“He settled her in a train, told her that his brother would meet her at Osaka and that he himself was ‘a little busy’ just now. He was hidden by the dusk, and the train left for the dark hills; she was abandoned in the cruelest solitude, which emphasized all the more that he, Tagaki, was the only one in the whole world, well-loved, loyal, to whom she was beholden for everything, without understanding anything. It was brightly lighted in the carriage, but everything outside was swallowed in gloom. Everything surrounding her was frightening and incomprehensible, as when the Japanese traveling with her, both the men and the women, began to get undressed before going to sleep, quite unashamed to go naked, or when they started selling hot tea in little bottles and supper in pinewood boxes, with rice, fish, radish, with a paper serviette, a toothpick, and two chopsticks. Then the light in the carriage went out and the people fell asleep. She did not sleep all night, feeling lonely, bewildered, and scared. She could not understand anything.”
Twenty years after Pilnyak’s story came to be written, my twenty-year-old mother set off on the journey of her lifetime, quite literally. Her train ticket gave entry to the unknown. Choosing this journey, and not some other, the skein of her fate began to unwind, which, it seems, together with the travel signs and railway stations, could already be traced in the lines on her palm. In Varna, on the Black Sea, where she lived, attended high school, and adored films and books, she met a sailor near the end of the war, a Croat, with whom she fell in love and became engaged. At war’s end, she set off for Yugoslavia, to her now fiancé. Her parents settled her on the train, placed her gently in her compartment, as if in a dinghy that would carry their child to safe harbor. They knew something of such journeys: my mother’s father, my grandfather, was a railway man. My mother traveled from Varna to Sofia, from Sofia to Belgrade, and from Belgrade to Zagreb. The train made its way through a ruinscape, and it is this journey, through swathes of scorched earth, that would irretrievably scar her. Following the sailor’s instructions, she would get off some fifty miles before Zagreb, and find herself in the darkness of an empty and abandoned provincial railway station. There was no one waiting for her. This black and desolate railway station burned itself into my mother’s heart like a branding iron, the first overwhelming and aching betrayal.
“A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written” adheres to the form of fairytale; the one about a mysterious creature from another world, an “unknown force” (the Beast, Raven Son of Raven, the Dragon, the Sunman, the Moonman, Koschei the Immortal, Bluebeard, etc.) that carries the princess away over seven mountains and seven seas to a distant kingdom (alternately known as the “bronze,” “silver,” “gold,” or “honey” kingdom). Jasper is Pilnyak’s synonym for Japan and for Sophia’s days of happiness (“her days resembled a rosary made of jasper beads”). The secretive Tagaki takes his Russian bride to his “jasper” kingdom. Tagaki has little in common with the ensign Ivantsov, who Sophia ceased greeting because he had “gossiped about their rendezvous.” The mysterious Tagaki, as opposed to the ruffian Ivantsov, kisses women’s hands and offers gifts of chocorate. At first, this “racially strange Japanese man” holds no appeal, is in fact “physically terrifying” to her, but—as if in a fairy tale in which the “beast” morphs into seductive lover—he promptly vanquishes her soul.
And herein lies the paradox: if Pilnyak’s story didn’t bear the blueprint of a fairy tale, there is little doubt that it would be so believable. The moment she consents to chase after the golden skein of her womanly fate, Sophia, who in no way differs from thousands of others, becomes a convincing heroine. But what is meant by womanly fate? The history of world literature offers a strong hint. The classics (both the minority written by women and the majority written by men) pass an almost inviolable template (a kind of memory card) down from generation to generation like a hereditary illness. The heroine must act in accordance with this template in order that we recognize her as such. In effect, she must endure a trial of some humiliation or another in order that she might win the right to eternal life. In Pilnyak’s story, the heroine is doubly betrayed, laid bare, and “robbed”: the first time by Tagaki, the second by Pilnyak. Pilnyak calls this “a journey through death” (!). In this way, Sophia, the young heroine of the story, joins the thousands of other literary heroines who bear this imprint to this very day, not least in novels that sell in the millions, wherein She shudders, entralled by the mysterious Him. He will put a spell on her, subjugate her, humiliate her, and betray her, and in the end She will arise as a heroine worthy of respect and self-respect.
Going back to my mother, her young and buoyant heart will quickly heal. As luck would have it, Fate, that clumsiest of writers, forgot that my mother was supposed to be met by her sailor. Sailors don’t wait for their sweethearts on railway platforms, their place is in the harbor, and perhaps that’s why Fate forgot about the sailor. And then, like a belated happy end, in the light at the end of a metaphorical tunnel, He appeared, the real hero of my mother’s story, my future father. This, however, is not a story about my mother and father, but a story that wishes to say something about how stories come to be written.
5.
I visited Moscow for the first time in 1975. I traveled from (today non-existent) Yugoslavia to the (today non-existent) Soviet Union to take up a two-semester scholarship. A particular incident marks the memory of my first trip to the center of Moscow. I needed a restroom, yet it wasn’t easy to get into a restaurant or café because of the queues that stretched out front; public restrooms were almost non-existent. Yet by some miracle I ended up finding one. Upon exiting the cubicle, I was surrounded by a group of Gypsies, five or six of them. I hadn’t a clue what they wanted from me. With little gobs of spit shining from every reflective surface, they gently patted me down, taking my hands and opening my palms, mumbling this or that, all at the same time. And then they withdrew as quickly as they had appeared. Dazed, I walked out into the street and noticed that I was clenching a ball of paper. I opened my palm. A bunch of tattered lottery tickets fell out. I checked my handbag. About two hundred rubles had disappeared, which at the time was around two average Soviet monthly salaries. The loss of the money didn’t bother me in the least; to the contrary, it seemed that on landing in Moscow, I’d flown into the everyday of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. Just as Pilnyak’s heroine Sophia saw the world through a romantic, Turgenevian prism, I (at least at the time) saw it through a Bulgakovian one.
I was placed in the student dormitory of Moscow State University. I lived in room 513, in Zone B, sharing a bathroom and vestibule with a countrywoman, a student of mathematics. It took me forever to work out the building’s entrances and exits, how to locate anything in the colossal labyrinth that was divided into zones. On my floor, in zone B, there were Yugoslavs, Finns, and Arabs. The latter’s presence was made known by the warm scent of unfamiliar spices wafting from the communal kitchen on our floor. One of the three Finns had won a scholarship to do doctoral research on Mikhail Sholokhov, who at the time was still alive. All three Finns, two guys and a girl, soon forgot why they’d come. Behind the closed doors of their rooms, they drank themselves to unconsciousness, unrelenting until it was time to return to their homeland. Various restrictions meant that for locals, vodka was hard to come by. Aided by their passports and hard currency, foreigners bought vodka in exclusive stores to which only they had access. The chain was called Beryozka. And vodka at Beryozka was a lot cheaper than in Finland.
In contrast to the Finns, I had come with the intention of collecting material for my master’s thesis on Boris Pilnyak. Of the nine-month academic year, I spent the first two or three in the Leninka, the Lenin Library (today the Russian State Library). Just getting into the library was tortuous: first, you had to wait in an interminable line for the cloakroom; then in an interminable line to pass through a security checkpoint manned by the library police (I remember the daily emptying of my handbag) before entering the library itself; and then you waited for a boo
k delivery mechanism that resembled a model train and railway (I hope I didn’t dream this up, that it really existed!). Maybe this explains why so many slept at the library, quiet snoring an ineluctable part of the general ambience. Given you were only allowed to copy twenty pages a day, the two or three photocopiers always had long queues. Copies were printed on coarse, cardboard-like paper. Anyone who could finance it could hire a “surrogate” to wait in line and do his photocopying for him. Yet the smoking area in the library attic was most repulsive of all—a small, poorly ventilated room with a few chairs and a table, dishes overflowing with butts and ash. At the foot of this butt mountain sat the martyrs, the smokers. Even the cafeteria didn’t offer the expected modicum of humanity and warmth, because there too one had to wait in a long line just to get in the door, yet the wait wasn’t worth the effort: crap coffee, good tea, and, it goes without saying, the miserable hotdogs that jumped out at you from everywhere, staples of student cafeterias, street vendors’ pots, and cheap Moscow lunchbars.
Work in the library was painstaking and required patience, and I, evidently, didn’t have the charismatic qualities it demanded. Incomparably more interesting was Moscow’s parallel literary life. In this parallel life, people hustled their way through with the help of friends and connections: a friend of mine who worked at the library would photograph the books I needed. Afterwards we’d develop the films and arrange the photos like pages. I had several boxes of such books, all on photographic paper. This parallel life was inhabited by witnesses to the previous epoch, and meeting them was infinitely more powerful than studying in the library. As if in a kind of Hades, it was here that one could meet senescent representatives of the Russian avant-garde, those who had the blind luck to survive; it was here that books were secretly copied and distributed, foreigners, like me, frequently rendering assistance. We could buy rare Russian editions in Beryozka, smuggle works of Russian tamizdat into the country, and, like postmen, smuggle manuscripts out of it.
6.
In this Moscow—where philologists, both local and foreign, hunted witnesses to the previous epoch; where famous writers’ widows were worshipped (Nadezhda Mandelstam, for example); where anyone who had survived, outlived others, and was in any state to testify about it, was worshipped; where the world burst with memoirs, mementos, and diaries, with collectors and archivists, with artists real and phony, with those who had “sat” (“sidet”), i.e. been in a camp, and those ashamed that they hadn’t—I met Pilnyak’s son, Boris. I never thought of myself as a “hunter”; the pervasive zeal for biographism held no appeal, though I understood where it came from. In this milieu, the battle won by the Russian Formalists—the great battle for the text of a work of art—proved futile. Innumerable authors saw their texts vanish beneath a stampede of biographical details.
Boris Andronikashvili was Pilnyak’s son from the writer’s third marriage to famed Georgian screen actress and director, Kira Andronikashvili. Boris was tall, strong, and handsome, also a trained as a screen actor. He felt himself Georgian, was proud of his aristocratic surname, spoke Russian with a heavy Georgian accent (as all Georgians do), and in his house they drank chacha and ate khachapuri: his true home was not cold and scentless Moscow, but “the city of roses and mutton tallow,” as Isaac Babel wrote of Tbilisi. By the time we met he had abandoned film and now occupied himself with the administration of his father’s estate. With no experience in such matters, he did so in an amateur fashion. He himself had written several works of prose. He was in his second marriage, from which he had two children, five-year-old Kira, and two-year-old Sandro.
I never wrote my master’s thesis on Boris Pilnyak; I gave up halfway. Later, I translated The Naked Year, “Snowstorm,” and “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” into Croatian, and I did write a master’s thesis, but on something entirely different. I saw Boris twice more, the last time on September 6, 1989, during a short stay in Moscow, when he gifted me his father’s volume, printed the same year, the foreword to which he had written himself. Were it not for his dated dedication in the inside cover, I wouldn’t remember the details. I almost didn’t recognize him, his expression one of indeterminate internal capitulation. We exchanged several letters, and then lost all contact. The Soviet Union fell apart, then Yugoslavia fell apart, and I left the country. I have closed many files, among them, the year in Moscow when I was supposed to delve deep into the work of Boris Pilnyak, but instead, in place of literature, I delved into life, even though at the time, the two appeared difficult to separate.
Boris Andronikashvili died in 1996, in his sixty-second year of life. I found that out on the internet. His collected works were published in 2007, in two volumes. His daughter Kira did her master’s and published a book on her grandfather, also editing two impressive volumes of Pilnyak’s letters. I’m not sure I’ll read those books. I travel a lot, crisscross borders, and try to carry as little luggage with me as possible. I’ve closed many files. And once closed, files gradually become unreadable.
7.
The biography of Sophia Vasilyevna Gnedikh-Tagaki attracted Boris Pilnyak like a magnet. Pilnyak stole Sophia’s soul (the fox as a mediator between two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead), yet in doing so, also erected a literary monument to her. In a given moment and constellation, her biography was significant to him; had it hooked him in another, the encounter with her story perhaps wouldn’t have given birth to a new story. Many stories in the life of a writer end as lithopedions, as calcified embryos.
In those years, Moscow was a city of philologists, both expert and autodidact, those who had taken on saving forgotten manuscripts and resurrecting neglected authors as their sacred mission. The gaping hole in which millions of human fates disappeared gave rise to a feverish hunger for restoration, which to us, “foreigners,” seemed akin to a real illness, albeit one with its own allure, like passage to the other side of the mirror. Many self-declared literary archivists truly burned for their voluntary rescue mission, saving books from oblivion. The “forest people” of Bradbury’s novel (and Truffaut’s film), Fahrenheit 451, came to mind. It was as if everyone knew a book by heart. Many dreamed of manuscripts lost to flame (manuscripts burn after all!), and the time for such dreaming was in abundance. People neither expected nor hoped for anything. In this frozen time one was left alone to his or her fever.
Writing this story, I opened a thin, yellowed folder at random to see whether its opening might light a spark . . . Inside were two notebooks, slender, with soft, light green spines, stamped with the word Tetrad. (Many years later I stumbled upon this kind of notebook again, in Berlin, I think, in a chic boutique selling nostalgia for the bygone era of communist design.) In scribbles in my own hand, a bibliography of articles on Pilnyak snaked along the checkered paper. Presumably, I had read or intended to read them in the library. It was the scent, a musky and unmistakable scent, not the content, of which there was little, that imbued the folder with meaning. Two xanthous pages of folded A4 paper slipped out, both bearing lists of words, one word under the other:
Album, games: cards, chess, spinning top, sherbet (Günter Grass); lethal objects: spike, revolver, pitch-fork; socks, ribbon, hairband, hair-piece, walking stick, fireplace; silk, cinnamon, pepper; tunic (Joseph and His Brothers); candles, matches, goblins, powder box, wig; shears, Krleža; Zola, nail (“Nana”); Hamsun, pencils, Pan; paddle, Dreiser; bed pan, skullcap, shirt, pipe, candied fruits; objects that migrate, Francis Ponge, Bachelard, Rilke; dagger, underwear, sheets, family photographs; Desdemona, handkerchief; key, barrel rum, mirror, medallions; Kafka, odradek, “The Cares of a Family Man”; music box, coffer, piano, window, tortoise-shell comb, amber; 12 chairs, The Glass Bead Game; sun umbrella, poison ring, signetring, garter, corset, curtain, prayer-book, flintlock, watch, monocle, lorgnon; Gogol, cake; Cortázar, sweets; cigarette-case, pawnshop.
The fragment seems incomphrehensible—a gulf of almost forty years lies between my former and present self. The words ar
e definitely written in my hand, in ugly, gray, and cold Moscow, where, seized by the atmosphere of underground life and a world view rent from Bulgakov, I spent an academic year. I’m only guessing now, but the things or objects on this haphazardly compiled list were supposed to be “triggers,” the kind that propel a story, play a crucial role in a fable, or otherwise function as a central compositional element in a story. Objects with magical properties play a crucial role not only in fairy tales, but often too in what we call belles lettres. I’m guessing that a literary exemplar lurks somewhere behind each entry, or at least a vague idea of such. But if this were the case, how did I overlook so many obvious triggers? I mean, what happened to Gogol and his overcoat? How is it that of all the possibilities, it was these very things, and not others, that raced around my young and bursting head? As it turns out, in my biography Moscow is a story barely begun, a lithopedion, a calcified embryo. It remains there, static, I forget its presence, if coexistence of this kind can at all be called presence.
8.
I met him in the bar of Moscow’s Hotel Belgrade, a well-known meeting place for the city’s Yugoslav population, students, embassy workers, representatives of Yugoslav firms, not to mention the Yugoslav tourists who, for this reason or that, stopped by in search of their countrymen. He was exceptionally good-looking, and with his vulpine, copper red hair and trimmed beard, light-green eyes and chiseled frame, it was hard not to notice him. He was my countryman and he was a liar, the kind who lies even when he doesn’t have to. A man strolling about in a red English sweater, a light blue shirt with fine white pinstripes, a cashmere coat, white cashmere scarf around his neck, claiming he’s studying painting in Moscow couldn’t be anything else. He was, however, a tight-lipped liar, which righted the picture to some extent. He put a spell on me; against Moscow’s gray and depressing backdrop, green-eyed and fair, he looked like something from another world. He had a carpenter’s hands, the biggest, broadest, warmest hands I had ever touched. He made love with conviction, one moment hot, the next cold, as if melting ice cubes in a well-heated pot. We were wild together and I fell in love with him, a love with the scent of a promise, a lovesickness that overcame me and made me ready to die for him. When he left, I cleansed Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport with my tears. Evidently unused to overtly emotional scenes, the airport police asked me for ID, asked me why I was crying, and I couldn’t answer, because I was dying: my copper-haired lover was swimming away in a sea of my tears and, reaching the shores of passport control, forever disappeared from my horizon. In my hand I crumpled imaginary winnings, worthless lottery tickets, ripped in two. My heart slipped from my chest and vanished . . . He didn’t leave me his address, and as I pressed mine upon him he told me that letters were silly, and that he was sure we’d meet again someday. And here’s the thing that I’ve never been able to explain: although prepared to venture to the end of the earth with him, I never forgot anyone in my life with greater ease or speed!
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