Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  So when I saw the oryx, I was not, mentally, all the way online. What I was thinking about was a poem by John Donne. It’s the poem that Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project, cited when asked why he’d chosen the name Trinity for his nuclear test site, even though (as Oppenheimer himself noted) the poem has nothing to do with the Trinity.

  It’s a poem about traveling west. “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” finds Donne on what he believes to be his deathbed, surrounded by doctors, and because it’s the early seventeenth century, Donne starts imagining the doctors as “cosmographers” and himself as a map, the sort of map an explorer might make, filling in the world’s blanks:

  Whilst my physicians by their love are grown

  Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie

  Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown

  That this is my south-west discovery,

  Per fretum febris, by these straits to die.

  Per fretum febris: by the wasting away of a fever. That was Ferdinand Magellan’s cause of death, when he died while trying to sail around the earth. (He really died while trying to convert the Philippines to Christianity by force, but that was a subcomponent of the larger expedition.) Magellan had discovered the strait that made passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific possible; Donne is reimagining this as the passage between life and death. To go west is to die, and yet

  I joy, that in these straits I see my west;

  For, though their currents yield return to none,

  What shall my west hurt me? As west and east

  In all flat maps (and I am one) are one,

  So death doth touch the resurrection.

  Travel far enough west, on a map, and you come out on the other side, in the east. In the same way, Donne says, if you travel into death, you emerge into resurrection. History’s unreturnable current moves one way, but creation is a sphere, not a plane, so nothing is really final, nothing is lost.

  Then I saw the oryx. They made no sense there. They made the opposite of sense. This isn’t a generic desert landscape. You would recognize these ridges, these grasses, this violet-gray light as New Mexico in a photo from the moon. In the same way, the oryx are unmistakably from where they’re from. The image didn’t fit. They had nothing to do with the atom bomb, nothing to do with war, nothing to do with anything I’d come to see.

  And yet. What shall my west hurt me? They were beautiful.

  I watched them, as we drove away on the straight road out of Trinity, until they disappeared behind the lavender curve of the world.

  The Little Gray Wolf Will Come

  A talking cat lives outside his door. Every night, after his mother puts him to bed, it comes. If he opens his eyes he can almost catch its shadow, pacing along the gap where the light shines in through the door. The light is magical, he thinks; it holds enchanted things. He thinks of the cat, and happiness, and bread sprinkled with sugar.

  He lives, by day, among the trees in the yard, with the other boys from the kommunalka. Climbing, fighting, catching insects, waging wars. His family shares a communal apartment with four others. In this part of Moscow, that makes them lucky, he knows: The flat upstairs holds twelve. Fifty people under one roof. It is 1952 and there are no social classes in the workers’ paradise, but his father is a machine-tool adjuster. Families who live in Maryina Roshcha are not well-off. Bandits operate in the area; at night, the lights are dim.

  His family, the Norsteins, are Jewish. The word doesn’t mean much to him, but sometimes old women spit and call him Christ killer, and sometimes his friends do the same. One day after class, his drawing teacher pulls him aside and tells him not to come back. He cries when this happens, because he loves art more than anything. He does not understand that Stalin is stoking anti-Semitism for political purposes. He only feels that the mood of the world shifts unpredictably, and sometimes the days are bad.

  He knows who Stalin is because he sees his picture on the street. Joseph Vissarionovich says there will be no bread tomorrow. Comrade Joseph, who won us the war. He knows what the war was because he remembers it, a little, the fear and the fireworks and the close-typed lists of the dead. The war is why his aunt Bella came home alone and pregnant, after serving with the air force on the front. He was very small then. When the baby died, Aunt Bella gave him her milk. There was so little other food, so little of anything. “Auntie, Auntie,” he would call across the yard. “Give me some milk!” The war is why the nights are still so dark, why the streetlamps are dull and the hallway bulb dimmer than the paraffin stove, barely as bright as a candle.

  He doesn’t mind the dark. It, too, is magical. When the moon is out he watches the wind sweep the leaves from the ground, like a big arm scooping itself up. He listens to the music playing somewhere, the accordion always sighing out the same song, the tango “Weary Sun.” After bedtime the dark belongs to the little gray wolf, who, according to the lullaby his mother sings, will take him away if he sleeps too close to the bed’s edge, steal him away and hide him in the woods, under the willow root. The wolf is absolutely real to him. Like the cat, it lives just past the boundary of what he normally sees and hears, in the other realm that surrounds his everyday life.

  A bad day: His father is fired. Stalin is moving against the Jews, and the consequences reach all the way down to the machine shop. He feels the tension, sees the worried lines on his parents’ faces. Then an hour comes when the world pulls back in thrilling disbelief: Stalin is dead. Later, adults tell him about the transports that the dictator had prepared to carry the Jews to Siberia.

  Wood smoke and wax smoke. Potatoes rattling in a pan. Granny Varya, whose son spies for the government. Climbing the poplars, higher than the buildings, climbing hair-raisingly high.

  Later, when he is an old man, he will marvel at these memories. His childhood, when the days seemed so long.

  And leafing now and then through a book about Siberia: Well, well, Joseph Vissarionovich; but here I am.

  * * *

  Well. Here he is, an old man, onstage at the Dom Kino. Cinephiles of Moscow, your evening’s entertainment: Yuri Norstein, seventy-four, white bearded, stout, small, urbane, and mischievous. Sitting in front of a pale gold curtain, in a rumpled shirt, with a bump on his nose the size of a pistachio shell. Considered by many a great, if tragically self-defeating, Russian artist. Considered by many the finest animator in the world.

  It is 2016. He did not move to Moscow last week; he knows what people say about him. They say he sabotaged his own career at what should have been its peak. They say he has not released a new film in thirty-seven years. As a young man, he made Hedgehog in the Fog, a movie every Russian child knows by heart, and then Tale of Tales, which international juries have more than once named the greatest animated picture ever made. Then, people say, he threw it all away to chase an unattainable ideal, an animated adaptation of Gogol’s short story “The Overcoat” that he has toiled at for nearly four decades and never been able to finish. He takes questions at events like this, and the sequence is always the same. First a few respectful queries about his past work, his process, his inspirations. Then, when some brink of nerve has been crossed: When will you finish The Overcoat? Do you think you ever will?

  Still: a good crowd tonight for his lecture. In the vestibule outside the hall, his assistant, Tania, has set up the usual table, selling postcards and picture books and refrigerator magnets. The faces of his most beloved characters look out from the racks, in tiny dozens; the same faces he’ll project, enormous, onto the screen behind him while he speaks. The little gray wolf. The poet’s cat. The hedgehog, the owl, the bull that turns the jump rope. Some people might find it strange to see their dreams living outside their heads. For him it is the other way around: The moments are rare when he is not surrounded by dreams.

  He is introduced. Applauded. He takes out a flask of cognac, holds it up for the audience. Drinks. “I hope we will have a very serious discussion tonight.” Laughter. On the screen he project
s an image of himself, sitting beside his pet. “The two people in this photograph,” he announces, “are both dogs.”

  He turns his sad, merry eyes over the crowd. He has given this talk, and many talks like it, many times before. He has to give talks because he has to pay his rent. In 2005 he collected his lectures on the art of animation into a kind of memoir, Snow on the Grass; it sold so well he ran out of copies for Tania to stock at the table. His charm onstage is casual, but he knows how to hold an audience. He is romantic: He believes that imagination, embodied in art, offers an escape from what is degraded and alienating in a society that wants to make us machines. But he is also a clown: He likes to shock people, he knows how to make them laugh. He has hidden a bottle of beer in the lectern. He’ll reveal it when the cognac runs out.

  He speaks of the great paintings, how they move when he looks at them. Here, consider Kandinsky: The lines go up and down like pistons, while the circles float like soap bubbles. Michelangelo’s bust of Brutus: electrifying, how it changes from different sides. He has never been to the Accademia in Florence, but in his mind he sees it in three dimensions, so clearly it makes his heart race.

  He shows off his grandson’s drawings of a medieval battle, thickets of arrows plunging toward stick-figure armies. Such energy, such use of white space! Technical perfection is not the highest aim of art; art needs human vitality, which is why paintings by children can be riveting and why animation done with computers makes him feel physically sick. Small imperfections, which make a work human, make it beautiful. “If my hands shake,” he says as he talks about this, “it is not because I am an alcoholic. It’s because I’m honest!”

  He speaks of his own work. Wolf and hedgehog, heron and crane. Here is the image of the infant at the breast that appeared in Tale of Tales. Here is a photograph of his wife, Francheska—his most important collaborator, the art director for his films—in a similar pose, breast-feeding their son, Borya. (Can it really have been fifty years ago? It was: in the late 1960s.) He remembers how furious she was when he included the photo in his memoir. But he loves it so much; and then, he and Francheska have been married a long time, and they put up with each other, which is to say, she puts up with him. He tells the story onstage, and her long-ago anger tickles him. He laughs.

  He talks freely about The Overcoat. Why not? The story—it concerns a poor clerk in St. Petersburg who has to save up for a new coat, only to have it stolen as soon as he acquires it—is one of the foundational works of Russian literature, as important, he says, as a book of the Bible. He says nothing about the film’s state of completion, but he plays clips, as he sometimes does, from the scenes he’s finished so far, and wonder ruffles the crowd.

  He doesn’t treat it as an unfinished project. He speaks of it as something long accomplished, widely known. Perhaps this is backward, describing the making of a film that technically does not yet exist. But he cares about this work, which has consumed half his life. He cares about how it is received. If the film were a real overcoat, you could see light shining through its holes. But he knows what he has, and he knows what it has cost him. And what artist does not wish to be praised?

  From the stage, he looks out at the old movie palace. High ceilings, faded velvet, dusty light. A church of cinema: suitable for such revelations.

  * * *

  A church. That is where they send him to work in 1961, when he finishes animation school. Or not a church, precisely. It has stone walls and a bell tower, a steeple and onion domes; it is set back from the street behind a black iron gate. But the bureaucrats seized it from the priests years ago and, exercising their own power of transubstantiation, made it into something else. Now it is a puppet workshop that only happens to look like a church: in the same way that Eucharist blood once happened to taste like wine.

  He works, posing puppets, for Soyuzmultfilm, the Soviet state animation studio. He doesn’t like the work; he would rather be doing something else. He is young, headstrong, frustrated. The studio’s films embarrass him. Puerile Disney knockoffs, whitewashed for communist children.

  Listen, animation is not serious art. Not really! His dream, since he was a little boy in drawing class, has been to become a painter. But the state permits artistic careers only to those who have successfully finished art school, and when he tried that, all he managed to do was fail the entrance exam. This, however, he did very successfully: He failed it four times. He wound up in a furniture factory, pounding nails into packing crates. There was one way out: a two-year training course in animation. He thought it might offer a roundabout path to art school. It didn’t. But what was he supposed to do, stay at the factory and get sawdust up his nose? What a waste of time!

  If you believe in progress and the revolutionary logic of history, which treats time as a straight line, then he will never be an artist, in the same way that the church is no longer a church. The church has been made into a mere building, a part of the neighborhood: the snow and the trash cans, crooked streets and barking dogs. He has been made into an animation assistant. But he is not sure he sees much reason to believe in progress. And he has never been sure that time is a straight line.

  He went to the Pushkin Museum not long ago with his mother, to see the old master paintings the Red Army rescued from Germany after the war. The awe he felt in those rooms! A cloak painted so that you could feel the pull of its rippling in the wind. A staff painted so that you saw clearly how its angle would change as the bearer put weight on it. This, he felt, was what art should be: not entertainment, not instruction, but something that spoke to the highest possibilities of the human spirit. People say that now, with Khrushchev having succeeded Stalin, Soviet artists are finally free to express themselves. But animation directors are so cautious! He yearns to create work worthy of Leonardo, of Goya, yet he spends his days tweaking the joints of a puppet shaped like a ewe.

  He isn’t shy about sharing his opinions. Animators, like many Soviet workers, are strictly divided into ranks. It is true that within the relatively relaxed, creative environs of Soyuzmultfilm a certain irony tinges the observation of this hierarchy. Good morning, Animator Class 1, how are you today? About the same, Director Class 3, only I wish I slept better. Still, he speaks his mind impetuously enough that he annoys his superiors. Norstein! There is one well-known director, old Ivan Ivanov-Vano, who spots his potential and tries to help him. But Norstein sees his peers moving ahead of him, watches as his classmates from the training course are given their own films to direct. And he bristles, and he shifts a hoof two inches, and he sighs.

  It isn’t a matter of capability; he can do things they can’t. He can do things no one has thought of. One day, on a film being made with cutouts—essentially two-dimensional puppets, drawings with movable limbs—he startles his colleagues by gathering all the cutouts and tearing the hinges out of their joints. Why rely on hinges when he can make them move more naturally as loose collections of shapes? Sometimes he senses a possibility in this, a faint stirring of potential. He works on one film, My Green Crocodile, a lyrical, melancholy fantasy about a crocodile who falls in love with a cow, which makes audiences gasp with delight. But the experience is annoying, because the film is made with puppets, and puppet animation is inescapably limiting. Why go to so much trouble to emulate realistic physical space, he thinks, when if animation offers anything, it’s the freedom to create any sort of space you can dream up?

  At the studio he meets a young designer. She is dark, quiet, careful, and serious, all things that he is not. He sees immediately that she is a better painter than he is, a more skillful illustrator. Francheska Yarbusova: a film student, helping out at Soyuzmultfilm in the evenings. She had wanted to work on live-action movies, but her adviser convinced her that a woman would never be able to order men around on a set; she should try animation, where the men are imaginary. He is the son of a machine-tool adjuster; she is the daughter of a famous psychologist who made important contributions to the study of the human eye. He is irascible, she
is implacable. Their arguments are ferocious. Still, he thinks: Something good may come from this job after all.

  It’s a good joke, him working where he works. As a boy, he was banned from drawing class because he was a Jew. Now he spends his days making children’s cartoons under a dome built for Christian murals. Saints and their serious faces, angels with fiery wings.

  * * *

  In his studio the dried flowers rustle like birds’ wings. He pads, in house slippers and cargo shorts, through the warren of dark rooms, holding a white teacup: Lipton Yellow Label, splash of milk. Kuzya, the dog, snores by the door. From outside, in the park, he hears birds singing. It occurs to him that Kuzya, who is deaf, can’t hear them, and he feels a twinge of pity: What would a life without birdsong be like?

  He loves the park, with its soft light, its little ducks and trees. Every morning when the pond is not frozen solid, he jumps in and goes for a swim. “Only not,” he sometimes boasts, “in the summer. The water is too hot!”

  Now, in 2016, it is spring, and Moscow is noisy with construction. Jackhammers ripping up sidewalks; cranes tipping themselves over buildings like giraffes above watering holes. He hates what Putin is doing to the city. The old Moscow had an organic order to it, like a beehive: church, square, shops, neighborhood, church, square, shops, neighborhood, and again, in simple, untroubled succession. Now everything is haphazard. Every rooftop suddenly needs a café. Skyscrapers shoot up, senseless clumps of them, as though rubles were drifting over the city like dandelion fuzz and apartment towers sprouted wherever they took root. Construction contracts make Putin’s cronies rich. Boutiques keep the populace docile. It makes him shake with rage. Many Muscovites keep dachas, country houses within easy reach of the city; his was once forty-five kilometers from the nearest urban development, but the new Moscow threatens to swallow it up. “I keep telling Francheska, ‘I’m going to write to these idiots, and I’m going to call them out,’” he says. “I know they could say, ‘You’re being offensive,’ but I’ll say, ‘You’re offensive!’ I’m going to do it!”