“Zeroes, if they want to mean something, can only go to the right.”
The newspaper folded up its pages, and now my inquiring gaze was met by two giganticized eyes exploding out of their sockets. I jerked away, but an overlong arm came after me: the outsize thumb and index finger, dwarfing the other three, made the hand look like a lobster claw. Catching me at the very end of the bench, the claw gripped my fingers.
“How do you do. My name is Visual Aid. And yours? It seems to me that you too”—his bulging nostrils quivered—“smell of printer’s ink.”
“Visual indeed,” I replied, avoiding the question. “You certainly are a sight.”
“Such a sight”—he grinned, exposing his mixed-caliber teeth—“that no woman will ever call me a sight for sore eyes.”
“Who knows,” I said, attempting a compliment, “in this world there is not much beauty, but a lot of bad taste.”
“Yes, and the worse, the better. They used to call it the preestablished harmony, harmonia predestinate.* But if you want me to be your aid, ask me anything: all numbers from zero to infinity at your service.”
I produced my notebook.
“How many suicides were there during the civil war?”
“Zero.”
“How is that?”
“Here’s how: before you got around to it yourself, others had . . . for you.”
9
Meanwhile the October winds had torn the last leaves from the boulevard trees, the days like the mercury in thermometers had grown shorter, roofs and ground were covered with snow. I usually warmed myself with brisk walks. One day, as I was striding past a dilatory caravan of trams clanking along frozen rails, I noticed that at the front of every one, next to the driver, sat an old man stooped with age, snowy wisps of gray hair poking out from under his hat. I stopped and let pass the caravan of trams with their drivers and decrepit old men. Puzzled, I asked a passerby, “Who are they?”
“Braces,” he growled and passed on.
I set off at once for the library in the History Museum. A dozen aristocratically hooked noses and as many protruding lower lips filed by in my mind’s eye. I asked for the Velvet Book* and began leafing through the genealogies: there were Berses, there were Bruces, but no Braces.
What could this mean? Pondering the fate of the ancient line of Braces lost in books, I left the museum—and soon learned the answer: walking down one of the seven hills over which Moscow is sprawled, I saw yet another tram which, steel grinding against steel, was struggling in vain to conquer the ascent. Finally, at a sign from the driver, the ancient brace got down and hobbled on ahead of the car: no longer worth his salt, he sprinkled it left and right, and the tram, also groaning old-mannishly, toiled up the salt-coated rails.
Given such a system, Moscow trams are convenient only for functionaries who, with their help, arrive late for work. I entrusted myself only once to one of those steel tortoises, and I must confess it very nearly took me . . . too far. I had confused the stops, you see, and so I bought, instead of an eleven-kopeck ticket, an eight-kopeck one. The inspector caught me. My misdeed was reported and an investigation conducted, after which the case and I were sent to trial. The case of the unpaid three kopecks was heard by the Supreme Court: they escorted me between two sabers to the dock. An enormous crowd of curiosity seekers had filled the courtroom. The words “capital crime” and “death penalty” went from mouth to mouth.
In my defense I argued as follows: Inasmuch as my deed, deemed a misdeed, had been the result of conditional reflexes, my punishment should also be conditional. After due deliberation, the court pronounced me guilty and sentenced me to be shot . . . by popguns.
The morning of my execution they stood me against a wall facing a dozen muzzles—before I could blink a volley crackled and they shot me. Taking off my hat, I apologized for the disturbance and passed out into the street. I was now in the position of a conditional corpse.*
As executions usually take place at dawn, the streets were still empty, like the paths in a graveyard; moreover, it was a Sunday, when life wakes a bit later. I walked along in a state of some excitement: I could still feel the muzzles’ stare. The city was beginning to stir. Taverns and beerhouses were opening their doors. My throat was parched. Turning in under a green and yellow sign, I was greeted by a beery smell and vehement voices. I sat down and glanced around at the mugs and faces. Much struck me as strange: none of the customers sitting and staring into their mugs were conversing with the others, yet they were all talking a blue streak. I listened more closely and began to make out the words. There were fewer words than speakers as these last were all repeating, with only slight variations, the same string of Russian obscenities. As the beer in their mugs grew less, their red faces and bloodshot eyes grew more and more furious, so that the air’s every pore seemed to burst with their vile abuse. Faces and eyes all looked past one another, no one was angry at anyone else; only the leaves of an artificial palm trembled nervously beneath the hail of invective. Unable to make head or tail of what was going on, I beckoned to a waiter and asked him to explain. He gave me a lazy smile and said, “Vendors.”
“What of it?”
“Here’s what: for six days you put up with everything from buyers—not a moment’s peace for you or your ware. They grab it, grab it again, ask, ask again, not that, no this, you take it out, put it away, measure it, measure it again, and hold your tongue. You suffer in silence for six days, but on the seventh. . . .”
Brushing a peapod off a table with his dishcloth, the waiter went back to the counter.
I smiled: so then these people were giving back to the air—on their one day of rest—everything they had taken in through their eyes and ears during the long workweek.
Yes, I smiled, not at the crude curses sounding all around me, but at the dim memory they evoked: I recalled the postilion’s horn—I dare say you have not forgotten it—that amazing horn in which, like a snail in its shell, the tunes had frozen up so as to come out of their own accord when the warmth and spring returned.* But curses have better luck than tunes: in the poet’s calendar, alas, there are no Sundays, and even if he manages not to freeze on the road, his heart is still frostbitten. Thus I, a conditional corpse in a beerhouse, sat musing on conditional reflexes.
10
From the back of the hall, from last row to first, diving down and darting up from behind shoulders, came a scrap of paper folded in four; on reaching the lectern, it put a momentary stop to the speech.
“I have received a note!” Munchausen beamed, brandishing the missive.
•
A female hand asks about the woman’s position in Soviet society, about her rights in love and marriage. I had not intended to broach this matter, but as you insist, here it is in a nutshell: the attitude toward women in the former Russia has radically improved: those disharmonious creatures, “long of hair, but short of brain,” have at last won the right to have their hair short too.
As for any practical study of love and marriage, my two hundred years absolve me somewhat of the duty to report on this point. However, wishing to be entirely conscientious and remembering that curiosity may pass for passion, I did attempt a mild flirtation with a pair of charming eyes. Walking down the street one day, I saw ahead of me a sylphlike girl leading a little boy by the hand. “His nurse, no doubt,” thought I. Catching her up, I glanced under the brim of her hat. She turned away, embarrassed, but just then the child’s red balloon on a string slipped out of her fingers, floating up past windows toward the rooftops. In a twinkling, I had shinnied up a drainpipe in pursuit. There I was, running over the rattling sheets of tin, when a gust of wind swept the errant balloon to a neighboring roof. I bent my knees and jumped from this house to that: the string was in hand. Pushing off from the roof ledge, I floated gently down with my red balloon to the feet of the astonished girl and open-mouthed little boy. After that, everything took its natural course: her eyes invited me to call on them. Inwardly I was already
crowing, but then a silly mix-up spoiled everything. Wishing to hasten success, I stopped at a shop on the way. In Moscow, under one and the same signboard, they sell: fresh-cut flowers and horseflesh, bloodsucking leeches and tinned meat, and so on and so forth. The black letters on the blue rectangle above this particular shop read: CONFECTIONARY and COFFINS. I asked for one of the larger boxes of chocolates, but must have pointed inexactly. They handed me a large oblong box wrapped in elegant paper and tied up with pink ribbon. With pounding heart I knocked at the door of my temptress. On seeing my present, her eyes lit up—all was going marvelously well. When I sensed I was halfway from gazes to kisses, I pulled off the ribbon, then she, with the smile of one who loves sweets, undid the paper—and we both reeled back against the sofa: out of the crackling wrappings came—dark blue with a white border—a baby’s coffin. The train to Happiness whistled—and raced past. Oh, how steep and narrow are those confounded Moscow stairwells!
Yes, I am not afraid to be frank, so I will tell you that men with imagination have nothing to do in love. A grandmaster, after all, can play a game of chess without looking at the board; and as for romance, better to love without looking at the woman. Just think! Who has success with the ladies? To this day I cannot forget the somewhat pimply visage of a certain archivist from Hanover,* who, having fiddled his whole life with the ribbons of archival folders, learned to undo them so quickly that, by transposing this light-fingeredness, he became, so he claimed, irresistible. Before they could say “yes” or “no,” this archivist liked to brag, their ribbons had all been undone. I tend to think that not all his words were mere boasting.
At any rate, I abandoned the practice of love and thereafter confined myself to a theoretical acquaintance with this problem. Piles of Soviet belles lettres led me to extremely pleasing conclusions and prognoses: while Soviet newspapers harp on the implacable hatred of one class for another, their novels extol only the love of the Chekist for the beautiful White Guard girl, of the Red female partisan for the White officer, the laborer for the lady aristocrat, the detitled prince or count for the simple black-earth peasant girl. That is why we, trusting in the old realistic traditions of Russian literature, may confidently expect all that has been driven in with a hammer to be cut down by a sickle . . . moon: sooner or later the nightingale will outwarble the factory whistle. So it always was, so it will always be: antitheses will always trail after theses, but let them marry—and their old friend synthesis will be there like a shot.
Opinions on this score are still up in the air; they have not had time to settle down and take hold. Some people champion the slogan EVERYONE INTO THE STREETS for love,* while others will fight tooth and nail to keep the home fires burning.* Titian’s Amor Sacro and Amor Profano, shown sitting peaceably either side of a well,* have suddenly grabbed each other by the hair, the better to push each other down that well.
Without entering the realm of speculation, one must nevertheless note that a great start has been made in the business of reorganizing love. “A great start is worth more than money,”* as one girl, deflowered five minutes before, said when the agreed-upon sum was not paid her. I do not believe that laws invented by jurists can fight the laws of nature. The great methodologist Francis Bacon defined the experiment thus: “We merely increase or decrease the distance between bodies—nature does the rest.”* If one considers that living conditions in the country from which I have just returned will not permit of any further decrease in distances,* then. . . . But allow me to return to my paper.
11
Restoration of the Soviet economy has begun slowly, imperceptibly, exactly like their northern spring, which scarcely manages to push new leaf buds through the bare icy skin of branches. If I remember correctly, it all began with the beams that people began casting out of each other’s eyes. In the past they had been loath to notice even the motes,* but necessity makes us sharp-sighted: soon the supply of beams hauled out of people’s pupils was such that one could set about building. On the city outskirts, now here, now there, log huts began to appear, residential cooperatives sprang up, and overall things began to improve.
Saplings were planted along the boulevards (of the old trees there remained only stumps) and made to grow quickly by a simple, but ingenious means: to each little tree they attached one end of a rope; the other end was attached to a pulley, and the tree was pulled up until it reached the prewar height. Within a few weeks, the bare boulevards were thick with shade trees and arrayed as of yore.
Quantities of posters placarded on all the walls and fences edified passersby with bits of practical advice, such as SINCE A FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD DOWN, EAT IT FROM THE TAIL UP* or SAVE YOUR SOLES, WALK ON YOUR HANDS.* I cannot remember them all. Competing with the posters were playbills announcing extravagant productions and popular entertainments. Swept up in this wave, I could not remain a passive spectator and proposed various projects of my own design. Thus it was that I, while consultant to a Moscow theater director, advised him to stage Gogol’s Inspector General* on my grand scale, so to speak, in a Munchausenian manner that would turn everything upside down,* beginning with the title.
The play, as we envisaged it, would be called Thirty Thousand Messengers: the main plot would shift from the individual to the masses;* the main characters would be the poor souls who slaved as messengers for that cruel exploiter, the Petersburg minister Khlestakov. He drives them hard, causing packages to rain down on their heads until one day they organize, decide to strike, and stop delivering. Meanwhile, Khlestakov is making love to the beautiful wife of either a cabinet governor or kitchen gardener, I forget which. He sends her a letter by the first messenger fixing a rendezvous for that evening in the kitchen garden (as is the custom in Russia); but the striking messenger does not deliver the letter. Khlestakov waits all night in the garden, then returns, rather nettled, to his ministry and sends a second letter to the same effect to the same address by the second messenger. With the same result. The second, the third, the thousandth, the thousand and first all fail him. Khlestakov waits every night in the kitchen garden for three long years without result, but also without abandoning hope of winning the heart of his stand-offish lady love. He grows old and thin, but goes doggedly on sending her letters by messenger: the 1,450th, the 1,451st, the 2,000th. In scene after scene. A seasoned skirt-chaser abhors foot-dragging in love. He puts all work aside and every day he writes not one, but ten, twenty, a hundred letters, unaware that they are all being taken to the strike committee. Meanwhile, the gardener’s wife, who is not at all standoffish, has waited these many years for even a line from her heart’s desire; her kitchen garden is choked with weeds and overgrown with thistles. But now, from among the strikers, there emerges a lone strikebreaker: this is the last messenger, the thirty thousandth, who, unable to bear the strain of the strike any longer, delivers Khlestakov’s letter to the addressee.
Following this event, Khlestakov runs as fast as his feet will carry him to meet the gardener’s wife: at long last! But the strikers, too, are not napping: they track down the strikebreaker only to discover that letter No. 30,000 has slipped through their fingers. Now they tear open the twenty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine undelivered letters. Imagine the effect of this scene! Envelopes flying everywhere, thirty thousand white squares falling on spectators’ heads! A chorus of furious voices—a collective recitation—reads thirty thousand nearly identical texts aloud, roaring so the walls and ceiling shake: “Come to the kitchen garden!” Then all thirty thousand descend in orderly ranks on the kitchen garden so as to do away with the minister-seducer. The couple is discovered whispering by the wattle fence. The two try to flee, but from all sides stride messengers—messengers—messengers. The night is now white as day with the thirty thousand envelopes being waved in Khlestakov’s face. His life is hanging by a thread. The selfless gardener’s wife cries that she is ready to give herself to all thirty thousand, if only to save her one and only. This embarrasses the messengers, who want to hide insi
de their envelopes. Then a repentant Khlestakov publicly confesses that he is not the minister they take him for, but a common titular counselor, working class like all the rest. Reconciliation. Every one of the thirty thousand holds a spade in his hand; to strains of the folk song “Don’t Lead Me Up the Garden Path,” their spades strike the earth, disenthistling the thistle-choked garden. Crimson streaks of sunrise. Wiping the sweat from his laborious brow, Khlestakov reaches toward the new day: “The scales have fallen from my eyes.” After the scales, the curtain too falls. How about that? Eh?
Rehearsals had already begun when we ran up against an unexpected obstacle: to play the thirty thousand messengers we had engaged two military divisions from districts near Moscow.* But the authorities, fearing a coup no doubt, balked at bringing so many troops into the capital. I left soon after, having asked the director, should my staging ever come to fruition, not to reveal my real name on the playbill. I think he will not break his promise.
The Return of Munchausen Page 8