At this point in our reflections, we’re ready to throw ourselves into vagabonding, to brodiazhnichat. Naturally the world abounds in empty-headed BRODIAGA — and ordinary men — who don’t interest us, but I’ve met several contemplative or скиталцы вроıауа and occasionally we’ll see one of them being interviewed on TV. For the BRODIAGA has other eyes that enable him to see very deeply and discern the hard nut of existence. I’ve never gone beyond mere admiration of the garden’s foliage, but the fear of madness is there and does not diminish: a perfectly sane person can end up a BRODIAGA. Lev Tolstoy took his first step at the age of eighty-two and, inevitably, at the very start of the long journey, died.
C
CALLIGRAPHY. One day during an essentially sterile summer a woman friend had the following note delivered to me: “Don’t think for one moment that I’ll bear a grudge for what you’ve done. I’ve forgotten it already and am off to my parents’ house. I hope your anger will have passed by the time I come back. Many kisses from the one who loves you. T**”
At ten o’clock in the morning when I was still wondering whether to get up, meditating in my bed about how to waste the hours of that day, she’d already had time to do her morning jump-rope exercises, water the begonias on the balcony, put on her only summer dress — the one with red polka dots — and take a minute to write me that little note. How could a person capable of composing such a note be incapable of doing anything in the world? “Don’t think for one moment that I’ll bear a grudge for what you’ve done. I’ve forgotten it already and am off to my parents’ house. I hope your anger will have passed by the time I come back. Many kisses from the one who loves you. T**”
Her CALLIGRAPHIC writing was a further demonstration of the ease of her movement through a universe as precise as a clockwork mechanism, blindly guided by discipline. This was the source of her unvarying good humor. I could never achieve such handwriting. T** was, even so, a fine, upstanding woman who had all the grace of her flowery capitals. Her note made me happy (I’d come to love her a great deal) and saddened me at the same time.
I went down to the garden.
“Know what? I always thought CALLIGRAPHY was an antiquated practice, from the days when my father was studying it by the Edward Johnston system and all around us were beautiful PACKARDS whose looping contours are like CALLIGRAPHY compared to today’s cars, which look like printed block letters. To discover a thing like this”—and I showed my lady friend the little note from T**—“is highly disconcerting, believe me.”
CATWALK (see: PASARELA).
CHOCOLATES (SWISS). At the neighboring table, a uniformed general was gallantly attending to his companion, a lady who, I later learned, had amassed a fortune administering a meat provisioning facility. I invited them to join us, that we might all be the merrier for it: Muscovite simplicity.
Within the first half hour they’d already given evidence of astonishing appetites: raw silk kimonos, solid silver flatware, DACHAS with cedar-lined bathrooms and heated swimming pools, hunting parties with packs of hounds and beaters preceding them across the terrain, their heedless way of chewing, their formidable drive — in forty-eight hours they could have been sunbathing in Portugal. . Or so the general informed me.
“Think about that, young man”—delivering a slam of his fist to the table. “In forty-eight hours we could have been sunbathing in Portugal. With our tanks. .”—he leaned toward me. “In the blink of an eye. Let’s drink to that!”
“For Heaven’s sake, calm down! Who remembers all that now?” the lady administrator, who bore herself with the aplomb of a duchess, reproached him.
“Who remembers? All of Europe! They trembled at the sight of me! An officer of the Red Army!”
And he, meanwhile, had trembled at the wheel of a beautiful black sedan he had occasion to drive across a small European country, barely on the map. The motor’s muffled vibration, his officer’s glands functioning at full speed. He took the lady executive by the hand and cast a dreamy gaze into her turquoise blue eyes: “That car was as good as a Russian woman (wonderful, sturdy, well-built).”
a) Ready, in a word, to take up his position in the Archipelago contaminated by evil. When Russian troops laid siege to Berlin in 1945, Central Command had already received several reports concerning a disturbing Red drift toward the enemies’ cushier digs: a petty predilection for trophy watches that gave a fuller sense of time than the stubby Russian models. Millions of soldiers who, at war’s culmination, brought home the seeds of movies not filmed in the Dovzhenko studios. It became necessary to subject them to detoxification in the snowy fields of Siberia. (Remember how Raskolnikov comprehends the depths of his guilt as he watches the blue sky through the tiny window of his cell in the Siberian prison camp?)
“Well, a car is a car,” he added, to cover his broad back. He gave me a sidelong glance. “I think the Lada won a stage of last year’s Paris-Dakar. What’s more, our airplanes are among the best in the world and at this very moment we have three men in the cosmos.” (Three men continually offering this salvation to the Russian people, a last-gasp argument for faith in the nation.)
I was about to add something but we were distracted by the creak of the swinging doors: RUDI with the CHOCOLATES. A beautiful box, lilacs blooming across the lid. An assortment of bonbons.
“With liqueur?” queried the duchess, set on edge by this unexpected apparition.
“An assortment,” the writer explained, untying the satin ribbon.
The duchess, who at her many congresses and high-level meetings must have dispatched more than a thousand such boxes, informed us, “Of all the bonbons in the Union, my favorite are from Chelyabinsk.”
Chelyabinsk? The city with a soccer team in the national league and a uranium-enrichment combine? I spoke of Swiss CHOCOLATES but the duchess had been in Geneva and eaten her fill of them. The impression she had retained was a negative one. “I’m not sure, perhaps it was too much milk; very soft, as well. The finest CHOCOLATES are made here, in the Union.”
LINDA passed the box around. The general, who, without yet actually having done so, was talking about throwing our rock crystal goblets over our shoulders, selected a bonbon and plopped it into the executive’s champagne (he had heard that ladies like this), whereupon she grew stony-faced, for the gesture struck her as being in dreadful taste. The general, who’d anticipated a different reaction, shrank in his chair and made several superfluous movements with his hands: he straightened his tie, the sort of tie a VILLAGER would wear, pulled down the sleeves of his military jacket, and twiddled his enormous cuff links, made of gold. His life was an endless thicket of false steps and it was clear that at this moment he hated the lady executive, whose disapproval of anything she found in poor taste was without appeal. She must have learned her manners at Party meetings, for she also severely reprimanded the general for crossing his knife and fork over the plate instead of setting them down in paralleclass="underline" that trifle. She conveyed this to him in a brief pantomime, like a space ship captain under zero gravity conditions, lightly picking up the offending flatware and replacing them on the plate in the correct manner. Then she told him in a whisper everyone could hear, “Do you understand? I will not even mention the bonbon in the champagne. I’m not one of the sluts you soften up with chocolate bars then take back to the barracks.”