes. He liked the question.
I recognize a word not only by its image but also by a whole complex of feelings that it arouses. A word can taste or smell or have a weight or a texture. Its sound can cause a slight tickling in my left hand, or I might sense something oily slipping through my fingers. When that happens, I simply remember, without effort.
Perhaps you could explain how the process works with numbers, suggested Luria.
Take the number one, said S—. This is a proud, well-built man.
And two? I asked.
Two is a high-spirited woman; three a gloomy person.
What about numbers of several digits? I asked.
Well, he said slowly. You see, seven is a man with a moustache. Eight is a very, very fat woman — a sack within a sack. So the number eighty-seven is a very fat woman and a man twirling his moustache.
Wonderful, I said.
S— grinned.
He was a true archive. A living, breathing collector. When asked how he remembered such lists in the precise order in which they’d been given, he explained that he did it by walking.
I take a mental walk down a street I know very well. Tverskaya used to be a good one, but not now, not with all the changes. But what I do is walk from one place to another. It happens easily, and more often than not, the walk becomes dream-like in a way and the impossible happens: I begin in Moscow and, without realizing it, end in the town in which I grew up, Torskok.
Outside, a cloud must have covered the sun because the light on the window was suddenly dull. A pigeon hopped down to the sill from somewhere above. The sudden darkness seemed to waken S— from a sort of reverie. Luria suggested a cup of tea. S— declined, saying he needed to be home to care for his mother.
In the hall, his steps were soundless, but after a minute or so I heard him exchange hellos with a woman whose singsong voice tripped back to us, magnified.
We followed him just moments later, but the woman was gone.
Outside, the sun warmed me again.
Luria lit his pipe.
The building was at a high point in the city, so it was only natural to drift down to the river, crossing the bridge and going down the hill on the other side to the small park, where a bench was waiting for us.
He’s incredible, I said, once we were seated.
Luria crossed his legs and drew two quick puffs from his pipe.
The problem is, he said, exhaling, that he lacks the capacity to interpret. He thinks like a young child, in concrete images that are associative, thematic, almost like poetry; yet whenever I’ve shown him a poem, he can’t get past the surface images. He’s so caught up in the surface of words that he can’t deal with their intended meanings. Metaphor is completely lost on him.
I lit a cigarette and took a drag. Every so often, a slight breeze nipped up from the river, but still we were warm.
What troubles you about this? I asked.
Isn’t it obvious? Nothing means anything to him.
So S— collected a series of objects, situated them in a familiar place, and then could only remember that they existed, without knowing why their existence mattered.
Is he bothered by it? I asked.
Oh, I don’t know, said Luria quickly, and then more slowly, It’s just that the more time I spend with him, the more I am aware of a profound sadness about him. It’s like he is waiting for something, some great thing.
And you think it is meaning that he’s waiting for, I said.
Yes.
But, I said, taking another drag, isn’t that true of all of us? Aren’t we all waiting for meaning?
But he’ll never have it, said Luria.
Will we? I asked.
Luria shook his head, still thinking.
And what’s worse, he said, is that his immediate images haunt him for hours. You know, the types of images that ought to fade, like the swirl of smoke above my pipe, or the reflections off the river, the way they dance, or even the curve of the bridge, all these things stay with him, indefinitely. His whole mental world is like a junk heap of impressions.
Some children tumbled down the hill into the park and started throwing stones into the river. I tried to imagine what it would be like to hold on, forever, to the image of the perfect splash erupting out of the river just as the rock plunged in, but just like that, the rock, the splash, the image was gone.
At home again that night, I knew that I would have to move, and I knew how it would go. No warning and a family knocks at the door with their bulging suitcases hanging at their sides. I didn’t want to have to leave like that, so suddenly.
I started with the books. I would give them away. Books need to circulate.
The bookshelf was our one good piece of furniture. Glass doors to each section protected the books from dust. To open the section, the doors swung up and slid under the upper shelf. All of the sections opened easily except one.
Its door refused to slide all the way back. Holding the door up with one hand, I removed the books one by one with the other. At the back of the shelf, there was a satchel, and inside that a piece of black cloth encased a series of hard objects that clicked against each other as I pulled them out. I lay them on my lap and untied the black cloth.
That fucker! was my first thought.
Everything we had been looking for was there, stacked according to size. The smallest was a standard glass slide three centimetres by eight. The sample was a follicle of hair, its label torn and illegible. There were sea creatures and leeches, sketches of samples, and if there was one colour that could describe them all, it was black. There were four lantern slides: all of them taken of the blackened edge of Lenin’s brain. Placed side by side, they comprised four quadrants of black space, creating the eerie impression that the void had, indeed, been captured and given physical dimension in the photographic process. The lantern slides would not degrade. One by one, I held the objects up to the light so that I could admire the workings of disease and decay. Not just that, though. Here were actual slices of Lenin’s brain which also showed signs of the same necrosis. With those, I thought about the passageways that would have been filled with blood, and then I put the slides down on the table and, without thinking, took a knife to the gummy labels, which identified the slides as #1301, #1302, #1303, #1304, all from Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, or Lenin. I pressed the knife through the labels to make them tear and pucker and become unidentifiable to anyone but me.
In the black, red, and white of Rodchenko’s style, he’d inked a portrait of Anushka’s dog and named her Witness, though in real life her name was Oktober. Akhmatova’s book had become his sketchbook; every page had a portrait. Of Bogdanov. Of Anushka. Of Zhanna. Of Sergei. Of Bekhterev. Of me. They were drawn in China ink that had then been wetted so that its black could spill into the shadows of our faces. The dark pools beneath our eyes, the hollows in our cheeks. It was as though he thought no one would remember us without him. As if he thought we’d be forgotten. Or erased.
And the objects had been left in our bookshelf, hidden in a place only I would look and only if I had to. He knew how I hated Chekhov. He knew I’d only ever look there if I were leaving, and perhaps he knew I’d only need to leave if he was considered dead, and so he’d wanted me to find these objects once he was gone, in order to tell me what? I looked again at the images. His drawing of Bekhterev had made him looked handsome, almost young.
There was, in Sasha’s small collection, a picture of what the institute was, at its beginning, at its best. In his collection, Sasha was telling me that he knew me and that
he knew me better than I knew myself. I hadn’t cried when he left, nor at his funeral, nor at any of the times I’d imagined him on the street, walking just ahead of me or lagging just behind, murmuring, arguing, but now I did, because I saw at once what I had lost when I said to him I didn’t care if he left and he said to me that he’d tried and failed to know my heart. He hadn’t failed. But I let him leave believing he had.
I gathered all the pieces back together and slid them back into the satchel. I hadn’t even realized how much had gone missing from the institute. Now it was clear why I’d missed Sasha so many times there. Had this been his art? The thing he’d been working on these past months? The secret thing that had replaced the Osorgins? This was art and anti-art as the very same thing. Art in the everyday.
I dismantled the entire apartment that night, looking for other objects, but found only one: one of the many slices of the brain stem that we had catalogued so carefully and that I had later realized meant nothing to anyone but me.
In the morning, I left the house, tucking the satchel into another, larger bag without knowing where I was going. My mind was still preoccupied with what the collection might have meant to Sasha, though that question changed shape as I walked, morphing into what the collection might mean to me, and then, more pressingly, what it might mean to me were I to be found with it in my possession. On every street corner, it seemed, documents were being checked. It suddenly felt as though the police were everywhere.
The objects I had thought of as scientific within the confines of the institute had, in my apartment, become artworks: mystical and enigmatic. Now, out on the street, the specimens changed shape again, and I wondered what this man, a red guard, would say of the black sections of Lenin’s brain, or what this woman, a nurse, would make of the autopsy report, or what about those children there, or that line of people who, to judge from the bedraggled shape of them, had been waiting for hours. The bag itself seemed to change shape according to the figure I passed, its contents accusatory or salubrious, things that might put me in prison or save me once I was there. Everywhere I walked there were lineups. Lineups for sugar, lineups for bread, lineups in front of Lubyanka. I walked past doorsteps and endless stretches of fence, the posts of which blurred together while I walked.
The pigeons moaned and flapped out of my way. It was hot. The city had come into bloom. Oh, spring! I kept going and passed another doorstep in which a middle-aged man was squatted down on his hindquarters, holding a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, his smoke whirling around in the doorstep, and I slowed down, inhaled deeply, looking him in the eyes. I felt his used-up smoke enter my lungs, and then I breathed out and I kept walking. Then there were three women and then a small man, and then a young child stepped in front of me and was yanked back by his mother. I looked up at her and then back to where I’d come from and then forward to where I was going, and the stream of people seemed to go on forever. Men, women — more women than men — some with young children, all of them waiting, and as I continued they bunched ever closer together, and this bunching together seemed to screw their faces up in irritation with each other and with whatever it was they were waiting for, which turned out to be a state store out of whose door I would see a man exit, carrying a single loaf of bread. I kept walking, the bag of specimens still clinking ever so slightly in the cloth satchel I’d looped over my shoulder as it had become heavy and I was tiring. It became muggy.
Up ahead was St. Basil’s, and I was still walking, looking now and again for a face I might recognize, looking, I realized, as I had so many times before, for my mother and then for my father, wondering what had happened to them and into what version of aging they had descended. Had she remarried, had she had other children, what? And he, had he left the country behind? Did they live in the shadow country, the exile place? Had either of them had the good fortune to develop laugh lines, or were their faces worn, like the faces I saw all around me now — coming and going, arguing over bread and sugar, walking in silence, eyes cast downwards in exhaustion or something else — worn with lines of worry and puffy with drink? Had they gotten thin?
I kept on, St. Basil’s on my left now, its spirals peering out from behind the buildings, their swirls still like candy stripes, the sky above them the light blue of mid-morning, the sun on the verge of raging the way it would at noon and for hours afterwards. I passed more and more lines. Moving past them, as I was, made it seem as if the lines didn’t move at all, but surely they did. Now it was Hunter’s Row, but most of its stalls were empty, because there was so little to sell. The vendors still hung about, trying to hawk wooden toys, shoe polish, neckties, and lingerie, but what was the point of possessions when all you’d be able to do with them in the end would be to leave them? Missing were the buckets of apples and sugar figurines and the raw meat that used to be laid out and bought so quickly.
Rounding a corner, I came face to face with three policemen. They fanned out as they had in the train station.
The middle one, Papers, please.
I was sweating. I shifted my bag on my shoulder, heard the clink of the slides, saw the way the sound piqued the interest of the man on my left. I said nothing, presenting my papers to the one who had asked. By now this gesture was becoming almost normal. I felt the man on my left looking at me intently, and I turned to look at him, seeing then that he was a junior cadet. And then I had my papers back, and the three of them went on their way, and I walked the rest of the block, only collapsing in tears on a front step once I’d rounded the corner and they were out of sight.
I hadn’t planned where I would go, but somehow I found myself standing in front of the neurology building at the university, looking for Luria, hoping I wouldn’t find him. I wanted to be free of these items but also wanted them to be safe. By now, the security guards knew me. They were playing checkers and barely looked up.
Over the past few months, we’d started to hear rumours that the institute was going to close or relocate. Sergei said it was because Our Great Father of the Union was jealous, but others mused that it was simply that we hadn’t published enough papers and funding was drying up. All over the city, institutes like ours were closing or being relocated, the state exerting more and more control. Luria had been named Distinguished Scientist, putting him on par with the new class of distinguished writers, musicians, playwrights, and so on. In public, from then on, he had to be referred to with honorifics and a new etiquette. He accepted this change as Bekhterev might have — it was useful but otherwise meaningless. Science still existed in a realm separate from politics, but the Party was trying its best to play judge, even if its assessments were clumsy either/ors. Scientists were either praised or banished, sometimes permanently, as we now knew. I didn’t know what was happening, only that somewhere, someone in the building was playing dominoes and that something about the sound was trapped and trying to escape.
The sound was click, click, click and so was the sound of my bag, with each step, as I walked down the dark halls in the general direction of Luria’s office, but not quite. Just as I was about to arrive at his office, I turned, walking instead down a darker hallway towards what appeared to be a broom closet. The sign on the wall read Northern Corridor.
As it turned out, I hadn’t needed to ask Dimitri outright. And he hadn’t meant it when he said I was alone because obviously he had been involved, somehow, in the room to which I was assigned in a hotel right across the street from his. Our rooms were the same size now, though mine was on a higher floor, which, if the room itself had been his choice, had been gentlemanly of him: granting me the privacy height accords. On the first night, I kept my lights off and looked down into what I thought was his room, but his lights stayed off, too, which meant that maybe we were watching each other.
I’d left virtually everything behind. In my new room, every piece of furniture was labelled with a tin tag on which its inventory number and the name of the hotel were written. My room had a similar wash table to the one in D
imitri’s room, but this one had three drain holes that could not be plugged. Above that, there was a small mirror into whose corner I tucked Sasha’s postcard. I rearranged the furniture, hoping to make it feel like it was mine, but there were so few objects in the room that, in the absence of my books, it felt empty and anonymous. In the hallway, the telephone rang all day long. Occasionally someone answered it, and when they did it was always for the old woman who lived in the room at the hallway’s farthest end. Getting her to the phone was an ordeal we all had to go through. The hotel porter stayed in the small room at the entrance. If I arrived past eleven, I couldn’t be sure of entrance, he told me.
Can’t I have a key? I asked.
No, he said.
My food deliveries stopped once I moved into the hotel. We weren’t permitted food in the rooms, so everyone ate together in the cafeteria or else out in the city. The cafeteria was the best bet, because without that, one had to line up for one’s own food, and that could take all day. The other residents, those who had been there for years, grumbled that the servings had gotten smaller, there was no sugar for tea, and even the utensils were becoming more and more scarce.
We haven’t had knives for months, they said.
Where did they go? I asked.
Stolen. People have taken them to their rooms, they said, and the state won’t replace them now.
This was my new life now. I put a fork and spoon in my pocket.
But it was summer, and food still got wasted, or at least the crumbs left behind were sufficient to attract a healthy population of ants. Every day they congregated someplace new. Every morning a young worker would come out and crush a few under her fingers, pushing hard into the surface of whatever corner, leg, or cupboard it was, until she was sure they were dead. Then she’d drag their crushed corpses all over, spreading the word, she explained, about what would happen if anyone else came to visit.
It’s the smell of dead ants that they don’t like, she said. Gruesome, but true. They won’t return. If I get very organized, I’ll make a blend of dead ant juice, she told me one morning, and spread it throughout the cafeteria, get an award for most zealous ant killer, become a Stakhanovite and get a new apartment for me and my boyfriend.