Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  He knocked on my door a year or so later, by which time I was already back home. The meeting left me stunningly indifferent, and moreover, his surprise, unannounced appearance irked me somewhat. He seemed to avoid my gaze, yet my gaze was not focused on anything in particular. I got out of him everything that needed be known: that he was married, that he had a son, and that he was in Zagreb not to see me, but to see one of my countrywomen, who (oops!), was the mother of his unwanted child. Although a story excruciatingly banal, a moth of compassion escaped my unventilated heart.

  He appeared one final time a few years later, again unannounced, but this time a new, powerful, and unanticipated spark was lit, and we eloped to the Adriatic coast for a brief and torrid affair. Again he didn’t say much about himself (oh, the sly fox!), but with an almost inappropriate tenderness recalled our distant trip to Leningrad.

  “But we never went to Leningrad together!” I replied in shock.

  He tried to convince me we had, and offered details, the name of the hotel, the number of the hotel room, happenings from a visit to the Tsar’s Village, the names of restaurants where we had dined, the ballets we’d seen, scenes from our lovemaking, remembrances of our return on the night train to Moscow, of people we’d met along the way . . .

  “I was crazy about you, girl . . . I’d never been like that with anyone . . .”

  “Why are you mocking me?”

  He was lying, of course, but his little “Leningrad fabrication” worried me. The lie had no function, nor had he a motive of any kind. We started to fight, packed up our things, and returned to Zagreb. I cowered in silence the whole way home, dying of fear as he drove like a man possessed. He let me out in front of my building, we never said goodbye. In the darkness, shadowed by sandy eyelashes, his green eyes flashed with a coldness I’d never known.

  A month or two after his departure a book slipped from one of my library shelves and from the book a bundle of papers I’d absentmindedly saved. Among the papers were theater tickets for a ballet in Leningrad, reservations for a hotel in Leningrad, my name and his and the date of our stay all there, even tickets proving a visit to the Tsar’s Village. For whatever reason, this little “ikebana” also contained a pressed and dried four-leaf clover . . .

  This, however, is not a story about me and my time in Moscow, but a story that is trying to tell a story, and that story is trying to tell a story about how stories come to be written.

  9.

  So really, how do stories come to be written? Pilnyak lived in a time when the literary word was powerful and central, the cinematic image exciting and young. I live in a time when words have been shunted into a corner. How can one expect users of new technologies, those who have undergone physical and mental metamorphosis, whose language consists of pictures and symbols, to be willing and able to read something that until recently was called a literary text, and today appears under the widely adopted term book?

  I am haunted by the feeling that I live in a time in which enchantment has been forever banished, although I can’t explain what that magic is, nor the purpose it serves, nor why the past was better than the present. Anyone daring to compare different time periods is not only afforded the possibility of being wrong, but more often than not, is wrong. Many moments in the past seem magical to us, simply because we were not direct witnesses to them, or if we were, those moments are now irrevocably gone.

  Why does Pilnyak’s heroine Sophia remain as alluring as she ever was, irrespective of Pilnyak’s attempts to strip her bare, and why do I return to Pilnyak’s story again and again, equally enchanted by his talent in its telling? It is entirely possible that magic is a poorly chosen word.

  What, for example, are we to do with the central symbol of Pilnyak’s story, with the fox? Judging by the innumerable amateur video-postcards to be found online, the Fushimi Inari shrines are a kind of Japanese Disneyland. In today’s social codes, Pilnyak’s fairy tale about the ethics of the writerly trade, about the fox as totem of treachery, would be read in reverse. The motto of the present would go something like: the fox is the totem of cunning and treachery: if the spirit of the fox enters a person, then that person’s tribe is blessed! The fox is everyone’s totem, there are no privileged few!

  Today, Sophia would be scurrying to write her account of her erotic life with Tagaki, her novel lavishly buffeted by promotional video material. Putting one’s life and the lives of others on display is, at this moment, no longer a question of ethics and choice, but one of automatism: everyone does it, and everyone expects it of everyone else. Could Pilnyak have imagined, for example, that his granddaughter would leave her innocent fingerprint on a random website, explaining that she loves Turgenev’s prose and Bunin; that she likes running; that she doesn’t believe in political parties; that she’s convinced things would be better if everyone loved their work and performed it honestly; that she is temperamental and easily offended; that she doesn’t wish anyone harm. What separates the short biography of Pilnyak’s granddaughter from the thousands like it?

  “In the hills above Kobe . . . there is a temple, dedicated to the totem of the fox. On cliffs that fall to the sea, high above the ocean, nestled in ancient pines, an entire city has been raised. In the silence sounds a Buddhist bell. The deeper one enters the mountain, the more deserted and quiet it becomes. There stand small altars, on them industrially produced porcelain foxes, their quality worse than the puppet foxheads sold for small change at fairgrounds. One evening in Kobe, I bought ten such foxes at the market for a single Japanese yen,” Pilnyak writes in his book The Roots of the Japanese Sun.

  What would Pilnyak say were he able to cast an eye over the billion-dollar Japanese manga and anime industries? I cast such an eye, and learned that foxes (little blue foxes, in an anime film!), eyes enormous and round like billiard balls, are popular in Japanese comics and films; that these foxes are morphs (just like in the old Japanese legends), able to leap freely from a fox’s body into a teenager’s, the teenage body not in the least uncomfortable with the addition of vulpine ears and tail. When if Pilnyak today visited Japan and saw young people girded with artificial tails, which, operated by remote control, signal their owner’s emotional state to those around them (lowered tail–raised tail–wagging tail); what would Pilnyak have made of all of this? The journey from the silence and mystery of a temple on whose altar foxes lie in repose to vulpine cosplay and fake tails took barely a century.‡‡

  A volcanic dust of oblivion constantly falls upon us, slowly burying us, like insoluble snow. We are all footnotes, many of us will never have the chance to be read, all of us in an unrelenting and desperate struggle for our lives, for the life of a footnote, to remain on the surface before, in spite of our efforts, we are submerged. Everywhere we leave constant traces of our existence, of our struggle against vacuity. And the greater the vacuity, the more violent our struggle—mein kampf, min kamp, mia lotta, muj boj, mijn strijd, minun taistelu, mi lucha, my struggle, moja borba . . . Behind us we leave thousands of photographs and video recordings that we never find time to look at or watch; if, but a few years later, we chance upon a clip, we no longer even know where it was filmed, nor when, nor who the people are around us; we’re not even sure that’s us in the clip or not. Behind us we leave volcanic dust, new layers covering the old. With their little blue tails, eyes as round as billiard balls, little blue foxes from Japanese anime films cleanse, sweep away, and erase Pilnyak’s story, their own mythological history too, and in the end, put us to sleep with a blue smile of oblivion.

  This, however, is not a story about the past and the present, but a story about a story that tells of how stories come to be written.

  10.

  Boris Pilnyak was arrested on suspicion of being a Japanese spy at the very hour his son Boris was celebrating his third birthday. He was arrested at his dacha in Peredelkino, on October 28, 1937, and shot several months later, on April 21, 1938; a bullet to the nape of the neck, the customary way. He was forty-three yea
rs old. Some two thousand Soviet writers were arrested in the same period, an estimated fifteen hundred of whom lost their lives. In a purge unprecedented, both people and their manuscripts disappeared.

  The circumstances of Boris Pilnyak’s arrest are detailed in his son Boris Andronikashvili’s piece “About My Father,” the account based on the testimony of his mother, Kira Andronikashvili.

  “At ten o’clock in the evening a new guest appeared. He was dressed head to toe in white, although it was fall, and the hour late. Boris Andreyevich had met him in Japan, where ‘the man in white’ was an employee at the Soviet consulate. He was painfully courteous. ‘Nikolai Ivanovich requests that you come urgently. He needs to ask you something. You’ll be back within the hour,’ he said. Noticing the doubt and fear on the face of Kira Georgiyevna at the mention of Yezhov’s name, he added: ‘Take your car so you can drive yourself home.’§§ Then he repeated: ‘Nikolai Ivanovich just wants to verify something.’ Boris Andreyevich nodded: ‘Let’s go.’ Holding back tears, Kira Georgiyevna brought out a little package. ‘What for?!’ Boris Andreyevich refused. ‘Kira Georgiyevna, Boris Andreyevich will be back in an hour,’ said the man in white, scornfully now. Mother kept offering the package, souring the game the nice man had imposed, but Boris Andreyevich didn’t take it. ‘He wanted to leave the house as a free man, not a man under arrest,’ said mother.”

  Brutal fate assigned Boris Pilnyak an end akin to a fable: the fox came for the writer’s head in order to place it at the feet of Hedgehog the Terrible.***

  Could this be put a little better?

  Brutal fate assigned Boris Pilnyak an end akin to that of an unknown work from his unfinished opus. His angel of death differed from popular conceptions of the angel who brings news of the end. Pilnyak’s angel of death:

  a) Was painfully courteous

  b) Was dressed in white

  c) And was an employee of the Soviet consulate in Japan.

  11.

  At a certain point in his narrative, Pilnyak observes that “this is how one could end the story of how stories come to be written,” yet continues apace.

  Pilnyak’s “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written” is organized on the principle of juxtaposition and the relationship between three incomplete stories narrated in fragments: the first story is attempted by Sophia Gnedikh-Tagaki in her short biographical notes, whose narration Pilnyak usurps; the second is that contained in Tagaki’s novel, of which we know only indirectly (via the short dispatch of an anonymous journalist), Pilnyak’s own admission that his friend Takahasi relayed the contents of Tagaki’s novel to him, and Pilnyak’s claim that Tagaki had written “a splendid novel”; the third that in which Boris Pilnyak writes of Sophia and Tagaki and of his own visit to Japan. Having focused primarily on the story’s obvious complexity and virtuosity, few literary scholars have taken an interest in that which interests the majority of readers: are the writer Tagaki and Sophia Gnedikh real people?

  In her article “Pilnyak and Japan,” the Japanese Russianist Kyoko Numano maintains that Pilnyak used celebrated Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki as a living prototype for the character of Tagaki (Tagaki-Takahasi-Tanizaki!), and more explicitly, Tanizaki’s novel Chijin no Ai, which translates as “A Fool’s Love” and was published in English as Naomi. Tanizaki’s novel was serialized in the Osaka newspaper Asahi in 1924, and appeared in a single edition the following year. Pilnyak set off for Japan in the spring of 1926. On a visit to Tokyo, a Japanese Russianist by the name of Semu Naboru brought Tanizaki to Pilnyak’s attention, describing it as the literary sensation of the day.

  The hero of Tanizaki’s novel, Jōji Kawai, is obsessed with fifteen-year-old waitress Naomi. Jōji is enamored with western culture, and Naomi, who reminds him of Mary Pickford, becomes the incarnation of his cultural and erotic aspirations. In this respect, Jōji is a kind of Japanese Pygmalion: he pays for Naomi’s putative “Western” education (piano lessons, singing lessons, ballroom dancing lessons, English lessons), and having quickly acknowledged his erotic obsession with the girl, he marries her, only to end up the girl’s slave. In Tanizaki’s novel Naomi is characterized as a beautiful yet cunning, vulgar, lazy, and manipulative modan gāru, or “modern girl.” She is, not incidentally, a representative of the new class that emerged with the Japanese industrial revolution, where the role of women radically changed.

  Tanizaki sets out his novel as shi-shosetsu, an “I-Novel,” or “novel of the self.” At the time, literary naturalism, which centered on the details of a narrator’s personal life (particularly those of a sexual nature) had developed into a literary school or movement. The first such work in Japanese literature is Katai Tayama’s The Quilt (1907). Like Tanizaki’s novel, it caused a scandal on publication. Together with Roman Kim, a Russian expert in Japanese literature, Pilnyak published an article in 1928 on the affair in the Russian literary periodical Press and Revolution, their claim being that contemporary Japanese literature had given birth to a specific form of literary creation, which they referred to as “autobiographical belles lettres.” According to Pilnyak and Kim, this form of literary testimony was authentically Japanese, and a form of which “European literature has almost no sense,” and that “autobiographical belles lettres” were, at that very moment, dominating Japanese literature.

  It’s hard to say whether Pilnyak’s “A Story . . .” was inspired by Russian formalism (Boris Eikhenbaum’s How Gogol’s Overcoat Was Made) or intended as a kind of moral polemic with Japanese authorial confessionalism, or whether his intentions were otherwise. Whatever the case, the fascination with Japan—both that of Pilnyak and of his heroine Sophia—ends in a sense of defeat. Sophia leaves Japan having suffered the devastating betrayal of everything she held dear,††† while Pilnyak’s Japanese cycle appears to evidence that the Russian writer tried “with all his heart to fathom the soul of Japan.” Yet as in the case of his heroine Sophia Gnedikh-Tagaki, it appears that Pilnyak’s “Japanese affair” left a bitter taste—quite aside from the fact that some years later it would cost him his head. Perhaps it really was, as Pilnyak suggested, that the East expels the westerner like the cap from a bottle of kvass.

  Pilnyak fails to solve the puzzle of Japan, and instead becomes a small fragment of its whole. First clue down: Russian avant-garde writer who wrote about Japan, surname beginning with the letter “P.” Perhaps Pilnyak wasn’t really interested in Japan. Perhaps his feeling of defeat is rooted in something else, perhaps, for example, the realization that even after the books he had written, the countries he had traveled, the literary fame he had won, and the inescapable bullet that awaited him in mid-life, he, Boris Pilnyak, Ivan the Fool, was still standing at the very beginning, obsessed by the question of how, exactly, do stories come to be written?

  12.

  I read Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s Naomi in an English translation,‡‡‡ certain that the story I am obviously still writing was, well, finished. Given its theme, an older man’s obsession with a manipulative fifteen-year-old, Tanizaki’s novel better compares with Nabokov’s Lolita than Pilnyak’s “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written.” I have no doubt that somewhere a studious Nabokovophile has already investigated any similarities between Naomi and Lolita. As for Tagaki and Tanizaki, the latter of whom Pilnyak is thought to have employed as a prototype, there is almost certainly a link. If nothing else, having read Tanizaki’s novel it must have been easier for Pilnyak to imagine the way in which the fictional writer Tagaki might describe his Russian wife, Sophia.

  Only superficially are Sophia and Naomi alike. Both are “foreigners,” Sophia Russian, Naomi Japanese—the latter’s pale “Western” skin and western visage making visible her difference. Both are characterized (the former by Pilnyak, the latter by Jōji, the narrator of Tanizaki’s novel) as ill-educated and somewhat vacuous. While Sophia evolves from a “stupid girl” to a mature woman who endures the betrayal she suffers with unexpected strength, Naomi goes from being a problematic teen t
o a capricious, promiscuous, and selfish young woman, an adept dominatrix, who, revealing an infallible instinct, turns Jōji into a willing victim, her slave.

  “It seems that once a person has a terrifying experience, the experience becomes an obsession that never goes away. I’m still unable to forget the time Naomi left me. Her words echo in my ears: ‘Now do you see how frightening I can be.’ I’ve known all along that she’s fickle and selfish. If those faults were removed, she would lose her value. The more I think of her as fickle and selfish, the more adorable she becomes, and the more deeply I am ensnared by her.”§§§