16 I J О S E PH B R О DSKY
the way World War II airfield hangars were and French police vans still are.
I was observing it without any vested interest. I was then just twenty, and I neither drove nor aspired to drive. To have your own car in Russia in those days, one had to be real scum, or that scum's child: a Parteigenosse, an academician, a famous athlete. But even then your car would be only of local manufacture, for all its stolen blueprints and know-how.
It stood there, light and defenseless, totally lacking the menace normally associated with automobiles. It looked as if it could easily be hurt by one, rather than the other way around. I've never seen anything made of metal as unem- phatic. It felt more human than some of the passersby, and somehow it resembled in its breathtaking simplicity those World War II beef cans that were still sitting on my win- dowsill. It had no secrets. I wanted to get into it and drive off—not because I wanted to emigrate, but because to get inside it must have felt like putting on a jacket—no, a raincoat—and going for a stroll. Its side-window flaps alone resembled a myopic, bespectacled man with a raised collar. If I remember things correctly, what I felt while staring at this car was happiness.
xii
I believe my first English utterance was indeed "'His Master's Voice," because one started to learn languages in the third grade, when one was ten, and my father returned from his tour ofduty in the Far East when I was eight. The war ended for him in China, yet his hoard was not so much Chinese as Japanese, because at that end of the story it was Japan that was the loser. Or so it seemed at the time. The bulk of the hoard was records. They sat in massive but quite elegant cardboard albums embossed with gilded Japanese characters; now and then the cover would depict a scantily attired maiden led to a dance by a tuxedoed gent. Each album would contain up to a dozen black shiny disks staring at you through their thick shirts, with their gold-and-red and gold-and-black labels. They were mostly "His Master's Voice" and "Columbia"; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner. So much so that its presence would influence my choice of music. As a result, by the age of ten I was more familiar with Enrico Caruso and Tito Schipa than with fox-trot and tangos, which also were in abundance, and for which in fact I felt a predilection. There were also all sorts of overtures and classical hits conducted by Stokowski and Toscanini, "Ave Maria" sung by Marian Anderson, and the whole of Cannen and Lohengrin, with casts I no longer recall, though I remember how enthusiastic my mother was about those performances. In fact, the albums contained the whole prewar musical diet of the European middle class, which tasted perhaps doubly sweet in our parts because of the delay in its arrival. And it was brought to you by this pensive doggy, practically in its teeth. It took me at least a decade to realize that "His Master's Voice" means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouthpiece too, and since dogs normally run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach. In any case, the doggy ran around the world, since my father found those records in Shanghai after the slaughter of the Kwangtong Army. Needless to say, they arrived in my reality from an unlikely direction, and I remember myself more than once dreaming about a long train with black shining records for wheels adorned with "His Master's Voice" and "Columbia," trundling along a rail laid out of words like "Kuomintang," "Chiang Kai-shek," "Taiwan," "Chu Teh"— or were those the railroad stations? The destination was presumably our brown leather gramophone with its chromium- steel handle powered by my measly self. On the chair's back hangs my father's dark blue Navy tunic with its golden epaulets, on the hat rack there is my mother's silver fox clasping its tail; in the air: "Una furtiva lagrima."
xiii
Or else it could be "La Comparsita"—the greatest piece of music in this century, as far as I am concerned. After this tango, no triumph is meaningful, either your nation's or your own. I've never learned to dance, being both self-conscious and truly awkward, but I could listen to these twangs for hours and, when there was no one around, move. Like many a folk tune, "La Comparsita" is a dirge, and at the end of that war a dirge rhythm felt more suitable than a boogie- woogie. One didn't want acceleration, one craved restraint. Because one vaguely sensed what one was heading for. Put it down, then, to our dormant erotic nature that we clung so much to things that as yet hadn't gone streamline, to the black-lacquered fenders of the surviving German BMWs and Opel-captains, to the equally shining American Packards and bearlike windshield-squinting Studebakers, with their double rear wheels—Detroit's answer to our all-absorbing mud. A child always tries to get beyond his age, and if one can't picture oneself defending the motherland, since the real defenders are all around, one's fancy may fly one into the incoherent foreign past and land one inside a large black Lincoln with its porcelain-knob-studded dashboard, next to some platinum blonde, sunk to her silk knees in the patent- leather cushions. In fact, one knee would be enough. Sometimes, just touching the smooth fender was enough. This comes to you via one of those whose birthplace went up in smoke, courtesy of a Luftwaffe air raid, from one of those who tasted white bread for the first time at the age of eight (or, if this idiom is too foreign for you, Coca-Cola at thirty- two). So put this down to that dormant eroticism and check in the yellow pages where they certify morons.
xiv
There was that wonderful khaki-green American thermos made of corrugated plastic, with a quicksilver, mirrorlike glass tube, which belonged to my uncle and which I broke in 1951. The tube's inside was an optical infinity-generating maelstrom, and I could stare at its reflections of itself in itself forever. That's presumably how I broke it, inadvertently dropping it on the floor. There was also my father's no less American flashlight, also brought from China, for which we pretty soon ran out of batteries, but its shining refractor's visionary clarity, vastly superior to the properties of my eye, kept me in thrall for most of my school years. Eventually, when rust started to fray its rim and its button, I took it apart and, with a couple of magnifying lenses, turned its smooth cylinder into a totally blind telescope. There was also an English field compass, which my father got from somebody with one of those doomed British PQs he'd meet off Murmansk. The compass had a phosphorescent dial and you could read its degrees under a blanket. Because the lettering was Latin, the indications had the air of numerals, and my sense was that my position's reading was not so much accurate as absolute. That's perhaps what was making that position unpalatable in the first place. And then there were my father's Army winter boots, whose provenance (American? Chinese? certainly not German) I can't recall now. They were huge, pale yellow buckskin boots lined with what looked to me like coils of lamb's wool. They stood more like cannonballs than shoes on his side of the king-size bed, although their brown laces never were tied, since my father wore them only at home, instead of slippers; outside, they'd call too much attention to themselves and therefore their owner. Like most of that era's attire, footwear was supposed to be black, dark gray (boots), or, at best, brown. Up to the 1920s, I suppose, even up to the thirties, Russia enjoyed some semblance ofparity with the West as regards existential gadgetry and know-how. But then it snapped. Even the war, finding us in a state of arrested development, failed to fish us out of this predicament. For all their comfort, the yellow winter boots were anathema on our streets. On the other hand, this made these shizi-like monsters last longer, and as I grew up, they became a point of contention between my father and me. Thirty-five years after the war they were good enough for us to argue at length about whose right it was to wear them. In the end he won, because he died with me far away from where they stood.