\Ve must make it easier for the next man, if we can't make it safer. And the only way to make it easier for him, to make him less frightened of it, is to give him the whole measure of it—that is, as much as we ourselves can manage to cover. \Ve may argue about our responsibilities and loyalties (toward our respective contemporaries, motherlands, otherlands, cultures, traditions, etc.) ad infinitum, but this responsibility or, rather, opportunity to set the next man— however theoretical he and his needs may be—a bit more free shouldn't become a subject for hesitation. If all this sounds a bit too lofty and humanistic, then I apologize. These distinctions are actually not so much humanistic as deterministic, although one shouldn't bother with such subtleties. All I am trying to say is that, given an opportunity, in the great causal chain of things, we may as well stop being just its rattling effects and try to play causes. The condition we call exile is exactly that kind of opportunity.
Yet if we don't use it, if we decide to remain effects and play exile in an old-fashioned way, that shouldn't be explained away as nostalgia. Of course, it has to do with the necessity of telling about oppression, and of course, our condition should serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an ideal society. That's our value for the free world: that's our function.
But perhaps our greater value and greater function are to be unwitting embodiments of the disheartening idea that a freed man is not a free man, that liberation is just the means of attaining freedom and is not synonymous with it. This highlights the extent of the damage that can be done to the species, and we can feel proud of playing this role. However, if we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting—or at least imitating—the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.
A Place as Good as Any
I
The more one travels, the more complex one's sense of nostalgia becomes. In a dream, depending on one's mania or supper or both, one is either pursued or pursues somebody through a crumpled maze of streets, lanes, and alleyways belonging to several places at once; one is in a city that does not exist on the map. A panicky flight originating as a rule in one's hometown is likely to land one helpless under the poorly lit archway in the town ofone's last year's, or the year before's, sojourn. It is so much so that eventually your traveler finds himself unwittingly sizing up every locale he encounters for its potential value as a backdrop for his nightmare.
The best way to keep your subconscious from getting overburdened is to take pictures: your camera is, as it were, your lightning rod. Developed and printed, unfamiliar facades and perspectives lose their potent three-dimensionality and their air of being an alternative to one's life. Yet one can't click nonstop, one can't constantly put things in focus —what with clutching the luggage, the shopping bags, the spouse's elbow. And with a particular vengeance the unfamiliar three-dimensional invades the senses of unsuspecting innocents at railway stations, airports, bus stations, in a taxi, on a leisurely evening stroll to or from a restaurant.
Of these, railway stations are the most insidious. Edifices of arrival for you and those of departure for the locals, they insinuate travelers, tense with excitement and apprehension, straight into the thick of things, into the heart of an alien existence, pretending to be precisely the opposite by flashing their gigantic cinzano, martini, coca-cola signs—the fiery writing that evokes familiar walls. Ah, those squares in front of railway stations! With their fountains and statues of the Leader, with their feverish bustle of traffic and cinema billboards, with their whores, hypodermic youths, beggars, winos, migrant workers; with taxicabs and stocky cabdrivers soliciting in loud snatches of unfathomable tongues! The deep-seated anxiety of every traveler makes him register the location of the taxi stand in this square with greater precision than the order of appearance of the great Master's works in the local museum—because the latter won't constitute a way of retreat.
The more one travels, the richer one's memory gets with exact locations of taxi stands, ticket offices, shortcuts to platforms, phone booths, and urinals. If not often revisited, these stations and their immediate vicinities merge and superimpose on each other in one's mind, like everything that's stored for too long, resulting in a gigantic brick-cum-cast- iron, chlorine-smelling octopal ogre, submerged in one's memory, to which every new destination adds a tentacle.
There are apparent exceptions: the great mother, Victoria Station in London; Nerva's masterpiece in Rome or the garish monumental monstrosity in Milan; Amsterdam's Central with one of its fronton's dials showing the direction and speed of the wind; Paris's Care du Nord or Care de Lyon with the latter's mind-boggling restaurant, where, consuming superb canard under frescoes a la Denis, you watch through the huge glass wall trains departing down below with a faint sense of metabolic connection; the Hauptbahnhof near Frankfurt's red-light district; Moscow's Three-Railroad- Stations Square—the ideal place to ladle despair and indirection even for those whose native alphabet is Cyrillic. These exceptions, however, do not so much confirm the rule as form the core or kernel for subsequent accretions. Their Piranesean vaults and staircases echo, perhaps even enlarge, the seat of the subconscious; at any rate, they remain there—in the brain—for good, waiting for addition.
II
And the more legendary your destination, the more readily this gigantic octopus comes to the surface, feeding equally well on airports, bus terminals, harbors. Its real dainty, though, is the place itself. What constitutes the legend— artifice or edifice, a tower or a cathedral, a breathtaking ancient ruin or a unique library—goes first. Our monster salivates over these nuggets, and so do travel agencies' posters, jumbling Westminster Abbey, the Eiffel Tower, St Basil, the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, and some pagodas in an eye-catching, mind-skipping collage. We know these vertical things before we've seen them. What's more, after having seen them, we retain not their three-dimensional image but their printed version.
Strictly speaking, we remember not a place but our postcard of it. Say "London" and your mind most likely will Hash the view of the National Gallery or Tower Bridge with the Union Jack logo discreetly printed in a corner or on the opposite side. Say "Paris," and . . . There is perhaps nothing wrong with this sort of reduction or swapping, for had a human mind indeed been able to cohere and retain the
38 I J О SEPH B R О D s K y
reality of this world, the life of its owner would become a nonstop nightmare oflogic and justice. At least its laws imply as much. Unable or unwilling to be held accountable, man decides to move first and loses either count or track of what he experiences, especially for the umpteenth time. The result is not so much a hodgepodge or a jumble as a composite vision: of a green tree if you are a painter, of a mistress if you are a Don Giovanni, of a victim if you are a tyrant, of a city if you are a traveler.
Whatever one travels for—to modify one's territorial imperative, to get an eyeful of creation, to escape reality (awful tautology though this is), the net result of course is feeding that octopus constantly hungry for new details for its nightly chow. The composite city of your subconscious sojourn—nay! return—will therefore permanently sport a golden cupola; several bell towers; an opera house a la Feni- ce in Venice; a park with gloom-laden chestnuts and poplars, incomprehensible in their post-Romantic swaying grandeur, as in Graz; a wide, melancholy river spanned by a minimum of six well-wrought bridges; a skyscraper or two. Mter all, a city as such has only so many options. And, as though semiconscious of that, your memory will throw in a granite embankment with its vast colonnades from Russia's former capital; Parisian pearl-gray fac;ades with the black lace of their balconies' grillwork; a few boulevards petering out into the lilac sunset of one's adolescence; a gothic needle or that of an obelisk shooting its heroin into a cloudy muscle; and, in winter, a well-tanned Roman terra-cotta; a marble fountain; poorly lit, cave-like cafe life at street comers.