Less Than One: Selected Essays

I guess there was always some "me" inside that small and, later, somewhat bigger shell around which "everything" was happening. Inside that shell the entity which one calls

T never changed and never stopped watching what was going on outside. I am not trying to hint at pearls inside. What I am saying is that the passage of time does not much affect that entity. To get a low grade, to operate a milling machine, to be beaten up at an interrogation, or to lecture on Callimachus in a classroom is essentially the same. This is what makes one feel a bit astonished when one grows up and finds oneself tackling the tasks that are supposed to be handled by grownups. The dissatisfaction of a child with his parents' control over him and the panic of an adult confronting a responsibility are of the same nature. One is neither of these figures; one is perhaps less than "one."

Certainly this is partly an outgrowth of your profession. If you are in banking or if you fly an aircraft, you know that after you gain a substantial amount of expertise you are more or less guaranteed a profit or a safe landing. Whereas in the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft. In this field, where expertise invites doom, the notions of adolescence and maturity get mixed up, and panic is the most frequent state of mind. So I would be lying if I resorted to chronology or to anything that suggests a linear process. A school is a factory is a poem is a prison is aca- demia is boredom, with flashes of panic.

Except that the factory was next to a hospital, and the hospital was next to the most famous prison in all of Russia, called the Crosses. · And the morgue of that hospital was where I went to work after quitting the Arsenal, for I had the idea of becoming a doctor. The Crosses opened its cell doors to me soon after I changed my mind and started to

· The Crosses has 999 cells.

write poems. When I worked at the factory, I could see the hospital over the wall. When I cut and sewed up corpses at the hospital, I would see prisoners walking in the courtyard of the Crosses; sometimes they managed to throw their letters over the wall, and I'd pick them up and mail them. Because of this tight topography and because of the shell's enclosure, all these places, jobs, convicts, workers, guards, and doctors have merged into one another, and I don't know any longer whether I recall somebody walking back and forth in the flatiron-shaped courtyard of the Crosses or whether it is me walking there. Besides, both the factory and the prison were built at approximately the same time, and on the surface they were indistinguishable; one looked like a wing of the other.

So it doesn't make sense to me to try to be consecutive here. Life never looked to me like a set of clearly marked transitions; rather, it snowballs, and the more it does, the more one place (or one time) looks like another. I remember, for instance, how in 1945 my mother and I were waiting for a train at some railway station near Leningrad. The war was just over, twenty million Russians were decaying in makeshift graves across the continent, and the rest, dispersed by war, were returning to their homes or what was left of their homes. The railway station was a picture of primeval chaos. People were besieging the cattle trains like mad insects; theywere climbing on the roofs of cars, squeezing between them, and so on. For some reason, my eye caught sight of an old, bald, crippled man with a wooden leg, who was trying to get into car after car, but each time was pushed away by the people who were already hanging on the footboards. The train started to move and the old man hopped along. At one point he managed to grab a handle of one of the cars, and then I saw a woman in the doorway lift a kettle and pour boiling water straight on the old man's bald crown. The man fell—the Bro^ian movement of a thousand legs swallowed him and I lost sight of him.

It was cruel, yes, but this instance of cruelty, in its o^ turn, merges in my mind with a story that took place twenty years later when a bunch of former collaborators with the German occupation forces, the so-called Polizei, were caught. It was in the papers. There were six or seven old men. The name of their leader was naturally Gurewicz or Ginzburg—i.e., he was a Jew, however unthinkable it is to imagine a Jew collaborating with Nazis. They all got various sentences. The Jew, naturally, got capital punishment. I was told that on the morning of the execution he was taken from the cell, and while being led into the courtyard of the prison where the firing squad was waiting, he was asked by the officer in charge of the prison guard: "Ah, by the way, Gurewicz [or Ginzburg], what's your last wish?" "Last wish?" said the man. "I don't know ... I'd like to take a leak . . ." To which the officer replied: "Well, you'll take a leak later." Now, to me both stories are the same; yet it is even worse if the second story is pure folklore, although I don't think it is. I know hundreds of similar tales, perhaps more than hundreds. Yet they merge.

What made my factory different from my school wasn't what I'd been doing inside each, not what I'd been thinking in the respective periods, but the way their fa'<ades looked, what I saw on my way to class or to the shop. In the last analysis, appearances are all there is. The same idiotic lot befell millions and millions. Existence as such, monotonous in itself, has been reduced to uniform rigidity by the centralized state. What was left to watch were faces, weather, buildings; also, the language people used.

I had an uncle who was a member of the Party and who was, as I realize now, an awfully good engineer. During the war he built bomb shelters for the Party Genossen; before and after it he built bridges. Both still stand. My father always ridiculed him while quarreling about money with my mother, who would cite her engineer-brother as an example of solid and steady living, and I disdained him more or less automatically. Still, he had a magnificent library. He didn't read much, I think; but it was—and still is—a mark of chic for the Soviet middle class to subscribe to new editions of encyclopedias, classics, and so on. I envied him madly. I remember once standing behind his chair, peering at the back of his head and thinking that if I killed him all his books would become mine, since he was then unmarried and had no children. I used to take books from his shelves, and even fashioned a key to a tall bookcase behind whose glass sat four huge volumes of a pre- revolutionary edition of Man and Woman.

This was a copiously illustrated encyclopedia, to which I still consider myself indebted for my basic lrnowledge of how the forbidden fruit tastes. If, in general, pornography is an inanimate object that causes an erection, it is worth noting that in the puritanical atmosphere of Stalin's Russia, one could get turned on by the one hundred percent innocent Socialist Realist painting called Admission to the Komsomol, which was widely reproduced and which decorated almost every classroom. Among the characters depicted in this painting was a young blond woman sitting on a chair with her legs crossed in such a way that two or three inches of her thigh were visible. It wasn't so much that bit of her thigh as its contrast to the dark brown dress she wore that drove me crazy and pursued me in my dreams.