Through six symmetrical holes in its back, in the subdued glow and flicker of the radio tubes, in the maze of contacts, resistors, and cathodes, as incomprehensible as the languages they were generating, I thought I saw Europe. Inside, it always looked like a city at night, with scattered neon lights. And when at the age of thirty-two I indeed landed in Vienna, I immediately felt that, to a certain extent, I knew the place. To say the least, falling asleep my first nights in Vienna felt distinctly like being switched off by some invisible hand far away, in Russia.
It was a sturdy machine. When one day, in a paroxysm of anger at my incessant fiddling with various frequencies, my father threw it on the floor, its frame came apart, but it kept receiving. Because I wouldn't dare take it to a professional radio mechanic, I tried to repair that Oder-Neisse- like crack as best I could, using all sorts of glue and rubber bands; but from then on, it existed in the form of two somewhat loosely connected bulky halves. Its end came when the tubes gave out, although once or twice I managed to track down their analogues through the grapevine of friends and acquaintances. Yet even when it became just a mute box, it still remained in our family—as long as the family itself existed. In the late sixties, everyone bought a Latvian-made Spidola, with its telescopic antenna and all sorts of transistors inside. Admittedly, it had better reception and was more portable. Still, I saw it once in a repair shop with its back removed. The best I can say about the way it looked inside was that it resembled some geographic map (roads, railroads, rivers, tributaries). It didn't look like anything in particular; it didn't even look like Riga.
8/ JOSEPH BRODSKY
IV
But the greatest spoils of war were, of course, films! There were lots of them, and they were mostly ofHollywood prewar production, with (as we were able to determine two decades later) Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Tyrone Power, Johnny Weissmuller, and others. They were mostly about pirates, Elizabeth I, Cardinal Richelieu, et cetera—nothing to do with reality. The closest they approached to our time was in Waterloo Bridge with Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh. Since our government wasn't keen on paying for the rights, no credits were given and, as a rule, no names ofcharacters or actors either. The show would start in the following fashion. The light dimmed, and on the screen, in white letters against a black background, this message would appear: this FILM WAS CAPTURED AS A MILITARY TROPHY IN THE COURSE OF THE GREAT WAR FOR OUR MOTHERLAND. It would flicker there for a minute or so; then the film started. A hand with a candle in it lit up a piece of parchment with the royal PIRATES, Captain blood, or robin hood in Cyrillic on it. That might be followed by an explanatory note indicating time and place of action, also in Cyrillic but often fashioned after Gothic script. Surely this was theft, but we in the audience couldn't care less. For that, we were too absorbed in reading subtitles and following the action.
Perhaps just as well. The absence of who was who on the screen imparted to these films the anonymity of folklore and the air of universality. They held us in greater sway and thrall than all the subsequent output of the neorealists or the nouvelle vague. The absence of credits made them openly archetypal at the time—the early fifties: the last years of Stalin's rule. The Tarzan series alone, I daresay, did more for de-Stalinization than all Khrushchev's speeches at the Twentieth Party Congress and after.
One should take into account our latitudes, our buttoned-up, rigid, inhibited, winter-minded standards of public and private conduct, in order to appreciate the impact of a long-haired naked loner pursuing a blonde through the thick of a tropical rain forest with his chimpanzee version of Sancho Panza and lianas as means of transportation. Add to that the view of New York (in the last bit of the series that was played in Russia), with Tarzan jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge—and almost an entire generation's opting out will become understandable.
The first thing that came in was, of course, the haircut. We all turned long-haired at once. That was immediately followed by stovepipe trousers. Ah, what pains, what subterfuge, what effort it cost to convince our mothers/sisters/ aunts to convert our invariably black ballooning postwar pants into straight-leg precursors of yet unknown Levi's! But we were adamant—and so were our detractors: teachers, police, relatives, neighbors, who'd kick us out of school, arrest us on the street, ridicule us, call us names. That's why a man who grew up in the fifties and the sixties despairs today trying to buy a pair of pants; all this ridiculous, fabric- wasting, baggy stuff!
v
There was, ofcourse, something more crucial to these trophy movies; it was their "one-against-all" spirit, totally alien to the communal, collective-oriented sensibility of the society we grew up in. Perhaps precisely because all these Sea Hawks and Zorros were so removed from our reality, they influenced us in a way contrary to that intended. Offered to us as entertaining fairy tales, they were received rather as parables of individualism. What would be regarded by a normal viewer as a costume drama with some Renaissance props was regarded by us as historical proof of individualism's precedence.
Showing humans against the backdrop of nature, a film always has documentary value. Connoting a printed page, a black-and-white film does all the more so. Given our closed, better yet our tightly shut, society, we were thus more informed than entertained. With what keenness did we scrutinize turrets and ramparts, vaults and moats, grilles and chambers that we'd seen on the screen! For we'd seen them for the first time in our lives! So we took all those papier- mache, cardboard Hollywood props for real, and our sense of Europe, of the West, of history, if you will, always owed a great deal to those images. So much so that some among us who later would have landed in the barracks of our penal system frequently improved their diet by retelling plots and remembered details of that West to both guards and fellow inmates who'd never seen those trophy movies.
VI
Among those trophies one could occasionally bump into a real masterpiece. I remember, for instance, That Hamilton Woman with Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier. Also, I seem to recall Gaslight with the then very young Ingrid Bergman. The underground industry was very alert, and in no time one could buy, from a shady character in the public lavatory or in the park, a postcard-sized print of this or that actress or actor. Errol Flynn in his Sea Hawk outfit was my most sacred possession, and for years I tried to imitate the forward thrust of his chin and the autonomous motion of his left eyebrow. With the latter, I failed.
And before the twang ofthis sycophantic note dies away, let me mention here something else—something that I have in common with Adolf Hitler: the great love of my youth, whose name was Zarah Leander. I saw her only once, in what was called, then and there, Road to the Scaffold (Das Herz einer Konigin), a story about Mary, Queen of Scots. I remember nothing about this picture save a scene where her young page rests his head on the stupendous lap of his condemned queen. In my view, she was the most beautiful woman who ever appeared on the screen, and my subsequent tastes and preferences, valid though they were in themselves, were but deviations from her standard. As attempts to account for a stunted or failed romantic career go, this one feels to me oddly satisfactory.
Leander died two or three years ago, I think, in Stockholm. Shortly before that, a record came out with several Schlagers of hers, among which was a tune called "Die Rose von Nowgorod." The composer's name was given as Rota, and it couldn't be anyone else but Nino Rota himself. The tune beats by far the Lara theme from Doctor Zhivago; the lyrics—well, they are blissfully in German, so I don't bother. The voice is that of Marlene Dietrich in timbre, but the singing technique is far better. Leander indeed sings; she doesn't declaim. And it occurred to me several times that had the Germans listened to that tune, they would not have been in the mood to march nach Osten. Come to think of it, no other century has produced as much schmaltz as ours; perhaps one should pay closer attention to it. Perhaps schmaltz should be regarded as a tool of cognition, especially given the vast imprecision of our century. For schmaltz is flesh of the flesh—a kid brother indeed—of Schmerz. We have, all of us, more reasons for staying than for marching. What's the point in marching if you are only going to catch up with a very sad tune?