12 / J О S E PH B R ODSKY
I suppose my generation was the most attentive audience for all that pre- and postwar dream factories' production. Some of us became, for a while, avid cineastes, but perhaps for a different set of reasons than our counterparts in the West. For us, films were the only opportunity to see the West. Quite oblivious of the action itself, in every frame we tried to discern the contents of the street or of an apartment, the dashboard of the hero's car, the types of clothes worn by heroines, the sense of space, the layout of the place they were operating in. Some of us became quite adept at determining the location in which a film was shot, and sometimes we could tell Genoa from Naples or, to say the least, Paris from Rome, on the basis of only two or three architectural ensembles. We would arm ourselves with city maps, and we would hotly argue about Jeanne Moreau's address in this film or Jean Marais's in another.
But that, as I said, was to happen much later, in the late sixties. And later still, our interest in films began to fade away, as we realized that film directors were increasingly of our own age and had less and less to tell us. By that time, we were already accomplished book readers, subscribers to Foreign Literature monthly, and we would stroll to the cinema less and less willingly, having realized that there is no point in knowing a place you are not going to inhabit. That, I repeat, was to happen much later, when we were in our thirties.
One day, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I sat in the courtyard of a huge apartment complex driving nails into the lid of a wooden box filled with all sorts of geological instruments which were to he shipped to the (Soviet) Far East—where I myself was about to follow, to join my team. It was early May, hut the day was hot and I was bored out of my wits and perspiring. Suddenly, out of one of the top floor's open windows, came "A-tisket, a-tasket"—the voice was that of Ella Fitzgerald. Now this was 1955 or 1956, in some grimy industrial outskirt of Leningrad, Russia. Good Lord, I remember thinking, how many records must they have produced for one of them to end up here, in this brick-cum-concrete absolute nowhere, amid not so much drying-up as soot- absorbing bedsheets and lavender underpants! That's what capitalism is all about, I said to myself: winning through excess, through overkill. Not through central planning, but through grapeshot.
IX
I knew the tune, partly because of my radio, partly because in the fifties every city youth had his own collection of so- called bone music. "Bone music" was a sheet of X-ray film with a homemade copy of some jazz piece on it. The technology of the copying process was beyond my grasp, hut I trust it was a relatively simple procedure, since the supply was steady and the price reasonable.
One could purchase this somewhat morbid-looking stuff (speak of the nuclear age!) in the same fashion as those sepia pictures of Western movie stars: in parks, in public toilets, at Hea markets, in the then-famous "cocktail halls," where you could sit on a tall chair sipping a milkshake and think you were in the West.
And the more I think ofit, the more I become convinced that this was the West. For on the scales of truth, intensity of imagination counterbalances and at times outweighs reality. On that score, as well as with the benefit of hindsight,
I may even insist that we were the real Westerners, perhaps the only ones. With our instinct for individualism fostered at every instance by our collectivist society, with our hatred toward any form of affiliation, be that with a party, a block association, or, at that time, a family, we were more American than the Americans themselves. And if America stands for the outer limit of the West, for where the West ends, we were, I must say, a couple of thousand miles off the West Coast. In the middle of the Pacific.
X
Somewhere in the early sixties, when the power of suggestion, headed by garter belts, began its slow exodus from the world, when we found ourselves increasingly reduced to the either/or of pantyhose, when foreigners had already started to arrive in planeloads in Russia, attracted by its cheap yet very sharp fragrance of slavery, and when a friend of mine, with a faintly contemptuous smile on his lips, remarked that perhaps it takes history to compromise geography, a girl I was courting gave me for my birthday an accordionlike set of postcards depicting Venice.
They belonged, she said, to her grandmother, who went to Italy for a honeymoon shortly before World War I. There were twelve postcards, in sepia, on poor quality yellowish paper. The reason she gave them to me was that, at about that time, I was full of two books by Henri de Regnier I'd just finished; both of them had for their setting Venice in winter: Venice thus was then on my lips.
Because the pictures were brownish and badly printed, and because of Venice's latitude and its very few trees, one couldn't tell for sure what season was depicted. People's clothes were of no help, since everyone wore long skirts, felt hats, top hats, bowlers, dark jackets: turn-of-the-century fashions. The absence of color and the general gloom of the texture suggested what I wanted them to suggest: winter, the true time of the year.
In other words, the texture and the melancholy it conveyed, because so familiar to me in my own hometown, made these pictures more comprehensible, more real. It was almost like reading relatives' letters. And I read them and reread them. And the more I read them, the more apparent it became that this was what the word "West" meant to me: a perfect city by the winter sea, columns, arcades, narrow passages, cold marble staircases, peeling stucco exposing the red-brick flesh, putti, cherubs with their dust-covered eyeballs: civilization that braced itself for the cold times.
And looking at these postcards, I made a vow that, should I ever get out of my native realm, I'd go in winter to Venice, rent a room on the ground—nay, the water— floor, sit down there, write two or three elegies, extinguishing my cigarettes on the damp floor, so that they'd hiss; and when the money was up, I'd purchase not a ticket back but a Saturday-Night Special and blow my brains out on the spot. A decadent fantasy, of course (but if you are not decadent at twenty, then when?). Still, I am grateful to the Parcae for allowing me to act out the better part of it. True, history is doing a rather brisk job at compromising geography. The only way to beat that is to become an outcast, a nomad; a shadow briefly caressing lace-like porcelain colonnades reflected in crystal water.
xi
And then there was the Renault 2CV that I saw one day parked on an empty street in my hometown, by the Hermitage's caryatided portico. It looked like a flimsy yet self- contained butterfly, with its folded wings of corrugated iron: