Fox

by Dubravka Ugrešic

  ** As a beneficiary of the tangled relationship between the two countries, not to mention a benevolent cultural and political moment in history, Boris Pilnyak visited Japan on two occasions, in the spring of both 1926 and 1932. Indeed, the history of cultural relations between Russia and Japan is curiously absorbing, in that Japan has traditionally shown strong interest in Russian culture, from the realist period and first translations of Tolstoy into Japanese, through to the well-established Slavic tradition at Japanese universities, to interest in Pilnyak himself, whose works such as The Naked Year were known to Japanese readers in advance of his visit to the country. The new Japanese translation of The Brothers Karamazov sold in the millions, something, I sense, that wouldn’t even happen in Russia today. Yet the relationship between the two countries is not based on reciprocity: the Japanese have always shown far greater cultural interest in Russia than Russia has ever shown in Japan. In this respect, the writer Tagaki, who speaks Russian and recites Russian verse by heart is an entirely believable character.

  †† At the invitation of MGM, Pilnyak traveled to American in 1931 to assist with a film about an American engineer working on an enormous construction site in Soviet Russia (Pilnyak’s novel The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea centers on the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station). Pilnyak tore up his contract shortly after arrival and bought a second hand Ford, traveling coast to coast across America. On his travels he met fellow writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Floyd Dell, Regina Anderson, Wald Frank, Mike Gold, Max Eastman, W.E. Woodward, and Upton Sinclair.

  ‡‡ But perhaps we should be going back a few centuries, to the painting “The Beggars” by Peter Bruegel the Elder. The garments worn by the crippled figures of beggars in Bruegel’s painting are festooned with fox tails. Bruegel’s colleagues Bosch and Dürer portray a fool who carries a fox tail strung from his belt. Perhaps the fox tail was used to mark social outcasts: vagrants, beggars, cripples, fools, and madmen.

  §§ Nikolai Yezhov was head of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) between 1936 and 1938. In Russian, the time of his purges is known as “Yezhovschina.” Although Stalin’s right-hand man, Yezhov was also to be accused of “anti-Soviet activities,” and arrested and executed in 1940, just three years after having ordered the arrest of Boris Pilnyak. He became known as “the Vanishing Commissar”: following his death his likeness vanished from sight, particularly from photos in which he had appeared with Stalin.

  *** Translator’s note: in Slavic languages, the word jež, ёж, еж, ježek, ježko, їжак, means hedgehog, which explains how the terrifying “Yezhov” here becomes Hedgehog the Terrible.

  “The fox knows many things and the hedgehog but one,” is the Greek aphorism Isaiah Berlin used as a motto for his noteworthy 1953 essay, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” in which he establishes the dichotomy between monistic and pluralistic moral values. Put baldly, authoritarian and totalitarian ideas are grounded in monism, and tolerance and liberalism in pluralism. In accordance with these categories, Berlin divided eminent writers into hedgehogs and foxes; into those who write, engage, and think with recourse to a single idea (hedgehogs), and those who merge manifold heterogeneous experiences and ideas (foxes). Dante, Plato, Pascal, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Proust are hedgehogs, and Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, and Joyce foxes. One could draw a connection between Berlin’s essay and Pilnyak’s “A Story about How Stories Come to Be Written,” yet it would be somewhat forced. In any case, in Berlin’s typology Pilnyak would be rather among the foxes than the hedgehogs.

  ††† In his text on the image of the Japanese in Russian literature, G. Chkhartishvili writes that Sophia Gnedikh-Tagaki finds herself not only in a foreign, “but in an inhuman foreign world” (Chkhartishvili’s italics). For Chkhartishvili it is the corporeal freedom enjoyed by the Japanese, which also shocks Sophia, that is “inhuman,” yet this suggestion of alterity likewise brings to mind the connection between Pilnyak’s heroine and the template of the fairytale. In the code of the fairytale, Tagaki, “the alien,” becomes the Beast, Bluebeard (the inhuman), and in such a reading Sophia fails to withstand the test of the genre, which explains the sense of defeat and lack of any happy ending.

  ‡‡‡ Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi, translated by Anthony H. Chambers (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 237.

  §§§ Ibid., p. 237.

  **** Ibid., p. 236.

  †††† Ibid., p. 47.

  ‡‡‡‡ Ibid., p. 61.

  §§§§ Ibid., p. 69.

  ***** Ibid., p. 68.

  ††††† Ibid., p. 120-21.

  ‡‡‡‡‡ Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (Leete’s Island Books, 1977), p. 42.

  PART TWO

  A Balancing Art

  It was late afternoon, and she sat, smoking, in the corner, in the deep shadow cast by the tall cupboard onto the wall. The shadow was so deep that the only things one could make out were the faint flicker of her cigarette and the two piercing eyes. The rest—her smallish shrunken body under the shawl, her hands, the oval of her ashen face, her gray, ashlike hair—all were consumed by the dark. She looked like a remnant of a huge fire, like a small ember that burns if you touch it.

  —Joseph Brodsky, “Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980): An Obituary”

  1.

  Literature and Geography

  I was once traveling by train from Antwerp to Amsterdam; across from me sat a young man, engrossed in his book. The book title was stamped on the cover in raised, gold letters. The young man was a manual laborer whose muscles were his bread and butter. “I have a library of five hundred books,” he bragged. He read only thrillers, the plots of which were situated in scintillating, geographically exotic locales: Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo . . . “And everything about the place has to be exactly right, like in a travel guide,” added the young man. “Why?” I asked. “Because I enjoy traveling to the city where the story takes place and visiting all the sites described in the book!”

  The young man ran his finger over the raised gold letters of the title, Murder at Kuala Lumpur Motel. “I have not yet come across a thriller that takes place in nature. Nature is no good for thrillers,” he added with the cadence of a seasoned reader, and I envied momentarily all those writers who situate their exciting stories in exciting cities, without skimping on topographic detail.

  But I was skeptical as to how meaningful topography (and geography) could be for a plot as it unfolds; how essential is it to the story? How much do the two elements—plot and topography—work in tandem and how much are they at odds? Will any link between them occur to the readers only later, in their interpretation? I wondered then what role chance plays in all this, and whether an “urban scenography” helps the story or hurts it. Because if the plot locality is a “strong place” (one that is, at the same time, a cultural text) while the event is “weak,” our entire literary effort could end up as some sort of fictionalized travel guide. If, on the other hand, the event is “strong” and the place “weak,” the reader might rightfully wonder what point there was to insisting on the topography.

  I hadn’t given this much thought before. Now, when these two things, the event and the place where the event occurs, are bouncing and colliding in front of my nose like balls in the hands of a slipshod juggler, I am thinking about it. I feel sure they are essentially irreconcilable, that between them—between my place and my events—there rules a thematic and stylistic incompatibility. Linking a fictional literary text and its geography is most often “artistically” risky. One is tempted to do so by the hope—supported by nothing—that these “partners” will conform to one another and join in a harmonious marriage, like orange juice and the ice cube.

  I was invited for three days to Naples as part of a meeting on European migrations. The meeting was an international academic conference, attended mostly by historians, sociologists, and poli
tical scientists. We, a few of my colleagues and I, belonged to the category of “entertainers.” We were the mavens of migration, the acrobats of exile, the people of rubber, the tightrope walkers (who knew how to stretch a wire and, ambulating along it, inch our way to Europe from Africa), writers who were thought to have something first-hand to say about émigré life. I agreed to go, not because of the draw of the subject matter (this was a topic I had long since plumbed), but because I’d never been to Naples.

  2.

  The Hotel

  I arrived at Grand Hotel Santa Lucia on Via Partenope around noon. At the reception desk they asked me to wait for at least an hour as my room wasn’t yet ready. I strolled along Via Partenope by the sea and then came back and explored the little streets right behind the hotel. It was a Sunday, but this part of the city seemed somewhat forsaken and deserted. In a small restaurant I ate a sad little pizza and then went back to the hotel. At the front desk I picked up a brochure for guided tours, went up to my room, and drew the curtains across the breathtaking view of the sea and Castel dell’Ovo. I turned on the light and looked for the schedule the organizers had sent out at the last moment (Ah, those slapdash Italians!). A second perusal of the schedule made things no clearer, but I did understand what mattered most: the meeting with the organizers would be held only in the evening of the next day. Before I slid between the impeccably clean, cool sheets (Ah, bless those Italian women!), I called down to the front desk and asked to join the full-day tour: “Pompeii & the Amalfi Coast.”

  I slept—stirring now and then—until morning, exactly as if I’d landed on the moon instead of Naples. Like cotton candy I chewed my dreams. At one moment I gurgled, started awake, cleared my throat from the gunk of sleep, and with deep breaths continued greedily sipping sleep like oxygen.

  In the morning I lingered for a time in the shower, then dressed and went down to breakfast. Along the way I surveyed the hotel guests, guessing which ones might be my “colleagues.” The best known among us, I’d heard, would be the widow of a famous writer. Her husband had been an émigré and had died long ago; only recently had people begun thinking of him as a great writer. In the front hall, however, there was not a single woman who looked the way I imagined the widow of a great writer might look. The minibus soon arrived and enthusiastically I joined the smallish knot of tourists.

  3.

  Pompeii & the Amalfi Coast

  The minibus delivered us to Pompeii and left us there to wait. There were dozens and dozens of people milling around as they waited patiently for their guides. Around us were a few cafés, vendors hawking plastic bottles of water, hats, and caps (for protection from the sun), and stands, tents, and booths with souvenirs. Costumed figures dressed as Roman soldiers mingled with the crowd so tourists could pose with them for a photograph. In time the crowd dispersed, groups formed, each was assigned its guide. The guides made sure they were visible by holding up umbrellas or flags. For my “umbrella” I chose a couple, tourists from my own group, a young Estonian woman and her husband, for she—dressed in loud green pants, green T-shirt, green jacket, her hair black as a crow’s feathers, with a perturbed, dark look in her eye as if copied from the face of a tragic silent-movie actress, her full lips done in loud red lipstick—was simply impossible to miss.

  Our guide, too, was a striking young woman with an impressive mastery of the genre of eco-catastrophe. “Pompeii was laid out like New York City,” she said, sketching a map of Manhattan in the air with her red, buffed fingernails, gesturing to the Pompeii streets that lay there before us. When she said the word up she pronounced it with a broad “a” and drawn-out “p” (aah-puh) while pursing her lips, which her lipstick made look three times their natural size. Telling us about the vanished life of everyday Pompeii as if it were her very own intimate past, our guide completely entranced us. And when she drew our attention to a penis engraved on a paving stone—meant to point eager sailors to Pompeii’s red-light district—the men from our group snorted with childish glee. They smirked softly, in hoarse, geezerly tones, with the stolid wordless backing of their wives who moved, sentry-like, to their men, tucking an arm silently under theirs or leaning just slightly into them. The collective male delight, bubbling over at the sight of that twenty-century-old symbol of manhood, was comical, especially coming as it did from mainly older men. The collective female reshuffle after seeing the penis carved in the street was nearly unanimous. When I remarked in passing to the Estonian woman something about how it’s only the unreliable things—the things women cannot seriously depend on—that require monuments carved in stone, she breezed right by my sentiment and reached, instinctively, for her husband’s arm.

  With dramatic language, the Neapolitan woman painted for us the catastrophe of two thousand years ago, comparing Vesuvius to a pressure cooker, pronouncing the word “eruption” (erruppshoooon), rolling her eyes framed with their thick, brush-like lashes, so the men—their foreheads scorching in the hot afternoon sun—now also smirked at the word “eruption.” The young woman buoyed our flagging attention by frequent use of the phrase “Now, surely you can imagine . . .” and repeating that the people of Pompeii were buried under twenty tons of volcanic ash. I don’t know where she pulled the fact from, but she trotted it out at least five times.

  Our guide also relied heavily on a book, Pompeii Reconstructed, which she flipped open to show us how certain places had once looked centuries before and how they looked now. We all hastened to inquire, of course, where we might buy it. The book, if our group’s reaction was any indication, pressed our mental before-after button. It was a total-makeover toy and crystalized for us what life had been like in Pompeii before the “erruppshooon.” The book’s photographs of a Pompeii staged free of tourists, and even the town itself today thronged by hundreds of tourists, us included, looked far better than the reconstruction sketched in the style of a classic, high-detail comic strip. The drawings gobbled up the imagination with the speed of a termite, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

  I think the unconscious appeal of Pompeii for tourists lies in vague memories of a childhood game that we called “statues,” or something like that. The person who is “it” tags the players and then they have to “freeze” like statues and stay where they were when they were tagged. Whoever moved was out. The carbonization of daily life, frozen at the instant of the eruption, evoked a similar childish thrill. Pompeii was like a sweet dream of our own funeral that we dreamed with ease, knowing we weren’t dead.

  As I observed the people who trudged obediently along behind their guides, their bottles of water in hand, their canes, hats, and sunglasses at the ready, as I recalled the collective male smirk at the sight of the penis in the shape of an asymmetrical clover carved into the paving stone, I was overcome by a sudden attack of misanthropy. In another fifteen minutes they would be ushering us into the vast hall of what used to be a workers’ cafeteria, a “restaurant” in name only. Spry waiters there would shovel into us lousy spaghetti, rotting lettuce, and vinegar-sour wine; an aging singer with guitar in hand would gallop through several canzone Napoletana because outside was another tourist group waiting impatiently. As I watched the human circus, the frenzied waiters reeling from the tempo, the countless plates sailing above our heads, the voluntary humiliation to which we acquiesced as if we had paid for the right to be humiliated; as I watched our stampede emptying the lunch room so the next group could stampede in, I suddenly longed for Great Vesuvius to do its damnedest, spew its lava over all of us, carbonize us, and blanket us with twenty tons of volcanic ash . . .

  Life is so short, says Ingrid Bergman when she visits Pompeii in the movie Viaggio in Italia. Guided tours are organized precisely as if designed for attacks of misanthropy. They seem to exist mainly to run adults ragged as if they were children, have them scarf down every food served up to them so that they drop off to sleep, dead tired. My spell of misanthropy would soon be assuaged by the beauty we’d already seen, the beauty of Pompeii, and the beauty was
hing over us through the windows of the bus on the road to Amalfi. The sea shimmered below us; in the distance we’d see the eternally “pregnant” island of Capri, charming Praiano, Positano, Galli, Isola di Nureyev, magical Amalfi . . . From time to time we’d step down out of the bus and inhale the air, aromatic with oranges, lemons, and salt, while the shimmering blue of the sea and sky caressed us like silk . . .

  At the “restaurant,” as cavernous as a basketball court, we perched on long wooden benches. Across from me sat the Estonian couple. The Estonian woman was earnestly assisting the waiters to hand out the plates with spaghetti, passing them on to others. She was adept, exactly as if she had spent her entire life vacationing in girl-scout camps. She and her husband would be continuing on to Vesuvius while I went on to Amalfi. She was the proprietor of a fashion boutique in Tallinn. I handed her a brochure with a guided tour of outlets where one could purchase clothing by famous Italian designers at deeply discounted prices.