499 I In a Room and a Half 4 4
And so it does, in ever-increasing volume. Yet one may derive some comfort, if not necessarily hope, from the fact that, if not the last laugh, then the last word belongs to one"s genetic code. For I am grateful to my mother and my father not only for giving me life but also for failing to bring up their child as a slave. They tried the best they could—if only to safeguard me against the social reality I was born into—to hirn me into the state's obedient, loyal member. That they didn't succeed, that they had to pay for it with their eyes being closed not by their son but by the anonymous hand of the state, testifies not to their laxness but to the quality of their genes, whose fusion produced a body the system found alien enough to eject. Come to think of it, what else could be expected from the combined strength of his and her ability to endure?
If this sounds like bragging, so be it. The mixture of their genes is worth bragging about, if only because it proved to be state-resistant. And not simply state but the First Socialist State in the History of Mankind, as it prefers to bill itself: the state specifically adept at gene splicing. That's why its hands are always awash in blood, because of its experiments in isolating and paralyzing the cell responsible for one's willpower. So, given that state's volume of export, today if one is to build a family, one should ask for more than just the partner's blood group or dowry: one should ask for her or his DNA. That's why, perhaps, certain peoples look askance at mixed marriages.
There are two pictures of my parents taken in their youth, in their twenties. He, on the deck of a steamer: a smiling, carefree face, a smokestack in the background; she, on a footboard of a railroad carriage, demurely waving her kid- gloved hand, the buttons of the train conductor's tunic behind. Neither of them is as yet aware of the other's existence; neither of them, of course, is me. Besides, it is impossible to perceive anyone existing objectively, physically outside your own skin, as a part of yourself. ". . . but Mom and Dad/Were not two other people" as Auden says. And although I can't relive their past, even as the smallest possible part of either one of them, what is there to prevent me, now that they are objectively nonexistent outside my skin, from regarding myself as their sum, as their future? This way, at least, they are as free as when they were born.
Should I brace myself then, thinking that I am hugging my mother and father? Should I settle for the contents of my skull as what's left of them on earth? Possibly. I am presumably capable of this solipsistic feat. And I suppose I may also not resist their shrinkage to the size of my, lesser than their, soul. Suppose I can do that. .Am I then to meow to myself as well, after having said "Keesa"? And into which one of the three rooms I am now living in do I have to run to make this meowing sound convincing?
I am them, of course; I am now our family. Yet since nobody knows the future, I doubt that forty years ago, on some September night of 1939, it crossed their mind that they were conceiving their way out. At best, I suppose, they thought of having a child, of starting a family. Fairly young, and born free on top of that, they did not realize that in the country of their birth it is now the state which decides what kind of family one is to have, and whether one is to have a family at all. When they realized that, it was already too late for everything except hope. Which is what they did until they died: they hoped. Family-minded people, they couldn't do otherwise: they hoped, planned, tried.
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For their sake, I would like to think that they didn't allow themselves to build up their hopes too high. Perhaps my mother did; but if so, that had to do with her own kindness, and my father didn't miss a chance to point this out to her. ("Nothing pays less, Marusya," he used to retort, "than self- projection.") As for him, I recall the two of us walking one sunny afternoon together in the Summer Garden when I was already twenty or perhaps nineteen. We'd stopped before the wooden pavilion in which the Marine Brass Band was playing old waltzes: he wanted to take some pictures of this band, White marble statues loomed here and there, smeared with leopard-cum-zebra patterns of shadows, people were shuffling along on the gravel, children sluieked by the pond, and we were talking about the war and the Germans. Staring at the brass band, I found myself asking him which concentration camps in his view were worse: the Nazis' or ours. "As for myself," came the reply, "I'd rather be burned at the stake at once than die a slow death and discover a meaning in the process." Then he proceeded to snap pictures.
LITERATURE / CRITICISM la&N 97в О 374 SZOSS 7