As the months went by, your belief became a science, and I was strictly forbidden from questioning it. Sometimes, the rebellious dissident, I raised my eyes to the sky. You would shoot daggers at me and resort to the blunt weapon of your truth. I needed a manual to survive, or a crash course on von Clausewitz’s book on war; Hitler believed that every soldier should have a copy of it in his pack. I would have had to sign a protocol with you, the way warring countries do. Love had become a two-step of compromises and negotiated settlements to keep the peace. I was a UN Peacekeeper. I watched where I put my feet.
If love is an ordinary event that attracts all language to it, you were my dictionary, my Berlitz, my Assimil. But just because I’m writing about you doesn’t mean you really exist. The more time passes, the more your language becomes foreign. I have stopped recognizing the voice that enchanted and lulled and caressed me, your voice that bewitched me like the notes of a rat-charmer, your voice always working to persuade me. Aphorisms, directives, declarations, quotations, fine phrases, prayers, slogans, all those truths hanging like mobiles over everyday life, or nailed to the wall like crucifixes. Who could tell whether what you said was true, or if you even believed in it yourself?
Sometimes the words that poured from your mouth made me lose my way. The man I had met, for whom life was joyful, had disappeared. The one who had taken his place was the messenger of the apocalypse.
When, tormented by your convictions, I began to have doubts, I found myself in the vise of conflicting loyalties like the children of divorced parents, split between the you I loved and whose words I wanted to believe, and the me who didn’t believe you, who couldn’t believe you, and who really didn’t want to. Believing in God wouldn’t have solved anything, for that law couldn’t do anything for damaged beings and troubled minds, in the end even God couldn’t have soothed your anger.
Against your will, you came to join me in my country. In exchange, you demanded that I immigrate too. I couldn’t have imagined the country you would demand I adopt, a world of complete uncertainty, where everything could fall apart without warning, like in ancient Rome where a friend would suddenly become the enemy and earn the fatal thrust without warning, where the mistress of the evening became a woman abandoned the next morning, swearing vengeance, for it is better to kill than be dishonoured.
Overlooking the Forum, the antique Piccadilly that was once the beating heart of the Republic, I picture a Rome built on irony and sarcasm, where threats and declarations of love were whispered between the lines, where senators were both orators and butchers. Rome is like a Caravaggio canvas, made of mysteries, a world where reason and law never have the last word. The leaden blanket of the Vatican does not ward off transgression, and if men marry, they do not limit themselves to the marriage bed.
Even today I still wonder what in you echoed so strongly in me. What was the empty room, what was the need you gave the impression you could fulfill, what truth about me did your presence reveal? I wonder what battle you allowed me to fight, and what freedom I was meant to conquer.
I don’t remember which of the fathers of psychoanalysis said that love is the experience that most closely approximates psychosis without actually crossing over into madness, I don’t remember if it was Jung who one day succumbed to his passion for Sabina Spielrein, a former patient. Later on, when she had become a psychoanalyst and opened a kindergarten in Moscow, she had a strangely violent young charge named Vassili, Stalin’s son, registered under a pseudonym. Spielrein had always supported the system, but as time went by and events developed around her, she realized that her country had fallen into the hands of an insane person. Threatened by the KGB, her school was shut down. Apparently she died in a hail of Nazi machine-gun fire in a synagogue in Rostov, the city of her birth.
Once, when she was still very much in love with Jung, who had abandoned her to return to his wife, she wrote Freud a letter saying she wanted to separate from Dr. Jung for good, but couldn’t succeed until she was free enough to be able to love him, or until she had forgiven him for everything, or killed him.
When you brandished your homesickness like an olive branch, I loaded my cannons with Dostoevsky’s words: “When you encounter the first small instance of suffering, you brood upon it like a hen with her egg.”
It was hateful, you claimed, the way I mocked you when you defended the myth of the Slavic soul, the wound you said was impossible to cure, whereas I understood that you did not want to be cured, it was your way of establishing your identity. You loved the Czech Republic, that was the excuse you served up to anyone who would listen and accept to be contaminated in the process, for who could compete with such horrors?
You screamed at me, I didn’t understand anything about your world, only what you taught me, and now I was stealing it from you, you accused me of pillaging you to fill the empty container with what didn’t belong to me, since emptiness is what defined people on this continent. For you, the people of Quebec had nothing to offer, and you separated me from the rest only because I had a vaguely European background. You forgot that my father had immigrated here too, and the way you rejected the place that had opened its arms to him was repulsive, he had no part of your admiration for the French who were the ones, according to you, we had to rely on to build our culture, and for that reason their arrival like a wave in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood was a blessing.
You explained that Slavs knew how to live because they ate, fucked, and slept with death. You forgot that your origins were in part inventions and that your memory wrapped them in nostalgia that had nothing to do with reality, the sites of childhood always end up playing the role of paradise lost. You forgot that as the years passed and your travels added up, you had become a hodgepodge of identities, that was the destiny you were facing and the trouble with America, it mirrored the image of your identity, your body as a land of immigration.
You dreamed of purity and sometimes, without the slightest hint of irony, you came up with statements that were racist, snobbish, reactionary, and misogynist, and no one could tell if you believed what you were saying or even understood what you meant, or whether you were just trying to provoke. At those times you embodied everything I can’t stand, but I went on loving you anyway, the way we love teenagers and forgive them their outrageous assertions because they don’t really believe a word of what they’re saying, and it’s just a matter of time, they’ll grow up and leave this awkward stage, this rite of passage. I awaited the sign of the armistice, when you would emerge from the sinister exile you inhabited like a stateless orphan. You became Raskolnikov asking Sonia, “Well, you are crying and embracing me again. Why do you do it? Because I couldn’t bear my burden and have come to throw it on another: you suffer too, and I shall feel better! And you can love such a mean wretch?”
Except I wasn’t Sonia, that passive and infinitely patient woman you dreamed of, I couldn’t wait a lifetime for you to finally speak the words that would free you, the final confession that would recognize the pain at the centre of your world, and the desire to be cured of it and leave behind the inner territory you defended tooth and nail, risking your own life.
I ended up cohabiting with Stalin.
The Rosenbergs were electrocuted in Sing Sing, in 1953. The event was the high point of the Cold War, the touchstone of that period that was a wall, a mushroom cloud, nuclear winter. Julius died after three surges of current. Ethel’s heart went on beating as if crying out against the injustice. The executioners kept at it until smoke rose above her head, according to witnesses. The Rosenbergs were accused of being spies, traitors to the nation, evil incarnate. They were accused of passing information about the atom bomb to the Russians. They were Jews, and they were going to die at the start of the Sabbath, they would die together, one after the other, like Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet. Was there an inspiring love story behind the Rosenbergs? Were they inseparable, the Bonnie and Clyde of high treason? I wonder about the meaning
of their marriage, and what they had actually espoused, the East or the West.
A few months before the death of the Rosenbergs, Stalin was found, fully dressed, lying in a room of his dacha, behind an armoured door. He had suffered a stroke, but was still breathing. Stalin was the Vozhd, the Dear Father, the Man of Steel. He took Russia from plows to atomic batteries. He cleaned out the country, orchestrated darkness, signed three hundred and eighty-three death sentences, and scribbled insults on the love letters that people he had deported sent him in their naivety, convinced he wasn’t aware of what was happening in his country.
When, at Stalin’s request, Prokofiev tried his hand at Romeo and Juliet, he decided to rewrite the tragedy. In the last act, the lovers pirouetted together in a delightful happy ending. But Soselo, that incorrigible romantic, banned the new version and demanded that the composer stick with broken hearts and the despair of love.
They say that Slavs suffer most when they’re not suffering at all.
We met, love fell upon us, and we answered the call. We were made for each other, we had been waiting forever for this love that would unite us, we would live, create, and die together, nothing would keep us apart.
Two years later, bullets replaced Cupid’s arrows, the sweat of our bodies had turned to tears, our love torn to shreds like the clothing Sébastien rips up when Claire leaves him in the Jacques Rivette film, she loves me, she loves me not.
Brecht said the last war carries the seeds of the next one. Is the last love affair a promise of the next?
You said that love was like a sauna, a cleansing of the past, and that we had to keep going back for more treatment. You would say that when I was desperate and you suddenly feared I would cut the cord and stop loving for both of us, when you couldn’t keep counting on the fact that because you had a Slavic soul, all would be forgiven, when you couldn’t bet on that tactic to keep me. Other times, you changed tactics and started threatening me, we had to separate, it was intolerable, you were suffocating. Then I would become the encouraging one, we had to keep going, it was like living in wartime, a shotgun wedding and then off to the front. When the war is over and conjugal life begins, two strangers find themselves sharing the same bed, two fearful creatures.
You and I came into this world with the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Martin Luther King, Apollo 7, the first heart transplant, the attempted murder of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas, Hair, and the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. We were born at the same time as Céline Dion and Andrei Ivanovitch, Lisa Marie Presley and Timothy McVeigh. We were born with Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow and her pixie cut in the role of the feminist Madonna impregnated by the devil. Sharon Tate was first cast for the role, then replaced. A year later, thirty-eight weeks pregnant, she was stabbed sixteen times by the Manson family. Polanski was supposed to have been at her side a few days later for the birth of their new baby. They had been married a year, the filmmaker cheated on her and everyone knew. Sharon Tate said, “Roman lies to me and I pretend to believe him.”
How many love stories do I carry in my mind? How intently have I clung to romantic dreams? How many young men on their knees, trembling before the woman they hope to marry? How many glittering diamonds? How many close-ups on a perfect kiss with bodies frozen in an image of endless love? Those stories turned me into a hopeless romantic, like Kundera’s Teresa. And you became the Prince Charming of our love story in the glass case of these images.
I had forgotten that Tybalt was hiding in Romeo’s skin, and that the dragon lived not below the castle but within it, and that Jennifer Cavilleri’s leukemia could have been the trace of Oliver Barrett IV in her blood.
One morning, you looked me in the eye, you were livid with rage and you screamed, “You are such a typical Quebec woman!”
I didn’t quite know how to take that, or what hurt me most about the insult, whether it was that superior way you said “woman,” or your arrogance when you said “Quebec,” or the combination of the two in your syntax stitched together with anger.
You were at the head of an army marching on Montreal the way the Russians entered Berlin, and the way they occupied Prague. You were the machine invented by Kafka in the penal colony. You were Hitler on the outskirts of Moscow: “This place will be razed and covered over with an artificial lake!”
For our first Christmas, I bought you a red phone I found at an antique dealer on the Main. On the case was a piece of tape with a date: 1968. The year of the Prague Spring.
It was a dial phone like the ones we had when I was a child, it went tick-tick-tick when you dialed a number, like the teeth on the drum of a music box. The dealer promised me the machine would work, and it did. I made sure when I got home. The sound of the bell was hard, almost harsh, an alarm that had nothing to do with the gentle tones of today’s telephones. On December 24, I put it under the tree.
The unwrapped gift sat on the counter, unused, as if we didn’t trust it or were afraid of it, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have a red phone in the house—what had Santa Claus been thinking? After you left, I kept the phone, figuring that one day, just maybe, it would ring and announce momentous news, like a truce between us because at long last you were ready to push down on the detonator inside you and let your resistance be blown to smithereens, and that among the pieces my love could finally find a home.
I figured that, or dreamed it, but in any case it wasn’t true. Time passed, the dream faded, and the red phone has been stowed ever since, at the back of the closet, and the Iron Curtain has descended for good.
Children who grew up on this side of the globe, in the camp of those you considered uncultured unbelievers who moved dully through life without asking themselves if they deserved the gift or imagining that one day they might lose it, these children grew up with the boogeyman of the end of the world, and I was one of them, we lived in the vague fear that it could happen at any moment due to an act of will or an accident, or an angry lashing out, or a finger unfortunately pushing a button, a single phone call and the arsenal would be used, life wiped out in a giant mushroom, decomposed into tiny particles in a reverse big bang. We waited in the silence of infinite winter that was a thick layer of fractals, the shroud of a wedding dress, the white curtain of névé stretching above the ocean between two countries we knew nothing about, so had to invent. The Eastern and Western Bloc were a scattering of colours on the map of the world. We crossed our fingers and hoped the missiles wouldn’t hit the wrong spot.
The Cold War was the war I would never understand because it was talked about like something obvious, everyone silently agreed with it, since fear and hatred had to be stoked. Our childish heads were full of fallout shelters and stocks of canned goods, horrible burns and annihilation. We saw that little Vietnamese girl running along the road, naked because she had torn off her burning clothes, terrified by the napalm attack. We rehearsed the duck-and-cover routine, the strategy for surviving the effects of a nuclear attack, on the floor, knees up and head down, curl up in the fetal position and hope for the best. We engaged in passionate debate during recess, we gathered at the end of the playground in mock military formation, our stories warded off the nuclear threat and UFOs at the same time, little green men from Mars and Communists, those fat, loud, drunken men who devoured whole quarters of beef and, why not, children too. They wore bushy moustaches, their arms were massive, their bellies were swollen, and their teeth were like rocks. They didn’t speak, they grunted. All bad guys were Soviets, along with movers, deliverymen, Russians, Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians, and Czechs, faces from the East that rolled their words every which way, maybe they had a sack of marbles in their mouth, and when they felt like it, they grabbed women with a lusty hand, tall blonds with eyes like cats, like Fay Wray in the hands of the great ape at the top of the Empire State Building. The only way to negotiate with them was with a bottle of vodka and your fist on the table.
Com
munists were bandits with knives between their teeth, ready to give their lives to defend the soul of their country. They were Mafiosi whose underground economy ran beneath the streets of the city, in tunnels. Communists were comrades, spies, gymnasts, physicians, madmen, visionaries, criminals fuelled by rage, artists, and men subject to deep depression. They were superstitious, and refused to kiss as they came through the door for fear that the devil would slip into the house, and they believed that on Easter Sunday, holy water ran from the faucets. Communists were a danger to the public, like the bears that were free to wander through the streets of Moscow, they were xenophobic mashers racists aristocrats rotten with melancholy.
Olga, Eva, or Tatiana, the women described how they found their future husband dead drunk in a ditch, how they grabbed them by the suspenders and pulled them out and took them home. Maybe I had done the same. I met you at the Villa d’Ostia. Beneath your cynicism and arrogance, your passion for film shone through. Out of love for you, I did everything possible so you could express it. Later, I would tell you that you were wasting your gifts, you were letting what was most alive in you die, you preferred to feed your superstitions and absurd beliefs, you wanted to defend a culture that was only half yours rather than believe in your talent.
You had been wandering for years to escape the contradictions that paralyzed you, your travels were synonymous with suffering. Your heart hesitated between the executioner and the victim, between Russian and Czech, and since you couldn’t decide, you fled. Nearly all of Europe had trampled on it, and now, against your will, you chose America. You said that in order to stop running, you needed a place to settle down, and that place was me, where you could finally come to rest. That was the promise you held out, and I slowly understood it would never happen, between your father and your mother, the latter would always pull you back, her and her suitcase full of resentment and terror.
The Last Bullet Is for You Page 6