“It’s silk, the very latest style, and it suits you marvelously.”
I. The doorman at the Astoria shot me a frosty look. It was his job to find young ladies for the guests’ entertainment and he was annoyed at losing my business. As we crossed the lobby several men noticed the threadbare jeans worn by the beauty on my arm and the large prominently labeled bag that I carried, with our purchases inside, and thus were educated in how to win young lady friends for themselves. I followed LINDA along the carpeted hallway, entirely surrendering to the measured waltz of her hips, her backlit red hair.
In silence, LINDA studied the magnificent copies in oil, the 1905 furniture, the Art Nouveau chandelier dangling from the ceiling.
“Isn’t all this far too expensive just for a novel?”
“I’ve told you: I have ample funds at my disposition. I’ve been saving up for a long time and thinking about a redheaded girl like you. Look, I’ll show you the shirts I’ve bought, all made of silk. Or no, this will give you a better idea.”
We went over to the table where my open laptop lay.
“This computer cost me a great deal, and then there’s the SCANNER, too. You don’t know what a SCANNER is? It’s a device that allows you to introduce texts directly into your computer without having to key them in. Very convenient since I’ve brought along a whole library. I’ll show you how it works. Could you get that book down for me? The one I was leafing through this morning? Look here.”
Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets, which held his massed suits and dressing gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season: spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such, such beautiful shirts before.”
“Impressive, isn’t it?”
“It’s a new technology.”
“Yes, in a sense. You’re right. What more can I show you?”
H
HAND AX (топóР). The leafy BOSCAGES of Moscow: VILLAGES and monasteries depicted in vertical perspective. Monks who penetrate this verdant grove and piece together the first Muscovite kingdom with blows of massive woodsman’s axes and без единого гвоздя (without a single nail). We are accustomed to viewing the AX as a tool for woodcutters. In Russia, however, there is always a HAND AX within a radius of five meters, at arm’s length; they’re as common as bread knives. The AX represents brutality, the не обтесанные (rough-hewn) side of the Russian soul. RASKOLNIKOV kills the pawnbroker and Lizveta with an AX. We know from Gogol that during HARD FROSTS VILLAGE idiots left shreds of their tongues on its cold metal. It may strike us as rather uncomfortable (and in fact, is), but the good Russian who has resolved to take matters to their ultimate consequences brandishes one of these and strikes, with no fear of the effusion of blood. The AX, as we noted earlier, represents the irrational, an animal terror. A.A. expressed it perfectly: Fear stirs among the things in my dark room,a ray of moonlight shatters on the blade of an AX.
HAM (XАМ). Both a son of Noah and a blasphemous oath.
(And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. Genesis 9: 20–22, King James Version.)
In the Russian language, HAM is a self-sufficient word, a Hammer of Hams. I once observed an incident in which an individual muddied the quiet stream of a retiree’s pleasant stroll and the wronged party turned, terrible and full of rage, and SPAT “HAM, HAM, HAM!” over and over at the HAM, defining him, singularizing him, putting the handcuffs on him, preparing him to be caged and subjected to public derision.
When you go out into the street, you may at any moment witness the beginning of legendary HAM sessions. (THELONIOUS MONK in New Orleans, the night he sent out for the only drum kit, had it brought to him across the sleeping city.) Old men and young ladies do not cease to whisper the accusatory apostrophe in a rage, hissing it out left and right.
I. To behave rudely in Moscow is almost to show a kind of deference to the victim of the aggression; it is to allude to a human quality that is out of the ordinary, a capacity for understanding that is distinct and Christian. Someone has shouted at you, and he is the bad guy, the HAM, but (and herein lies the great challenge) are you not able to forgive him? And everyone, all well experienced in this particular spiritual gymnastics, forgives everyone else, mutually, for their terrible fits of rage.
In a café we summoned the waiter to ask for TEA and had to wait half an hour for him to appear. When he did, he was highly annoyed, for we had failed to grasp that his activity as a café waiter was purely a masquerade, a job he was performing only to remain in close proximity to some secret chamber of speculation. He took our order with the demeanor of a king mingling incognito with the commoners who discovers, to his displeasure, that in addition to wearing the apron and carrying the pencil behind the ear — both indispensible elements of the disguise — he must also run from kitchen to dining room, take down orders, and endure the complaints of the clientele. All his wrath fell upon us for we continued to insist that he bring us clean eating implements and thereby won for ourselves the black hatred of that waiter, the HAM.
HARD FROSTS. Covered in rime, the leafless trees, their branches sketched against a sky dense as sea water. Numb with cold, we moved in silence as if this were a bed of coral and we the mute school of fish interminably shooting to and fro.
I’ve been scuba diving at a depth of three meters and it was exactly like this; the ice crystals sparkling in the air are the spots of light that pierce through the water’s mass to dapple the seabed covered in coral, which is what trees look like at 32 degrees below zero (centigrade).
I. “This morning when I went downstairs to shake out the carpets, I realized immediately that we must be very far below zero because my eyelashes grew heavy with a coating of ice. It happened in a single blink.”
I’ve opted for this detail about the eyelashes to give you a precise idea of the cold. (The real India, a writer — Nabokov — tells us, reveals itself in the green mildew that blooms on a pair of shoes left outside for the night.) I was in the garden, beneath white trees, and had to melt the frost off my eyelashes with the heat of my fingers. I have no such personal detail with which to illustrate life in the freezing barracks (I was shaking out the rugs as an exercise, enjoying the iridescent swirl of ice crystals): the slavering pack of dogs that rip straight through your padded trousers or the sweet indifference of dying from cold and inanition, the unfathomable abyss of an undeserved prison sentence, the appalling discovery that there’s been no mistake whatsoever, only the refined absurdity that is the total absence of any system, the pullulating chaos beneath an apparent order, the millions of dead and your single concrete death (a pair of boots covered in mildew).