Amsterdam? I asked her immediately. And she answered: Of course not. I’ve had to push him sometimes, to get him to go home, because he has to do something. I’ve told him so, he can’t just hide out waiting for them to put him to death (I overlooked the word, Petya, she couldn’t have meant: dead).
Nor was what she told me about your mother true: that it had been her idea to move to that rich city, Marbella, that seaside resort where he was still bent on going ahead with a second plan, an even more fantastic plan. At the very mention of which Larissa, when she heard what Vasily was telling her, had burst out laughing. And laughed that night in the disco, again, remembering how she had laughed. A plan that involved the following: Nelly herself behind a counter, a small workshop in Marbella, specializing in jewelry repair. Where they would restore brilliance to cloudy diamonds—according to the sign outside—bluer now, redder, just like new. The real diamonds being, when the jewelry was returned to its owners, very far away, pried free of the little teeth that kept them in their settings and newly on sale in cities like Bombay or Tel Aviv. All due to the great skill of Vasily, who by then, two weeks later, three weeks, would have made stones in no way different from the originals. Twirling on their owners’ wrists, gleaming in tiaras and Cartier bracelets, emitting flashes of sparkling light whose falsity was indistinguishable to the eye. Their owners would never know: gems of the same water, the same size. “And me?” Larissa giggled loudly. “I’m the queen of Sheba and the empress of Russia!”
Idiot girl! It shocked me to hear her talking about Nelly like that. I pulled my head from her shoulder to look at her and question her, about to retort: Nelly? No way! But that gesture took me out of the range of her voice, and I had to draw closer to her eyes (spheres of golden crystal, so beautiful) and thus could see, as I watched her speak, wherein lay Nelly’s, your mother’s, mistake.
Not because their owners or the alert eye of some jeweler invited to a party aboard one of those immense yachts might somehow realize. Anchored well away from the coast, reaching into the cooler and colliding with the bejeweled wrist or forearm of Rania (of Jordan), this hypothetical jeweler would never shout, “Hold on just a second there, my queen! Those stones are fake!” Never, though neither his etiquette nor his good breeding would prevent it: a jeweler can be just as vulgar as anyone else. But to begin with, no jeweler would ever be invited aboard one of those yachts; a simple jeweler would never be rubbing elbows with Fannia or Theodora of Greece, his index finger pointing to a set of tourmalines on the arm of Mathilde of Belgium. And even if such eyes, by some miracle or improbable chance, were present there, they wouldn’t respond to the glint of Vasily’s diamonds with any suspicion, blinded as they’d be by the similar sparkle of all the other stones, their corneas enameled by the intense brilliance, light hammering hard and fast at their retinas’ rods and cones.
The danger would not appear there, did not lurk among the rods and cones. No, Nelly! (No, Petya!) The danger was this: how many chokers, how many rings, how many Van Cleef invisible settings—the stone seeming to float, trembling, upon a golden net—how many damaged pieces, how many stones blackened or made opaque by the years? How many? I shouted into Larissa’s ear. Very few. How many Saudis, how many Russians, how many Englishmen would drop off their Carrera y Carrera, Boucheron, or Bulgari at a nameless workshop? I could picture them going in, examining the pieces on display, and fleeing after one look at Batyk, his skinny arms crossed over his hollow chest, his sullen gaze.
Larissa had to be about my age: a franker nature and longer bones, a common sense her whole body exuded and a forthright intelligence that had made her laugh at their project. But Nelly had accumulated more sun in her cheeks, like a piece of Baltic amber which, closely scrutinized, held up to the eyes, contains little figures, inclusions, biographical accidents, flies trapped in the fresh resin, insects that should never have flown so close.
And there was I, in excellent spirits between those two suns, like a compatriot of Skywalker on Tatooine gazing upon the two luminous bodies in its sky, one orange, the other blue. Turning to face one and then the other (mentally). A sect of sun worshippers on that distant planet: which of the two would it revere? What would Sir James Frazer have gathered from their ancient lips? Which of the two suns, Petya? The question didn’t trouble me; I didn’t hesitate a second. I was more powerfully attracted by the sun that had shone in space for more years; my adoration was greater, and there could not be nor was there any battle within me between the sect that worshipped the young sun and the worshippers of the older sun.
Sixth Commentary
1
Indistinguishable from an original text at first sight, the words of the annotater, the Commentator. Which, if subjected to isotropic analysis by some prodigiously memorious savant of India and read from right to left, starting with the final word, would reveal no break whatsoever in their paragraphs, a clean crystal with no flaw to shatter the light. Knowing, nevertheless, having understood long ago that these are false and secondary texts, cunningly secreted around the grain or seed of a primary text, which he gradually surrounded with commentaries, building them up layer after layer from the prodigious decoction of his memory (that, yes). Cultivated pearls, muscovite micas, metamorphic crystals that shine, in the end, as if by a natural light and for which he had very beautiful texts at his disposal, other people’s gems that he had no qualms about breaking into pieces in the depths of his study.
A whole public library at his disposal. And not by chance did he take refuge in a library, in the depths of its labyrinthine corridors, a room with a fake sign saying Do Not Enter or Staff Only where he examined those fragments or bits of text in satisfaction. A treasure, the rich copy of precious stones that could reach us and be admired only thus, truncated and inserted into his commentaries. Knowing that he would give them the full brilliance of the book they were torn from, so that entering into his work our eyes wouldn’t see a single break in the light: an equivalent reaction coefficient set in an exquisite mounting, that was his aim. But to come upon one of these fragments of Baudelaire (page 133) or Maeterlinck (page 189) is to turn off a dirt road, a bumpy backwoods lane, and go speeding along the ideal asphalt of a superhighway. However bad this comparison or commentary of mine may be. Here’s a better one: like Han Solo’s ship after someone has taken a hand to it outside an intergalactic bar and suddenly, with a low hum, it shoots off effortlessly into space.
Always flowing better in those passages, but then back again to the feigned taciturnity, the mania for the right word, the con job of the precise adjective. Without ever a real metaphor or image. The Writer says of Flaubert that he never finds a good image in his work (nor have I). Only that dogged struggle with the text, the tireless polishing that finally dries it out, or perhaps it’s not dried out but oiled to the maximum degree, to a high sheen, with a look of premeditation about it. Abstract gestures, paper frenzies, never a pair of hands raised to the breast in an outburst of true emotion, as when the Writer confesses to us that he has wept, that his hero, an alter ego of the Writer, Søren K., has wept.
2
The same astonished reaction from your father to the answer you gave him out by the pool one evening when I was watching the two of you from above, not knowing that you were talking about me. He asked you in amazement: Where? On hearing you muse over the reasons why no man can vanquish terrestrial gravity, why gravity cannot be annulled. “So much theory, such profound knowledge: from where?” he inquired. And you answered: “Do not be amazed by my learning, Papa, for I am receiving my education from a person who is the very incarnation of the intellect.” And he raised his eyes then and tried to catch a glimpse of me from below, intrigued by these words: this young man, this foreigner, the incarnation of the intellect?
My turn to be astonished now, for the man I’d taken at first for a bodyguard (and with that flimsy build, not a very good one) had arrived two months before I did and was also in hiding. As I told you, as I’ve already roundly denou
nced: it was from him, from Batyk, that the idea of swindling the two from Saint Petersburg had come. And it was Batyk who had brought word that Kirpich and Raketa had been freed.
(Pause.)
But was he a scientist, too: that kind of scientist? Yes, no more and no less than a very gifted researcher, someone who had some knowledge of the subject to bring to bear and who’d provided indispensable help in the production of the first diamonds. Which Vasily had been synthesizing for years without ever achieving gem quality, always frustrated by the slow rate of growth, until one day, with a softer gradient and some refinement of the metallic solvent: larger and better diamonds than anyone else, ever, in the whole world. It wasn’t one of those scientists in the West in their state-of-the-art air-conditioned labs with machines in the hall that dispense chocolate and cookies, no! He alone! In the deepest depths and from the deepest depths!
Confident from Petya’s reply about my physics classes that I would understand (as indeed I did) the arduous explanation of his method for manufacturing diamonds, the procedure he first put into practice one winter morning. How he grew them in a Feielson press, following the advice of Batyk—he, too, an exceptional physicist (I wrinkled my brow again here, Petya, disbelieving). The corrections and improvements made to the design of the growth chamber, the—fabulous!—diminution in size, which made the press virtually portable, when taken apart into sections.
And the afternoon when the petals of the growth chamber opened and through the cut they’d made in the matte surface of the sleeve they saw it sparkling, they peered inside and glimpsed in amazement: a diamond, an intensely pink diamond. And understood that they were the first. Color diamonds, synthetic color diamonds such as no one else in all the universe (or perhaps someone, in some far corner of the universe: some minor god, Petya, busy at this vulgar task) had created. Large and blue, round and red, translucent.
“And you,” he turned, in the same indulgent tone he’d been using when his cell phone interrupted us—“you. Such intelligence, a man who can explain Bohm’s paradox of the fish to me, a scientist, with your fluency in Spanish …”
Should I have interrupted him, Petya, to explain, to clarify that Spanish was my native tongue?
“Of course it’s going to be easy for you, though for me the situation has become untenable, a dead end, no way out.”
Meaning: no way out for the diamonds. All the times he’d gone to those cities and stood before the windows of Böhmer and Van Cleef & Arpels without daring to go in. His silhouette reflected on the glass as in that extraordinarily sweet passage by the Writer when Odette de Crécy (the fragility of her arching brows, her lovely dark eyes) breakfasts at Tiffany’s, feasting on the sparkle of the jewels on display at Fifth and Fifty-seventh, dreaming of all that money, the bracelets and pendants she’d buy if she were rich.
And then immediately, in terror: what kept me there, Petya, what kept me there, between your father’s ineptitude and Batyk’s incredible ill will? Your mother? Her shoulders? The money they’d told me I’d carry off with me some day in the end, before leaving Russia, that amazing, corrupt country, and the Russians, my amazing, corrupt friends?
3
He rolled this ruse or clumsy deception toward me, your father, like a tumblebug pushing its sphere of dung, like an Amazonian ant with its bubble of wet clay, his iris transfigured, enlarged by excitement, as he scanned my face, waiting for a reaction of understanding or consent to his crude proposal. Only one possible reading here: deception, a trap from which I would never be able to extricate my head and that I would lament for many winters to come, waking up freezing in fifth-rate hotels, wondering, how could I? How could I have accepted his commission that day and fallen into his little trap, descending irremediably, stumbling and bumping into every protrusion all the way down to this hotel room?
A decision that the whole of my life wouldn’t give me sufficient time to regret. That would reach into and permeate each and every one of my future days. And I told him: no.
Of course not. Naturally.
Never would I agree to become the seller of your stones, the corrector, in essence, of your ineptitude, Vasily (thus, in those words).
Ineptitude I’d never heard of a few months ago and to which I have no connection or solid link. Why would I go anywhere near it now? Why would I turn off onto this branch of fate along which I’d have to scurry forever, hiding, giving the slip, a police sketch of my face in every branch of Graff, printed on paper watermarked with the forty-eight facets of a gem?
Who would decide, who on earth would make a plan to swindle the mafia? In what universe did they think they were living? In a membrane universe, whose porous borders would allow them through, loaded down with the millions, and leave Kirpich and Raketa behind on the other side, filtered out as undesirables? Incapable—or so they thought—of reaching them, of passing through the filter? But no: Kirpich and Raketa had sharpened their wits. They, too, had purchased beautiful shirts made of expensive fabrics, refined their manners, learned to move with subtlety, passing through the most minute pores of the West. And if seen, for example, in a hotel lobby speciously studying an airline schedule, they’d never be taken for killers, for individuals with automatic weapons tucked in their breast pockets. Cleanly erased, no longer visible on their faces, the suffering, the grimaces of pain of the frail old men they’d tortured, the tears of the shopgirls whose diminutive kiosks they’d entered and whose friends they’d pretended to be, forcing them to converse for hours and then to make room on their narrow straw mattresses, the money the girls—almost willingly!—gave them bulging in their pockets.
What had made them believe, what had given them the idea, how had they imagined that I could run off to some jeweler pretending to be a young African, an excombatant in one of those conflicts in Africa, pockets full of diamonds from Namibia or Zimbabwe? When it went without saying that I’d be thrown in jail in a heartbeat, no matter how fluently I spoke Spanish. And then no one, never. I’d be abandoned. Nelly wouldn’t come to see me on Wednesdays, say, or Thursdays, in her red dress. Putting her hand on the glass and forming an I love you with her lips. I love you? Yeah, right. (Though she wouldn’t do even that.) On the other hand, I’d be learning all sorts of Arabic words with my new friends from Meknes (in Morocco): hatred, pain, loneliness, and idiot (that’s the one I’d really need). I’d shuffle along in line, holding my dish of soup at belly level and seeing reflected in it, as in a mirror of ink, the luxurious life of 4x4 jeeps they’d still be leading outside, laughing at me, at how stupid I’d been. Had they hired me only for this? The tutoring no more than a pretext?
Lying to me, moreover, during their visits: claiming they were in an identical state of despair, they, too. Though I’d see it all: more money, inexplicably; more jewels, more chokers around her neck, no reduction in Vasily’s production levels, and had they somehow come up with a way of selling them, reached some sort of arrangement with the local mafia? Lying to me in their letters, too: “Dear Psellus, we still haven’t been able to sell anything. I know we owe you (six months’ salary? Six months, Petya!), but for now we can do nothing.” And three more paragraphs of lies. Along the lines of: “We think of you always and if you could only see how well Petya is speaking Spanish now!” (in closing). Things like that, pure falsehood on your mother’s lips, as if Batyk had been speaking through her mouth that day of the interview and from the pages of her letters, always.
And there was this, too, Petya: I couldn’t condemn them, I felt sorry for Kirpich and Raketa. Whom I may well have seen or met in that city, Saint Petersburg, where I, too, once lived. Poor Kirpich and Raketa! Happily going home to their apartments on Pionerskaya or Vasiliostrovskaya, home to their wives, stroking the blond heads of their children, telling themselves before going to bed as I had told myself for many nights: “a good business, this!” Imagining, as I had imagined after a successful sale, the things they would buy with the money: beautiful thick gold chains (though I would never have imagined
anything like that), furs for their wives, Nintendos for their children, houses with swimming pools in the South. All the things that Vasily, your father, had bought. All of them imagined with precisely the same bad taste by those gangsters in Saint Petersburg. And the awakening, Petya, the brutal awakening: how they tried to run away in Amsterdam, the two years they’d had to spend in prison, minting traffic lights and finishing them off by hand, while imagining, knowing, with chilling precision, how they would exact their revenge.
I could stop them, their entry into my room. Explain: I understand you, gentlemen. You were foully deceived; it isn’t something I approve of. And me, too, at some point, merchandise in poor condition, a swindle like that. Not comparable, of course, with what was done to you: that moment when I took off my rucksack, loosened its straps, and said: You’ll see, gentlemen, a quality such as you’ve never seen before—only to see nothing, to find nothing in there! But on very rare occasions, the times when, like everyone else in Russia, in 1991, 1992, those years, I sold things, a youthful dilettante, buying a pair of boots in Moscow and selling them in Saint Petersburg, right there in the train station, the difference in price covering the cost of the train ticket. Little things like that, Petya. So now just imagine, see them unfolding the black cloths, the little packets of diamonds, smug as thieves, to discover, with a cry of pain, with a wild beast’s howl, that the stones were counterfeit!
4
Remember how I told you about that movie, The Matrix: how incredible that the Writer could have seen, dozens of years before, the chain of fists, the levitating men, miraculously sustained in the air? Though we are not going to go to the movies; the movies are bad. Consider, for example, the effect that Hollywood has had on your parents (their unbearable bad taste), as well as the fear that terrible scene of the beating in the metro installed in my soul and in my head. Imagining during the nights when I was piously bent over my desk—studying my notes in preparation for our class—your father’s screams of pain and your mother’s cries for help as she ran through the house seeking refuge. While I covered my ears, pretending not to hear. The door of my room wide open to say: me? No sirs, nothing to do with any of that. Come in, I’m the boy’s tutor, just here preparing some classes, reading.
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