Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  – V. I. Lenin

  1. For What, Actually?

  They said that he wasn’t serious, just chasing after sensations. As I left, I looked at him and thought that it was the other way around: he’s very serious, because he seriously loves what is sensational. This was his position:

  “Think about it: what is a sensation? Sensus is feeling, a sensation shakes your entire core with feeling. What is so bad about that, if a person loves being shaken up? Life moves along soberly, people are occupied with mundane things. Then one day a person looks up and sees that life is moving along soberly and people are occupied with mundane things. So now what? What is the point of our efforts? Food? New clothes? A chance to travel? Travel to where? You can’t out-distance old age, and everything that is given to you to see in this life, you’ll eventually see from the window of a train or maybe from the window of a spaceship. For God’s sake, we won’t even have spaceships unless we start building them. When will that be? In the meantime we wait, while life slowly dribbles out, like wine from a leaking leather pouch.”

  When they told him to leave, he asked me:

  “Are you sure that archeology is only important for the history of material culture? Why study this material culture to begin with?”

  “This is why you are being fired,” I said. “If you would dig deeper…”

  “No, my dear teacher, that’s not why they are firing me. They are firing me precisely because I want to dig deeper. To me, digging deeper is the task of archeology.”

  “Bad pun.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s not a pun. You are all just pretending. Insofar as archeology needs funds, you pretend that you are studying cultures of the past in order to help those of the present. But how does it help? Maybe you’ll find a few decorative pieces, and yet another skull, at which the smart ninth graders on a museum field trip will gawk, although the really smart ones will spend their time gawking at the girls in the excursion next to theirs.”

  “They’re right to fire you.”

  “Of course they’re right. They’re trying to remove the witness to the crime.”

  “What crime? Think about what you are saying!”

  “Exactly – I am saying what I think. People don’t like it. Listen to me! Why did you get into archeology? You wanted to dig deeper and find something sensational. Am I not right? You were still a child then, a treasure-hunter, a romantic. Of course the adults around you, the unhappy ones who in an entire lifetime never came close to digging up Tutankhamun’s faded little coffin, were quick to explain to you that archeology is very difficult work, not just chasing after something sensational. But is that really so obvious? What if archeology is hunting for the sensational, and this is its very essence? The greatest finds of archeology have helped humankind understand itself. Isn’t that true? Is there anything more sensational than self-understanding? Gradually you grew up, and our monkey’s instinct for imitation forced you to disavow your own thoughts. Yes, archeology is very difficult work! Yet what is this work for, if it does not lead to sensational finds, the kind that make our entire being tremble and shake with the feeling that humankind has opened its eyes and stared at its own face?

  “I still think you talk too much,” I warned.

  “Fine, sign my dismissal,” he said. “You’re chasing the only poet out of your guild of antique junk dealers.”

  They fired him. He was always a master of creating sensations. Perhaps most absurd is the fact that we let him go, and now we are preparing for an expedition based on his materials.

  I hope that was the last sensation. We’ve had enough. Archeology is simply a science that is necessary for... for what, actually?

  2. Such Was His Logic

  He was a strange guy. There was always a vague smile flickering across his face. Nobody could understand what exactly he wanted out of archeology – or, for that matter, out of life.

  One night, as the expedition sat around a campfire, he came out and said, “Salut alaikum.”1 At the time, nobody guessed that this was not just an attempt at being fashionably witty, it was the formula of his personality. He greeted the world around him through a strange mixture of modern and ancient salutations.

  Every person is in some ways two people. We all know this. For the most part, our double self lives peacefully and presents only one side to the outside world. The world judges us by this side. The other side lies in wait, to appear only when the time is right, in extraordinary circumstances. Then it is said that so-and-so turned out to be a hero, or, on the contrary, a real villain. What does this mean? Nothing more than the fact that the hidden side was able to adapt better, or, on the contrary, could not adapt, to a given set of unusual conditions. Under ordinary circumstances, we would see the other side, the person we see under conditions that we like to call “normal.” But are our conditions ever really normal?

  Let’s say I go to work every day to a job that I am thoroughly sick of, but I know how I behave at that job. If you gave me a job that I love, would I behave differently? We don’t know. It’s always assumed – give a person something he or she likes to do, and everything will be fine. In fact, this is just where it starts to get the most complicated. One person will joyfully immerse himself in a beloved occupation and not ask for anything more in life. Another will experience his favorite occupation solely as a means for getting ahead and gaining the advantage over others. A third will be frightened by the freedom and spiritual space that opens up when one does what one loves, and this person will never crawl out of his boring but comfortable shell. Instead, he will secretly envy the bold ones, rejoice when they fail, and spend his whole life obstructing their way.

  Perhaps the most complicated case is when a person searches long and hard for what inspires him the most – and suddenly he stumbles upon it and is blinded by the brightness. If you let a nightingale out of its cage, it flies straight up and then falls down dead, having swallowed too much of the sky. If you let it fly around a room first, this can be avoided. Perhaps.

  I was probably the only one among all of us who guessed what was going on with him. I understood that he belonged precisely to the fourth case. Therefore his two sides did not coexist in harmony, but were constantly at war with each other. You could see it in everything he did. He would be telling us crazy, hilarious stories, everyone would be rolling with laughter, and his eyes would crinkle merrily, but the rest of his face looked long and sad. One lovely morning, when you could just barely hear the knocking of a generator motor in the distance along with the lowing of oxen behind the mud walls of the village, I saw him coming toward me and smiling with the rest of world. But when he came closer, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

  He was interested in the problem of the devil. Are you surprised? Naturally, he did not mean the devil invoked by mystics and religion, but the real devil. He was convinced that there actually was such a thing – that there was something real that provided the motive for all legends, folk tales, stories, and countless works of art. Like all modern people, he understood that the devil is just a personification of the force of evil; that is, of all those forces, both natural and manmade, that we can’t figure out and that we find easier to ascribe to an imaginary demon. In that case, however, why do we depict the devil as something non-human, whereas God looks human? Evidently, because God is an ideal person, that is, a person who brings the world only good, whereas the devil is something harmful, and therefore must be depicted as some kind of monstrous, inhumane creature. But if that is so, and “God” is conceptualized as an ideal human – that is, as the ideal of a real creature – then we should be able to conceptualize a monstrous real creature, onto which we have projected all our unhappiness. This was his logic.

  3. He Was Working As a Research Assistant

  He was dumped from our expedition for good reason, when after working for free for a month, eating only out of our community rations, he announced his crazy idea. Basically, he was fired because this idea of his, once he had vo
iced it, acquired a strange attractive power. Something devilish started to happen. Here we were, devoutly modern young people, for whom even Hemingway was starting to seem old-fashioned, suddenly obsessed not only with ancient grave mounds, but with ancient texts in which we tried to find the real, actually existing prototype for the image of ungodly horror. Names like Swedenborg and Jakob Boehme2 came up in conversations over boiled green tea and cans of beef stew. At first, I tolerated the half-joking talk of visionaries, basilisks, newts, and dragons. Who doesn’t like fairy tales? Archeology needs whimsicality just as much as math. Fantasy cleanses the mind, among other things. Let them have fun, I thought, take a break from logic. But when things began to get out of hand – when Valya Medvedeva, a nice, calm girl, announced that we should look for prototypes of the devil in fossils of prehistoric animals, and Pasha Bidenko countered that our concept of the devil derives from a deep knowledge of human nature – I decided to put an end to it.

  “Look, my friend,” I told him. “Why don’t you leave us in peace and go your own way.”

  He went his own way just as he had arrived. Smiling vaguely, he left the campfire, leaving a whiff of insanity and incomprehensible longing in his wake.

  The dig continued successfully. We found traces of an advanced material culture. We came across a market square, ancient trading stalls, weapons. We loaded boxes of artifacts, numbered and wrapped in tissue paper, to be transported back by all-terrain vehicles. When the cold season arrived, our expedition wrapped up its work in the field and returned to Moscow to systematically sort through and describe what had been found.

  We ran into him in the Academy of Science’s Institute of Archeology. He was working as a research associate.

  4. It’s Demagogy!

  How he managed to wheedle his way in remained a mystery, but the fact remained: this man, who had no academic degrees, no published articles, not even any serious training, was already working as a scientific research associate at the Institute by the time we returned. It was not at all clear how he’d managed to get this position. In fact, it seemed suspicious. Rumors circulated. Opinions were divided. The rumors became more incredible. Some decided that he was a member of a secret sect, while others assumed he was an auditor sent from the Department Against the Misappropriation of Socialist Property. Only I knew the improbable truth.

  The personnel manager, whom no one had ever seen laugh (although he occasionally smiled politely), accosted me while doubled over with silent laughter, wiping away tears:

  “He’s hilarious!”

  “Who?”

  “That carpet clown. Before he worked here, he must have been in the circus!”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “How can you not laugh? Look at the photo he brought over to human resources.”

  It was the usual 4.5x6 photo, except his face was covered in paint. I nearly choked.

  “Don’t worry, Vladimir Andreyevich,” said the manager, “later he brought a real photo. I just kept this one for fun.”

  “Photos are not the issue! I’m going straight to the director. You’re turning science into some kind of circus.”

  “That’s exactly what it is, a circus, Vladimir Andreyevich. And nothing will come of going to the director, because he has already approved the hire.” He said something else, but I didn’t listen.

  My conversation with the director went like this:

  “I know, Vladimir Andreyevich, I know. Have a sip of water…”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tell me, Vladimir Andreyevich, in your opinion, is it possible for, say, a Soviet deputy to be a clown?

  “I don’t know. In my view, that seems ridiculous.

  “Bravo. We have the same opinion.”

  “Why?”

  “I answered his question exactly as you just did. Literally in the same words. And he said, ‘A clown is an artist, and it is quite possible for an artist to become a people’s representative. It begs the question, why can’t a clown become a scientist?’ Do you object, Vladimir Andreyevich?”

  “Yes. It’s demagoguery.”

  “Then read this. Sit down. It’s sixteen pages long.”

  5. Secrets

  It was an article that conveyed the following in everyday, non-scientific language:

  Among the Italian masters who took part in the construction of the Moscow Kremlin, the most well-known was Aristotele Fioravanti. As a result, the common assumption is that he was the main architect. However, it turns out that the person who designed the most important parts of the Kremlin – the towers and the walls – has been nearly forgotten. There are only two structures like this in all of Europe, in Moscow and in Milan. At the time, they looked like twins. The unique peaked turrets on the Moscow towers were constructed much later. The name of the unknown architect is inscribed on the inside wall of the Spassky Tower: “Pietro Antonio Solari of Milan.”

  None of this was entirely new. Perhaps it’s true that until now, nobody had specifically enumerated the parts designed by Pietro Antonio, so his fundamental contributions to the construction of the Kremlin had not been fully acknowledged. One could use this information and accentuate it more in various brochures. The interesting part was still to come… The article went on to show that Pietro Antonio Solari was a scion of the Milanese Solari family, whose members were all artists, engineers, and so forth. Since all of Milan’s artists would sooner or later meet while working at the court of Lodovico il Moro, uncle of the sickly duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, and since for some reason the entire Solari family left Milan in 1490 – that is, the year Pietro Antonio arrived in Moscow – and since Christoforo Solari was a student of Leonardo da Vinci’s (this is now officially acknowledged), and since at that time Leonardo da Vinci himself was building the Milan castle, it becomes clear why the Moscow emissaries invited the unknown Pietro Antonio to build their most important structure and did not hand the construction of the Kremlin over to the internationally famous Fioravanti. Our official histories have conveniently forgotten Pietro Antonio, because who wants to admit that Moscow’s great Kremlin, “the fourth Rome,” was built by some second-rate engineer? Instead, let’s celebrate Aristotele Fioravanti! But in fact it turned out that by inviting Solari, they were actually inviting Leonardo himself, one of the most enigmatic figures in history. For instance, did you know that the first map of America that actually depicts “America” as a separate continent surrounded by ocean was found in the papers of Leonardo da Vinci? So what, you ask? So, it means that Leonardo’s map was made before Magellan’s, who was the first to confirm with his own eyes that America was a separate continent, and not the other side of India, as Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci had thought.

  I hardly noticed the degree to which I got sucked in by this clown’s arguments.

  According to him, the builder of the Moscow Kremlin was one of Leonardo da Vinci’s apprentices. Great, that’s excellent – it changes our entire view of Europe, and of Russia’s relationship to Italy. But why conclude that Pietro learned from Leonardo? Weren’t there a lot of masters around at the same time that Leonardo was working on the Milan castle? And besides, Leonardo didn’t build the Milan castle by himself, there were many others. There would have to be some direct proof of the relationship. And guess what? There was.

  If you follow the wall that overlooks the Moscow River, you will find strange openings along the top of its battlement. These crenels are strange because they are not openings between the merlons, as is usually the case, but holes inside the merlon, just above the base of each “tooth.”3 As we know, battlement merlons were not decorative: warriors stood behind the merlons while pouring boiling tar through the openings between them. But in this case the openings are in the merlons, and so low to the base that it would be impossible to even crouch behind them. However, an opening with no purpose cannot exist in a fortification wall.

  It turns out that one of Leonardo’s drawings contains a sketch of a certain apparatus with openings in the solid part
s of a crenellated wall. Poles are inserted through the openings to the outside, and logs are lashed to the poles in a long line. Within the walls, the whole thing is connected to a system of levers. When an enemy army attempted to breach the walls by running up ladders, the defendants would push down the levers, causing the horizontal line of logs outside to pop up and topple over all the ladders. That is the purpose of those unusually placed openings. In order to use Leonardo’s secret in the Moscow Kremlin, Pietro must have known about them directly.

  6. Soda-Sun

  What do we know about the past, when we know so desperately little about the present? To think that we want to predict the future as well! We accumulate facts, wrap them up in tissue paper, place them on shelves, and completely fail to capture the hidden connection between things. It’s some kind of obsession with us. Wherever he shows up, nothing seems stable anymore – instead there’s chaos or bedevilment of some sort. Although, is he really that far off the mark? Indeed, what is the point of our perennially fading, perennially resurrected profession?

  They called him Soda-Sun.

  The American pilots who flew shuttle flights over Berlin and then came to our base for a drink greeted him with incoherent howls of joy. He shielded them from German airstrikes while they ran from their base to ours. He single-handedly shot two Messerschmitts down into the sea, while a third one lay smoking on the horizon.

  “A whiskey-and-soda, for you!” they cried.

  “Soda-solntse!” he answered, parting his lips to catch drops of a fleeting rain shower that blew through the open window while the sun still shone outside.

  Someone translated for the Americans: soda-sun. The Americans laughed again and got happily drunk. From then on they called him Soda-Sun. Whenever he appeared at the base, the mood lightened. He was tall and thin, with chestnut brown eyes, lucky in his undertakings and sweet with the girls. The girls from ABW – the Air Base Wing – groaned when they heard his whistle. He always whistled the same tune: