The conductor is wearing a round cap. Uniforms without billed caps can’t be taken quite seriously. He smiles, lips like Belmondo’s, I smile and hand him my ticket, which he signs off on. We’re moving through Tatabanya now, an eagle painted on a rock face, some sort of hoist frame on a hill topped by massive ruins. The Danube on the other side almost makes up for it.
“Suddenly they let go of me, one after the other, I heard somebody cursing, the whole pack made themselves scarce. I got to my feet. Walking toward me was a man in a fur cap, a full net shopping bag in each hand. I reached for my wallet, checked to make sure I wasn’t bleeding, and picked up my glasses. I was all right.”
Here the real story begins, but the narrative flow starts to meander, since some explanations are needed for the reader to follow the miraculous turn that the incident is now supposed to take for me.
I had bellowed myself hoarse and at first could manage only a whisper, so my rescuer barely understood my thank-you, but traced his gloved forefinger along the vertical slit a knife had left on the right side of my coat. I asked him his name. “Gilles,” he said, “I’m French.” “Gilles?” I croaked in bewilderment.
Watteau’s Gilles was the favorite painting of my deceased friend Helmar, to whom 33 Moments is dedicated. The Russian edition is the only one in which his first name appears rather than just his initials. This is required information for anyone to understand why I was so thunderstruck by the name Gilles. On the day of my book’s publication, I had been rescued in the middle of St. Petersburg by a Frenchman named Gilles, almost as if Helmar … But of course I didn’t actually believe that.
Gilles insisted we look for a policeman. We found one outside the GAI station (the “State Auto Inspection,” as the traffic police are called in Russia) next to the Marble Palace. We shoe-horned ourselves into a GAI Lada and drove around a bit, but the kids, much to my great relief, had vanished into thin air. What would we have done with them anyway? The only items missing were a little dictionary and a lighter taken from an outside pocket of my backpack. They hadn’t punched me or kicked me or pulled my hair. A gutsy Gilles had sufficed to drive them off. When I spotted the Russian Museum through the window of the Lada, I realized that what had happened to me was something I had already described. “Have you ever seen anything like it, in the middle of the street, and kids right behind, two of them, and another, on a line with them, across the way, watching doorways, and then another, just ahead, along the railing … Müller-Fritsch lay half on his back, half on his side, against the canal railing.”
A few hours later as I was walking, escorted by a translator and an interpreter, through the pedestrian passage under the Nevsky that would take us from Sadko in the direction of Gostinny Dvor, I tossed some coins in the cap of a one-legged beggar, all the loose change I had in my pocket. I still recall how in some little nook of my heart I regarded this gesture — made more by way of overcoming my own inertia than of performing any sort of sacrifice — as an act of propitiation that would guard me from similar attacks in the future.
The beggar, however, called after me, in a tone of voice that didn’t sound like a blessing. When I turned around he was already swinging his one good leg between his crutches. I still assumed this was purely accidental. But once he set to work hopping up the stairs of the underpass after me, there could be no doubt. I barely had time to pull the door of the taxi shut, and there was the rubber tip of his crutch pounding against the windowpane. “We’ll walk,” Ada said — the cabbie had demanded an outrageous fare. “We’ll pay!” I cried, never taking my eyes off the rubber tip banging at the fogged-over window. At last the driver maneuvered toward the middle of the street. At the same moment I was convinced that — since this too resembled a scene in the book — I myself would now have to experience everything I had described in 33 Moments of Happiness. St. Petersburg was demanding its tribute for my stories. How could I ever have thought I would get away with it, and go unpunished for writing anything I wanted to write?
No sooner had we come to a stop at the end of a long line of traffic waiting for a light than Ada screamed. Flames were shooting out of the car to our left, its motor was burning. We ducked, I waited for the explosion. During those seconds I ran through the book in my mind. But nowhere had my fantasy gone so far as to set a car ablaze. It wasn’t my fault, this fire had nothing to do with me — I was overcome with relief. The taxi pulled away, and when we stopped again we were at least thirty or forty meters from the burning car.
You might take them for paratroopers if it weren’t for the “Border Guard” printed on their chests. I know what I have to do. Without a word the border guard assigned to me extends his hand for my passport, shifts his weight forward, and — with an imperceptible flick of the wrist of someone playing trumps — hands my passport back to me, as if he weren’t the right official, as if he didn’t even need to look at it. And now it’s the French family’s turn. “Bonjour,” the children say, the parents smile — it’s printed on the backs of the border guards as well, yellow on blue, “Border Guard.”
But what’s become of the customs agents?
In Györ there is a long freight train waiting on a siding, with cars labeled, “We’re doing the driving for Audi” or “We’re doing the driving for VW,” plus logos, brown and rusty as the cars themselves. A water tower in the background, UFO on its shaft. Customs really ought to be here by now.
I’ll tell Petra that in my story “Incident in Petersburg” my fear of having to pay for what I had written is the mirror image of my desire to live with a poet, and that I confused my love for her poems with my love for her, just as she confused love …
The first time I saw you reading your poems, I will say, I fell … But then I’ve told her a hundred times now how when she read her poems her face took on an entirely different look, like that of a young girl, and that when, between poems, she talked about the situation out of which the next poem had arisen — both the organizers and the public loved her for these stories — you believed she had just awoken and was shaking off a dream. And I was certain that everyone who saw and heard her had to fall in love with her. And yet I won’t confess to her this time either that I dreamed of being the intimate “you” in her poems. I didn’t want dedications — dedications are like thirteen-year-olds who smoke. You’ll see, I’ll say, rebutting each of her objections, I haven’t written anything that will hurt you. No, I won’t say that. What I’ve written is that everyone will want to move into your apartment, with its old hardwood floors that would do any museum proud, they’ll want to go strolling with you in Schönbrunn.
In my “Incident in Petersburg,” the reminiscences awakened by the burning car are followed by a depiction of the scene that took place only twenty-four hours before. I was on the phone with my father, and while searching for pencil and paper to write down his telephone number in the rehab clinic, I wandered into Petra’s room with its wide floorboards and old windowpanes (“can’t find those anywhere but Vienna”). Petra looked up, reproachfully, angrily, because I had torn her away from her poem or because I still had on her bathrobe, which was much too small for me. I looked just as reproachfully back at her, because she needed to understand that I had to find a pencil quick, and because she managed to run around in nothing but baggy pants, sweat pants, gym pants, jogging pants — clothes even a lousy soap-opera scriptwriter can come up with if he wants to denigrate a character. Only someone aware of the increasingly long intervals between our meetings would understand these mutual reproaches. Petra and I were just no match for all the running around, the earning-your-daily-bread reading tours, not to mention the constant back-and-forth between Berlin and Vienna.