by Andrei Bitov
And you will hear no more about pants, for with this they are out of the story, as the Icelandic sagas say.
“You do as you like, but I’m not drinking any more,” I told HIM. He didn’t even wave me away, so great was his accumulated contempt for me.
In the end, I didn’t protest. I had tossed back so many with Pavel Petrovich, according to the methods of Privy Councillor Johann von Goethe (I use the terminology of the unforgettable Venichka),{35} without giving HIM even a drop, that it was time to take my leave.
So, more or less with clear conscience, I entrusted him to Million Tomatoes, and they trudged off “along the fair curls of day” (Daur Zantaria’s expression, from Esenin, I think).
If the facial features of the modern hero have been erased and his curls have fallen out, those of the fair day remain. Its clean tresses trailed in the Black Sea, within sight of the snow-white brow of the Hotel Abkhazia (designed, like the Hotel Adjaria in Batum, by Academician Shchusev{36} for a conference which Stalin had planned for the allied countries but which was held in neither place and which therefore received the name “Yalta Conference”). From here on, so that we won’t have such long parentheses, we’ll eavesdrop on their conversation at the Cafe Amra, which juts out into the Black Sea like a white breakwater, opposite the Hotel Abkhazia …
“Well, and then it would have been the Sukhum Conference … ”
“And Churchill and Roosevelt would have come to Sukhum .. ”
“And they would have sat like you and me … ”
“And drunk coffee at the Amra … ”
“The Amra didn’t exist then.”
“The Amra has always existed!”
“Churchill drank only Armenian cognac.”
“Since when?”
“They decided it right at the Yalta Conference. Every year, Stalin sent him a carload of the best Armenian cognac.”
“Sure, and cigars from Castro.”
“Listen, why talk like that! I know Castro didn’t exist then!” This retort indicates that there were no longer two of them but considerably more—more by at least one, the bartender from the bar next door, an Armenian named Serozh, who was resting up from the work that lay ahead of him.
“Castro didn’t exist, but cigars did.”
“Listen, why be a pest! Would you rather they’d had the Yalta Conference in Batumi?!”
An excuse to find out what kind of cigar Churchill had smoked—after his requisite glass of Armenian cognac—presented itself then and there. He had long been attracting our notice, this man. All but wearing a cork helmet, he was feeding the seagulls and still nursing the same cup of coffee, with an eloquently silent escort; as we had conjectured, he did prove to be an Englishman. We immediately translated our question into language he would understand: with the help of the word “Chercheell,” we poured him a little more cognac and puffed grandly on his Marlboro as if it were a cigar. He still didn’t catch on.
“You Russians are strange people,” he said after the third glass. “You love Thatcher, you love Chahchill … You’re strange people.”
We “Russians”—two Abkhaz, two Mingrelians, one Armenian, and one Greek, not counting me—almost felt slightly insulted, either on Russia’s behalf or because he had known Russian all along. We ordered another coffee.
Not by nationalities but by our coffees were we divided! Two medium-strong, two weak, one sade with sugar, two sultans, one double-sweet, and one plain no sugar, one for Marxen, one for me … The Englishman was ecstatic, with good reason. This was a ritual! In the first place, without waiting in line: natives, the right of the habitué, close acquaintanceship with the coffee chef. The people in line, out-of-town visitors, say nothing, act timid, don’t object (if they don’t object, it means they’re from out of town). “Meess, are you here for a long visit? Haff you seen the dolphins yet?” The accent is intentional, people in Sukhum have little accent; the accent is for romance, to inspire fear and respect. A week’s growth of beard (which will come into style only many years later in the West); a gold chain; a carelessly tucked-in white shirt, unbuttoned to expose a cross buried in fur; sleeves rolled up as if by chance, below the elbow; a muscular, careless hand, perhaps with a thick gold ring … “Ovik, six more, be so kind: two extra-strong, one medium, two weak, one regular!” The peculiar chic of the coffee chef is to ignore the order but fill it promptly and unerringly, keeping it straight, which coffee for whom. The peculiar chic of the man placing the order is to have affection in his voice and severity on his face, and not to dither when paying, so that he proffers a crumpled note with disdain for the money but not for the coffee or the coffee chef … After executing this ballet, the man who has ordered is not immediately liberated from his mask. But then, after listening with downcast eyes and modest pride as he is toasted, he is liberated after all and joins the conversation … “He might be reckoned as Jewish, but he might not, either.” “If it’s through the mother, he should be. Jews reckon nationality through the mother.”
“Well, but through the father it’s obvious. If you’re a Rabinovich everyone knows you’re Jewish, even if your mother’s Russian.”
“That way they get more Jews. Through both sides. Clever people.”
“Yes, unlike the Abkhaz. We just get fewer. If it’s through the father you’re Georgian. And if it’s through the mother you’re Georgian.”
“Damn Lavrenty!{37} How many we might have been … ”
“What do you think?” They put the question point-blank to the silent escort.
“Are you speaking to me?”
“Was Jesus a Jew or not?”
“I do scientific, ah, research. This isn’t my problem.”
“Then what is?”
“I study monkeys.”
“And you?” This was to me.
“Listen, why pester everyone? What are you, Jewish or something?”
“I’m not Jewish, I’m Greek. But anyway?”
“Who among us has not been a Jew at least once?” Who said this? Surely not HE?
“It seems to me,” I said, treading cautiously, “you can reckon the Son of God by His Father, but not by nationality.”
“And you, Serozh?”
“Me? I’m Armenian.”
“I’m Ainglish,” said the Englishman. “None of you know what a third-category city is!”
The Englishman was just in from Voronezh, and Voronezh,{38} to be specific, was a third-category city … But how easy it was to talk about Jews here! Everyone here was in a minority.
But together we already formed rather a large crowd, once more to burst out onto the embankment in the genial mood of masters of life.
This, however, was what I needed the white trousers for! (“No vow is forever”—but I didn’t think that one would prove so shortlived.) White trousers! I needed them in order to walk with my arms around my friends and catch the glow of my own self-delight on the faces of passersby. In exactly this state of mind (was it fate, the plot, the laws of symmetry, or simply a mirror image?) we might encounter an even more self-satisfied cohort coming toward us. They were always in an indisputable majority. It was amazing! Like a movie! I felt the muscles of my Abkhazian friends flexing under their tight, freshly laundered T-shirts. By the way, I have seen Million Tomatoes lift a hundred kilograms with one hand, and every second man complained that his muscles took half his time.
And it was a movie. It advanced on us in “pig” formation, as the wedge was called in the Middle Ages. That is, in front rode a knight armored in fame, slight though he was in stature. The whole myth, the whole preeminence, the whole unquestionability of the cinema was concentrated in him. On either side, keeping a slight distance behind him, and taller toward the edges, followed his retinue—administrators and female assistants who seemed to be always asking something and taking notes. Mighty, courageous cameramen and electricians feathered this wedge.
My friends tensed, the movie director and I embraced, everything merged, and we were doubled. Th
ey had come to choose a location. The action of their film took place in Yalta, but Yalta did not fit Yalta. Sukhum fitted it better. This was a new version of “The Lady with the Lapdog.”{39} It was a musical. The role of the lapdog had been accepted by an actress who in her youth had been filmed by Bergman, though she wasn’t famous just for that, and the hint of a relationship between the heroine and the little dog, as you yourself understand, would produce a revolution in the Russian cinema.
In our new status as a recognized international cohort, we made the rounds of all the remaining coffeehouses on the embankment. There were about seven of them.
Oh, this embankment! It seems so long, by virtue of these coffeehouses! In actual fact this intensive segment lasts two hundred meters, at most, but to walk it you must spend half a day (and half a day back). You can also spend a lifetime (the same people of the embankment will celebrate your funeral). We were coming from the Amra, from south to north; they were going toward the Hotel Abkhazia (where the director was supposed to unpack), from north to south. But we were walking like normal people, while they had tromped past like elephants. Consequently we (as locals) made them turn back, to examine everything as it deserved. “That’s no way to choose a location,” we implied.
We gratified our vanity as best we could. All Sukhum exchanged bows with us, the filmmakers went unrecognized. “Who’s that?” the director would ask in one or another instance, when he thought our tone was especially respectful. “How to tell you … We don’t generally say, but everyone knows … Well, he’s a mobster.” This gentleman of sixty, in a snow-white shirt and a cloud of imported deodorant, his face as smooth as if shaved from inside, with his mild, intelligent features and a gaze filled with deference and virtue, was so unlikely as to be enchanting—you immediately had no doubt that just such a man, and only such a man, could be a mafia chief. He was very preoccupied, our capo; his granddaughter was trying to get into college in Moscow. All measures had been taken, and yet he was very anxious. The solicitous grandfather had notched up eight lives, however. No, he hadn’t killed anyone in the last twenty years. Simply because there had been no need. How to explain it to you, it’s rather complicated … Well, he has three or four shops, let’s say … He’s the owner? … No, the owners pay him. What for? Well, not to touch them. But it’s been twenty years since he touched anyone! … Well, so they pay on time.
The noble mafioso—ah, the leisure of his gait!—walked to his car, not in order to leave … No, I’m wrong! Of course he couldn’t have walked to the car himself, if he wasn’t leaving. He simply spoke, without turning to the man he spoke to. From behind his shoulder emerged Aslan (or was it Astamur? he nodded reluctantly, or perhaps unrecognizingly, in reply to my cheerful greeting). Aslan or Not-Aslan caught the keys, and it was he who walked to the car, opened the trunk, rustled around in it for a moment, and brought out something wrapped in The Dawn of the East, oblong, like a sawed-off rifle. This gun promptly fired, of course (in the hands of the unskilled dramaturge), as clearly and tonelessly as the first autumn frost. It was champagne on ice! Talent means talent in everything … Our friend the mafioso had been the first man in Sukhum to think of carrying a picnic cooler in his trunk! And now these dusty, talentless boxes, after overstocking the shelves of all the village general stores for several years, had become shortage items. (He hadn’t bought the cooler, by the way. He had received it as a gift from the manager of the cooperative that produced them.)
The champagne fired, striking my heart and HIS. Smoke curled from the barrel. The hand of a professional! How beautiful this was. I couldn’t deny myself the hyperbole … From the way he managed the bottle, it was obvious that his hand would not have trembled. Then this impeccable cleanness (not washedness), and the lovingly groomed fingernails … And the cuff! And the cuff link! … The cuff link was perhaps a bit large, though of course it was gold. But not everything at once—someday he, too, would wear a tiny cuff link, with a single pinprick diamond. It takes more than one generation to make the chief badge as inconspicuous as the Legion of Honor.
The glasses sprouted on the table (I hadn’t noticed any particular Not-Aslan bringing them), champagne flowed from the hand of the violinist who had never held a violin, the landscape vitrified as we watched: the sun, forever suspended over the mooring … the Greek fortress of Dioscurias, whose cyclopean rubble, although this is not the first thousand years it has lain here, always seems to have washed ashore only yesterday in some unprecedented gale … the trunk of a plane tree, diseased with psoriasis … the blinding path of sunlight on a sea becalmed at this hour, oily, taut as silk … the seagull forever suspended over the smokestack of the ship Taras Shevchenko, which is also moored forever … and the gull’s sharp cry will never fade over this landscape, which is suddenly darkening and turning coal black, narrowing in my eyes because overpopulated with happiness.
What I respect in him is that he never drinks champagne. “The main thing is, don’t drink the bubblies,” he was told by a dying old alcoholic, who meant not only champagne but beer and mineral water as well. HE believed the alcoholic, not me. Champagne is my privilege. Once a year I, too, can drink to success, which, by the way, consists only in the fact that yet another time has gone by.
My enchanting mafioso began to talk too much about the movies, addressing himself more and more to the director (the same breed!) and for some reason calling him Federico. By now our fame was running ahead of us like a large dog, like a smooth billow of lazy surf, and ultimately like us (in our own view). Champagne appeared at every coffeehouse. They loved us. The union of art and sport—that’s what a movie is, and you couldn’t find a better place for them to meet than an out-of-season resort. The beaches and restaurants and hotels stand empty just for them, for the film troupes and sports teams.
We were brought together by Marxen, the former world record holder in pistol shooting. Without ever having removed his telescopic sights from his eyes, he was now a cardiologist and a bachelor who in keeping with his specialty took advantage of all the local widows (those who hadn’t lost their charm and had even gained a certain quality of mystery), as the confidant of their autumnal secrets. So far, fortunately, our mutual friend was not treating us; so far we had among us one lone micro-infarct, Daur’s, which had flown as unexpected and bright as a hummingbird into our determinedly youthful company …
Having made the rounds of all the coffeehouses, we must also stop in at the home of the physician and record holder. Here he would show us his library, this man who had read everything … Camus and Borges, if you had only known … who would be the first to read you in Russia! He took off his spectacles and exposed eyes so weak that even his hands, wiping his glasses, suddenly seemed as wax white and shaky as a flickering candle. Neither hand nor eye had wavered, however, when he hit 599 out of 600. The director, as always, was running the show; that is, he had started a penetrating conversation about sports. He himself couldn’t boast the same achievements in his past and was therefore trying to best the champion in his insight into the phenomenon. Not a chance!
Marxen was born blind and grew up blind in an Abkhazian village. His parents didn’t think to put glasses on him (minus twenty, he stated modestly). Children his age were already being taken on the hunt, but why take a blind boy? So one day when no one was home he put on his hundred-year-old grandmother’s glasses, seized a small-bore rifle, and darted outdoors, blinded by eyesight and looking for something to shoot. He couldn’t shoot the domestic animals, of course. Suddenly, fifty meters away, he saw some wild ducks swimming down the small river. He fired once—missed, the duck went on swimming. Fired at another—same thing. Fired at a third … Only on the fifth did he notice that they bobbed their heads after the shot. He checked his observation on the sixth and seventh. Same effect: they bowed their heads gently and shyly but continued to swim in the same column, steady as little boats. At this point a neighbor arrived, cursing as he ran—Marxen had shot all his decoys, it turned out, hitting each one i
n the eye, and they had continued to float downstream with the current.
“Dark, dark was the night, the rain was pouring down .. His father was Georgian and his mother Abkhazian, but his grandmother had been Jewish, a pre-Revolutionary revolutionary, and that was how he came by the name Marxen. His parents were imprisoned in ’37, so he ended up in the village with his Abkhazian grandfather. Even then, in ’37, he saw things clearly. Marx and Engels—he hated those mothers … You yourselves understand, what could he do with a name like that, the little blind son of parents subjected to repression? The only road was sports. He said that the brain, eye, hand, barrel, and target, when he fired, were not just a single line but a taut violin string singing in the wind, and then he took into account the wind direction, and the shimmer of warm air if the sun was … It was that hot in Italy, when he … Brain and target became a single point, equal to the bullet—he felt the movement of the bullet in the barrel when he fired …
The director bit his lip. What the hell did he care about “The Lady with the Lapdog,” he was thinking, when this was the man he should be doing a film about! A ready-made scenario! The actor—there was no real actor … Oh, if only Cybulski were alive … Stung by the way the director had so quickly pulled the whole blanket (Marxen) over himself, I asked Marxen to show us his weapon. And now we heard all about the abject situation of the athlete in Soviet sports. He had nothing! He didn’t have his pistol—it had been state property, unlawfully classified as a military weapon. Only the stock—that was all he had left as a memento of his world record and twenty years of his life. Embarrassed by the paltriness of the outcome of an entire lifetime, he tenderly unfolded a flannel rag, as though it contained a baby’s little corpse. There lay a fantastic bone …