Idiot girl! It shocked me to hear her talking about Nelly like that. I pulled my head from her shoulder to look at her and question her, about to retort: Nelly? No way! But that gesture took me out of the range of her voice, and I had to draw closer to her eyes (spheres of golden crystal, so beautiful) and thus could see, as I watched her speak, wherein lay Nelly’s, your mother’s, mistake.
Not because their owners or the alert eye of some jeweler invited to a party aboard one of those immense yachts might somehow realize. Anchored well away from the coast, reaching into the cooler and colliding with the bejeweled wrist or forearm of Rania (of Jordan), this hypothetical jeweler would never shout, “Hold on just a second there, my queen! Those stones are fake!” Never, though neither his etiquette nor his good breeding would prevent it: a jeweler can be just as vulgar as anyone else. But to begin with, no jeweler would ever be invited aboard one of those yachts; a simple jeweler would never be rubbing elbows with Fannia or Theodora of Greece, his index finger pointing to a set of tourmalines on the arm of Mathilde of Belgium. And even if such eyes, by some miracle or improbable chance, were present there, they wouldn’t respond to the glint of Vasily’s diamonds with any suspicion, blinded as they’d be by the similar sparkle of all the other stones, their corneas enameled by the intense brilliance, light hammering hard and fast at their retinas’ rods and cones.
The danger would not appear there, did not lurk among the rods and cones. No, Nelly! (No, Petya!) The danger was this: how many chokers, how many rings, how many Van Cleef invisible settings — the stone seeming to float, trembling, upon a golden net — how many damaged pieces, how many stones blackened or made opaque by the years? How many? I shouted into Larissa’s ear. Very few. How many Saudis, how many Russians, how many Englishmen would drop off their Carrera y Carrera, Boucheron, or Bulgari at a nameless workshop? I could picture them going in, examining the pieces on display, and fleeing after one look at Batyk, his skinny arms crossed over his hollow chest, his sullen gaze.
Larissa had to be about my age: a franker nature and longer bones, a common sense her whole body exuded and a forthright intelligence that had made her laugh at their project. But Nelly had accumulated more sun in her cheeks, like a piece of Baltic amber which, closely scrutinized, held up to the eyes, contains little figures, inclusions, biographical accidents, flies trapped in the fresh resin, insects that should never have flown so close.
And there was I, in excellent spirits between those two suns, like a compatriot of Skywalker on Tatooine gazing upon the two luminous bodies in its sky, one orange, the other blue. Turning to face one and then the other (mentally). A sect of sun worshippers on that distant planet: which of the two would it revere? What would Sir James Frazer have gathered from their ancient lips? Which of the two suns, Petya? The question didn’t trouble me; I didn’t hesitate a second. I was more powerfully attracted by the sun that had shone in space for more years; my adoration was greater, and there could not be nor was there any battle within me between the sect that worshipped the young sun and the worshippers of the older sun.
Sixth Commentary
1
Indistinguishable from an original text at first sight, the words of the annotater, the Commentator. Which, if subjected to isotropic analysis by some prodigiously memorious savant of India and read from right to left, starting with the final word, would reveal no break whatsoever in their paragraphs, a clean crystal with no flaw to shatter the light. Knowing, nevertheless, having understood long ago that these are false and secondary texts, cunningly secreted around the grain or seed of a primary text, which he gradually surrounded with commentaries, building them up layer after layer from the prodigious decoction of his memory (that, yes). Cultivated pearls, muscovite micas, metamorphic crystals that shine, in the end, as if by a natural light and for which he had very beautiful texts at his disposal, other people’s gems that he had no qualms about breaking into pieces in the depths of his study.
A whole public library at his disposal. And not by chance did he take refuge in a library, in the depths of its labyrinthine corridors, a room with a fake sign saying Do Not Enter or Staff Only where he examined those fragments or bits of text in satisfaction. A treasure, the rich copy of precious stones that could reach us and be admired only thus, truncated and inserted into his commentaries. Knowing that he would give them the full brilliance of the book they were torn from, so that entering into his work our eyes wouldn’t see a single break in the light: an equivalent reaction coefficient set in an exquisite mounting, that was his aim. But to come upon one of these fragments of Baudelaire (page 133) or Maeterlinck (page 189) is to turn off a dirt road, a bumpy backwoods lane, and go speeding along the ideal asphalt of a superhighway. However bad this comparison or commentary of mine may be. Here’s a better one: like Han Solo’s ship after someone has taken a hand to it outside an intergalactic bar and suddenly, with a low hum, it shoots off effortlessly into space.
Always flowing better in those passages, but then back again to the feigned taciturnity, the mania for the right word, the con job of the precise adjective. Without ever a real metaphor or image. The Writer says of Flaubert that he never finds a good image in his work (nor have I). Only that dogged struggle with the text, the tireless polishing that finally dries it out, or perhaps it’s not dried out but oiled to the maximum degree, to a high sheen, with a look of premeditation about it. Abstract gestures, paper frenzies, never a pair of hands raised to the breast in an outburst of true emotion, as when the Writer confesses to us that he has wept, that his hero, an alter ego of the Writer, Søren K., has wept.
2
The same astonished reaction from your father to the answer you gave him out by the pool one evening when I was watching the two of you from above, not knowing that you were talking about me. He asked you in amazement: Where? On hearing you muse over the reasons why no man can vanquish terrestrial gravity, why gravity cannot be annulled. “So much theory, such profound knowledge: from where?” he inquired. And you answered: “Do not be amazed by my learning, Papa, for I am receiving my education from a person who is the very incarnation of the intellect.” And he raised his eyes then and tried to catch a glimpse of me from below, intrigued by these words: this young man, this foreigner, the incarnation of the intellect?
My turn to be astonished now, for the man I’d taken at first for a bodyguard (and with that flimsy build, not a very good one) had arrived two months before I did and was also in hiding. As I told you, as I’ve already roundly denounced: it was from him, from Batyk, that the idea of swindling the two from Saint Petersburg had come. And it was Batyk who had brought word that Kirpich and Raketa had been freed.
(Pause.)
But was he a scientist, too: that kind of scientist? Yes, no more and no less than a very gifted researcher, someone who had some knowledge of the subject to bring to bear and who’d provided indispensable help in the production of the first diamonds. Which Vasily had been synthesizing for years without ever achieving gem quality, always frustrated by the slow rate of growth, until one day, with a softer gradient and some refinement of the metallic solvent: larger and better diamonds than anyone else, ever, in the whole world. It wasn’t one of those scientists in the West in their state-of-the-art air-conditioned labs with machines in the hall that dispense chocolate and cookies, no! He alone! In the deepest depths and from the deepest depths!