Not reliable, steadfast either. For how to endow his figure with the greyhound sleekness of a Duke of noble blood, make him abandon his crude manners, his way of shambling across the garden to the swimming pool bar for a beer? Looking, as he moved, like a man who’d stolen a fortune, who perhaps was toying with the expedient of growing fat, eating fishsticks unceasingly in order to attain the objective of hiding himself from sight inside a hugely fattened body. Could this be called reliable? Could this be called steadfast?
Certainly not, quite the opposite: a brutally voluble person, changing his mind every second, who endlessly consulted the tiny screen of his cell phone throughout the night they spent in the cabin, continually on the point of standing up and confessing everything to the gangsters. And not steadfast either. Because he’d accepted the idea, it had struck him as good, and then, on the way to the cabin, when they had their goal in sight and while Batyk (pretending to be a Yakut) was rubbing his hands with gusto, your papa suddenly entertained and esteemed the idea of making a U-turn and racing back to E* in the jeep without selling anything. So how reliable, then? How steadfast?
Becoming aware of this difficulty and pointing her double error out to Nelly, on the basis of the Book’s authority and of this argument, which was to my mind insurmountable: that imposture is intimately linked to commentary. The result would be impossible to sustain; we would not succeed in deceiving any reader with our swindle, just as I myself always react when confronted with the Commentator’s falsity and imposture.
Without the words of a commentary scrawled ineptly across the foreheads of many of these imposters — such and such an opera singer, the “best” performer of Bach, so many painters — they would collapse. On closer view, it’s easy to discover how diminutive the text that holds them up is: what a critic said about him, the most knowledgeable authority on Renaissance vocal music, the number one specialist in alfresco painting, men in their turn puffed out with words, repellant palmers off of citations, people whose words have no weight whatsoever, not even for themselves, if they can’t manage to make them refer to an authority. Impossible for that reason, Nelly, and for this one, too: ranged against the feasibility of a new czar is the fact that there are already ten royal houses in Europe; the Russian house would make an improbable eleventh.
7
Or how about has keen judgment, is clear-thinking and circumspect when he couldn’t stop admiring the ingenuity of the men who wanted to hunt him down, and was shouting, “Mother! Are you listening, Mother?” to Nelly (wasn’t it absurd, that way he had of calling your mother “Mother”?). “But which is better? Huh?”
Explaining how there was once some Vanya somewhere, a man in Russia, coming back from an important meeting, walking with the quick steps of a young mafioso to the distant black point of his car (also a Mercedes), pulled up on a patch of lawn. Not on the sidewalk, not on the asphalt of a parking lot — why would he park it on asphalt, between the yellow stripes that frame a normal car? And he saw, drawing closer, that someone, that something was hanging from the handle of the door — a plastic bag, tied around the handle by some idiot. Easy to see it now: a plastic supermarket shopping bag.
Tied or left there by some mechanic from the nearby garage or some TV repairman, a man walking to his shop in the morning or on his way home from the night shift, unable to keep his envy of that car parked on the grass from making him tie up that bag there, in passing, as a stupid and out of place reminder: Hey! There are still workers coming in or going out at these hours, while you, bourgeois thief, and not even bourgeois thief, big mafia strongman, go around robbing and thieving, leaving your car on the grass.
The man standing at the car door saw all that, imagined the mechanic’s gray overalls disappearing down the alley, leaving his stupid and inappropriate declaration hanging there, and thought of the many things he’d like to explain: how, for example, he himself had worked in one of those repair shops until not very long ago, but without time to argue or any desire to do so, very irritated and full of rage.
And he went to swipe the bag away with his hand and be rid of this impertinence, and it was a bomb — wasn’t it, Mother? — a bomb that exploded the moment his hand ripped it furiously away. “Low tech, huh, Mother?”
As if, during a production meeting, some young fellow, a killer newly arrived at the Technical Solutions Lab, had listened to his older colleagues’ meanderings about limpet bombs, motion-activated detonators, resins set off by remote control from beneath manhole covers (and how? with the car on the lawn?) and had modestly raised his hand and suggested this: low tech. A degree of acquaintance, a precise calibration of the sequence of thoughts triggered by a plastic bag left hanging from a car door. The final thought sequence of the man who ripped the bag away while still talking on his cell phone. “Russians! Huh, Mother? Russians!” Vasily grew animated as he told her about it, then lowered his eyes, defeated by the evidence of a multiform ingenuity that would hunt him down in the end, wherever he ran, wherever he hid.
Tormented not only by the ingenuity, but also by the perseverance of a sharpshooter, posted for many days at the top of a building. The attic where he waited patiently for the curtains to part in the house where, also patient, without ever going near the window, a father and son were hiding. Two men who’d swindled the mafia, two entrepreneurs who had robbed too much (millions), without succeeding in buying a better house, or without having had time to do so when their game was up and they’d had to run and hide in that apartment, never going near the windows. But one afternoon, the kitchen’s yellow light bulb already switched on, the cold air of winter coming in through the window above, the older of the two, precisely the one on whom the godfather’s order of execution was weighing, had approached, had wanted to see something in the courtyard, the scene that he knew from memory — snow flattened by cars, children playing in the vacant lot — and had taken the bullet before the curtain had fallen back into place, the finger withdrawn. One glimpse. An H & K abandoned next to a mattress in the attic of the neighboring house, its three-thousand-dollar price tag amply covered by the payment guaranteed under the contract, no fingerprints or cigarette butts or sandwich wrappers anywhere nearby.
“No one could shoot you, Vasily: we’re on a cliff, there are no houses higher than this one,” I told him.
Your father repeated my stupid words: “Boooo, boooo! No one could shoot you, Vasily, there are no houses higher than this one … Booooo!” And turned his head from shoulder to shoulder in a gesture of resignation inspired by my stupidity: and what about plastic bags with bombs in them, and the many other means of killing him that even he himself, without being a killer, has thought of?
8
For also, in Pollux, another difficulty: that he has far-reaching ideas. What far-reaching ideas, and how far-reaching? A single one that he succeeded in exploiting to the maximum degree, on the bad advice of the Buryat’s black heart. I do concede that the idea he had in his laboratory in the Urals was far-reaching and unique. For the first time in history, color diamonds that bore no trace of having been manufactured. A far-reaching idea? All right: one far-reaching idea, I grant that. But then led directly afterward, by hand and mouth, to small ideas, to the infinitely despicable and minuscule idea of the swindle that had ended in their precipitous departure from Russia.