Now I can confess: I’d decided to die, put an end to the suffering caused by seeing so deeply, having so full an awareness of the unbearable beauty of the world. I’d managed to conceal from LINDA the constant attacks of my malady, when the world fell apart into gems and quartzes whose BRILLIANT CORNERS I studied, entranced and blinded by their gleam. And now, on this rooftop, it no longer mattered to me whether I died, whether I threw myself into the abyss like a Hyperborean (see EURASIA, Pliny’s notes) committing suicide after a life of excess. Neither the success of my experiment nor the love that, I could almost swear, I’d been able to awaken in LINDA, had managed to calm my despair, alleviate my fleshly existence, halt the course of my sickness. There, at the edge of the parapet, two steps away from the ravenous pack that was gaping at my credit cards without yet understanding a thing, I turned to LINDA to say good-bye. I see myself raising my eyes, seeking some motive that will explain my decision, pointing my index finger toward the sky, opening my mouth to emit a first phrase — the all-important fact, the new line of discourse we decide to embark on when we suddenly realize we’ve wasted two-thirds of the allotted time, and we organize our thoughts, take a deep breath, the central thesis blazing in our mind—“Listen, LINDA, the notion. .” and then I begin to blur, affected by an actual earthquake, furrows of fire that shoot across my face: LINDA, who at that moment throws down the camera and bolts for the trapdoor. Apparently, the fall activated the sound button. It’s the last thing the camera recorded: my image, vanishing, and a cry that now fills me with joy and sadness: “THELONIOUS, jump!”
(The real world is naught but appearance. If we continue to have some sort of objective existence when our eyes are closed it’s only because we’re imagined by a being, a BOGATYR, asleep outstretched in a field, head resting on a hummock. He is the last bastion, the final dream that contains us all. LINDA’S cry, almost a scream, made him crack open an eye, blink for a second, and then o dark dark dark they all go into the dark: me, LINDA, RUDI, YALTA, Russia, immensity itself, all go into the dark.)
PETER I (пэтэр I). The tyrant indispensible to Muscovy’s enormity. A man of wide-ranging temperament — a Russian — he spent several years as an apprentice carpenter in Zealand, caulking the Russian Navy’s first ships. His indisputable talent earns him the same indulgent treatment as the drunken master craftsmen who plague the IMPERIUM’S factories: he’s accepted as an irremediable affliction, “very much our own.” Saint Petersburg, for example, the resplendent Germanic city he founded on the unhealthy and shifting delta of the Neva, стоит на костях (stoit na kostiah), that is, took root upon the bones of many thousands of Russian muzhiks. Figuratively, of course: but when I heard this terrible accusation for the first time I thought PETER had given the order to fill in the delta’s sandbanks with the corpses of the builders — the technique used by the Ch’in for the Great Wall.
But PETER is credited with an even more horrendous crime: that of having introduced the discordant note of the batiste handkerchief into the simple world of the boyar caftan. For this daring and premeditated attack against the patriarchal order of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, he would never be completely forgiven. A life-size sculpture of him done in wax is on display in the Hermitage: a man of great stature, he rises high on narrow calves, stoit na kostiah. He’s dressed in the cosmopolitan garb he brought back from his trip to Europe: the scandalous square-toed Dutch shoes with buckled arches and heels of painted wood (no more of those Asiatic buskins with the tips of the toes curling back!); his skinny tibia clad in stockings, matador-style, held up by a simple garter; close-fitting breeches of blue wool; the bow tie of fine silk; and the brocade frock coat adorned with a double row of buttons (no more of those caftans reaching all the way to the floor!); a sparse beard; a small and impertinent mustache; and, finally, a tricorne (no more of those floppy woolen caps!) atop a wig of powdered curls.
One winter afternoon in 198* I visited the pantheon of the Romanov family in the cathedral that stands within the walls of the Peter and Paul Fortress. I was accompanied by T**, a friend, who had insisted on showing me PETER’S sepulchre. Frozen stiff, our hats pulled down on our heads, we approached a group that was receiving the usual litany from a guide’s lips: PETER I, the good CZAR who founded a city, distributed land and organized the Russian army. . When he reached the point of the city built na kostiah. . I, who was hearing the story for the first time, was horrified and sought clarification of this turn of phrase — figurative or literal? — from my friend. Our whispers caught the guide’s attention and he lifted his head (which had been downcast by the useless sacrifice of thousands of Russian souls) and detected ours, with hats on. Then, without preamble or introductory note, like a sports car going from zero to ninety-five kilometers an hour in the span of ten meters, he thrust his sacerdotal index finger at us: “They haven’t bared their heads before PETER!” and waited for everyone to turn and look before repeating with a hiss: “They haven’t bared their heads before PETER!”
Then he stared at me and proffered from between clenched teeth: “NERUS! What can we expect from a NERUS.” This statement entirely overlooked the fact that PETER I had reigned over an IMPERIUM that included millions of NERUS, even as it affirmed the immortality of PETER I, the only surviving CZAR.
PSEUDO DEMETRIUS. In Russian, for “imposter,” they (we) have the word самозванец, samozvanets, “he who gives a name to himself,” a very conceptualist idea, we’d say today. In 1602, PSEUDO DEMETRIUS revealed himself to the monks of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra as the CZAREVITCH Dimitri, son of Ivan the Terrible, believed to have been murdered on Boris Godunov’s orders. He pushed back the hood of his habit, stabbed his index finger at his chest, and gave himself a name. But his “sheep’s eyes” ran in despair across the vast field of his face and the monks expelled him willy-nilly. When the figure of Grigory Otrepyev was no more than a distant point far down the Dnieper river, the prior SPAT in rage and baptized him without needing to consult the book of saints: imposter.
Neither beard nor mustache grew on Grigory’s face. He was small in stature, disproportionately broad of shoulder, and short of neck. He was, moreover, five years older than the CZAREVITCH, who was, in fact, murdered in Uglich. Nor did he suffer from epilepsy, and, as we’ve seen already, he had to struggle grimly against a physiognomy that often betrayed him. The only things that distinguished him were his beautiful CALLIGRAPHIC handwriting and his undoubted talent as a con artist, for he had discovered a gold mine, a vacant niche in the pantheon of Russian gods.
Mortal enemy of mirrors, he marches to Poland, where God himself places in his path a beauty, Marina Mniszech, who comes to close the circle: beauty and the beast. (I’ve invented nothing here; this is the most astonishing story I heard in Russia!) While we do not know with certainty how he managed to win her favor, it would appear that she yielded to a promise that overran the narrow limits of a Polish maiden’s imagination: “You shall be empress of Russia.” A truly powerful oath; any woman would have lost her head. (Two centuries later, even Catherine the Great, on the night of the coup d’etat that brought her to the throne — the soft thump of the pillow over the mouth of the sleeping Peter II — paced nervously until dawn. When at last she was informed of the operation’s success, the news would turn out to be somewhat imprecise, for it omitted the corollary that from Peter II’s still-warm body the ethereal copy of an imposter had detached itself, as in a Disney cartoon, leapt into the garden, and spurred its steed away: two ghosts, rider and steed, to whom Catherine would never give chase.)