I found her where a beauty of that kind should be. The Writer’s description of those women in their luxurious Fortunys, like ships, he writes, with sails unfurled, floating lightly through parks and that gardenlike forest in Paris. They’re closer to us now, those women, we can see them without the impediment of a garment: easily visible on the beaches or next to a swimming pool. Larissa.
The way the sun played on her half-raised arms, her flat stomach, her manicured nails. Not a vulgar platinum blonde but a platinum blonde of the most sophisticated type. The way she spoke elegantly on a topic about which I could gain no clear idea (thinking still of the danger I’d just been through). Without understanding, I repeat, what the woman was talking about, but understanding the way in which she was addressing her subject: with absolute elegance and poise, someone from the same institute among the trees where Vasily had worked his whole life.
The way she stood up with total innocence, devoid of coquetry, walked in front of me, cutting through the air as she went for something, a hairband on an adjacent lounge chair, raising her arms to tie her hair back, still talking, holding it for a moment between her teeth, the hairband, muttering something I understood perfectly (and which did not amaze me: that Vasily had been there last week and hadn’t flown to Amsterdam as he’d claimed), her breasts taut beneath the bikini top, rosy in the afternoon light, soft and round. The veins or blood vessels beneath her skin like those new telephones made of translucent plastic, designed to show the electronics running through them, and glowing, a red light coming on when someone calls (instead of a ring). And even if the afternoon light hadn’t finally ceased to shine and the sun that had remained in the sky for so many hours (in answer, perhaps, to my prayer for more light, first to try to kiss your mother, and then for fear that Vasily would finish me off) had not finally disappeared into the deep darkness of a suddenly fallen night, this woman would have glowed like a creature from another world, from Epsilon Indi of the constellation Tucana, myriads of photons shining through her pores as if she were an angel or one of the stones that had phosphoresced in my hand. Equally disturbing, this effect.
A man, a giant, an immensely lucky man, whom I’d all too quickly dismissed as merely vulgar but who had the two most incredibly beautiful women, manufactured to conform precisely to the very latest prototypes for beautiful women, all the falsity of technology incorporated into their gleaming bodies. Calculated to make any man tumble and fall into them. My God, I said to myself: a goddess!
6
Psellus, I thought. I’d prefer that you call me Psellus, though my name is something else, as you know. But from the eyes of Michael Psellus, from that sphere, I will follow you with the diaphanous gaze of a sublime pedagogue, my hand on your head, feeling the Book’s knowledge pass into you, seeing how you claim it for yourself, Petya. So that if this civilization with its exquisitely tiled bathrooms and your parents’ solid gold faucets were to cease to exist and only my lessons, my readings of the Book, were preserved, these days could still be recuperated, the echo of my words holding fast in you like inclusions in amber.
You and me, beneath the slow spin of that spherical surface: you listening, me speaking to you. Fragments of the Book, commentary on its passages, floating around us, emerging from my lips, traveling through the air to you, your concentrating face perfectly visible. Blue letters unfurling across the floor, on your clothing, on the courtyard’s paving stones, as the sphere turns and the text moves slowly up its walls.
Fifth Commentary
1
Neither a book whose infinitely thin pages contain whole libraries in a single volume nor a library made up of rhomboidal chambers where men—librarians—worship the books, venture on long peregrinations, interrogate abstruse combinations of letters, or are thrown into the void to die, etcetera. (Which, by the way, is a rather mechanistic simile now quite outmoded, a compression of the concept of a library). I’ve come up with something entirely different: a circumference whose radius is infinite, a spherical construction, a bibliosphere that has its Ptolemaic center in every reader and makes room between its thin walls (no thicker than a page of the Bible) for all books, including this one, and all commentaries upon them.
Though yes, strictly speaking, the commentary on a single book would suffice … But how can I describe or depict my distress, my despair, when I came back from Torremolinos to discover that someone had profited from my absence by destroying the Book, stripping me—or so I believed—of the source of my knowledge and pedagogical skill.
“What? The Book? Burned?”
“Burned … Destroyed by fire … But forget about that … First …”
“I know you’re listening to me right now, Batyk; you haven’t stopped spying on me for one second since I got here.” Though never visible in the garden when I’m talking to the child, talking to you, Petya, Batyk always knew—I’d gathered from his way of retorting to things I’d never said to him—what passages we’d touched on, what subjects we’d covered on a given day in April or March (the subject of gravity, for example, so important) and the precise words we’d used. Until, overwhelmed by the force and wisdom and undeniable beauty of the Book, he conceived of doing away with it, depriving me of this public—not secret: public!—source of my power and pedagogical erudition.
The day I came back from that trip, Petya, knowing exactly where in the Book to find a passage about your mother’s nervous collapse: the words of Cottard, the family doctor, words that would allow me to read the fear in her eyes correctly. I went up to my room for the Book and my fingers, fanning out wide, found nothing, probed only emptiness on my night table, and my eyes registered only emptiness. Without my ever imagining for a moment anything along the lines of: you in short pants and suspenders like a child from a bygone era, stopping in your tracks on your way to the Nintendo, then proudly turning your back on it, retracing your steps, pulled back, by my months of effort, to the Book.
I found in my mind a miniature representation of what must have happened, a replica of the passage, in the Writer, where a sultan approaches the mystery of a table and beholds a seeming chessboard on which small wooden effigies are arranged. And then, to his surprise, he perceives that they are all in motion: the horses prancing and curveting, the warriors brandishing their scimitars, the half moons of their helmets gleaming. And he sees it all from the surprised distance of his eyes, with a faint sound of drums and trumpets and the clanging of arms. Which was how I saw the Buryat lurking along the stretch of wall between your door and mine, his hands interlocked at his forehead, listening to passage after passage, sentence after sentence, and registering an important fact I’d mentioned in one of my classes: the combustion temperature of paper is 451 degrees Fahrenheit. Why Fahrenheit, though, when the Writer would have used Celsius, making it 232.77 degrees? I don’t know, don’t know. But Batyk understood and schemed what he would do to my copy of the Book at the first opportunity. Which did not take long to present itself during my two-day absence—and without your doing anything, Petya, to save it. To save the Book.
My outstretched fingers found nothing but air on the little table and only closed, hours later, on a blackened oval of stiff paper lying in the hedge next to the pool bar. The pages had been torn out one by one and consumed by the flames without a trace, while the harder and more flame-resistant material of the cover, the calfskin, was only charred along the edges.
I studied that cinder for a second, not a trace of the title’s gilded letters at the center, nothing to signify the Book, the name of the Writer, the cursive of his signature. I understood immediately what the Book’s fate had been and flung the cover away from me with a movement of the wrist, just as I throw the Frisbee to Almaz, the borzoi.
And it rose through the night to the back of the garden; it rose, caught and propelled by the turbulence its very advance and rotation were generating, and sailed neatly over the wall. Impossible now for me to walk into the house with that black cinder and throw it in the face of the Bu
ryat, who would pale, etcetera. A cackle of laughter or the air that could have erupted into a cackle of laughter filled my chest without my actually laughing into the night, only my eyes: HA! And I turned around to present my face and my laughing eyes to the lights of the house, for at the moment the wafer of the Book went flying off into the night, my eyes had seen an illuminated stele of light advancing toward me through the air. Without any laborious searching, I’d come up with a passage from the Book about wild laughter. This one: He picked up the turban and put it on all different ways until—oh wonder of wonders!—when he looked at himself in the mirror, he had disappeared! He gave the turban another spin and there he was in the mirror again. He turned it again and disappeared. He took it off and could see himself in the mirror. Then he burst out in peals of wild laughter, bellowing, “All glory to Chernomor and his turban! Terror begone! May joy return to my heart!”
2
Allow me to stress this point: I suspected nothing. I hadn’t seen it coming, never imagined it for a moment. Ersatz diamonds. There was nothing to foretell it, nothing in the Writer to help me understand. A subject unworthy of him, a matter to which he would never have devoted a sentence, not even as a joke, an exercise: never! The manufacture of ersatz diamonds, the double cross an ersatz diamond inevitably and almost automatically places in the soul of its creator: would such a subject occur to a gentleman? Would a gentleman devote himself to the manufacture of ersatz diamonds? Would a courteous young man—myself, for example—ever wonder for one second whether the diamonds his employer’s wife, a beautiful woman with exquisite manners, had placed in his hands as payment for his educational efforts were in fact ersatz? Never. There are things about which it’s best not to think, things upon which a limpid and upright soul never dwells. Allow myself to be invaded by your father’s hammered gold chains and ruffian manners, the way the bottoms of his trousers swept his shoes as he walked? To what end? Toward what objective?
I’d been afraid, had imagined him shoving me along the top of a cliff, pebbles rolling beneath my feet, a question in his bad eye: Have you been seducing my wife? Giving me a beating that is precisely described in the passage of the Book that prefigures The Matrix (everything is there in the Book!), the scene in The Matrix when one of the agents catches up with Neo in a metro station and launches a series of quick blows, a wheel of fists hitting Neo’s torso like the blades of a windmill—what a minor nineteenth-century writer might call a “hail” of fists, when it is in fact, as the Writer describes it, a constellation of fists, which fall by the simple force of gravity, breaking the torque at a certain point and then smashing down like pile drivers … All that, in this passage of the Book: as an astral phenomenon appears in the sky, … two ovoid forms … with vertiginous speed … Saint-Loup’s two fists … that enabled them to create, in front of [Smith, Agent Smith], an unstable constellation, etcetera.
I’m sure of this. I cannot be mistaken about something like this: I hold the whole Book in my memory, its text incarnate in me. Nor should you be confounded by the turban and cackling laughter, which may appear to be a later addition, a corruption introduced in a subsequent era. The same goes for this passage with the unusual image of the constellation of fists.
Carried away with that image, I was imagining fists in the air all the way to Torremolinos and the whole time we were there with Larissa. But there were no fists. Quite the contrary: Vasily was friendly and indulgent, a scientist who entirely understands that a young man, almost a boy, in so luxurious a mansion, in the company of so lovely a woman. Surrounded by diamonds, this woman, not only her neck but her whole being, an entourage, a cloud of diamonds orbiting around her: how could anyone not fall in love, not fall madly in love with such a woman?
Your papa’s demeanor had deceived me, I was thrown off, never having seen real mafiosi, only in the movies. I’d taken him for, believed him to be, one of those.
Now I understood: he was a defenseless scoundrel, a petty thief, a small-time crook, garroted by fear. His terror palpable in the way his eyes swept the top of the wall as he emerged from the swimming pool, putting his hands on the edge and pulling himself up, then quickly turning toward the wall as if someone might take advantage of his back in the water, a swimmer’s vulnerability, to put two bullets into him, a sudden red stain in the swimming pool spreading out in a purple cloud, and Vasily floating strangely in the center, fixedly observing or as if fixedly observing the glint of a coin at the bottom, the bullets that missed.
But this, too, this thought yielding speedily to fear of an encounter with the windshield, even more terrible!
These people I’d believed and imagined to be fabulously rich, immensely affluent? Horribly poor, in reality! Bankrupt! He himself had confessed it: bankrupt! Catastrophically bankrupt! Nobodies!
Profoundly swindled, Petya. I felt profoundly swindled by your parents, deeply deceived by this couple who had so well, so consummately, so garishly played the role of supperrich. To the point that I’d believed them, presumed I was living in a castle, sucking deeply and directly from the udder of their wealth and congratulating myself upon it. And let’s be clear about this: only to gain some time and make myself a little money (never enough) to save up for the hard days ahead and go on with my journey. True, I’d had moments of suspicion, sudden rushes of glimmerings, my hands and feet trying to correct the false picture, the mistaken perception my brain was constructing.
For example, there was the exaggerated tip I’d seen him give a few hours earlier on the way out of a disco even more luxurious and expensive than Ishtar. Indignant over it, angry at seeing myself forced to emend the error, wrest the bill away from the astonished doorman … And the worst of it was—my gaze fixed on a church steeple that I didn’t stop watching until it disappeared around a bend in the road—they hadn’t paid me! At all! Ersatz diamonds? They hadn’t paid me!
How much is an ersatz diamond worth? How much money can an ersatz diamond be sold for?
He read it all in my face, Vasily; he didn’t stop watching me all the way there, but without ever seeming anxious or cornered. Quite the contrary: a smile on his lips. A smile of aplomb and impudence, of smug self-satisfaction with the car he was driving, the lovely creature he had for a wife, and the beauty, the ineffable beauty, he had for a lover. I studied her again this morning, couldn’t take my eyes off her: Larissa, standing there in front of her house, then walking back toward the door in her sequined jean jacket, thick blonde hair halfway down her back, turning and waving to me happily, her arm held high. To the point that I wondered, as in a nineteenth-century novel: Will I see her again? Ever?
3
I didn’t open my mouth for several kilometers. Along that part of the road we ran into a cloud of insects that I took for locusts or African grasshoppers but that turned out to be tiny yellow butterflies. The Writer has a beautiful passage where Swann and Agostinelli enter such a cloud of butterflies and roll along pulverizing them beneath the wheels of their Hispano-Suiza, hearing them crunch and watching them pile up on the windshield until they have to stop the car and clean the small crushed thoraxes off the glass. The sun about to rise on that April morning, still a little chilly, and those butterflies, the golden dust from their wings.
And there was this: the relief that your mother was not a member of the mafia. Impossible that she could be evil, so sweet a woman with whom I’d talked over so many things during the evenings he said he was in Rotterdam. Married to a man who was cheating on her, a man I couldn’t hope to control or set limits on and who was escaping me at top speed, his left eye opening a path for us a few inches above the asphalt. Not taking his eyes off the road for a second, laughing, his eyes surrounded by the bunching wrinkles of a man laughing gleefully to himself. He had a very beautiful lover (I’d seen her), a fast car, and his wrists had grown larger—how could he have failed to be in excellent spirits that morning? Sunrise over the Costa del Sol.
The wrists had appeared suddenly. All the force of his new look, his n
ewfound internal security enlarging his wrists. But I, too, eh? I, too, could hit back at them, could reduce them to nothing, though they had to be taken into account, those wrists. They dovetailed without deviation into his arms or rather his arms fit with greater security and strength into the bridge of those wrists, wider now, more blood could pass along them, more troops, if needed. I could let him stand up, the muscles of his back rippling menacingly, and throw himself confidently onto me, only to catch him in midflight. By the wrists. Not grown so large, Vasily, that I couldn’t encircle them with my thumb and index finger if I wanted. An optical illusion, Vasily, an optical illusion I myself was about to fall victim to. In fact they were not that large or thick, those wrists. Normal wrists. Piece of cake. One: (to the ground). Two: (say uncle?).
“How can you do this to Nelly?” I protested. “I wish I had the Book here, I’d show you; you’ll end up saying to yourself: To think I’ve wasted years of my life, I’ve wanted to die … for a woman who wasn’t my type!”
“Not true,” he snorted. “I’m never going to say that,” not taking his eyes off the road until he did move them for a second, threw a glance at me, and laughed. “No way am I ever saying that, batiushka.”
“Yes, you are, I can’t be mistaken about a thing like this. What’s more, I’m saying it, too. I’m saying it to you: how can you do this to Nelly?”
(Although it wasn’t true, undoubtedly wasn’t true. How could she be a woman who wasn’t my type when she was the perfect blonde, the Platonic ideal of a blonde, an iridium blonde, immune to any variation in temperature, a blonde who was the octagonal seal wrought of gold which, in heaven, imprints its form on all other blondes? How, in what way, could I ever come to regret or conclude I was wasting the best years of my life after dancing with a woman like that?)
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