3.
Romanians, both young and middle-aged, like to wear their hair tied back in a long ponytail. My translator, an anorexic thirty-something, had a silky blonde one. Rake-thin, he rolled matchstickish cigarettes, chain-smoking one after the other, his English that of a born and bred American. Parading his feathers in front of me, this young man was well-informed about everything and anything, as if he’d spent the past few months glued to the Internet. Yet for all his eloquence, there was also an old-fashioned jitteriness there, a kind of “tubercular” excitability. He dusted the general dreariness of the surroundings with words, as if his mouth were a snow machine. I spent the two days at a Bucharest literary festival surrounded by a similar crowd. But looking past their faces, eyes, shoulders, and voices, I managed to catch a glimpse of other chance details: the ramshackle streets, peeling façades, the ubiquitous and nonchalant packs of stray dogs who gave the impression that they, and not humans, were the true masters of the city.
I also felt a strong yet vague sense of absence. Of what I wasn’t exactly sure, but it felt like I was walking around a graveyard that was just pretending to be a city. Being in Bucharest was like finding myself in the not-so-distant past, in the already-vanished Eastern European intellectual everyday, a world permeated with tobacco smoke, alcohol, intellectual excitability, and the inevitable bitterness; a world where the smell of betrayal, like naphthalene, hung in the air, but also where people still dreamed dreams of art that would change the world. The faces around me were shot through with the sum total of despair, because everyone carried his or her own, a world of sudden ascents to arrogance and headlong falls into inferiority. I didn’t understand the language, but knew well what people were talking about.
On the last day of October, sitting in an airport café in Bucharest and waiting for a flight to Istanbul, I spotted it again out of the corner of my eye. A muscă, a fly, crept along my chair and jumped onto the rim of my coffee cup, anchoring itself there, frozen. It was early in the morning, and my lower back hurt from sleeping in a guesthouse bed so low and narrow you would have thought it was for a child. Even the bathroom mirror was hung lower than normal. In my nostrils I could still smell the old sewers and the sulfurous stench that had filled my room.
Why, today, more than ever, does Eastern Europe really look like Eastern Europe, as if it was trying to fit the stereotypes others have created of it? The further it moves towards the West, the more it remains in the East. Or is it perhaps the other way around? Does the East today look more like the West than the West is prepared to admit? And is my gaze an eastern or western one?
I wandered, dazed and confused, around the vanished system of coordinates. East and West definitely no longer exist. In the meantime, the world has split into the rich, who enrich themselves globally, and the poor, who are impoverished locally. A well-heeled English friend of mine recently spent a summer holiday on an exclusive Thai island. The nature over there, he said, really is pristine and untouched, but the island itself is overrun with wealthy Russians. “It was great,” he said. “I got to brush up my rusty Russian.”
I proceed towards the boarding gate for Istanbul. From the lip of my coffee cup, the muscă, the fly, watched me leave. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me.
4.
Insects creep merrily through the literary, musical, and visual texts of the Eastern European cultural zone as in the delirium tremens of a chronic alcoholic. Kafka’s emblematic Metamorphosis doesn’t even scratch the surface of the insect-inspired artistic corpus: cockroaches, fleas, bedbugs, and flies are everywhere. For a start, there’s Mayakovsky’s drama The Bedbug and Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons, from which Captain Lebyadkin’s poem “The Cockroach” (’Tis of a cockroach I will tell. .) was later set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich. Sticking with music, there’s also Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” and Béla Bartók’s “From the Diary of a Fly.” In the area of poetry, generations of Russian children know Korney Chukovsky’s “The Clattering Fly” (Mukha-Tsokotukha) by heart, not to mention his short story “The Giant Roach” (Tarakanishche), in which the “roachzilla” title character is actually thought to be Stalin. In Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel White Robes (Beliye Odezhdi), a character named Xavier appears as a cockroach, while his more contemporary countryman Victor Pelevin has a novel entitled The Life of Insects (Zhizn’ nasekomyh). Long before Pelevin, the Čapek brothers, Karel and Josef, wrote the allegorical Ze života hmyzu, itself often translated as The Life of Insects. Even when “Easterners” switch cultural zones, there’s absolutely no guarantee that they’ll shake their fascination with flies. The Serbian-American poet Charles Simic published a memoir entitled A Fly in the Soup.
Ilya Kabakov’s Life of a Fly project consisted of sketches, albums, and installations on the theme of the fly. It also included an authorial hoax, which included brief notes on the role of the fly in art, politics, economics, music, and philosophy and the fabricated comments of fictitious visitors to the exhibition. One of the installations is entitled “My Homeland” (Moya rodina): in a cavernous empty space a swarm of flies buzzes through the air towards the ceiling.
Culturally and linguistically (at least in Slavic languages) the fly carries any number of negative connotations: the fly is insignificant (I’ll squash you like a fly!); hasn’t a shred of dignity (Where can a fly go but to the shit!); is stupid and irrational (He goes around like headless fly!); is ubiquitous, annoying, and boring (Boring as a fly!); and is inevitably associated with poverty, decay, and chaos. As Boris Groys writes, although Kabakov sees Russia as “a country of rubbish and flies” (“strana musora i muh”), he leaves the symbolic nature of the fly open. For every negative connotation, a fly could equally serve as a symbol of freedom, “soul,” and spirituality (an angel in the diminutive?). It could be an “archeologist;” a guardian of memories and of continuity (because wherever there are “rubbish” and ruins, there are also flies); an emissary between worlds; a comic symbol of the relativization of all values (it sits on both the dung heap and the Czar’s crown); a standard-bearer for the re-evaluation of closed meanings, clichés, and hierarchies; a constant human companion who sees through non-human eyes.
5.
The Istanbul festival set was worlds apart from its Bucharest counterparts. Young management and translation studies students, volunteers, hovered everywhere. I was involved in two events: the first was in a restaurant with a spectacular view of the Bosphorus, where we sat jammed in a corner doing our best to ignore the encroaching restaurant noise. The festival organizer read excerpts from our books in Turkish, each writer getting about two or three minutes. Apart from the student volunteers, there were actually only two spectators in the audience, although I couldn’t help thinking they might be the organizer’s mother and aunt. The other reading was in an Istanbul literary café. The audience of volunteers, relatives, and friends was almost identical. The two Turkish writers, one on either side of me, were particularly impressive. In his black Armani suit and black T-shirt, the shaven-headed young guy looked like a male model, his young countrywomen, a new corporate literary star — Manolo Blahnik shoes and frosted-blond Hilary Clinton hair — the perfect match. Both of them had a superior stage presence, but the enviably muscular self-confidence of the young Turkess set her apart. Everything was the way it should have been: there were writers, local and foreign, the odd literary agent, the odd publisher, the odd ambitious and American-educated local editor. The event had everything — except an audience, mutual curiosity, books, and literature.