Sometimes the anonymous housewives of whom the duchess reminded me would shout some instruction into your ear, which you understood perfectly the first time you heard it but opted, for whatever reason, not to carry out right away. Then they would say to each other, “I’m speaking to him in Russian and he doesn’t understand me.” Or else I might be talking with a friend in a public place and a woman, taking us perhaps for NERUS (non-Russians, representatives of one of the IMPERIUM’S national minorities), would grow indignant: “Hey, why don’t you speak Russian? You’ve been talking for half an hour in that twittering bird language of yours and it’s making my head spin. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.” Then she’d get a better look at us and spit on the ground. “What can you expect from these NERUS?” The existence within the IMPERIUM of millions of NERUS who spoke other languages was ignored or barely tolerated. With the years and the advent of The Fall of the House of [R]Usher, I was witness to a traumatic mental transformation, an inversion of the magnetic poles of the Rus, now avid for a full and Occidental life devoid of boiled potatoes or gherkins in brine.
NIGHTS, WHITE (Белые ночи). I shall now reveal the secret, the stupefying rabbit pulled from the hat, of the WHITE NIGHTS. The dimmed brilliance of the moon and sun at their equinox. I had expressly chosen the date, awaited the favorable conjunction of the stars, and though I’ve taken care not to mention what month we met in, the reader who knows the work of F.M. must have intuited by now that I wouldn’t fail to take advantage of the phantasmagoric decor of the White Nights by describing a long walk through the insomniac city.
LINDA and I left the Astoria arm in arm. In the scant light of that hour, the colors of her dress and the scarlet of her lips were muted. I set my feet down very slowly as we walked, fighting against something I felt was about to spill open inside me and wash through my cranial cavity. When we reached the Ekaterinsky Canal, LINDA leaned her elbows on the parapet and watched, absorbed in the water’s flow. After a while, she seemed to have come up with the words she’d been seeking for the previous half hour, even before the dispute with Maarif: “Znaesh ne nuzhen mne tvoi roman. Ja dolzhna otkazatsia; ja peredumala. Maarif konechno prav.”
It was like a bolt of lightning. Such a tirade, and delivered in her very purest Russian: “Know what? I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going along with your plan. Maarif is right.” LINDA gave me no time to recover, to identify a tactic. She went on, “I can’t seem to find anything in your plan that actually deserves a movement of my soul, an effort of my spirit. I will never be someone who thinks that fashion and dressing well — everything you talked about this afternoon in the garden — are anything to lose sleep over, or that can change my life. God knows, I understand perfectly that you were counting on my youth!”
“And on my money, LINDA!”
“And on your money, IOSIF. But do you think that’s enough? You’d have to change me completely, make me into another girl. And I’m certain you wouldn’t be able to do that. For us Russians there’s no shame in being poor; on the contrary, the sin lies in riches. You can’t imagine how remote all the wealth and ostentation you talk about is from my Russian soul.”
When I heard that I breathed easier. She’d made a mistake. I hurried to take advantage of this opening.
“No, you Russians are essentially the same. It’s just that you’ve forgotten. In 1915, more posters of La Kholodnaya were sold than photos of the Imperial family — which in my view is perfectly understandable. I’m only trying to teach you to hate certain things such as those horrible paintings by Dalí you picked out today. And Maarif’s ridiculous Cossack overcoat, doesn’t it make you laugh? You think it’s a dumb joke, too, don’t you?”
“But how can you pretend to know Russia? You, a foreigner? You’ll never be able to. We’re very different. You’ll think I’m exaggerating, but I feel that the OCCIDENT has lost all its. . sanctity? Yes, sanctity is the right word. Look, I haven’t got a clear idea of where the failure lies, but I sense a certain false note in everything — a falsity that, in all sincerity, I don’t find in the life we have in Russia. Perhaps, some day, we will become OCCIDENTALIZED, but without transforming ourselves internally. Anyway, you told me that what interests you is the nontranscendent, the trivial — but don’t you want your novel to be transcendent? And what about the title? Not only does it include the word “soul,” it’s in Latin.3 I perceive — and forgive me for telling you this — a profound contradiction between what you claim you want to do and your actual plan. Wouldn’t irresponsibility and carelessness suit your novel better? Why this mania to record every detail of this summer?”
(This last argument struck a painful blow, I must acknowledge, and though I didn’t consider it sufficient to invalidate my experiment on the spot, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.)
“The fact that I play the FLUTE, you know. . And furthermore, there are personal reasons. . There’s my hamster. . I have a hamster in a cage in my room. I wouldn’t know who to ask to take care of him if I agreed to go on this trip with you.”
“Maarif, maybe?” I hazarded in a whisper, dismayed by this unforeseen obstacle.
“Maarif!”—she laughed. “He would never be able to take care of a hamster. The poor thing would starve to death. He’s not very practical. I must say that it was very intelligent of you to have chosen me, a woman, to consummate your plan. Maarif would never go along with such a project. And even I agreed to have dinner with you only out of curiosity. What harm could it do? Nothing could have been more innocent. But from there to accepting the whole story. . N o thanks. But really, everything was wonderful and you were terrific. Maarif!”
Which was to say: “Maarif, come on out of the shadows!” (I was perfectly well aware that he’d been following us.)
I. I was also perfectly well aware that it was Maarif who’d been speaking through her mouth. Now, as it happens, I also knew who had been speaking through Maarif’s mouth. Her speech had contained an extremely important clue that cast her refusal in an entirely different light. She claimed to have no one to take care of her hamster, a dopey white-furred rodent, its cheeks perpetually stuffed with crackers. They sell hamsters in the zoomagazini along with Guinea pigs, little freshwater turtles, and goldfish. Another thing entirely is the entry that keeps company with “hamster” in the pages of the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (Saint Petersburg, 1893). In Russian, hamster is хомяк (khomiak): dopey white-furred, et cetera. It’s the entry which follows that sounds the note of alarm: Khomiakov, Alexei Stepanovich, hard-core Slavophile and author of two important treatises, The Opinion of Foreigners about Russia and The Opinion of Russians about Foreigners, from which Maarif, and now LINDA, had extracted the majority of the theses she had just shared. Two phantoms, two shadows, following us along the bank of that canal.
O
OCCIDENT, THE. The mirror in which Russia gazes at itself each morning to touch up its own image. A mental construct, a grandiose civitas Dei built on a foundation of weighty volumes in folio, bad films, and high-gloss consumer goods of widespread appeal, such as my BOOGIE SHOES, to name but one example. Now, of course, seen from the IMPERIUM, the OCCIDENT presented a different aspect, as if it were a levogyrate or counterclockwise OCCIDENT. Viewed against a backdrop made not of steel but of polarizing glass. The inhabitants of the IMPERIUM could distinguish Paris with their naked eyes, and a Parisian bistro and, seated at one of its little tables, a very manly bourgeois, none other than the very leftist writer Louis Aragon dipping his croissant into his coffee. On the table, to his left, the page proofs of La Semaine Sainte. This gentleman would raise an accusatory index finger, wrinkle his brow, give voice to irate discourses: these images were perceived with dazzling clarity. Their background could only be guessed at: dim shapes, zones of complete darkness where the eye could discern nothing beneath ink blots and the hysterical crosshatch of deletions. Occasionally, on very sunny days, floating torsos could be made out, which moved past disembodied legs, orphaned arms, and talking heads: the mutilated fauna of the OCCIDENT. Many suspected that these beings may once have had a human appearance, an integral existence, and desperately sought a position from which to make a closer study of them. A maneuver that would, for a second, allow them to make out shadows slipping through the superfine sieve of glass, shadows that declaimed at the top of their lungs, wielded paintbrushes, spun with dazzling skill on the tips of their toes — only to disappear back into the recesses of that unknown world.