Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia

by Jose Manuel Prieto

  I was thinking of you, the red-haired girl I would choose for my novel, and wanted something clean and fresh. Monsieur Baldini, the shopkeeper, assured me he had what I was looking for. He went into the back and emerged with the last remaining bottle of a very old brand, sold out years ago, that contained no musk. When the bouquet of that antique treasure filled the air, I saw the uncontrollable mass spinning before me once more and felt the same emotion. How had this perfume reached the banks of the Volga? But of course it wasn’t the same one. It was only the same base, without musk. Back in my hotel, I decanted this glass flacon, without a label, devoid of prehistory. Even I no longer remember its original name. I’ve thought of calling it LINDA. But your name, all on its own, would add nothing. I must unify these elemental lines into the complex organism of a publicity campaign and settle on its meaning, arbitrary but overflowing with emotion: the simple man who untangles the mystery of the girl’s death, confronts the murderer, and kills him cleanly, not a muscle in his face even twitching, everything I felt that day in the darkened movie house. “Do you smell that fragrance? It’s truly magnificent, it smells like you.”

  (First the striped awning, then the twelve-speed mountain bike pedaling along fast, a baguette sticking out of the saddle bag. Geraniums at the windows. France? The South of France? Night, the dark mass spinning in the void. A droplet falls onto LINDA’S naked shoulder. Fade out.)

  ORGANDY. The latest fashion is announced almost stealthily, a full season in advance; its manifestations are secondary and it moves out through the world as if traveling incognito. So that when, one day, from a moving car, we glimpse the striking feathery crest of a new hairstyle or see a winter scarf knotted around the neck like a cravat, we feel a start of discovery. Somewhat incredulous, we mentally review this vision until we are convinced. Yes, of course, what bliss: a narrow scarf knotted atop the overcoat collar as if it were a necktie, and in the course of the day we run into three, five fellow pedestrians, all tricked out like this, which is already an avalanche (because as soon as you notice the first manifestation, you’re immediately amazed to discover how many people are already up-to-speed on the fashion). Which hasn’t yet reached the circle of your most intimate friends and, therefore, when you arrive at that evening’s gathering transformed into a dandy, one of them, the most absurd of the lot, the one most permanently deaf to all sartorial subtlety, asks you in amazement: “Huh? What’s that necktie-scarf thingy? I don’t like it at all, wouldn’t be caught dead . . .” (and he’s the one who, six months later, when no one else is doing it any more, goes on wearing his scarf that way for two more seasons). Later you doubt your own daring, wonder if perhaps you should wait a little longer and, on the way home, since it’s very cold outside and you’re afraid of catching flu, you wear the scarf in your usual manner. The next day, though, you go back to the more poetic style, the ends of your scarf flying in the wind.

  (THELONIOUS was capable of mentally reproducing the evolution of the wristwatch from the massive oblong metallic rotundity so much in vogue at the beginning of the seventies to the superthin model of the mid-eighties. He visualized the process as if it were one of those educational films that show a sprout breaking through the shell of the seed and twirling up through layers of earth, continuing its ascent as a plant, turning to follow the path of the sun, losing its leaves, then disappearing, metamorphosed into pollen.)

  I. With fabrics, with delicate ORGANDY, we can construct an ephemeral world of beauty. You must learn to distinguish the quality of a piece of cloth, its approximate value, at a glance.

  I was sitting on the edge of the bed. LINDA passed in front of me and stepped out onto the balcony. The sea, its white foam. She had selected a string bikini that rode very high on the hips, but she seemed to notice something out there, the cypresses bent at a steep angle by a wind that was picking up, and she came back inside and changed into a lovely maillot, with real seashells sewn around the borders of the bust.

  “A bathing suit is an abstraction, the smallest thing we can achieve with fabric,” I explained to her. “These little snippets of cloth allow you to emerge from animality, they block the mammary glands, the physiological, from sight, and thereby diminish the horror of the naked body.” LINDA was back out on the balcony, not listening.

  “. . . it represents the minimal effort of the human against the animal. Except that the wide straps of some of the older types of suits make them look a bit like underwear. That wouldn’t suit you. It’s the high chest that’s in style, the line of the bust raised. Why don’t you try on this pretty one-piece with a mesh back and a pattern of daisies and sunflowers. Except it makes you look even younger . . . Doesn’t it amaze you how so few elements can transmit so many ideas? See what a fresh look those oversized buttons create! Okay, quite frankly, there’s not much more I can say about swimsuits: I find Lycra a bit disconcerting, it repeats the naked body in some way. What do you think about wrapping this delicate length of organdy around the hips? It will lift the ensemble a little, your legs showing through the transparency, their fierce line . . .”

  Finally LINDA was standing in front of the mirror trying on a little pea green hat.

  “How’s this?”

  “Look at that . . . It’s amazing! That ORGANDY wrap can be even more interesting than a dress. But the shoes, LINDA! What shoes will you wear down to the beach? I’d completely forgotten about that. There’s nothing more difficult than choosing a pair of shoes for a swimsuit. If you wear that pair with high heels, I won’t be able to look at you when you walk along the path ahead of me. It disturbs me to see women dressed that way, far too approachable and defenseless, as if they were open to an activity considerably more intimate than a stroll. If you go barefoot, though, your walk will be somnambulant, arduous, and the slow dance of the organdy wrap will only heighten that impression. Try that nice pair of sandals we bought in Saint Petersburg, just before setting out on our trip. You’ve worn them all too often since then, but I can’t think of anything better.”

  P

  PACKARD. I suspect that we are, to our Creator, as complex and mysteriously distant as machines, and that he swells with pride when he observes our perfection. In much the same way, we are unaware of the laws that govern the aesthetic evolution of the automobile; how it ceased to be the imperfect replica of a horse-drawn carriage and instead blossomed into the dazzling curves of the postwar PACKARD. Neither do we understand the first thing about the incurable malaise that has attacked the motor vehicles of today, the causes of the regression that makes them more alien and horrible to look upon each year. It is torture to watch how designers—perhaps perturbed by the idea of the archetypal auto, the mobilis—have gradually stripped them of mudguards, running boards, chrome diadems, nickel-plated hubcaps; how, trapped in a vortex of perpetual transformation, they’ve veered in the wrong direction toward functionalism, aerodynamics, an absurd notion of comfort. It requires a great effort to understand this, for we never imagine that a hundred years of evolution could be enough to exhaust a set of forms; we continue to believe that thousands of different models, with new protuberances, await us—but that is not the case. The thesis of lineal progress ad infinitum denies what we know about the spiral of development with its declines and recoveries. And it’s clear that we now find ourselves at the end of a phase, LINDA, very far from the decade of true splendor to which this PACKARD belongs. You can’t imagine how much work it was to find it. You Russians have nothing from this period; the entire stratum is empty, nary a molar nor an occipital bone pitted with holes: nothing. This model is from ’49 (the straight-eight engine, three speeds, maximum velocity ninety-five miles per hour) and I’ll have you know that according to the crook at the rental agency this car once belonged to Beria, the fearsome Minister of the Interior. Ah, yes, the inevitable mythic provenance that adds 15 percent to the price. I didn’t hesitate to pay, the very latest fashion in cars is to prefer these beautiful models from the forties, built for an efficient drive, conscient
iously prepared for the road like those elderly couples, tourist fossils from the BADEN-BADEN era, who buy pith helmets, binoculars inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a rattan basket for provisions, a cashmere throw against the evening chill, sunglasses with tortoiseshell frames. A lost precision: the visible evidence of expenditure. When I was a boy I’d help my grandfather wax his Oldsmobile and shine its nickel-plated grille. Then we’d go for a ride, simply to enjoy the pleasure of speed: the tufted leather upholstery, the steering wheel’s imitation-bone Bakelite. I would sit very close to him, not wanting to miss any part of the way he yanked the stick shift and slammed on the clutch. Alongside us were Pontiacs and the omnipresent Chevrolets, the couples within them embracing as if they were relaxing on an enormous sofa, Paul Anka blasting from the RADIO . . . How to explain this to you?

  I know you would have preferred one of those modern cars from Japan. I’ve learned to hate them. Japan is nothing but a parvenu in the OCCIDENTAL work of machinery, a clever imitator, incapable of capturing the profound logic that underlies the four speeds of the internal combustion engine. Have you ever seen a Japanese oil painting? It’s the same thing. The coloring is sickly, the composition chaotic, the touch of the brush uncertain. Where automobiles are concerned, they haven’t been able to come up with an equivalent to the fine technique of an Utamaro, a Suzuki Harunobu, those exquisite woodblock prints on rice paper. Only the Chinese, far wiser, have discovered the crowd of cyclists, the hybrid rickshaw. Isn’t the apparent ease with which a cyclist pedals, though all his muscles are straining, more Oriental? As is the modest size of the sedan chair. But this tendency toward lightness, when translated into automobile design, brought on the disaster of the horrible Nissan, the irresponsible airiness of the Mazda. The Japanese invasion has been successful because it found an important chink in the OCCIDENTAL bloc: the aerodynamic tendency. Evidence of which can be found in the showy “ducktail”—you see? Flight!—at the beginning of the sixties. Then in the seventies the Arabs had us worrying about not using so much oil, which meant we were ready when Ford, in despair, launched its execrable Torino, an entirely plain vehicle, nothing at all for the imagination to cling to, antiseptic.

  I’m comforted only by the knowledge that vehicles propelled by solar batteries are on their way, and these new ecological cars, these zen cars—their retractable headlights making them look like insects—may give rise to automobiles that are fundamentally new, perhaps in no way different from arachnids, a complete fusion with nature: an emergence from the kingdom of the machine into something else. Can’t we view the horse as the final phase of the prehistoric automobile that belonged to the civilization prior to ours? Isn’t it true that the Japanese—them again!—have invented a many-limbed robot, the prototype of some future means of transport?

  (We drove toward the sea together across the coastal hills, our PACKARD swift and ultrapowerful; LINDA eating her fill of grapes for the first time in years. The vineyards of Crimea.)

  PALACE (CHINESE). I got off the train at O**, near Petersburg, at the beginning of June. The station virtually a ruin. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze. To judge by the scant number of passengers continuing on, there must have been only two or three more stops on the line. At the edge of a shady grove of oak trees I came to a fence that bore the map of the park. I studied it as if it were an animated tableau and I a medieval knight confronting the thousand possible paths across a game board that chance might dictate. My finger inexorably traced the route to the CHINESE PALACE. I was thirsty. Birdcalls in the silence, a warm breeze.

  How could I have imagined that what awaited me around a bend in that hedge maze would turn out to be an unexpected augury of the sort provided by the I Ching? The CHINESE PALACE was not the Ming pagoda, the gilded pavilion I had imagined. For a moment I thought I’d lost my way and had reached some imperial DACHA of Peter II heretofore unsuspected by historians. A pond—a small artificial lake with ducks—reflected the Italianate volutes of a PALACE entirely devoid of Asiatic complexities. I consulted the sign to be certain I hadn’t made a mistake. The caption, as revealing as a conceptualist label, read: CHINESE PALACE. And since, effectively, this Russian PALACE was thus transformed into the CHINESE PALACE I was seeking, I thought of two more plaques. One in front of the lake that read Sea, and the other over the little house for the ducks, stating Gryphons.

  I found the basket of slippers for visitors entirely at my disposal; the season had only just begun. I chose a shapeless green pair with elastic bands at the heels then stood up and walked forward uncertainly, a centimeter of felt between the soles of my feet and the floor. As I waited for the guide, it began to rain. There would be no other visitors today. I crossed the threshold and shuffled along with difficulty, giving the parquet floor a nice polish, and for free.

  The guide, a shawl draped over her shoulders, had the tired face of a schoolmistress prepared to repeat a boring lesson about anaerobic respiration, a subject that escapes both her comprehension and her immediate perception. Her palaver followed a strict rhythm and bothered me as an inopportune fog would have, or rather, a light that was overly bright. Facing a writing desk with mother-of-pearl inlay, I intensified my scrutiny in an attempt to elude her explanations (date of manufacture, provenance) and, leaning forward to observe its delicate iridescence more closely, understood, suddenly, that the owner of that PALACE had also tried to free himself from a boring European existence (which must have annoyed him as much as the guide’s aimless blather was irritating me) by surrounding himself with Chinoiseries. There in the left wing of his PALACE, he could embark on excursions into the virtual cosmos of a life exempt from fatiguing service to Mother Russia. He had accumulated bronzes and porcelains, spheres of carved openwork marble, carpets showing the crane of wisdom and the tortoise of longevity, as if he were never going to die, which is the illusion of those who exist in the perfect present moment of their knickknacks.

  It was an ideal PALACE to live in, with minimal distance between my bosom and its magnificence. It made you feel that its owner, the gentleman who loved Japanese lacquers, had gone out for a brief stroll in the garden and would return, from one moment to the next, to the steaming samovar, afternoon TEA almost ready. The very fact that the Germans hadn’t occupied it during the war—information provided by the guide—lent it the attraction of goods prudently placed in the vault of a Swiss bank, safe from any danger.

  I was incapable of imagining myself CZAR of all Russia, lord of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, summering in Petergoff. But the CHINESE PALACE could well have been mine, along with a pair of thoroughbreds and its collection of Chinoiseries. To stroll through its rooms was to tighten and pluck the strings of many readings and images that had hung loosely in my thoracic cavity until then. They’d been dangling there for years, occasionally emitting beautiful notes, but the process by which they were tuned at last culminated in that PALACE and left me ready to be played upon by the long fingers of stimuli that were essentially insignificant.

  But equivalent, I hasten to clarify. Only years later did I have the money to begin overcoming, little by little, in tiny baby steps, the cosmic distance that separated me from a life such as that one. It was like throwing things into an unfathomable abyss—$2 million mansions, fifty-five-meter yachts, holidays in Oceania—never, in any case, to achieve any diminution of the gap. Yet this could cause me no pain. The man who is born owning a golf course never comes to understand the formidable pressure, the truly fundamental value of such a possession. I, in effect, had nothing, absolutely nothing; however, like a bronzed torso in an advertisement, I had captured the spirit. To caress the jade of the little statues was to touch the curving limb of the crane in flight, offered by the Zen master but invisible to my blind eyes. Or it was as if the spirit of the owner of the PALACE had appeared in the flesh before me to break his walking stick over my shaven head.

  I tossed the slippers into their basket, looked out at the garden through the graph of the windowpanes and saw that the sun was
shining again over the lake and its ducks. Here was the beautiful backdrop to another mise en scène, the brief appearance of a character who would play an extremely important role in my initiation.

  I. From the far end of the set, emerging from the depths of the park, I saw the white blur of a summer dress approaching. I quickly abandoned the foyer and went into the garden to intercept her at the little duck house. Sixteen or seventeen years old, to judge by her schoolgirl air. She wore a pair of comfortable leather sandals and let me accompany her without giving an instant’s thought to the emptiness of the park, the clumps of shrubbery, the humidity of the hour. Intrepidity, vigor, a walk that placed all her weight on the sole of the foot. By the time we reached the road that led back to the train station we’d already talked quite a bit and she’d allowed me to run my hand over her hair which was the color of burnished bronze. At that moment, standing there at the crossroads, I discovered that she wasn’t wearing a dress, as I’d thought, but a skirt and blouse in the same color.

  Our train departed from N**, only two stops farther in the opposite direction, at 6:35. It would arrive in fifty minutes. In the station restaurant, we asked for mushroom soup and toast. We ignored the kebab platter that, I now realize, cost almost nothing. The soup turned out to be wonderful; there was excellent cooking to be had in Muscovy in those days. Then we spent a long time talking. She showed me a notebook full of writing. She had jotted down the family names of the Italian architects, the cost of the restoration, the time it would take to complete. Minutes before the train arrived, we each paid our own check, a ruble and some kopecks, without the slightest embarrassment. We continued our chat onboard: a marvel of a woman (I’m trying to paint her portrait here). I’d admired the sheen of her hair. We had conversed. It was an experience. We said good-bye without exchanging addresses or arranging to meet again. It would have been a mistake on my part to consider her anything more than a sign, easy on the eyes, muse-worthy. I’d succeeded in becoming a lad equipped for something more than reading books.