Less Than One: Selected Essays

For the actual meaning of the line at the time was, of course, "\Ve must love one another or kill." Or "we'll be killing one another in no time." Since—after all, all he had was a voice and this wasn't heard or heeded—what followed was exactly what he predicted: killing. But again, given

World War Il's volume of carnage, one could hardly enjoy proving oneself a prophet. So the poet chooses to threat this "or die" literally. Presumably because he felt he was re­sponsible for failing to avert what had happened, since the whole point of writing this poem was to influence public opinion.

10

This, after all, wasn't the benefit of hindsight only. The evidence that he didn't feel very secure about this line's prescription is felt in the opening of the next stanza: "De­fenceless under the night . . ." Paired with "Our world in stupor lies," this is tantamount to an admission of failure to persuade. At the same time, "Defenceless under the night" is the most lyrical-sounding line in the poem and sur­passes in the height of its pitch even "All I have is a voice." In both cases, the lyricism stems from the feeling of what he terms in "In Memory of \V. B. Yeats" ''human un- success," from his own "rapture of distress" here in the first place.

Coming right after "We must love one another or die," this line has a sharper personal air and leaps from the level of rationalization to that of pure emotional exposure, into the domain of revelations. Technically speaking, "We must love another or die" is the end of the mental road. After this, there is only a prayer, and "Defenceless under the night" climbs there in its tonality if not yet in its diction. And as though sensing that things may slip from under his control, that the pitch approaches a vibration of wailing, the poet undercuts himself with "Our world in stupor lies."

Yet no matter how hard he tries to pull his voice down in this as well as in the subsequent four lines, the spell cast by "\Ve must love one another or die" gets reinforced almost against his own will by "Defenceless under the night" and won't go away. On the contrary, it penetrates his defenses at the rate at which he builds them. The spell, as we know it, is an ecclesiastical one, i.e., imbued with a sense of infinity; and words like "everywhere," "light," "just," thanks to their generic nature, echo that sense unwittingly and in spite of reductive qualifiers like "dotted" and "harmonic." And when the poet comes closest to having his voice com­pletely harnessed, that spell breaks through with full lyrical force in this breathtaking cross between plea and prayer:

May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

Well, what we have here, apart from everything else, is a seU-portrait that strays into the definition of the species. And that definition, I must say, comes from the tenor of "May I" rather than from the precision of the next three lines. For it's their sum that produces "May I." What we have here, in other words, is truth resulting in lyricism or, better still, lyricism becoming truth; what we have here is a stoic who prays. This may not be the species' definition as yet, but this is surely its goal.

At any rate, this is the direction in which this poet went. You may, of course, find this ending a bit sanctimonious and wonder who are "the Just"—the fabled thirty-six or somebody in particular—or what does this "affirming flame" look like? But you don't dissect a bird to find the origins of its song: what should be dissected is your ear. In either case, however, you'll be dodging the alternative of "We must love one another or die," and I don't think you can afford to.

1984

To Please a Shadow

1

When a writer resorts to a language other than his mother tongue, he does so either out of necessity, like Conrad, or because of burning ambition, like Nabokov, or for the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett. Belonging to a dif­ferent league, in the summer of 1977, in New York, after living in this country for five years, I purchased in a small typewriter shop on Sixth Avenue a portable "Lettera 22" and set out to write (essays, translations, occasionally a poem) in English for a reason that had very little to do with the above. My sole purpose then, as it is now, was to find myself in closer proximity to the man whom I consid­ered the greatest mind of the twentieth century: Wystan Hugh Auden.

I was, of course, perfectly aware of the futility of my undertaking, not so much because I was born in Russia and into its language (which I am never to abandon—and I hope vice versa) as because of this poet's intelligence, which in my view has no equal. I was aware of the futility of this effort, moreover, because Auden had been dead four years then. Yet to my mind, writing in English was the best way to get near him, to work on his terms, to be judged, if not by his code of conscience, then by whatever it is in the English language that made this code of conscience pos­sible.

These words, the very structure of these sentences, all show anyone who has read a single stanza or a single para­graph of Auden's how I fail. To me, though, a failure by his standards is preferable to a success by others'. Besides, I knew from the outset that I was bound to fail; whether this sort of sobriety was my own or has been borrowed from his writing, I can no longer tell. All I hope for while writing in his tongue is that I won't lower his level of mental opera­tion, his plane of regard. This is as much as one can do for a better man: to continue in his vein; this, I think, is what civilizations are all about.

I knew that by temperament and otherwise, I was a different man, and that in the best case possible I'd be regarded as his imitator. Still, for me that would be a compliment. Also I had a second line of defense: I could always pull back to my writing in Russian, of which I was pretty confident and which even he, had he known the language, probably would have liked. My desire to write in English had nothing to do with any sense of confidence, contentment, or comfort; it was simply a desire to please a shadow. Of course, where he was by then, linguistic bar­riers hardly mattered, but somehow I thought that he might like it better if I made myself clear to him in English. ( Al­though when I tried, on the green grass at Kirchstetten eleven years ago now, it didn't work; the English I had at that time was better for reading and listening than for speaking. Perhaps just as well.)

To put it differently, unable to return the full amount of what has been given, one tries to pay back at least in the same coin. After all, he did so himself, borrowing the "Don Juan" stanza for his "Letter to Lord Byron" or hexameters for his "Shield of Achilles." Courtship always requires a degree of self-sacrifice and assimilation, all the more so if one is courting a pure spirit. While in the flesh, this man did so much that belief in the immortality of his soul becomes somehow unavoidable. What he left us with amounts to a gospel which is both brought about by and filled with love that's anything but finite—with love, that is, which can in no way all be harbored by human flesh and which therefore needs words. If there were no churches, one could easily have built one upon this poet, and its main precept would run something like his

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

2

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet. A majority by definition, society thinks of itself as having other options than reading verses, no matter how well written. Its failure to do so re­sults in its sinking to that level of locution at which society falls easy prey to a demagogue or a tyrant. This is society's own equivalent of oblivion; a tyrant, of course, may try to save his subjects from it by some spectacular bloodbath.

I first read Auden some twenty years ago in Russia in rather limp and listless translations that I found in an anthology of contemporary English poetry subtitled "From Browning to Our Days." "Our Days" were those of 1937, when the volume was published. Needless to say, almost the entire body of its translators along with its editor, M. Gutner, were arrested soon afterward, and many of them perished. Needless to say, for the next forty years no other anthology of contemporary English poetry was published in Russia, and the said volume became something of a collector's item.

One line of Auden in that anthology, however, caught my eye. It was, as I leamed later, from the last stanza of his early poem "'No Change of Place," which described a some­what claustrophobic landscape where "no one goes I Fur­ther than railhead or the ends of piers, I Will neither go nor send his son . .." This last bit, "Will neither go nor send his son ..." struck me with its mixhire of negative extension and common sense. Having been brought up on an essen­tially emphatic and self-asserting diet of Russian verse, I was quick to register this recipe whose main component was self-restraint. Still, poetic lines have a knack of straying from the context into universal significance, and the threat­ening touch of absurdity contained in "Will neither go nor send his son" would start vibrating in the back of my mind whenever I'd set out to do something on paper.

This is, I suppose, what they call an influence, except that the sense of the absurd is never an invention of the poet but is a reflection of reality; inventions are seldom rec­ognizable. What one may owe here to the poet is not the sentiment itself but its treatment: quiet, unemphatic, with­out any pedal, almost en passant. This treatment was es­pecially significant to me precisely because I came across this line in the early sixties, when the Theater of the Absurd was in full swing. Against that background, Auden's han­dling of the subject stood out not only because he had beaten a lot of people to the punch but because of a considerably different ethical message. The way he handled the line was telling, at least to me: something like "Don't cry wolf" even though the wolf's at the door. (Even though, I would add, it looks exactly like you. Especially because of that, don't cry wolf. )

Although for a writer to mention his penal experiences —or for that matter, any kind of hardship—is like dropping names for normal folk, it so happened that my next oppor­tunity to pay a closer look at Auden occurred while I was doing my own time in the North, in a small village lost among swamps and forests, near the polar circle. This time the anthology that I had was in English, sent to me by a friend from Moscow. It had quite a lot of Yeats, whom I then found a bit too oratorical and sloppy with meters, and Eliot, who in those days reigned supreme in Eastern Eu­rope. I was intending to read Eliot.

But by pure chance the book opened to Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." I was young then and therefore particularly keen on elegies as a genre, having nobody around dying to write one for. So I read them perhaps more avidly than anything else, and I frequently thought that the most interesting feature of the genre was the authors' un­witting attempts at self-portrayal with which nearly every poem "in memoriam" is strewn—or soiled. Understandable though this tendency is, it often turns such a poem into the author's ruminations on the subject of death, from which we learn more about him than about the deceased. The Auden poem had none of this; what's more, I soon realized that even its structure was designed to pay tribute to the dead poet, imitating in reverse order the great Irishman's own modes of stylistic development, all the way down to his earliest: the tetrameters of the poem's third—last—part.

It's because of these tetrameters, in particular because of eight lines from this third part, that I understood what kind of poet I was reading. These lines overshadowed for me that astonishing description of "the dark cold day," Yeats's last, with its shuddering

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

They overshadowed that unforgettable rendition of the stricken body as a city whose suburbs and squares are grad­ually emptying as if after a crushed rebellion. They over­shadowed even that statement of the era

. . . poetry makes nothing happen . . .

They, those eight lines in tetrameter that made this third part of the poem sound like a cross between a Salvation Army hymn, a funeral dirge, and a nursery rhyme, went like this:

Time that is intolerant Of the brace and innocent, And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique,

Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it /ices; Pardons cowardice, conceit, Lays its honours at their feet.

I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peer­ing through the square porthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half be­lieving what I'd just read, half wondering whether my grasp of English wasn't playing tricks on me. I had there a veritable boulder of an English-Russian dictionary, and I went through its pages time and again, checking every word, every allusion, hoping that they might spare me the meaning that stared at me from the page. I guess I was simply refusing to believe that way back in 1939 an English poet had said, "Time . . . worships language," and yet the world around was still what it was.

But for once the dictionary didn't overmle me. Auden had indeed said that time (not the time) worships lan­guage, and the train of thought that statement set in mo­tion in me is still tmndling to this day. For "worship" is an attitude of the lesser toward the greater. If time worships language, it means that language is greater, or older, than time, which is, in its turn, older and greater than space. That was how I was taught, and I indeed felt that way. So if time—which is synonymous with, nay, even absorbs deity—worships language, where then does language come from? For the gift is always smaUer than the giver. And then isn't language a repository of time? And isn't this why time worships it? And isn't a song, or a poem, or indeed a speech itself, with its caesuras, pauses, spondees, and so forth, a game language plays to restructure time? And aren't those by whom language "lives" those by whom time does too? And if time "forgives" them, does it do so out of generosity or out of necessity? And isn't generosity a neces­sity anyhow?

Short and horizontal as those lines were, they seemed to me incredibly vertical. They were also very much offhand, almost chatty: metaphysics disguised as common sense, common sense disguised as nursery-rhyme couplets. These layers of disguise alone were telling me what language is, and I realized that I was reading a poet who spoke the truth—or through whom the truth made itself audible. At least it felt more like truth than anything else I managed to figure out in that anthology. And perhaps it felt that way precisely because of the touch of irrelevance that I sensed in the falling intonation of "forgives / Everyone by whom it lives; / Pardons cowardice, conceit, I Lays its honours at their feet." These words were there, I thought, simply to offset the upward gravity of "Time . .. worships language."

I could go on and on about these lines, but I could do so only now. Then and there I was simply stunned. Among other things, what became clear to me was that one should watch out when Auden makes his witty comments and observations, keeping an eye on civilization no matter what his immediate subject (or condition) is. I felt that I was dealing with a new kind of metaphysical poet, a man of terrific lyrical gifts, who disguised himself as an observer of public mores. And my suspicion was that this choice of mask, the choice of this idiom, had to do less with matters of style and tradition than with the personal humility im­posed on him not so much by a particular creed as by his sense of the nature of language. Humility is never chosen.

I had yet to read my Auden. Still, after "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," I knew that I was facing an author more humble than Yeats or Eliot, with a soul less petulant than either, while, I was afraid, no less tragic. With the benefit of hindsight I may say now that I wasn't altogether wrong, and that if there was ever any drama in Auden's voice, it wasn't his own personal drama but a public or existential one. He'd never put himself in the center of the tragic pic- hue; at best he'd acknowledge his presence at the scene. I had yet to hear from his very mouth that "J. S. Bach was terribly lucky. When he wanted to praise the Lord, he'd write a chorale or a cantata addressing the Almighty di­rectly. Today, if a poet wishes to do the same thing, he has to employ indirect speech." The same, presumably, would apply to prayer.

3

As I write these notes, I notice the first person singular popping its ugly head up with alarming frequency. But man is what he reads; in other words, spotting this pro­noun, I detect Auden more than anybody else: the aberra­tion simply reflects the proportion of my reading of this poet. Old dogs, of course, won't learn new tricks; dog owners, though, end up resembling their dogs. Critics, and especially biographers, of writers with a distinctive style often adopt, however unconsciously, their subjects' mode of expression. To put it simply, one is changed by what one loves, sometimes to the point of losing one's entire identity. I am not trying to say that this is what happened to me; all I seek to suggest is that these otherwise tawdry I's and me's are, in their own turn, forms of indirect speech whose object is Auden.

For those of my generation who were interested in poetry in English—and I can't claim there were too many of those—the sixties was the era of anthologies. On their way home, foreign students and scholars who'd come to Russia on academic exchange programs would understand­ably try to rid themselves of extra weight, and books of poetry were the first to go. They'd sell them, almost for nothing, to secondhand bookstores, which subsequently would charge extraordinary sums if you wanted to buy them. The rationale behind these prices was quite simple: to deter the locals from purchasing these Western items; as for the foreigner himself, he would obviously be gone and unable to see the disparity.

Still, if you knew a salesperson, as one who frequents a place inevitably does, you could strike the sort of deal every book-hunting person is familiar with: you'd trade one thing for another, or two or three books for one, or you'd buy a book, read it, and return it to the store and get your money back. Besides, by the time I was released and returned to my hometown, I'd gotten myself some sort of reputation, and in several bookstores they treated me rather nicely. Because of this reputation, students from the exchange pro­grams would sometimes visit me, and as one is not supposed to cross a strange threshold empty-handed, they'd bring books. With some of these visitors I struck up close friend­ships, because of which my bookshelves gained consider­ably.

I liked them very much, these anthologies, and not for their contents only but also for the sweetish smell of their bindings and their pages edged in yellow. They felt so American and were indeed pocket-size. You could pull them out of your pocket in a streetcar or in a public garden, and even though the text would be only a half or a third comprehensible, they'd instantly obliterate the local reality. My favorites, though, were Louis Untermeyer's and Oscar Williams's—because they had pictures of their contributors that fired up one's imagination in no less a way than the lines themselves. For hours on end I would sit scrutinizing a smallish black-and-white box with this or that poet's fea­tures, trying to figure out what kind of person he was, trying to animate him, to match the face with his half- or a third-understood lines. Later on, in the company of friends we would exchange our wild surmises and the snatches of gossip that occasionally came our way and, having developed a common denominator, pronounce our verdict. Again with the benefit of hindsight, I must say that frequently our divinations were not too far off.

That was how I first saw Auden's face. It was a terribly reduced photograph—a bit studied, with a too didactic handling of shadow: it said more about the photographer than about his model. From that picture, one would have to conclude either that the former was a naive aesthete or the latter's features were too neutral for his occupation. I preferred the second version, partly because neutrality of tone was very much a feature of Auden's poetry, partly because anti-heroic posture was the idee fixe of our genera­tion. The idea was to look like everybody else: plain shoes, workman's cap, jacket and tie, preferably gray, no beards or mustaches. \Vystan was recognizable.

Also recognizable to the point of giving one the shivers were the lines in "September 1, 1939" ostensibly explain­ing the origins of the war that had cradled my generation but in effect depicting our very selves as well, like a black- and-white snapshot in its o^ right.

I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.

This four-liner indeed was straying out of context, equat­ing victors to victims, and I think it should be tattooed by the federal government on the chest of every newborn, not because of its message alone, but because of its intonation. The only acceptable argument against such a procedure would be that there are better lines by Auden. What would you do with:

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play,

All the conventions conspire

To make this fort assume

The furniture of home;

Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

Or if you think this is too much New York, too American, then how about this couplet from "The Shield of Achilles," which, to me at least, sounds a bit like a Dantesque epitaph to a handful of East European nations:

. . . they lost their pride

And died as men before their bodies died.

Or if you are still against such a barbarity, if you want to spare the tender skin this hurt, there are seven other lines in the same poem that should be carved on the gates of every existing state, indeed on the gates of our whole world:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, Loitered about that vacancy, a bird Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone: That girls arc raped, that two boys knife a third, Were axioms to him, who'd never heard Of any world where promises were kept. Or one could weep because another wept.

This way the new arrival won't be deceived as to this world's nature; this way the world's dweller won't take demagogues for demigods.

One doesn't have to be a gypsy or a Lombroso to believe in the relation between an individual's appearance and his deeds: this is what our sense of beauty is based on, after all. Yet how should a poet look who wrote:

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.

How should a man look who was as fond of translating metaphysical verities into the pedestrian of common sense as he was of spotting the former in the latter? How should one look who, by going very thoroughly about creation, tells you more about the Creator than any impertinent agonist shortcutting through the spheres? Shouldn't a sensibility unique in its combination of honesty, clinical detachment, and controlled lyricism result if not in a unique arrange­ment of facial features then at least in a specific, uncom­mon expression? And could such features or such an expres­sion be captured by a brush? registered by a camera?

I liked the process of extrapolating from that stamp-size picture very much. One always gropes for a face, one al­ways wants an ideal to materialize, and Auden was very close at the time to amounting to an ideal. (Two others were Beckett and Frost, yet I knew the way they looked; however terrifying, the correspondence between their far;ades and their deeds was obvious.) Later, of course, I saw other photographs of Auden: in a smuggled maga­zine or in other anthologies. Still they added nothing; the man eluded lenses, or they lagged behind the man. I began to wonder whether one form of art was capable of depicting another, whether the visual could apprehend the semantic.

Then one day—I think it was in the winter of 1968 or 1969—in Moscow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, whom I was visiting there, handed me yet another anthology of modem poetry, a very handsome book generously illustrated with large black-and-white photographs done by, if I remember correctly, Hollie McKenna. I found what I was looking for. A couple of months later, somebody borrowed that book from me and I never saw the photograph again; still, I re­member it rather clearly.

The picture was taken somewhere in New York, it seemed, on some overpass—either the one near Grand Central or the one at Columbia University that spans Am­sterdam Avenue. Auden stood there looking as though he were caught unawares, in passage, eyebrows lifted in be­wilderment. The eyes themselves, however, were terribly calm and keen. The time was, presumably, the late forties or the beginning of the fifties, before the famous wrinkled— "unkempt bed"—stage took over his features. Everything, or almost everything, became clear to me.

The contrast or, better still, the degree of disparity be­tween those eyebrows risen in fomial bewilderment and the keenness of his gaze, to my mind, directly corresponded to the formal aspects of his lines (two lifted eyebrows = two rhymes) and to the blinding precision of their content. What stared at me from the page was the facial equivalent of a couplet, of truth that's better known by heart. The features were regular, even plain. There was nothing spe­cifically poetic about this face, nothing Byronic, demonic, ironic, hawkish, aquiline, romantic, wounded, etc. Rather, it was the face of a physician who is interested in your story though he knows you are ill. A face well prepared for everything, a sum total of a face.

It was a result. Its blank stare was a direct product of that blinding proximity of face to object which produced expressions like "voluntary errands," "necessary mur­der," "conservative dark," "artificial wilderness," or "trivi­ality of the sand." It felt like when a myopic person takes off his glasses, except that the keensightedness of this pair of eyes had to do with neither myopia nor the smallness of objects but with their deep-seated threats. It was the stare of a man who knew that he wouldn't be able to weed those threats out, yet who was bent on describing for you the symptoms as well as the malaise itself. That wasn't what's called "social criticism"—if only because the malaise wasn't social: it was existential.

In general, I think this man was terribly mistaken for a social commentator, or a diagnostician, or some such thing. The most frequent charge that's been leveled against him was that he didn't offer a cure. I guess in a way he asked for that by resorting to Freudian, then Marxist, then ecclesi­astical terminology. The cure, though, lay precisely in his employing these terminologies, for they are simply different dialects in which one can speak about one and the same thing, which is love. It is the intonation with which one talks to the sick that cures. This poet went among the world's grave, often terminal cases not as a surgeon but as a nurse, and every patient knows that it's nurses and not incisions that eventually put one back on one's feet. It's the voice of a nurse, that is, of love, that one hears in the final speech of Alonso to Ferdinand in "The Sea and the Mirror":

But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you, come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain . . .

Neither physician nor angel, nor—least of all—your be­loved or relative will say this at the moment of your final defeat: only a nurse or a poet, out of experience as well as out of love.

And I marveled at that love. I knew nothing about Au­den's life: neither about his being homosexual nor about his marriage of convenience (for her) to Erika Mann, etc. —nothing. One thing I sensed quite clearly was that this love would overshoot its object. In my mind—better, in my imagination—it was love expanded or accelerated by lan­guage, by the necessity of expressing it; and language— that much I already knew—has its own dynamics and is prone, especially in poetry, to use its self-generating de­vices : meters and stanzas that take the poet far beyond his original destination. And the other truth about love in poe­try that one gleans from reading it is that a writer's senti­ments inevitably subordinate themselves to the linear and unrecoiling progression of art. This sort of thing secures, in art, a higher degree of lyricism; in life, an equivalent in isolation. If only because of his stylistic versatility, this man should have known an uncommon degree of despair, as many of his most delightful, most mesmerizing lyrics do demonstrate. For in art lightness of touch more often than not comes from the darkness of its very absence.

And yet it was love all the same, perpetuated by lan­guage, oblivious—because the language was English—to gender, and intensified by a deep agony, because agony, too, may, in the end, have to be articulated. Language, after all, is self-conscious by definition, and it wants to get the hang of every new situation. As I looked at Rollie McKenna's picture, I felt pleased that the face there re­vealed neither neurotic nor any other sort of strain; that it was pale, ordinary, not expressing but instead absorbing whatever it was that was going on in front of his eyes. How marvelous it would be, I thought, to have those features, and I tried to ape the grimace in the mirror. I obviously failed, but I knew that I would fail, because such a face was bound to be one of a kind. There was no need to imitate it: it already existed in the world, and the world seemed somehow more palatable to me because this face was somewhere out there.

Strange things they are, faces of poets. In theory, authors' looks should be of no consequence to their readers: reading is not a narcissistic activity, neither is writing, yet the mo­ment one likes a sufficient amount of a poet's verse one starts to wonder about the appearance of the writer. This, presumably, has to do with one's suspicion that to like a work of art is to recognize the truth, or the degree of it, that art expresses. Insecure by nature, we want to see the artist, whom we identify with his work, so that the next time around we might know what tmth looks like in reality. Only the authors of antiquity escape this scrutiny, which is why, in part, they are regarded as classics, and their gen­eralized marble features that dot niches in libraries are in direct relation to the absolute archetypal significance of their oeuvre. But when you read

... To virit The grave of a friend, to make an ugly scene, To count the loves one has grown out of, Is iwt nice, but to chirp like a tearless bird, As though no one dies in particular

And gossip were never true, unthinkable . . .

you begin to feel that behind these lines there stands not a blond, brunette, pale, swarthy, wrinkled, or smooth-faced concrete author but life itself; and that you would like to meet; that you would like to find yourself in human prox­imity to. Behind this wish lies not vanity but certain human physics that pull a small particle toward a big magnet, even though you may end up echoing Auden's own: "I have known three great poets, each one a prize son of a bitch." I: "Who?" He: "Yeats, Frost, Bert Brecht." (Now about Brecht he was wrong: Brecht wasn't a great poet.)

4

On June 6, 1972, some forty-eight hours after I had left Russia on very short notice, I stood with my friend Carl

Proffer, a professor of Russian literature at the University of Michigan (who'd flown to Vienna to meet me), in front of Auden's summer house in the small village of Kirch- stetten, explaining to its owner the reasons for our being there. This meeting almost didn't happen.

There are three Kirchstettens in northern Austria, and we had passed through all three and were about to turn back when the car rolled into a quiet, narrow country lane and we saw a wooden arrow saying "Audenstrasse." It was called previously (if I remember accurately) "Hinterholz" because behind the woods the lane led to the local ceme­tery. Renaming it had presumably as much to do with the villagers' readiness to get rid of this "memento mori" as with their respect for the great poet living in their midst. The poet regarded the situation with a mixture of pride and embarrassment. He had a clearer sentiment, though, toward the local priest, whose n^e was Schicklgruber: Auden couldn't resist the pleasure of addressing him as "Father Schicklgruber."

All that I would learn later. Meanwhile, Carl Proffer was trying to explain the reasons for our being there to a stocky, heavily perspiring man in a red shirt and broad suspenders, jacket over his arm, a pile of books underneath it. The man had just come by train from Vienna and, having climbed the hill, was short of breath and not disposed to conversa­tion. We were about to give up when he suddenly grasped what Carl Proffer was saying, cried "Impossible!" and in­vited us into the house. It was Wystan Auden, and it was less than two years before he died.

Let me attempt to clarify how all this had come about. Back in 1969, George L. Kline, a professor of philosophy at Bryn Mawr, had visited me in Leningrad. Professor Kline was translating my poems into English for the Penguin edi­tion and, as we were going over the content of the future book, he asked me whom I would ideally prefer to write the introduction. I suggested Auden—because England and Auden were then synonymous in my mind. But, then, the whole prospect of my book being published in England was quite unreal. The only thing that imparted a semblance of reality to this ven lure was its sheer illegality under Soviet law.

All the same, things were set in motion. Auden was given the manuscript to read and liked it enough to write an introduction. So when I reached Vienna, I was carrying with me Auden's address in Kirchstetten. Looking back and thinking about the conversations we had during the subse­quent three weeks in Austria and later in London and in Oxford, I hear his voice more than mine, although, I must say, I grilled him quite extensively on the subject of con­temporary poetry, especially about the poets themselves. Still, this was quite understandable because the only Eng­lish phrase I knew I wasn't making a mistake in was "Mr. Auden, what do you think about ..."—and the name would follow.

Perhaps it was just as well, for what could I tell him that he didn't already know one way or another? I could have told him, of course, how I had translated several poems of his into Russian and took them to a magazine in Moscow; but the year happened to be 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and one night the BBC broadcast his "The Ogre does what ogres can . .." and that was the end of this venhire. (The story would perhaps have endeared me to him, but I didn't have a very high opinion of those transla­tions anyway.) That I'd never read a successful translation of his work into any language I had some idea of? He knew that himself, perhaps all too well. That I was overjoyed to learn one day about his devotion to the Kierkegaardian triad, which for many of us too was the key to the human species? But I worried I wouldn't be able to articulate it.

It was better to listen. Because I was Russian, he'd go on about Russian writers. "I wouldn't like to live with Dosto­evsky under the same roof," he would declare. Or, "The best Russian writer is Chekhov"—"Why?" "He's the only one of your people who's got common sense." Or he would ask about the matter that seemed to perplex him most about my homeland: "I was told that the Russians always steal windshield wipers from parked cars. Why?" But my answer —because there were no spare parts—wouldn't satisfy him: he obviously had in mind a more inscrutable reason, and, having read him, I almost began to see one myself. Then he offered to translate some of my poems. This shook me considerably. Who was I to be translated by Auden? I !mew that because of his translations some of my compatriots had profited more than their lines deserved; yet somehow I couldn't allow myself the thought of him working for me. So I said, "Mr. Auden, what do you think about . . . Robert Lowell?" "I don't like men," came the answer, "who leave behind them a smoking trail of weeping women."

During those weeks in Austria he looked after my affairs with the diligence of a good mother hen. To begin with, telegrams and other mail inexplicably began to arrive for me "c/o W. H. Auden." Then he wrote to the Academy of American Poets requesting that they provide me with some financial support. This was how I got my first American money—$1,000 to be precise—and it lasted me all the way to my first payday at the University of Michigan. He'd

378 I J О s E p H B В О D sky

recommend me to his agent, instruct me on whom to meet and whom to avoid, introduce me to friends, shield me from journalists, and speak ruefully about having given up his flat on St. Mark's Place—as though I were planning to settle in his New York. "It would be good for you. If only because there is an Armenian church nearby, and the Mass is better when you don't understand the words. You don't know Armenian, do you?" I didn't.

Then from London came—c{o \V. H. Auden—an invita­tion for me to participate in the Poetry International in Queen Elizabeth Hall, and we booked the same Bight by British European Airways. At this point an opportunity arose for me to pay him back a little in kind. It so happened that during my stay in Vienna I had been befriended by the Razumovsky family (descendants of the Count Razu- movsky of Beethoven's Quartets). One member of that family, Olga Razumovsky, was working then for the Aus­trian airlines. Having learned ab6ut W. H. Auden and myself taking the same flight to London, she called BEA and suggested they give these two passengers the royal treatment. Which we indeed received. Auden was pleased, and I was proud.

On several occasions during that time, he urged me to call him by his Christian name. Naturally I resisted—and not only because of how I felt about him as a poet but also because of the difference in our ages: Russians are terribly mindful of such things. Finally in London he said, "It won't do. Either you are going to call me Wystan, or I'll have to address you as Mr. Brodsky." This prospect sounded so grotesque to me that I gave up. "Yes, Wystan," I said. "Any­thing you say, Wystan." Afterward we went to the reading. He leaned on the lectern, and for a good half hour he filled the room with the lines he knew by heart. If I ever wished for time to stop, it was then, inside that large dark room on the south bank of the Thames. Unfortunately, it didn't. Although a year later, three months before he died in an Austrian hotel, we did read together again. In the same room.

5

By that time he was almost sixty-six. "I had to move to Ox­ford. I am in good health, but I have to have somebody to look after me." As far as I could see, visiting him there in January 1973, he was looked after only by the four walls of the sixteenth-cenhiry cottage given him by the college, and by the maid. In the dining hall the members of the faculty jostled him away from the food board. I supposed that was just English school manners, boys being boys. Looking at them, however, I couldn't help recalling one more of those blinding approximations of Wystan's: "triviality of the sand."

This foolery was simply a variation on the theme of society having no obligation to a poet, especially to an old poet. That is, society would listen to a politician of com­parable age, or even older, but not to a poet. There is a variety of reasons for this, ranging from anthropologic ones to the sycophantic. But the conclusion is plain and unavoid­able: society has no right to complain if a politician does it in. For, as Auden once put it in his "Rimbaud":

Butin that child the rhetorician's lie Burst like a pipe: the cold had made a poet.

If the lie explodes this way in "that child," what happens to it in the old man who feels the cold more acutely? Pre­sumptuous as it may sound coming from a foreigner, the tragic achievement of Auden as a poet was precisely that he had dehydrated his verse of any sort of deception, be it a rhetorician's or a bardic one. This sort of thing alienates one not only from faculty members but also from one's fellows in the field, for in every one of us sits that red- pimpled youth thirsting for the incoherence of elevation.

Turning critic, this apotheosis of pimples would regard the absence of elevation as slackness, sloppiness, chatter, decay. It wouldn't occur to his sort that an aging poet has the right to write worse—if indeed he does—that there's nothing less palatable than unbecoming old age "discover­ing love" and monkey-gland transplants. Between boister­ous and wise, the public will always choose the former (and not because such a choice reflects its demographic makeup or because of poets' own "romantic" habit of dying young, but because of the species' innate unwillingness to think about old age, let alone its consequences). The sad thing about this clinging to immaturity is that the condition itself is far from being permanent. Ah, if it only were! Then everything could be explained by the species' fear of death. Then all those "Selected Poems" of so many a poet would be as innocuous as the citizens of Kirchstetten rechristening their "Hinterholz." If it were only fear of death, readers and the appreciative critics especially should have been doing away with themselves nonstop, following the example of their beloved young authors. But that doesn't happen.

The real story behind our species' clinging to immaturity is much sadder. It has to do not with man's reluctance to know about death but with his not wanting to hear about life. Yet innocence is the last thing that can be sustained naturally. That's why poets—especially those who lasted long—must be read in their entirety, not in selections. The beginning makes sense only insofar as there is an end. For unlike fiction writers, poets tell us the whole story: not only in terms of their actual experiences and sentiments but—and that's what's most pertinent to us—in terms of language itself, in terms of the words thev finally choose.

An aging man, if he still holds a pen, has a choice: to write memoirs or to keep a diary. By the very nature of their daft, poets are diarists. Often against theii own will, they keep the most honest track of what's happening (a) to their souls, be it the expansion of a soul or—more fre­quently—its shrinkage and (b) to their sense of language, for they are the first ones for whom words become compro­mised or devalued. Whether we like it or not, we are here to learn not just what time does to man but what language does to time. And poets, let us not forget, are the ones "by whom it [language ] lives." It is this law that teaches a poet a greater rectitude than any creed is capable of.

That's why one can build a lot upon W. H. Auden. Not only because he died at twice the age of Christ or because of Kierkegaard's "principle of repetition." He simply served an infinity greater than we normally reckon with, and he bears good witness to its availability; what's more, he made it feel hospitable. To say the least, every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the lan­guage. W. H. Auden would do very well on both counts, if only because of their respective resemblances to hell and Limbo.

He was a great poet (the only thing that's wrong with this sentence is its tense, as the nature of language puts one's achievements within it invariably into the present), and I consider myself immensely lucky to have met him. But had I not met him at all, there would still be the reality of his work. One should feel grateful to fate for having been exposed to this reality, for the lavishing of these gifts, all the more priceless since they were not designated for any­body in particular. One may call this a generosity of the spirit, except that the spirit needs a man to refract itself through. It's not the man who becomes sacred because of this refraction: it's the spirit that becomes human and com­prehensible. This—and the fact that men are finite—is enough for one to worship this poet.

Whatever the reasons for which he crossed the Atlantic and became American, the result was that he fused both idioms of English and became—to paraphrase one of his own lines—our transatlantic Horace. One way or another, all the journeys he took—through lands, caves of the psyche, doctrines, creeds—served not so much to improve his argument as to expand his diction. If poetry ever was for him a matter of ambition, he lived long enough for it to become simply a means of existence. Hence his auton­omy, sanity, equipoise, irony, detachment—in short, wis­dom. Whatever it is, reading him is one of the very few ways (if not the only one) available for feeling decent. I wonder, though, if that was his purpose.

I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender's place in London. Wystan was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in his left, hold­ing forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED were put under him by the mistress of the house. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat.

1983

A Commencement Address

Ladies and gentlemen of the Class of 1984:

No matter how daring or cautious you may choose to be, in the course of your life you are bound to come into direct physical contact with what's known as Evil. I mean here not a property of the gothic novel but, to say the least, a palpable social reality that you in no way can control. No amount of good nature or cunning calculations will prevent this encounter. In fact, the more calculating, the more cautious you are, the greater is the likelihood of this ren­dezvous, the harder its impact. Such is the structure of life that what we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good. You never see it crossing your threshold announcing itself: "Hi, I'm Evil!" That, of course, indicates its secondary nature, but the comfort one may derive from this observa­tion gets dulled by its frequency.

A prudent thing to do, therefore, would be to subject your notions of good to the closest possible scrutiny, to go, so to speak, through your entire wardrobe checking which of your clothes may fit a stranger. That, of course, may turn into a full-time occupation, and well it should. You'll be surprised how many things you considered your own and good can easily fit, without much adjustment, your enemy. Yon may even start to wonder whether he is not your mirror image, for the most interesting thing about Evil is that it is wholly human. To put it mildly, nothing can be turned and worn inside out with greater ease than one's notion of social justice, civic conscience, a better future, etc. One of the surest signs of danger here is the number of those who share your views, not so much because un­animity has the knack of degenerating into uniformity as be­cause of the probability—implicit in great numbers—that noble sentiment is being faked.

By the same token, the surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even—if you will—eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a sea­soned impostor couldn't be happy with. Something, in other words, that can't be shared, like your o^ skin: not even by a minority. Evil is a sucker for solidity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balanced sheets. Its proclivity for such things has to do presumably with its innate in­security, but this realization, again, is of small comfort when Evil tri^phs.

Which it does: in so many parts of the world and inside ourselves. Given its volume and intensity, given, especially, the fatigue of those who oppose it, Evil today may be re­garded not as an ethical category but as a physical phe­nomenon no longer measured in particles but mapped geographically. Therefore the reason I am talking to you about all this has nothing to do with your being young, fresh, and facing a clean slate. No, the slate is dark with dirt and it is hard to believe in either your ability or your will to clean it. The purpose of my talk is simply to suggest to you a mode of resistance which may come in handy to you one day; a mode that may help you to emerge from the encounter with Evil perhaps less soiled, if not necessarily more triumphant than your precursors. What I have in mind, of course, is the famous business of turning the other cheek.

I assume that one way or another you have heard about the interpretations of this verse from the Sermon on the Mount by Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, .Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. In other words, I assume that you are familiar with the concept of nonviolent, or passive, resistance, whose main principle is reaming good for evil, that is, not responding in kind. The fact that the world today is what it is suggests, to say the least, that this con­cept is far from being cherished universally. The reasons for its unpopularity are twofold. First, what is required for this concept to be put into effect is a margin of democracy. This is precisely what 86 percent of the globe lacks. Second, it is common sense that tells a victim that his only gain in turning the other cheek and not responding in kind yields, at best, a moral victory, i.e., something quite immaterial. The natural reluctance to expose yet another part of your body to a blow is justified by a suspicion that this sort of conduct only agitates and enhances Evil; that a moral victory can be mistaken by the adversary for his impunity.

There are other, graver reasons to be suspicious. If the first blow hasn't knocked all the wits out of the victim's head, he may realize that turning the other cheek amounts to manipulation of the offender's sense of guilt, not to speak of his karma. The moral victory itself may not be so moral after all, not only because suffering often has a narcissistic aspect to it, but also because it renders the victim superior, that is, better than his enemy. Yet no matter how evil your enemy is, the crucial thing is that he is human; and al­though incapable of loving another like ourselves, we none­theless know that evil takes root when one man starts to think that he is better than another. (This is why you've been hit on your right cheek in the first place.) At best, therefore, what one can get from turning the other cheek to one's enemy is the satisfaction of alerting the latter to the futility of his action. "Look," the other cheek says, "what you are hitting is just flesh. It's not me. You can't crush my soul." The trouble, of course, with this kind of attitude is that the enemy may just accept the challenge.

Twenty years ago the following scene took place in one of the numerous prison yards of northern Russia. At seven o'clock in the morning the door of a cell was flung open and on its threshold stood a prison guard, who addressed its in­mates: "Citizens! The collective of this prison's guards challenges you, the inmates, to socialist competition in chopping the lumber amassed in our yard." In those parts there is no central heating, and the local police, in a manner of speaking, tax all the nearby lumber companies for one- tenth of their produce. By the time I am describing, the prison yard looked like a veritable lumberyard: the piles were two to three stories high, dwarfing the one-storied quadrangle of the prison itself. The need for chopping was evident, although socialist competitions of this sort had happened before. "And what if I refuse to take part in this?" inquired one of the inmates. "Well, in that case no meals for you," replied the guard.

Then axes were issued to inmates, and the cutting

started. Both prisoners and guards worked in earnest, and by noon all of them, especially the always underfed prison­ers, were exhausted. A break was announced and people sat down to eat: except the fellow who asked the question. He kept swinging his ax. Both prisoners and guards ex­changed jokes about him, something about Jews being normally regarded as smart people whereas this man . . . and so forth. After the break they resumed the work, al­though in a somewhat more flagging manner. By four o'clock the guards quit, since for them it was the end of their shift; a bit later the inmates stopped too. The man's ax still kept swinging. Several times he was urged to stop, by both parties, but he paid no attention. It seemed as though he had acquired a certain rhythm he was unwilling to break; or was it a rhythm that possessed him?

To the others, he looked like an automaton. By five o'clock, by six o'clock, the ax was still going up and down. Both guards and inmates were now watching him keenly, and the sardonic expression on their faces gradually gave way first to one of bewilderment and then to one of terror. By seven-thirty the man stopped, staggered into his cell, and fell asleep. For the rest of his stay in that prison, no call for socialist competition between guards and inmates was issued again, although the wood kept piling up.

I suppose the fellow could do this—twelve hours of straight chopping—because at the time he was quite young. In fact, he was then twenty-four. Only a little older than you are. However, I think there could have been another reason for his behavior that day. It's quite possible that the young man—precisely because he was young—remembered the text of the Sermon on the Mount better than Tolstoy and

Gandhi did. Because the Son of Man was in the habit of speaking in triads, the young man could have recalled that the relevant verse doesn't stop at

but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also

but continues without either period or comma:

And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.

Quoted in full, these verses have in fact very little to do with nonviolent or passive resistance, with the principles of not responding in kind and re^raing good for evil. The meaning of these lines is anything but passive, for it sug­gests that evil can be made absurd through excess; it suggests rendering evil absurd through dwarfing its de­mands with the volume of your compliance, which devalues the harm. This sort of thing puts a victim into a very active position, into the position of a mental aggressor. The victory that is possible here is not a moral but an existential one. The other cheek here sets in motion not the enemy's sense of guilt (which he is perfectly capable of quelling) but exposes his senses and faculties to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise: the way every form of mass produc­tion does.

Let me remind you that we are not talking here about a situation involving a fair fight. We are talking about situa­tions where one finds oneself in a hopelessly inferior position from the very outset, where one has no chance of fighting back, where the odds are overwhelmingly against one. In other words, we arc talking about the very dark hoirs in one's life, when one's sense of moral superiority over the enemy offers no solace, when this enemy is too far gone to be shamed or made nostalgic for abandoned scruples, when one has at one's disposal only one's face, coat, cloak, and a pair of feet that are still capable of walking a mile or two.

In this situation there is very little room for tactical maneuver. So tirning the other cheek should be your con­scious, cold, deliberate decision. Your chances of winning, however dismal they are, all depend on whether or not you know what you are doing. Thrusting forward your face with the cheek toward the enemy, you should know that this is just the beginning of your ordeal as well as that of the verse—and you should be able to see yourself through the entire sequence, through all three verses from the Sermon on the Mount. Otherwise, a line taken out of con­text will leave you crippled.

To base ethics on a faultily quoted verse is to invite doom, or else to end up becoming a mental bourgeois enjoying the ultimate comfort: that of his convictions. In either case (of which the latter with its membership in well-intentioned movements and nonprofit organizations is the least palat­able) it results in yielding ground to Evil, in delaying the comprehension of its weaknesses. For Evil, may I remind you, is only human.

Ethics based on this faultily quoted verse have changed nothing in post-Gandhi India, save the color of its adminis­tration. From a hungry man's point of view, though, it's all the same who makes him hungry. I submit that he may even prefer a white man to be responsible for his sorry state if only because this way social evil may appear to come from elsewhere and may perhaps be less efficient than the suffering at the hand of his own kind. With an alien in charge, there is still room for hope, for fantasy.

Similarly in post-Tolstoy Russia, ethics based on this mis­quoted verse undermined a great deal of the nation's resolve in confronting the police state. \\'hat has followed is known all too well: six decades of turning the other cheek trans­formed the face of the nation into one big bruise, so that the state today, weary of its violence, simply spits at that face. As well as at the face of the world. In other words, if you want to secularize Christianity, if you want to translate Christ's teachings into political terms, you need something more than modern political mumbo-jumbo: you need to have the original—in your mind at least if it hasn't found room in your heart. Since He was less a good man than a divine spirit, it's fatal to harp on His goodness at the ex­pense of His metaphysics.

I must admit that I feel somewhat uneasy talking about these things: because turning or not t^^ing that other cheek is, after all, an extremely intimate affair. The en­counter always occurs on a one-to-one basis. It's always your skin, your coat and cloak, and it is your limbs that wilwil have to do the walking. To advise, let alone to urge, anyone about the use of these properties is, if not entirely wrong, indecent. All I aspire to do here is to erase from your minds a cliche that harmed so many and yielded so little. I also would like to instill in you the idea that as long as you have your skin, coat, cloak, and limbs, you are not yet defeated, whatever the odds are.

There is, however, a greater reason for one to feel uneasy about discussing these matters in public; and it's not only your own natural reluctance to regard your young selves as potential victims. No, it's rather mere sobriety, which makes one anticipate among you potential villains as well, and it is a bad strategy to divulge the secrets of resistance in front of the potential enemy. What perhaps relieves one from a charge of treason or, worse still, of projecting the tactical status quo into the fuhire, is the hope that the victim will always be more inventive, more original in his thinking, more enterprising than the villain. Hence the chance that the victim may triumph.

Williams College, 1984

Flight from Byzantium

To Veronique Schiltz

1

Bearing in mind that every observation suffers from the observer's personal traits—that is, it too often reflects his psychological state rather than that of the reality under observation—I suggest that what follows be treated with a due measure of skepticism, if not with total disbelief. The only thing the observer may claim by way of justification is that he, too, possesses a modicum of reality, inferior in extent, perhaps, but conceding nothing in quality to the subject under scrutiny. A semblance of objectivity might be achieved, no doubt, by way of a complete self-awareness at the moment of observation. I do not think I am capable of this; in any event, I did not aspire to it. AH the s^e, I hope that something of the sort took place.

2

My desire to get to Istanbul was never a genuine one. I am not even sure whether such a word—"desire"—should be used here. On the other hand, it could hardly be called a mere whim or a subconscious urge. Let it be a desire, then, and let's note that it came about partly as the result of a promise I made to myself in 1972, on leaving my hometown, that of Leningrad, for good—to circumnavigate the in­habited world along the latitude and along the longitude (i.e., the Pulkovo meridian) on which Leningrad is situated. By now, the latitude has been more or less taken care of; as to the longitude, the situation is anything but satisfactory. Istanbul, though, lies only a couple of degrees west of that meridian.

The aforementioned motive is only marginally more fanciful than the serious—indeed, the chief—reason, about which I will say something a bit later, or than a handful of totally frivolous secondary or tertiary ones, which I'll broach at once, it being now or never with such trivia: (a) it was in this city that my favorite poet, Constantine Cavafy, spent three momentous years at the turn of the century; (b) I always felt, for some reason, that here, in apartments, shops, and coffeehouses, I should find intact an atmosphere that at present seems to have totally vanished everywhere else; (c) I hoped to hear in Istanbul, on the outskirts of history, that "overseas creak of a Turkish mattress" which I thought I discerned one night some twenty years ago in the Crimea; (d) I wanted to find myself addressed as "effendi"; (e)— But I"m afraid the alphabet isn't long enough to accom­modate all these ridiculous notions (though perhaps it's better if you are set in motion precisely by some such non­sense, for it makes final disappointment so much easier to bear). So let us get on to the promised "chief" reason, even though to many it may seem deserving of at best the "f" in my catalogue of betises.

This "chief" reason represents the pinnacle of fanciful- ness. It has to do with the fact that several years ago, while I was talking to a friend of mine, an American Byzantinist, it occurred to me that the cross that Constantine beheld in his dream on the eve of his victory over Maxentius—the cross that bore the legend "In this sign, conqucr"—was not in fact a Christian cross but an urban one, the basic element of any Roman settlement. According to Eusebius and others, Constantine, inspired by his vision, at once set off for the East. First at Troy and then, having abruptly aban­doned Troy, at Byzantium he founded the new capital of the Roman Empire—that is, the Second Rome. The conse­quences of this move of his were so momentous that, whether I was right or wrong, I felt an urge to see this place. After all, I spent thirty-two years in what is known as the Third Rome, about a year and a half in the First. Consequently, I needed the Second, if only for my collection.

But let us handle all this in an orderly fashion, so far as this is feasible.

3

I arrived in Istanbul, and left it, by air, having thus isolated it in my mind like some virus under a microscope. If one considers the infectious nature of any culture, the com­parison does not seem irresponsible. Writing this note in the Hotel Aegean in the little place called Sounion—at the southeast corner of Attica, forty miles from Athens, where I landed four hours ago—I feel like the carrier of a specific infection, despite constant inoculations of the "classical rose" of the late Vladislav Khodasevich, to which I have subjected myself for the greater part of my life. I really do feel feverish from what I have seen; hence a certain incoherence in all that follows. I believe that my famous namesake experienced something of the sort as he strove to interpret the pharaoh's dreams—though it's one thing to bandy interpretations of sacred signs when the trail is hot (or warm, rather) and quite another a thousand and a half years later.

4

About dreams. This morning, in the wee hours, in Istanbul's Pera Palace, I, too, beheld something—something utterly monstrous. The scene was the Department of Philology of Leningrad University, and I was coming downstairs with someone I took to be Professor D. E. Maximov, except that he looked more like Lee Marvin. I can't recall what we were talking about, but that's not the point. My attention was caught by a scene of furious activity in a dark corner of the landing where the ceiling came down extremely low. I saw there three cats fighting with an enonnous rat, which quite dwarfed them. Glancing over my shoulder, I noticed one of the cats ripped apart by the rat and writhing convulsively in agony on the floor. I chose not to watch the battle's outcome—I recall only that the cat became still—and, exchanging remarks with Marvin-Maximov, I kept going down the staircase. I woke up before I reached the hall.

To begin with, I adore cats. Then it should be added that I can't abide low ceilings; that the place only seemed like the Department of Philology, which is just two stories high anyway; that its grubby gray-brown color was that of the fa<;adcs and interiors of Istanbul, especially the offices I had visited in the last few days; that the streets there are crooked, filthy, dreadfully cobbled, and piled up with refuse, which is constantly rummaged through by ravenous local cats; that the city, and everything in it, strongly smells of Astrakhan and Samarkand; and that the night before I had made up my mind to leave— But of that later. There was enough, in short, to pollute one's subconscious.

5

Constantine was, first and foremost, a Roman emperor—in charge of the Western part of the Empire—and for him "In this sigi, conquer" was bound to signify, above all, an extension of his own rule, of his control over the whole empire. There is nothing novel about divining the most immediate future by roosters' innards, or about enlisting a deity as your own captain. Nor is the gulf between absolute ambition and utmost piety so vast. But even if he had been a true and zealous believer (a matter on which various doubts have been cast, especially in view of his conduct toward his children and in-laws), "conquer" must have had for him not only the military, sword-crossing meaning but also an administrative one—that is, settle­ments and cities. And the plan of any Roman settlement is precisely a cross: a central highway running north and south (like the Corso in Rome) intersects a similar road running east and west. From Leptis Magna to Castricum, an im­perial citizen always knew where he was in relation to the capital.

Even if the cross of which Constantine spoke to Eusebius was that of the Redeemer, a constituent part of it in his dream was, un- or subconsciously, the principle of settle­ment planning. Besides, in the fourth century the symbol of the Redeemer was not the cross at all; it was the fish, a Greek acrostic for the name of Christ. And as for the Cross of the Crucifixion itself, it resembled the Russian (and Latin) capital T, rather than what Bernini depicted on that staircase in St. Peter's, or what we nowadays imagine it to have been. Whatever Constantine may or may not have had in mind, the execution of the instructions he received in a dream took the form in the first place of a territorial expansion toward the East, and the emergence of a Second Rome was a perfectly logical consequence of this eastward expansion. Possessing, by all accounts, a dynamic personality, he considered a forward policy per­fectly natural. The more so if he was in actual fact a true believer.

Was he or wasn't he? Whatever the answer might be, it is the genetic code that laughed the last laugh. For his nephew happened to be no one else than Julian the Apostate.

6

Any movement along a plane surface which is not dictated by physical necessity is a spatial form of self-assertion, be it empire-building or tourism. In this sense, my reason for going to Istanbul differed only slightly from Constantine's. Especially if he really did become a Christian—that is, ceased to be a Roman. I have, however, rather more grounds for reproaching myself with superficiality; besides, the results of my displacements are of far less consequence. I don't even leave behind photographs taken "in front of' walls, let alone a set of walls themselves. In this sense, I am inferior even to the almost proverbial Japanese. (There is nothing more appalling to me than to think about the family album of the average Japanese: smiling and stocky, he/she/ both against a backdrop of everything vertical the world contains—statues, fountains, cathedrals, towers, mosques, ancient temples, etc. Least of all, I presume, Buddhas and pagodas.) Cogito ergo sum gives way to Kodak ergo sum, just as cogito in its day triumphed over "I create." In other words, the ephemeral nature of my presence and my motives is no less absolute than the physical tangibility of Constan- tine's activities and his thoughts, real or supposed.

7

The Roman elegiac poets of the end of the first century B.C. —especially Propertius and Ovid—openly mock their great contemporary Virgil and his Aeneid. This may be explicable in tenns of personal rivalry or professional jealousy or opposition of their idea of poetry as a personal, private art to a conception of it as something civic, as a fonn of state propaganda. (This last may ring true, but it is a far cry from the truth, nonetheless, since Virgil was the author not only of the Aeneid but also of the Bucolics and the Georgics.) There may also have been considerations of a purely stylistic nature. It is quite possible that from the eleg- ists' point of view, the epic—any epic, including Virgil's— was a retrograde phenomenon. The elegists, all of them, were disciples of the Alexandrian school of poetry, which had given birth to a tradition of short lyric verse such as we are familiar with in poetry today. The Alexandrian prefer­ence for brevity, terseness, compression, concreteness, eru­dition, didacticism, and a preoccupation with the personal was, it seems, the reaction of the Greek art of letters against the surplus forms of Greek literature in the Archaic period: against the epic, the drama; against mythologizing, not to say mythmaking itself. A reaction, if one thinks about it— though it's best not to—against Aristotle. The Alexandrian tradition absorbed all these things and fitted them to the confines of the elegy or the eclogue: to the almost hiero­glyphic dialogue in the latter, to an illustrative function of myth ( exempla) in the former. In other words, we find a certain tendency toward miniaturization and condensation (as a means of survival for poetry in a world less and less inclined to pay it heed, if not as a more direct, more immediate means of influencing the hearts and minds of readers and listeners) when, lo and behold, Virgil appears with his hexameters and gigantic "social order."

I would add here that the elegists, almost without excep­tion, were using the elegiac distich, a couplet combining dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter; also, that they, again almost without exception, came to poetry from the schools of rhetoric, where they had been trained for a jurid­ical profession (as advocates: arguers in the modern sense). Nothing corresponds better to the rhetorical system of thought than the elegiac distich, which provided a means of expressing, at a minimum, two points of view, not to mention a whole palette of intonational coloring permitted by the contrasting meters.

All this, however, is in parentheses. Outside the paren­theses lie the elegists' reproaches directed at Virgil on ethical rather than metrical grounds. Especially interesting in this regard is Ovid, in no way inferior to the author of the Aeneid in descriptive skills, and psychologically infinitely more subtle. In "Dido to Aeneas," one of his Heroides—a collection of made-up correspondence from love poetry's standard heroines to their either perished or unfaithful beloveds—the Carthaginian queen, rebuking Aeneas for abandoning her, does so in approximately the following fashion: "I could have understood if you had left me because you had resolved to return home, to your own kin- folk. But you are setting out for unknown lands, a new goal, a new, as yet unfounded city, in order, it seems, to break yet another heart." And so on. She even hints that Aeneas is leaving her pregnant and that one of the reasons for her suicide is the fear of disgrace. But this is not gennane to the matter in hand. What matters here is that in Virgil's eyes Aeneas is a hero, directed by the gods. In Ovid's eyes, he is an unprincipled scoundrel, attributing his mode of conduct —his movement along a plane surface—to Divine Provi­dence. (As for Providence, Dido has her own teleological explanations as well, but that is of small consequence, as is our all too eager assumption of Ovid's anti-civic posture.)

8

The Alexandrian tradition was a Grecian tradition: one of order (the cosmos), of proportion, of hannony, of the tautology of cause and effect (the Oedipus cycle )—a tradi­tion of symmetry and the closed circle, of return to the origin. And it is Virgil's concept of linear movement, his linear model of existence, that the elegists find so exasperat­ing in him. The Greeks should not be idealized overmuch, but one cannot deny them their cosmic principle, informing celestial bodies and kitchen utensils alike.

Virgil, it appears, was the first—in literature, at least—to apply the linear principle: his hero never returns; he always departs. Possibly, this was in the air; more likely, it was dictated by the expansion of the Empire, which had reached a scale in which human displacement had indeed become irreversible. This is precisely why the Aeneid is unfinished: it must not—indeed, could not—be completed. And the linear principle has nothing to do with the "feminine" character of Hellenism or with the "masculinity" of Roman culture—or with Virgil's own sexual tastes. The point is that the linear principle, detecting in itself a certain irresponsi­bility vis-a-vis the past—irresponsibility linked with the linear idea of existence—tends to balance this with a detailed projection of the future. The result is either a "retroactive prophecy," like Anchises' conversations in the Aeneid, or social utopianism or the idea of eternal life—i.e., Christianity. There is not much difference between these. In fact, it is their similarity, and not the "messianic" Fourth Eclogue, that practically allows one to consider Virgil the first Christian poet. Had I been writing The Divine Comedy, I would have placed this Roman in Para­dise: for outstanding services to the linear principle, into its logical conclusion.

403 I Flight from Byzantium 9

ie delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing :>ws here except mustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown- th-stubble-before-supper part of the world. Bonfire embers used with urine. That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco d sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins e another turban. Racism? But isn't it only a form of santhropy? And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle en in the city, poking the world out of your eyes—and t one feels grateful even for that. Ubiquitous concrete, th the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave. 1, all that nearsighted scum—Corbusier, Mondrian, opius—who mutilated the world more effectively than y Luftwaffe! Snobbery? But it's only a form of despair. ie local population in a state of total stupor whiling its ie away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads as in a in reverse toward the television screen, where some- dy is permanently beating somebody else up. Or else ;y're dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole ^essible abstraction, the single means of concentration. santhropy? Despair? Yet what else could be expected im one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear nciple? From a man who has nowhere to go back to? om a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible thor of Sadomachia?

10

A child of his age—that is, the fourth century a.d., or, better, p.v. (Post-Virgil)—Constantine, a man of action, if only because he was emperor, could regard himself as not only the embodiment but also the instrument of the linear principle of existence. Byzantium was for him not only symbolically but literally a cross, an intersection of trade routes, caravan roads, etc.—both from east to west and from north to south. This alone might have drawn his attention to the place, which had given to the world (in the seventh century B.C.) something that in all tongues means the same: money.

Money certainly interested Constantine exceedingly. If he did possess a measure of greatness, it was most likely financial. A pupil of Diocletian, having failed to learn his tutor's high art of delegating authority, he nonetheless succeeded in a by no means inferior art: to use the modern term, he stabilized the currency. The Roman solidus, intro­duced in his reign, played the role of our dollar for over seven centuries. In this sense, the transfer of the capital to Byzantium was a movement of the bank to the mint.

One should perhaps also bear in mind that the philan­thropy of the Christian Church at this time was, if not an alternative to the state economy, then at least a recourse for a considerable part of the population, the have-nots. To a large extent, the popularity of Christianity was based not so much on the idea of the equality of souls before the Lord as on the tangible—for the have-nots—fruits of an orga­nized system of mutual assistance. It was in its way a combination of food stamps and the Red Cross. Neither

Neoplatonism nor the cult of Isis organized anything of the kind. In this, frankly, lay their mistake.

One may muse at length on what went on in Constantine's heart and mind with regard to the Christian faith, but as an emperor he could not fail to appreciate the organizational and economic effectiveness of this particular church. Besides, the transference of the capital to the extreme rim of the Empire transforms that rim into the center, as it were, and implies an equally extensive space on the other side. On the map, this is equivalent to India: the object of all imperial dreams known to us, before and after the birth of Christ.

1 1

Dust! This weird substance, driving into your facel It merits attention; it should not be concealed behind the word "dust." Is it just agitated dirt, incapable of finding its own place but constituting the very essence of this part of the world? Or is it the earth striving to rise into the air, detach­ing itself from itself, like mind from body, like the body yielding itself to the heat? Rain betrays the nature of this substance when brown-black rivilets of it go snaking beneath your feet, beaten back to the cobbles and away down the undulating arteries of this primeval kijlak, and yet unable to amass themselves enough to form puddles, because of the countless splashing wheels, numerically superior to the faces of the inhabitants, that bear this substance off, to the sound of blaring horns, across the bridge into Asia, Anatolia, Ionia, to Trebizond and Smyrna.

As everywhere in the East, there are vast numbers of shoeshiners here of all ages, with their exquisite brassbound boxes housing their kit of boot creams in round, thinnest-of- copper containers with cupola lids. Like little mosques with­out the minarets. The ubiquity of the profession is explained by the dirt, by that dust which covers your dazzling, reflecting-the-entire-universe-just-five-minutes-ago loafer with a gray, impenetrable powder. Like all shoeshiners, these people are great philosophers. Or, better, all philos­ophers are but shiners of great shoes. For this reason, it isn't all that important whether you know Turkish.

12

Who these days really examines maps, studies contours, reckons distances? Nobody, except perhaps vacationers or drivers. Since the invention of the pushbutton, even the military don't do it anymore. Who writes letters listing the sights he has seen and analyzing the feelings he had while doing so? And who reads such letters? After us, nothing will remain that is worthy of the name of correspondence. Even young people, seemingly with plenty of time, make do with postcards. People of my age usually resort to those either in a moment of despair in some alien spot or just to kill time. Yet there are places examination of which on a map makes you feel for a brief moment akin to Providence.

13

There are places where history is inescapable, like a high­way accident—places where geography provokes history.

Such is Istanbul, alias Constantinople, alias Byzantium. A traffic light gone haywire, with all three colors flaring up at once. Not red-amber-grecn but white-amber-brown. Also, of course, blue: for the water, for thc Bosponts-Marmara- Dardanelles, which separates Europe from Asia—or does it? Ah, all these natural frontiers, these straits and Urals of ours! How little they have ever meant to armies or cultures, and even less to non-cultures—though for nomads they may actually have signified a bit more than for princes inspired by the linear principle and justified in advance by an entrancing vision of the future.

Did not Christianity triumph precisely because it pro­vided an end that justified the means, because it temporarily —i.e., for the whole of one's life—absolved one from responsibility? Because the next step, any step at all, in any direction, was becoming logical? Wasn't it—in the spiritual sense, at least, Christianity—an anthropological echo of nomadic existence, its metastasis in the psychology of man the settler? Or, better still, hasn't it simply coincided with purely imperial needs? Pay alone could hardly be enough to stir a legionary (whose career's meaning lay precisely in a long-service bonus, demobilization, and get­ting a farm plot) from the spot. He should be inspired, too; otherwise, the legions turn into that wolf which only Tiberius could haul back by the ears.

14

A consequence can rarely look back at its cause with any­thing like approval. Still less can it suspect the cause of anything. The relations between effect and cause lack, as a rule, the rational, analytic element. As a rule, they are tautological and, at best, tinged with the incoherent en­thusiasm the latter feels for the former.

It should not be forgotten, therefore, that the belief system called Christianity came from the East, and, for the same reason, it shouldn't be forgotten that one of the ideas that overpowered Constantine after the victory over Maxentius and the vision of the cross was the desire to come at least physically closer to the source of that victory and that vision: to the East. I have no clear notion of what was going on in Judea at that time, but it is obvious, at least, that if Constantine had set off by land to go there he would have encountered a good many obstacles. In any event, to found a capital overseas would have contradicted plain common sense. Also, one shouldn't rule out a dislike of Jews, quite possible on Constantine's part.

There is something amusing, and even a bit alarming, isn't there, in the idea that the East is actually the meta­physical center of mankind? Christianity had been only one of a considerable number of sects within the Empire— though, admittedly, the most active. By Constantine's reign, the Roman Empire, in no small measure because of its sheer size, had been a veritable country fair or bazaar of creeds. With the exception of the Copts and the cult of Isis, how­ever, the source of all the belief systems on offer was in fact the East.

The West was offering nothing. Essentially, the West was a customer. Let us treat the West with tenderness, then, precisely for its lack of this sort of inventiveness, for which it has paid quite heavily, that pay including the reproaches of excessive rationality one hears to this day. Is this not the way a vender inflates the price of his wares? And where will he go once his coffers are overflowing?

15

If the Roman elegists reflected the outlook of their public in any way at all, one might suppose that by Constantine's reign—i.e., four centuries after the elegists—arguments like "The motherland is in danger" or "Pax Romana" had lost their spell and cogency. And if Eusebius' assertions are correct then Constantine turns out to be neither more nor less than the first Crusader. One should not lose sight of the fact that the Rome of Constantine was no longer the Rome of Augustus, or even that of the Antonines. It was, generally speaking, not ancient Rome anymore: it was Christian Rome, What Constantine brought to Byzantium no longer denoted classical culture: it was already the cul­ture of a new age, brewed in the concept of monotheism, which now relegated polytheism—i.e., its own past, with all its spirit of law, and so forth—to the status of idolatry. This, to be sure, was already progress.

16

Here I should like to admit that my ideas concerning antiquity seem somewhat wild even to me. I understand polytheism in a simple, and therefore no doubt incorrect, fashion. For me, it is a system of spiritual existence in which every form of human activity, from fishing to con­templating the constellations, is sanctified by specific deities. An individual possessing appropriate will and imagi­nation is thus able to discern in his activity its metaphysical, infinite lining. Alternatively, one or another god may, as the whim takes him, appear to a man at any time and possess him for a period. The only thing required of the latter, should he wish this to happen, is for him to "'purify" himself, so as to enable the visit to take place. This process of puri­fication (catharsis) varies a great deal and has an individual character (sacrifice, pilgrimage, a vow of some kind) or a public one (theater, sporting contests). The hearth is no different from the amphitheater, the stadium from the altar, the statue from the stewing pan.

A world view of this kind can exist, I suppose, only in settled conditions: when the god knows your address. It is not surprising that the culture we call Greek arose on islands. It is no surprise, either, that its fruits hypnotized for a millennium the entire Mediterranean, including Rome. And it is not surprising again that, as its Empire grew, Rome —which was not an island—fled from that culture. The flight began, in fact, with the Caesars and with the idea of absolute power, since in that intensely political sphere polytheism was synonymous with democracy. Absolute power—autocracy—was synonymous, alas, with mono­theism. If one can imagine an unprejudiced man, then polytheism must seem far more attractive to him than monotheism, if only because of the instinct of self- preservation.

But there is no such person; even Diogenes, with his lamp, would fail to find him in broad daylight. Bearing in mind the culture we call ancient or classical, rather than the instinct of self-preservation, I can only say that the longer I live the more this idol worship appeals to me, and the more dangerous seems to me monotheism in its pure form. There's little point, I suppose, in laboring the matter, in calling the spade the spade, but the democratic state is in fact the historical triumph of idolatry over Christianity.

17

Naturally, Constantine could not know this. I assume he intuited that Rome was no more. The Christian in him com­bined with the ruler in a natural and, I am afraid, prophetic manner. In that very "In this sign, conquer" of his, one's ear discerns the ambition of power. And it was "conquer'' indeed—more even than he imagined, since Christianity in Byzantium lasted ten centuries. But this victory was, I am sorry to say, a Pyrrhic one. The nahire of this victory was what compelled the Western Church to detach itself from the Eastern. That is to say, the geographical Rome from the projected one, from Byzantium. The Church the bride of Christ from the Church the spouse of the state. And it is quite possible that in his drive eastward Constantine was in fact guided by the East's political climate—by its despotism without any experience of democracy, congenial to his own predicament. The geographical Rome, one way or another, still retained some memories of the role of the senate. Byzantium had no such memory.

1 8

Today, I am forty-five years old. I am sitting stripped to the waist in the Lykabettos Hotel in Athens, bathed in sweat, absorbing vast quantities of Coca-Cola. In this city, I don't know a soul. In the evening, when I went out looking for a place to have supper, I found myself in the thick of a highly excited throng shouting something unintelligible. As far as I can make out, elections are imminent. I was shufHing along some endless main street blocked by people and vehicles, with car horns wailing in my ears, not understanding a word, and it suddenly dawned on me that this, essentially, is the afterlife—that life had ended but movement was still continuing; that this is what eternity is all about.

Forty-five years ago, my mother gave me life. She died the year before last. Last year, my father died. I, their only child, am walking along the evening streets in Athens, streets they never saw and never will. The fruit of their love, their poverty, their slavery in which they lived and died— their son walks free. Since he doesn't bump into them in the crowd, he realizes that he is wrong, that this is not eternity.

1 9

What did Constantine see and not see as he looked at the map of Byzantium? He saw, to put it mildly, a tabula rasa. An imperial province settled by Greeks, Jews, Persians, and such—a population he was used to dealing with, typical subjects of the eastern part of his empire. The language was Greek, but for an educated Roman this was like French for a nineteenth-century Russian nobleman. Constantine saw a town jutting out into the Sea of Marmara, a town that would be easy to defend if a wall was just thrown around it. He saw the hills of this city, somewhat reminiscent of Rome's, and if he pondered erecting, say, a palace or a church, he knew that the view from the windows would be really smashing: on all Asia. And all Asia would gape at the crosses that would crown that church. One may also imagine him toying with the idea of controlling the access of those Romans he had dropped behind him. They would be compelled to trail across the whole of Attica to get here, or to sail around the Peloponnesus. "This one I'll let in, that one I won't." In these terms, no doubt, he thought of his version of the earthly Paradise. Ah, all these excise man's dreams! And he saw, too, Byzantium acclaiming him as her protector against the Sassanids and against our—your and my, ladies and comrades—ancestors from that side of the Danube. And he saw a Byzantium kissing the cross.

What he did not see was that he was dealing with the East. To wage wars against the East—or even to liberate the East—and actually to live there are very different things. For all its Greekness, Byzantium belonged to a world with totally different ideas about the value of human exis­tence from those current in the West: in—however pagan it was—Rome. For Byzantium, Persia, for example, was far more real than Hellas, if only in a military sense. And the differences in degree of this reality could not fail to be reflected in the outlook of these future subjects of their Christian lord. Though in Athens Socrates could be judged in open court and could make whole speeches—three of theml—in his defense, in Isfahan, say, or Baghdad, such a Socrates would simply have been impaled on the spot, or flayed, and there the matter would have ended. There would have been no Platonic dialogues, no Neoplatonism, nothing: as there wasn't. There would have been only the monologue of the Koran: as there was. ByzanHum was a bridge into Asia, but the traffic across it flowed in the opposite direction. O f course, Byzantium accepted Christi­anity, but there this faith was fated to become Orientalized. In this, too, to no small degree lies the root of the subse­quent hostility of the Roman Church toward the Eastern. Certainly Christianity nominally lasted a thousand years in Byzantium, but what kind of Christianity it was and what sort of Christians these were is another matter.

Oh, I am afraid I am going to say that all the Byzantine scholastics, all Byzantium's scholarship and ecclesiastical ardor, its Caesaro-papism, its theological and administrative assertiveness, all those triumphs of Photius and his twenty anathemas—all these came from the place's inferiority complex, from the youngest patriarchy grappling with its own ethnic incoherence. Which, in the far end where I find myself standing, has spawned its dark-haired, level­ing victory over that incredibly high-pitched spiritual quest which took place here, and reduced it to a matter of wistful yet reluctant mental archeology. And—oh, again—I am afraid I am going to add that it is for this reason, and not just because of mean, vengeful memory, that Rome, which doctored the history of our civilization anyway, deleted the Byzantine millennium from the record. Which is why I find myself standing here in the first place. And the dust stuffs my nostrils.

20

How dated everything is here! Not old, ancient, antique, or even old-fashioned, but dated. This is where old cars come to die, and instead become dolmuflar, public taxis; a ride in one is cheap, bumpy, and nostalgic to the point of making you feel that you are moving in the wrong, unin­tended direction—in part, bccause the drivers rarely speak English. The United States naval base here presumably sold all these Dodges and Plymouths of the fifties to some local entrepreneur, and now they prowl the mud roads of Asia Minor, rattling, throttling, and wheezing in evident disbelief in this so taxing afterlife. So far from Dearborn; so far from the promised junkyard!

21

And also Constantine did not see—or, more precisely, did not foresee—that the impression produced on him by the geographical position of Byzantium was a natural one. That if Eastern potentates should also glance at a map they were bound to be similarly impressed. As, indeed, was the case— more than once—with consequences grievous enough for Christianity. Up until the seventh century, friction between East and West in Byzantium was of a standard, l'll-skin- you-alive military sort and was resolved by force of arms, usually in the West's favor. If this did not increase the popu­larity of the cross in the East, at all events it inspired respect for it. But by the seventh century what had risen over the entire East and started to dominate it was the crescent of Islam. Thereafter, the military encounters between East and West, whatever their outcome, resulted in a gradual but steady erosion of the cross and in a growing relativism of the Byzantine outlook as a consequence of too close and too frequent contact between the two sacred signs. (Who knows whether the eventual defeat of iconoclasm shouldn't be explained by a sense of the inadequacy of the cross as a symbol and by the necessity for some visual competition with the anti-figurative art of Islam? Whether it wasn't the nightmarish Arabic lace that was spurring John Dama­scene? )

Constantine did not foresee that the anti-individualism of Islam would find the soil of Byzantium so welcoming that by the ninth century Christianity would be more than ready to flee to the north. He, of course, would have said that it was not flight but, rather, the expansion of Christianity which he had—in theory, at least—dreamed of. And many would nod to this in agreement: yes, an expansion. Yet the Christianity that was received by Rus from Byzantium in the ninth century already had absolutely nothing in com­mon with Rome. For, on its way to Rus, Christianity dropped behind it not only togas and statues but also Justinian's Civil Code. No doubt in order to facilitate the journey.

22

Having decided to leave Istanbul, I set about finding a steamship company serving the route from Istanbul to Athens or, better still, from Istanbul to Venice. I did the rounds of various offices, but, as always happens in the East, the nearer you get to the goal, the more obscure become the means of its attainment. In the end, I realized that I couldn't sail from either Istanbul or Smyrna for two more weeks, whether by passenger ship, freighter, or tanker. In one of the agencies, a corpulent Turkish lady, puffing a frightful cigarette like an ocean liner, advised me to try a company bearing the Australian—as I at first imagined—name

Boomerang. Boomerang turned out to be a grubby office smelling of stale tobacco, with two tables, one telephone, a map of—naturally—the World on the wall, and six stocky, pensive, dark-haired men, torpid from idleness. The only thing I managed to extract from the one sitting nearest the door was that Boomerang dealt with Soviet cruises in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, but that that week there were no sailings. I wonder where that young Lubyanka lieutenant who dreamed up that name came from. Tula? Chelyabinsk?

23

Dreading a repetition, I will nonetheless state again that if Byzantine soil turned out to be so favorable for Islam it was most likely because of its ethnic texture—a mixture of races and nationalities that had neither local nor, moreover, over­all memory of any kind of coherent tradition of individu­alism. Dreading generalizations, I will add that the East means, first of all, a tradition of obedience, of hierarchy, of profit, of trade, of adaptability: a tradition, that is, dras­tically alien to the principles of a moral absolute, whose role —I mean the intensity of the sentiment—is fulfilled here by the idea of kinship, of family. I foresee objections, and am even willing to accept them, in whole or in part. But no matter what extreme of idealization of the East we may entertain, we'll never be able to ascribe to it the least semblance of democracy.

And I am speaking here of Byzantium before the Turkish domination: of the Byzantium of Constantine, Justinian, Theodora—of Christian Byzantium, anyway. Still, Michael

Psellus, the eleventh-century Byzantine historian, describing in his Chronographia the reign of Basil II, tells us about Basil's prime minister, also Basil, who was the Emperor's illegitimate stepbrother and, because of that, was simply castrated in childhood to eliminate any possible claim to the throne. "A natural precaution," comments the historian, "since as a eunuch he would not attempt to usurp the throne from the legitimate heir." Psellus adds, "He was completely reconciled to his fate, and was sincerely dedicated to the mling house. After all, it was his family." Let's make a note that this was written at the time of the reign of Basil II (a.d. 976-1025), and that Psellus mentions the incident very much in passing, as a routine affair—as, indeed, it was—at the Byzantine court. If this was a.d., what, then, of B.C.?

24

And how do we measure an age? And is an age susceptible to measurement? We should also note that what Psellus describes takes place before the arrival of the Turks. There are no Bajazet-Muhammad-Suleimans about, none of that. For the time being, we are still interpreting sacred texts, warring against heresy, gathering at universal councils, erecting cathedrals, composing tracts. That's with one hand. With the other we are castrating a bastard, so that when he grows up there will be no extra claim to the throne. That, indeed, is the Eastern attitude toward things—toward the human body in particular—and whatever era or millennium it is is irrelevant. So it is hardly surprising that the Roman Church turned its nose away from Byzantium.

But something needs to be said here about that church, too. It was natural for it to shun Byzantium, both for the reasons given above and because Byzantium—this new Rome—had abandoned Rome proper completely. With the exception of Justinian's short-lived efforts to restore im­perial coherence, Rome was left solely to its own devices and to its fate, which meant to the Visigoths, the Vandals, and whoever else felt inclined to settle old and new scores with the former capital. One can understand Constantine: he was born, and spent his entire childhood, in the Eastern empire, at Diocletian's court. In this sense, Roman though he was, he wasn't a Westerner, except in his administrative designation or through his mother. (Believed to be born in Britain, she was the one who was interested in Christianity first—to the extent that she traveled later in her life to Jerusalem and discovered there the True Cross. In other words, in that family it was the mom who was a believer. And although there is ample reason to regard Constantine as a true mama's boy, let's avoid the temptation—let's leave it to the psychiatrists, as we don't hold a license.) One, let's repeat, can understand Constantine.

As for the attitude of the subsequent Byzantine emperors toward the genuine Rome, it is more complex and rather less explicable. Surely, they had their fill of problems right there in the East, both with their subjects and with their immediate neighbors. Yet the title of Roman emperor, it would seem, should have implied certain geographical obligations. The whole point, of course, was that the Roman emperors after Justinian came for the most part from provinces farther and farther East, from the Empire's tradi­tional recruiting grounds: Syria, Armenia, and so on. Rome was for them, at best, an idea. Several of them, like the majority of their subjects, knew no word of Latin and had never set foot in the city that even by then was quite Eternal. And yet they all regarded themselves as Romans, called themselves so and signed themselves as such. (Something of the sort may be observed even today in the many and varied dominions of the British Empire, or let's recall—so that we don't twist our necks looking for examples—the Evenki, who are Soviet citizens.)

In other words, Rome was left to itself, as was the Roman Church. It would be too lengthy a haul to describe the relations between the Eastern and Western Churches. It may be noted, however, that in general the abandonment of Rome was to a certain degree to the Roman Church's advantage, but not entirely to its advantage.

25

I did not expect this note on my trip to Istanbul to expand so much, and I am beginning to feel irritated both with myself and with the material. On the other hand, I am aware that I won't have another chance to discuss all these matters, or if I do I will consciously miss it. From now on, I do promise myself and anyone who has got this far a greater compression—though what I would like to do right now is drop the whole business.

If one must resort to prose, a procedure utterly hateful to the author of these lines, for the very reason that it lacks any form of discipline aside from that generated in the process—if one must use prose, it would be better to con­centrate on details, descriptions of places and character: i.e., on things the reader presumably may not have a chance to come across. For the bulk of the aforesaid, as well as every­thing that follows, is sooner or later bound to occur to any­body, since we are all, one way or another, dependent on history.

26

The advantage of the Roman Church's isolation lay above all in the natural benefits to be derived from any form of autonomy. There was almost nothing and nobody, with the exception of the Roman Church itself, to prevent its devel­oping into a defined, fixed system. Which is what indeed took place. The combination of Roman law, reckoned with more seriously in Rome than in Byzantium, and the specific logic of the Roman Church's inner development evolved into the ethico-political system that lies at the heart of the so-called Western conception of the state and of individual being. Like almost all divorces, the one between Byzantium and Rome was by no means total; a great deal of property stayed shared. But in general one can insist that this Western conception drew around itself a kind of circle, which the East, in a purely conceptual sense, never crossed, and within whose ample bounds was elaborated what we term, or understand as, Western Christianity and the world view it implies.

The drawback of any system, even a perfect one, is that it is a system—i.e., that it must by definition exclude certain things, regard them as alien to it, and as far as possible relegate them to the nonexistent. The drawback of the system that was worked out in Rome—the drawback of

Western Christianity—was the unwitting reduction of its notions of evil. Any notions about anything are based on experience. For Western Christianity, the experience of evil was the experience reflected in the Roman law, with the addition of firsthand knowledge of the persecution of Christians by the emperors before Constantine. That's a lot, of course, but it is a long way from exhausting the reality of evil. By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity con­signed the East to nonexistence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.

Today, if a young man climbs up a university tower with an automatic rifle and starts spraying passersby, a judge— this is assuming, of course, that the young man has been disarmed and brought to court—will class him as mentally disturbed and lock him up in a mental institution. Yet in essence the behavior of that young man cannot be dis­tinguished from the castration of the royal by-blow as related by Psellus. Nor can it be told apart from the Iranian Imam's butchering tens of thousands of his subjects in order to confirm his version of the will of the Prophet. Or from Dzhugashvili's maxim, uttered in the course of the Great Terror, that "with us, no one is irreplaceable." The common denominator of all these deeds is the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing—i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique.

I am far from asserting that the absence of this concept is a purely Eastern phenomenon; it is not, and that is what's indeed scary. But Western Christianity, along with develop­ing all its ensuing ideas about the world, law, order, the norms of human behavior, and so forth, made the unfor­givable error of neglecting, for the sake of its own growth and eventual triumph, the experience supplied by Byzan­tium. After all, that was a shortcut. Hence all these daily— by now—occurrences that surprise us so much; hence that inability on the part of states and individuals to react to them adequately, which shows itself in their dubbing the aforementioned phenomena mental illness, religious fanat­icism, and whatnot.

27

In Topkapi, the former palace of the sultans, which has been turned into a museum, are now displayed in a special chamber the objects, most sacred to every Muslim's heart, associated with the life of the Prophet. Exquisitely en­crusted caskets preserve the Prophet's tooth, locks from the Prophet's head. Visitors are asked to be quiet, to keep their voices down. All about hang swords of all kinds, daggers, the moldering pelt of some animal bearing the discernible letters of the Prophet's missive to some real historical character, along with other sacred texts. Contemplating these, one feels like thanking fate for one's ignorance of the language. For me, I thought, Russian will do. In the center of the room, inside a gold-rimmed cube of glass, lies a dark-bro^ object, which I was unable to identify without the assistance of the label. This, in bronze inlay, read, in Turkish and English, "Impress of the Prophet's footprint." Size 18 shoe minimum, I thought as I stared at the exhibit. And then I shuddered: Yeti!

28

Byzantium was renamed Constantinople during Constan­tine's lifetime, if I am not mistaken. So far as simplicity of vowels and consonants goes, the new name was presumably more popular among the Seljuk Turks than Byzantium had been. But Istanbul also sounds reasonably Turkish—to the Russian ear, at any rate. The fact is, however, that Istanbul is a Greek name, deriving, as any guidebook will teU you, from the Greek stin poli, which means simply town. Stin? Poli? A Russian ear? Who here hears whom? Here, where bardak (brothel in Russian) means glass, where durak (fool) means stop. Bir bardak —one glass of tea; otobiis duragi—a bus stop. Good thing "otobiis," at least, is only half Greek.

29

For anyone suffering from shortness of breath, there's noth­ing to do here—unless he hires a taxi for the day. For anyone coming to Istanbul from the West, the city is remarkably cheap. With the price converted into dollars, marks, or francs, several things here actually cost nothing at all. Those shoeshiners again, for example, or tea. It's an odd sensation to watch human activity that has no monetary expression: it cannot be evaluated. It feels like a sort of heaven, an Ur-world; it's probably this otherworldliness that constitutes that celebrated "fascination" of the East for the northern Scrooge.

Ah, this battle cry of the graying blonde: "Bargain!"

Doesn't it sound guttural, too, even to an English ear? And, ah, this "Isn't that cute, dearie?" in a minimum of three European languages, and the rustle of worthless banknotes under the scrutiny of dark, apprehensive eyes, otherwise doomed to the TV set's interference and the voluminous family. Ah, this middle age dispatched all over the world by its suburban mantelpieces! And yet, for all its vulgarity and crassness, this quest is markedly more innocent, and of better consequence for the locals, than that of some talka­tive smart-ass Parisienne, or of the spiritual lumpen fatigued by yoga, Buddhism, or Mao and now digging into the depths of Sufi, Sunni, Shia "secret" Islam, etc. No money changes hands here, of course. Between the actual and the mental bourgeois, one is better off with the fonner.

30

What happened next everybody knows: from out of who knows where appeared the Turks. There seems to be no clear answer to where they actually came from; obviously, a very long way off. What drew them to the shores of the Bosporus is also not terribly clear. Horses, I guess. The Turks—more precisely, tuyrks—were nomads, so we were taught at school. The Bosporus, of course, turned out to be an obstacle, and here, all of a sudden, the Turks made up their minds not to wander back the way they had come but, instead, to settle. All this sounds rather unconvincing, but let's leave it the way we got it. What they wanted from Byzantium-Constantinople-Istanbul is, at any rate, beyond argument: they wanted to be in Constantinople—i.e., more or less the same thing that Constantine himself wanted. Before the eleventh century, the Turks had no shared sym­bol. Then it appeared. As we know, it was the crescent.

In Constantinople, however, there were Christians; the city churches were crowned with the cross. The tuyrks'— gradually becoming the Turks'—love affair with Byzantium lasted approximately three centuries. Persistence brought its rewards, and in the fifteenth century the cross sur­rendered its cupolas to the crescent. The rest is well docu­mented, and there is no need to expand upon it. What is worth noting, however, is the striking similarity between "the way it was" and "the way it became." For the meaning of history lies in the essence of structures, not in the character of decor.

31

The meaning of history! How, in what way, can the pen cope with this aggregation of races, tongues, creeds: with the vegetative—nay, zoological—pace of the crumbling- down of the tower of Babel, at the end of which one fine day, among the teeming ruins, an individual catches himself gazing in terror and alienation at his own hand or at his pro- creative organ, not in Wittgensteinian fashion but pos­sessed, rather, by a sensation that these things don't belong to him at all, that they are but components of some do-it- yourself toy set: details, shards in a kaleidoscope through which it is not the cause that peers at the effect but blind chance squinting at the daylight. Unobscured by the blow­ing dust.

427 I Flight from Byzantium 32

The difference between spiritual and secular power in Christian Byzantium wasn't terribly striking. Nominally, the Emperor was obliged to take the views of the Patriarch into account, and, indeed, this often happened. On the other hand, the Emperor frequently appointed the Patriarch and on occasion was, or had grounds for supposing himself to be, a superior Christian vis-a-vis the Patriarch. And, of course, we need not mention the concept of the Lord's anointed, which of itself could relieve the Emperor of the necessity of reckoning with anyone's metaphysics at all. This also happened, and, in conjunction with certain mechanical marvels, of which Theophilus was greatly enamored, played a decisive role in the adoption of Eastern Christianity by Rus in the ninth century. (Incidentally, these marvels—the throne ascending into the air, the metal nightingale, the roaring lions of the same material, and so on—were bor­rowed by the Byzantine ruler, with minor modifications, from his Persian neighbors. )

Something very similar also occurred with the Sublime Porte, which is to say the Ottoman Empire, alias Muslim Byzantium. Once again, we have an autocracy, heavily militarized and somewhat more despotic. The absolute head of the state was the Padishah, or Sultan. Alongside him, however, existed the Grand Mufti, a position combining— indeed, equating—spiritual and administrative authority. The whole state was run by a vastly complex hierarchical system, in which the religious—or, to put it more conve­niently, staunchly ideological—element predominated.

In purely structural terms, the difference between the

Second Rome and the Ottoman Empire is accessible only in units of time. What is it, then? The spirit of place? Its evil genius? The spirit of bad spells—porcha in Russian? Where, incidentally, do we get this word porcha from? Might it not derive from porte? It doesn't matter. It's enough that both Christianity and bardak with durak came down to us from this place where people were becoming converted to Chris­tianity in the fifth century with the same ease with which they went over to Islam in the fifteenth (even though after the fall of Constantinople the Turks did not persecute the Christians in any way). The reason for both conversions was the same: pragmatism. Not that this is connected with the place, however; this has to do with the species.

33

Oh, all these countless Osmans, Muhammads, Murads, Bajazets, Ibrahims, Selims, and Suleimans slaughtering their predecessors, rivals, brothers, parents, and offspring—in the case of }.1urad II, or III (who cares?), eighteen brothers in a row—with the regularity of a man shaving in front of a mirror. Oh, all these endless, uninterrupted wars: against the infidel, against their own but Shiite Muslims, to extend the Empire, to avenge a wrong, for no reason at all, and in self-defense. And, oh, those Janissaries, the elite of the army, dedicated at first to the Sultan, then gradually turn­ing into a separate caste, with only its own interests at heart. How familiar it all, including the slaughter, is! All these turbans and beards, that uniform for heads possessed by one idea only—massacre—and because of that, and not at all because of Islam's ban on the depiction of anyone or anything living, totally indistinguishable from one anotherl And perhaps "massacre" precisely because all are so much alike that there is no way to detect a loss. "I massacre, therefore I exist."

And, broadly speaking, what, indeed, could be nearer to the heart of yesterday's nomad than the linear principle, than movement across a surface, in whatever direction? Didn't one of them, another Selim, say during the conquest of Egypt that he, as Lord of Constantinople, was heir to the Roman Empire and therefore had a right to all the lands that had ever belonged to it? Do these words sound like justification or do they sound like prophecy, or both? And does not the same note ring four hundred years later in the voice of Ustryalov and the Third Rome's latter-day Slavo­philes, whose scarlet, Janissary's-cloaklike banner neatly combined a star and the crescent of Islam? And that hammer, isn't it a modified cross?

These non-stop, lasting-a-thousand-years wars, these end­less tracts of scholastic interpretation of the art of archery— might not these be responsible for the development in this part of the world of a fusion between army and state, for the concept of politics as the continuation of war by other means, and for the phantasmagoric, though ballistically feasible, fantasies of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the grand­father of the missile?

A man with imagination, especially an impatient one, may be sorely tempted to answer these questions in the affirma­tive. But perhaps one shouldn't rush; perhaps one should pause and give them the chance to turn into "accursed"' ones, even if that may take several centuries. Ah, these centuries, history's favorite unit, relieving the individual of the necessity of personally evaluating the past, and award­ing him the honorable status of victim of history.

34

Unlike the Ice Age, civilizations, of whatever sort, move from south to north, as if to fill up the vacuum created by the retreating glacier. The tropical forest is gradually oust­ing the conifers and mixed woodland—if not through foliage, then by way of architecture. One sometimes gets the feeling that baroque, rococo, and even the Schinkel style are simply a species' unconscious yearning for its equatorial past. Fernlike pagodas also fit this idea.

As for latitudes, it's only nomads who move along them, and usually from east to west. The nomadic migration makes sense only within a distinct climatic zone. The Eskimos glide within the Arctic Circle, the Tartars and Mongols in the confines of the black-earth zone. The cupolas of yurts and igloos, the cones of tents and tepees.

I have seen the mosques of Central Asia, of Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva: genuine pearls of Muslim architecture. As Lenin didn't say, I know nothing better than the Shah-i- Zinda, on whose floor I passed several nights, having no­where else to lay my head. I was nineteen then, but I retain tender memories of these mosques not at all for that reason. They are masterpieces of scale and color; they bear witness to the lyricism of Islam. Their glaze, their emerald and cobalt get imprinted on your retina, not least because of the contrast with the yellow-brown hues of the surrounding landscape. This contrast, this memory of a coloristic (at least) alternative to the real world, may also have been the main pretext for their birth. One does, indeed, sense in them an idiosyncrasy, a self-absorption, a striving to accomplish, to perfect themselves. Like lamps in the darkness. Better: like corals in the desert.

35

Whereas Istanbul's mosques are Islam triumphant. There is no greater contradiction than a triumphant church—or greater tastelessness, either. St. Peter's in Rome suffers from this as well. But the Istanbul mosques! These enormous toads in frozen stone, squatting on the earth, unable to stir. Only the minarets, resembling more than anything (pro­phetically, alas) ground-to-air batteries—only they indicate the direction the soul was once about to take. Their shallow domes, reminiscent of saucepan lids or cast-iron kettles, are unable to conceive what they are to do with the sky: they preserve what they contain, rather than encourage one to set eyes on high. Ah, this tent complex! Of spreading on the ground. Of namaz.

Silhouetted against the sunset, on the hilltops, they create a powerful impression: the hand reaches for the camera, like that of a spy spotting a military installation. There is, indeed, something menacing about them—eerie, other­worldly, galactic, totally hermetic, shell-like. And all this in a dirty-gray color, like most of the buildings in Istanbul, and all set against the turquoise of the Bosporus.

And if one's pen does not poise to chide their nameless true-believing builders for being aesthetically dumb it is because the tone for these ground-hugging, toad- and crab­like constructions was set by the Hagia Sophia, an edifice in the utmost degree Christian. Constantine, it is asserted, laid the foundations; it was erected, though, in the reign of Justinian. From the outside, there is no way to tell it from the mosques, or them from it, for fate has played a cruel (or was it cruel?) joke on the Hagia Sophia. Under Sultan Whatever-His-Redundant-Name-Was, our Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque.

As transformations go, this one didn't require a great deal of effort: all the Muslims had to do was to erect four mina­rets on each side of the cathedral. Which they did; and it became impossible to tell the Hagia Sophia from a mosque. That is, the architectural standard of Byzantium was taken to its logical end, for it was exactly the squat grandeur of this Christian shrine that the builders of Bajazet, Suleiman, and the Blue Mosque, not to mention their lesser brethren, sought to emulate. And yet they shouldn't be reproached for that, partly because by the time of their arrival in Constantinople it was the Hagia Sophia that loomed largest over the entire landscape; mainly, however, because in itself the Hagia Sophia was not a Roman creation. It was an Eastern—or, more precisely, Sassanid—product. And, simi­larly, there is no point in blaming that Sultan What's-His- Name—was it Murad?—for converting a Christian church into a mosque. This transformation reflected something that one may, without giving the matter much thought, take for profound Eastern indifference to problems of a metaphysi­cal nature. In reality, though, what stood behind this, and stands now, in much the same way as the Hagia Sophia, with her minarets and with her Christian-Muslim decor inside, is a sensation, instilled by both history and the Arabic lace, that everything in this life intertwines—that every­thing is, in a sense, but a pattern in a carpet. Trodden underfoot.

36

It is a monstrous idea, but not without a measure of truth. So let us try to grapple with it. At its source lies the Eastern principle of ornamentation, whose basic element is a verse from the Koran, a quotation from the Prophet: sewn, en­graved, carved in stone or wood, and graphically coincident with this very process of sewing, engraving, carving if one bears in mind the Arabic form of writing. In other words, we are dealing with the decorative aspect of calligraphy, the decorative use of sentences, words, letters—with a purely visual attitude to them. Let us, disregarding here the un- acceptability of this attitude toward words (and letters, too), point out only the inevitability of a literally spatial— because conveyed by distinctly spatial means—perception of any sacred locution. Let us note the dependence of this ornament on the length of the line and on the didactic character of the locution, often ornamental enough in itself. Let us remind ourselves: the unit of Eastern ornament is the sentence, the word, the letter.

The unit—the main element—of ornamentation that arose in the West was the notch, the tally, recording the passage of days. Such ornament, in other words, is temporal. Hence its rhythm, its tendency toward symmetry, its essen­tially abstract character, subordinating graphic expression to a rhythmic sense. Its extreme non-antididacticism. Its persistence—by means of rhythm, or repetition—in ab­stracting from its unit, from that which has already been once expressed. In short, its dynamism.

I would also remark that the unit of this ornamentation— the day, or the idea of the day—absorbs into itself any experience, including that of the sacred locution. From this follows the suggestion that the natty little bordure on a Grecian urn is superior to a pattern in a carpet. Which, in turn, leads us to consider who is more the nomad, the one who wanders in space or the one who migrates in time. However overwhelming (literally, too) the notion that all is interwoven, that everything is merely a pattern in a carpet, trodden underfoot, it frankly yields to the idea that every­thing gets left behind—the carpet and one's own foot upon it included.

37

Oh, I foresee objections! I see an art historian or an ethnol­ogist preparing to wage battle, figures or potsherds in his hands, over everything stated above. I can see a bespec­tacled someone carrying in an Indian or a Chinese vase with a meander or an epistyle just like the natty little Greek bordure and exclaiming, "Well, what about this? Isn't India (or China) the East?" Worse still, that vase or dish may turn out to be from Egypt or elsewhere in Africa, from Patagonia, or from Central America. Then out will gush a downpour of proofs and incontrovertible facts that pre- Islamic culture was figurative, that, thus, in this area the West simply lags behind the East, that ornament is by definition non-functional, and that space is greater than time. Or that I, for no doubt political reasons, am substitut­ing anthropology for history. Something like that, or worse.

What can I say to this? And need I say anything? I'm not sure, but all the same, I will point out that if I hadn't fore­seen these objections I wouldn't have taken up my pen— that space to me is, indeed, both lesser and less dear than time. Not because it is lesser but because it is a thing, while time is an idea about a thing. In choosing between a thing and an idea, the latter is always to be preferred, say I.

And I also foresee that there will be no vase, no potsherds, no dish, or bespectacled someone. That no objections will be issued, that silence will reign supreme. Less as a sign of assent than as one of indifference. So let us nastify our con­clusion somewhat and add that an awareness of time is a profoundly individualistic experience. That in the course of his life every person sooner or later finds himself in the position of Robinson Crusoe, carving notches and, having counted, say, seven of them, or ten, crossing them out. Such is the origin of ornament, regardless of preceding civiliza­tions, or of that to which this given person belongs. And these notches are a profoundly solitary activity, isolating the individual and forcing him toward an understanding, if not of his uniqueness, then at least of the autonomy of his existence in the world. That is what the basis of our civiliza­tion is, and that is what Constantine walked away from to the East. To the carpet.

38

A normal hot, dusty, perspiring summer day in Istanbul. Moreover, it is Sunday. A human herd loitering about under the vaults of the Hagia Sophia. Up there aloft, inaccessible to the sight, are mosaics representing either kings or saints. Lower down, accessible to the eye, yet not to the mind, are circular metallic-looking shields with lacelike quotations from the Prophet in gold against dark-green enamel. Monu­mental cameos with coiling characters, evoking shadows of Jackson Pollock or Kandinsky. And now I become aware of a slipperiness: the cathedral is sweating. Not only the floor but the marble of the walls as well. The stone is sweating. I inquire, and am told it is because of the sharp jump in temperature. I decide it is because of my presence, and leave.

39

To get a good picture of one's native realm, one needs either to get outside its walls or to spread out a map. But, as has been remarked before, who looks at maps nowadays?

If civilizations—of whatever sort they are—do indeed spread like vegetation in the opposite direction to the glacier, from south to north, where could Rus, given her geographical position, possibly tuck herself away from Byzantium? Not just Kievan Rus, but Muscovite Rus as well, and then all the rest of it between the Donets and the Urals. And one should, frankly, thank Tamerlane and Genghis Khan for retarding the process somewhat, by somewhat free-zing—or, rather, trampling—the Bowers of Byzantium. It is not true that Rus played a shielding role for Europe, preserving the West from the Mongol yoke. It was Con­stantinople, then still the bulwark of Christendom, that played that role. (In 1402, incidentally, a situation devel­oped under the walls of Constantinople which pretty nearly turned into a total catastrophe for Christianity and, indeed, for the whole of the then known world: Tamerlane en­countered Bajazet. Luckily, they turned their arms against each other: interracial rivalry, it would seem, made itself known. Had they joined forces against the West—that is, in the direction both were moving—we would now be looking at the map with an almond-shaped, predominantly hazel eye.)

There was nowhere for Rus to go to get away from Byzantium—any more than for the West to get away from Rome. And, just as the West in age after age became over- growi with Roman colonnades and legality, Rus happened to become the natural geographical prey of Byzantium. If in the way of the former stood the Alps, the latter was impeded only by the Black Sea—a deep but, in the final analysis, flat thing. Rus received, or took, from Byzantium hands everything: not only the Christian liturgy but also the Christian-Turkish system of statecraft (gradually more and more Turkish, less vulnerable, more militarily ideo­logical), not to mention a significant part of its vocabulary. The only thing Byzantium shed on its way north was its remarkable heresies—its Monophysites, its Arians, its Neo- platonists, and so on—which had constituted the very essence of its literary and spiritual life. But then its north­ward expansion took place at a time of growing domination by the crescent, and the purely physical power of the Sub­lime Porte hypnotized the North in far greater measure than the theological polemics of dying-out scholiasts.

Still, in the end Neoplatonism triumphed in art, didn't it? We know where our icons are from, we know the same about our onion-domed churches. We also know that there is nothing easier for a state than to adapt to its own ends

Plotinus' maxim that an artist's task must be the interpre­tation of ideas rather than the imitation of nature. As for ideas, in what way does the late M. Suslov, or whoever is now scraping the ideological dish, differ from the Grand Mufti? What distinguishes the General Secretary from the Padishah—or, indeed, the Emperor? And who appoints the Patriarch, the Grand Vizier, the Mufti, or the Caliph? What distinguishes the Politburo from the Great Divan? And isn't it only one step from a divan to an ottoman?

Isn't my native realm an Ottoman Empire now—in extent, in military might, in its threat to the Western world? Aren't we now by the walls of Vienna? And is not its threat the greater in that it proceeds from the Easternized, to the point of unrecognizability—no, recognizability!—Christi­anity? Is it not greater because it is more seductive? And what do we hear in that howl of the late Milyukov under the cupola of the short-lived Duma: "The Dardenelles will be ours!" An echo of Cato? The yearning of a Christian for his holy place? Or still the voice of Bajazet, Tamerlane, Selim, Muhammad? And if it comes to this, if we are quoting and interpreting, what do we discern in that falsetto of Konstantin Leontiev, the falsetto that pierced the air pre­cisely in Istanbul, where he served in the Czarist embassy: "Russia must rule shamelessly"? \Vhat do we hear in this putrid, prophetic exclamation? The spirit of the age? The spirit of the nation? Or the spirit of the place?

40

God forbid we delve any further into the Turkish-Russian dictionary. Let us take the word "fay," meaning "tea" in both languages, whatever its origins. The tea in Turkey is wonderful—better than the coffee—and, like the shoeshin- ing, costs almost nothing in any known currency. It's strong, the color of transparent brick, but it has no overstimulating effect, because it is served in a bardak, a fifty-gram glass, no more. Of all things I came across in this mixture of Astrakhan and Stalinabad, it's the best item. Tea—and the sight of Constantine's wall, which I would not have seen if I hadn't struck it lucky and got a rogue taxi driver who, instead of going straight to Topkapi, bowled around the whole city.

You can judge the seriousness of the builder's intent by the wall's height and width and the quality of the masonry. Constantine was thus extremely serious: the ruins where gypsies, goats, and young people trading in their tender parts may be found could withstand even today any army, given a positional war. On the other hand, if civilizations are granted vegetative—in other words, ideological—char­acter, the erection of the wall was a sheer waste of time. Against anti-individualism, to say the least, against the spirit of relativism and obedience, neither waU nor sea offers a protection.

When I finally reached Topkapi and, having surveyed a good part of its contents—predominantly the caftans of the Sultans, which correspond linguistically and visually to the wardrobe of the Muscovite rulers—headed toward the object of my pilgrimage, the seraglio, I was greeted, sadly, at the door of this most important establishment in the world by a notice in Turkish and English: CLOSED for RESTORATION. "Oh, if only!" I exclaimed inwardly, trying to control my disappointment.

41

The quality of reality always leads to a search for a culprit— more accurately, for a scapegoat. Whose flocks graze in the mental fields of history. Yet, a son of a geographer, I believe that Urania is older than Clio; among Mnemosyne's daughters, I think, she is the oldest. So, born by the Baltic, in the place regarded as a window on Europe, I always felt something like a vested interest in this window on Asia with which we shared a meridian. On grounds perhaps less than sufficient, we regarded ourselves as Europeans. By the same token, I thought of the dwellers of Constantinople as Asians. Of these two assumptions, it's only the first that proved to be arguable. I should also admit, perhaps, that East and West vaguely corresponded in my mind to the past and the future.

Unless one is born by the water—and at the edge of an empire at that—one is seldom bothered by this sort of dis­tinction. Of all people, somebody like me should be the first to regard Constantine as the carrier of the West to the East, as someone on a par with Peter the Great: the way he is regarded by the Church itself. If I had stayed longer at that meridian, I would. Yet I didn't, and I don't.

To me, Constantine's endeavor is but an episode in the general pull of the East westward, a pull motivated neither by the attraction of one part of the world for another nor by the desire of the past to absorb the future—although at times and in some places, of which Istanbul is one, it seems that way. This pull, I am afraid, is magnetic, evolutionary; it has to do, presumably, with the direction in which this planet rotates on its axis. It takes the forms of an attraction to a creed, of nomadic thrusts, wars, migration, and the flow of money. The Galata Bridge is not the first to be built over the Bosporus, as your guidebook would claim; the first one was built by Darius. A nomad always rides into a sunset.

Or else he swims. The strait is about a mile wide, and what could be done by a ''blond cow" escaping the wrath of Jupiter's spouse could surely have been managed by the dusky son of the steppes. Or by lovesick Leander or by sick-of-love Lord Byron splashing across the Dardanelles. Bosporus! Well-worn strip of water, the only cloth that is properly Urania's, no matter how hard Clio tries to put it on. It stayswrinkled, and on gray days, especially, no one would say that it has been stained by history. Its surface current washes itself off Constantinople in the north—and that's why, perhaps, that sea is called Black. Then it somersaults to the bottom and, in the form of a deep current, escapes back into Marmara—the Marble Sea—presumably to get itself bleached. The net result is that dusted-bottle-green color: the color of time itself. The child of the Baltic can't fail to recognize it, can't rid himself of the old sensation that this rolling, non-stop, lapping substance itself is time, or that this is what time would look like had it been con­densed or photographed. This is what, he thinks, separates Europe and Asia. And the patriot in him wishes the stretch were wider.

42

Time to wrap it up. As I said, there were no steamers from Istanbul or Smyrna. I boarded a plane and, after less than two hours' flight over the Aegean, through air that at one time was no less inhabited than the archipelago down below, landed in Athens.

Forty miles from Athens, in Sounion, at the top of a cliff plummeting to the sea, stands a temple to Poseidon, built almost simultaneously—a difference of some fifty years— with the Parthenon in Athens. It has stood here for two and a half thousand years.

It is ten times smaller than the Parthenon. How many times more beautiful it is would be hard to say; it is not clear what should be considered the unit of perfection. It has no roof.

There is not a soul about. Sounion is a fishing village with a couple of modern hotels now, and lies far below. There, on the crest of the dark cliff, the shrine looks from a distance as if it had been gently lowered from heaven rather than been erected on earth. Marble has more in common with the clouds than with the ground.

Fifteen white columns connected by a white marble base stand evenly spaced. Between them and the earth, between them and the sea, between them and the blue sky of Hellas, there is no one and nothing.

As practically everywhere else in Europe, here, too, Byron incised his name on the base of one of the columns. In his footsteps, the bus brings tourists; later it takes them away. The erosion that is clearly affecting the surface of the columns has nothing to do with weathering. It is a pox of stares, lenses, flashes.

Then twilight descends, and it gets darker. Fifteen columns, fifteen vertical white bodies evenly spaced at the top of the cliff, meet the night under the open skies.

If they counted days, there would have been a million such days. From a distance, in the evening haze, their white vertical bodies resemble an ornament, thanks to the equal intervals between them.

An idea of order? The principle of symmetry? Sense of rhythm? Idolatry?

43

Presumably, it would have been wiser to take letters of recommendation, to jot down two or three telephone num­bers at least, before going to Istanbul. I didn't do that. Presumably, it would have made sense to make friends with someone, get into contact, look at the life of the place from the inside, instead of dismissing the local population as an alien crowd, instead of regarding people as so much psycho­logical dust in one's eyes.

Who knows? Perhaps my attitude toward people has in its own right a whiff of the East about it, too. When it comes down to it, where am I from? Still, at a certain age a man gets tired of his own kind, weary of cluttering up his conscious and subconscious. One more, or ten more, tales of cruelty? Another ten, or hundred, examples of human baseness, stupidity, valor? Misanthropy, after all, should also have its limits.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (Russian for no­where).

4 4

I'm not a historian, or a journalist, or an ethnographer. At best, I'm a traveler, a victim of geography. Not of history, be it noted, but of geography. This is what still links me with the country where it was my fate to be born, with our famed Third Rome. So I'm not particularly interested in the politics of present-day Turkey, or in what happened to Atatiirk, whose portrait adorns the greasy walls of every last coffeehouse as well as the Turkish lira, unconvertible and representing an unreal form of payment for real labor.

I came to Istanbul to look at the past, not at the future— since the latter doesn't exist here: whatever there was of it has gone north as well. Here there is only an unenviable, third-rate present of the people, industrious yet plundered by the intensity of the local history. Nothing will happen here anymore, apart perhaps from street disorders or an earthquake. Or perhaps they'll discover oil: there's a fearful stench of sulfureted hydrogen in the Golden Horn, crossing whose oily surface you get a splendid panorama of the city. Still, it's unlikely. The stench comes from oil seeping out of rusty, leaking, nearly hole-ridden tankers passing through the Strait. One might squeeze out a living from refining that alone.

A project like that, though, would probably strike a local as altogether too enterprising. The locals are rather con­servative by nature, even if they are businessmen or dealers; as for the working class, it is locked, reluctantly but firmly, in a traditional, conservative mentality by the beggarly rates of pay. In his own element, a native finds himself only within the infinitely intertwining—in patterns akin to the carpet's or the mosque walls'—web-like, vaulted galleries of the local bazaar, which is the heart, mind, and soul of Istanbul. This is a city within a city; it, too, is built for the ages. It cannot be transported west, north, or even south. GUM, Bon Marche, Macy's, Harrods taken together and raised to the cube are but child's babble compared with these catacombs. In an odd way, thanks to the garlands of yellow hundred-watt bulbs and the endless wash of bronze, beads, bracelets, silver, and gold under glass, not to mention the very carpets and the icons, samovars, crucifixes, and so on, this bazaar in Istanbul produces the impression of—of all things—an Orthodox church, though convoluted and branching like a quotation from the Prophet. A laid-out version of the Hagia Sophia.

45

Civilizations move along meridians; nomads (including our modem warriors, since war is an echo of the nomadic instinct ) along latitudes. This seems to be yet another version of the cross that Constantine saw. Both movements possess a natural (vegetable or animal) logic, considering which one easily finds oneself in the position of not being able to reproach anyone for anything. In the state known as melancholy—or, more exactly, fatalism. It can be blamed on age, or on the influence of the East, or, with an effort of the imagination, on Christian humility.

The advantages of this condition are obvious, since they are selfish ones. For it is, like all forms of humility, always achieved at the expense of the mute helplessness of the victims of history, past, present, and future; it is an echo of the helplessness of millions. And if you are not at an age when you can draw a sword from a scabbard or clamber up to a platform to roar to a sea of heads about your detestation of the past, the present, and what is to come; if there is no such platform or the sea has dried up, there still remain the face and the lips, which can accommodate your slight— provoked by the vista opening to both your inner and your naked eye—smile of contempt.

46

With it, with that smile on the lips, one may board the ferry and set off for a cup of tea in Asia. Twenty minutes later, one can disembark in <;engelkoy, find a cafe on the very shore of the Bosporus, sit down and order tea, and, inhaling the smell of rotting seaweed, observe without changing the aforesaid facial expression the aircraft carriers of the Third Rome sailing slowly through the gates of the Second on their way to the First.

(Translated by Alan Myers and the author)

1985

In a Room and a Half

To L.K.

1

The room and a half (if such a space unit makes any sense in English) in which the three of us lived had a parquet floor, and my mother strongly objected to the men in her family, me in particular, walking around with our socks on. She insisted on us wearing shoes or slippers at all times. Admonishing me about this matter, she would evoke an old Russian superstition; it is an ill omen, she would say, it may bode a death in the family.

Of coUise, it might be that she simply regarded this habit as uncivilized, as plain bad manners. Men's feet smell, and that was the pre-deodorant era. Yet I thought that, indeed, one could easily slip and fall on a polished parquet, espe­cially if one wore woolen socks. And that if one were old and frail, the consequences could be disastrous. The par­quet's affinity with wood, earth, etc., thus extended in my mind to any ground under the feet of our close and distant relatives who lived in the same town. No matter what the distance, it was the same ground. Even living on the other side of the river, where I would subsequently rent an apart­ment ora room of my own, didn't constitute an excuse, for there were too many rivers and canals in that town. And although some of them were deep enough for the passage of seagoing ships, death, I thought, would find them shal­low, or else, in its standard underground fashion, it could creep across under their bottoms.

Now my mother and my father are dead. I stand on the Atlantic seaboard: there is a great deal of water separating me from two surviving aunts and my cousins: a real chasm, big enough to confuse even death. Now I can walk around in my socks to my heart's content, for I have no relatives on this continent. The only death in the family I can now incur is presumably my own, although that would mean mixing up transmitter with receiver. The odds of that merger are small, and that's what distinguishes electronics from superstition. Still, if I don't tread these broad Cana­dian-maple floorboards in my socks, it's neither because of this certitude nor out of an instinct for self-preservation, but because my mother wouldn't approve of it. I guess I want to keep things the way they were in our family, now that I am what's left of it.

2

There were three of us in that room and a half of ours: my father, my mother, and I. A family, a typical Russian family of the time. The time was after the war, and very few people could afford more than one child. Some of them couldn't even afford to have the father alive or present: great terror and war took their toll in big cities, in my hometown especially. So we should have considered our­selves lucky, especially since we were Jews. All three of us survived the war (and I say "all three" because I, too, was born before it, in 1940); my parents, however, survived the thirties also.

I guess they considered themselves lucky, although they never said as much. In general, they were not terribly self- aware, except when they grew old and malaises began to beset them. Even then, they wouldn't talk about themselves and death in that way that terrifies a listener or prods him to compassion. They would simply grumble, or complain addresslessly about their aches, or discuss at length some medicine or other. The closest my mother would ever come to uttering something of the sort would be while pointing at an extremely delicate set of china, saying: This will be­come yours when you get married or when . . . and she would interrupt herself. And, once, I remember her on the phone talking to some distant friend of hers who I was told was ill: I remember my mother emerging from the tele­phone booth on the street, where I was waiting for her, with a somewhat unfamiliar look in her so familiar eyes, behind her tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses. I leaned toward her (I was already a good deal taller) and asked what the woman had said, and my mother replied, staring aimlessly ahead: "She knows that she is dying and was crying into the phone."

They took everything as a matter of course: the system, their powerlessness, their poverty, their wayward son. They simply tried to make the best of everything: to keep food on the table—and whatever that food was, to tum it into morsels; to make ends meet—and although we always lived from payday to payday, to stash away a few rubles for the kid's movies, museum trips, books, dainties. What dishes, utensils, clothes, linen we had were always clean, polished, ironed, patched, starched. The tablecloth was always spot­less and crisp, the lampshade above it dusted, the parquet shining and swept.

The amazing thing is that they were never bored. Tired, yes, but not bored. Most of their time at home, they were on their feet: cooking, washing, circulating between the communal kitchen of our apartment and our room and a half, fiddling with this or that item of the household. When they were seated, it was of course for meals, but mainly I remember my mother in a chair, bent over her manual-cum- pedal Singer sewing machine, fixing our clothes, turning old shirt collars inside out, repairing or readjusting old coats. As for my father, his only time in a chair was when he was reading the paper, or else at his desk. Sometimes in the evening they would watch a movie or a concert on our 1952 TV set. Then they would also be seated . .. This way, seated in a chair in the empty room and a half, a neighbor found my father dead a year ago.

3

He had outlived his wife by thirteen months. Out of seventy-eight years of her life and eighty of his, I've spent only thirty-two years with them. I know almost nothing about how they met, about their courtship; I don't even know in what year they were married. Nor do I know the way they lived the last eleven or twelve years of their lives, the years without me. Since I am never to learn it, I'd better assume that the routine was the usual, that perhaps they were even better off without me: in terms both of money and of not having to worry about my being rearrested.

Except that I couldn't help them in their old age; except tiat I wasn't there when they were dying. I am saying this not so much out of a sense of guilt as because of the rather egotistical desire of a child to follow his parents through all the stages of their life; for every child, one way or an­other, repeats his parents' progress. I could argue that, after aU, one wants to le^ from one's parents about one's own future, one's ovwn aging; one wants to learn from them also the ultimate lesson: how to die. Even if one doesn't want any of these, one knows that one learns from them, however unwittingly. "Shall I look this way when I am old, too? Is this cardiac—or any other—problem hered­itary?"

I don't and I never will know how they felt during those last years of their life. How many times they were scared, how many times they felt prepared to die, how they felt then, reprieved, how they would resume hoping that the three of us would get together again. "Son," my mother would say over the telephone, "the only thing I want from this life is to see you again. That's the only thing that keeps me going." And a minute later: "What were you doing five minutes ago, before you called?" "ActuaUy, I was doing the dishes." "Oh, that's very good. It's a very good thing to do: the dishes. Sometimes it's awfully therapeutic."

4

Our room and a haH was part of a huge enfilade, one-third of a block in length, on the northern side of a six-story building that faced three streets and a square at the same time. The building was one of those tremendous cakes in so-called Moorish style that in Northern Europe marked the tum of the century. Erected in 1903, the year of my father's birth, it was the architectural sensation of the St. Petersburg of that period, and Akhmatova once told me that her parents took her in a carriage to see this wonder. On its western side, facing one of the most famous avenues of Russian litera­ture, Liteiny Prospect, Alexander Blok had an apartment at one time. As for our enfilade, it was occupied by the couple that dominated the pre-revolutionary Russian liter­ary scene as well as the intellectual climate of Russian emigration in Paris later on, in the twenties and the thirties: by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius. And it was from our room and a half's balcony that the larva-like Zinka shouted abuse to the revolutionary sailors.

After the Revolution, in accordance with the policy of "densening up" the bourgeoisie, the enfilade was cut up into pieces, with one family per room. Walls were erected between the rooms—at first of plywood. Subsequently, over the years, boards, brick, and stucco would promote these partitions to the status of architectural norm. If there is an infinite aspect to space, it is not its expansion but its reduc­tion. If only because the reduction of space, oddly enough, is always more coherent. It's better structured and has more names: a cell, a closet, a grave. Expanses have only a broad gesture.

In the U.S.S.R., the living quarters' minimum per person is 9 square meters. We should have considered ourselves lucky, because due to the oddity of our portion of the enfilade, the three of us wound up with a total of 40 meters. That excess had to do also with the fact that we had ob- taincd this place as the result of my parents' giving up the two separate rooms in different parts of town in which they had lived before they got married. This concept of exchange —or, better still, swap (because of the finality of such ex­change )—is something there is no way to convey to an outsider, to a foreigner. Property laws are arcane every­where, but some of them are more arcane than others, especially when your landlord is the state. Money has noth­ing to do with it, for instance, since in a totalitarian state income brackets are of no great variety—in other words, every person is as poor as the next. You don't buy your living quarters: at best, you are entitled to the square equivalent of what you had before. If there are two of you, and you decide to live together, you are therefore entitled to an equivalent of the square sum total of your previous residen­cies. And it is the clerks in the borough property office who decide what you are going to get. Bribery is of no use, since the hierarchy of those clerks is, in its own turn, terribly ar­cane and their initial impulse is to give you less. The swaps take years, and your only ally is fatigue; i.e., you may hope to wear them down by refusing to move into something quantitatively inferior to what you previously had. Apart from pure arithmetic, what goes into their decision is a vast variety of assumptions never articulated in law, about your age, nationality, race, occupation, the age and sex of your child, social and territorial origins, not to mention the per­sonal impression you make, etc. Only the clerks know what is available, only they judge the equivalence and can give or take a few square meters here and there. And what a difference those few square meters make! They can accom­modate a bookshelf, or, better yet, a desk.

454 I Joseph Brodsky 5

Apart from an excess of thirteen square meters, we were ter­ribly lucky because the communal apartment we had moved into was very small. That is, the part of the enfilade that constituted it contained six rooms partitioned in such a way that they gave home to only four families. Including our­selves, only eleven people lived there. As communal apart­ments go, the dwellers can easily amount to a hundred. The average, though, is somewhere between twenty-five and fifty. Ours was almost tiny.

Of course, we all shared one toilet, one bathroom, and one kitchen. But the kitchen was fairly spacious, the toilet very decent and cozy. As for the bathroom, Russian hygi­enic habits are such that eleven people would seldom over­lap when either taking a bath or doing their basic laundry. The latter hung in the two corridors that connected the rooms to the kitchen, and one knew the underwear of one's neighbors by heart.

The neighbors were good neighbors, both as individuals and because all of them were working and thus absent for the better part of the day. Save one, they didn't inform to the police; that was a good percentage for a communal apartment. But even she, a squat, waistless woman, a sur­geon in the nearby polyclinic, would occasionally give you medical advice, take your place in the queue for some scarce food item, keep an eye on your boiling soup. How does that line in Frost's "The Star-Splitter" go? "For to be social is to be forgiving"?

For aU the despicable aspects of this mode of existence, a communal apartment has perhaps its redeeming side as well. It bares life to its basics: it strips off any illusions about human nature. By the volume of the fart, you can tell who occupies the toilet, you know what he/she had for supper as well as for breakfast. You know the sounds they make in bed and when the women have their periods. It's often you in whom your neighbor confides his or her grief, and it is he or she who calls for an ambulance should you have an angina attack or something worse. It is he or she who one day may find you dead in a chair, if you live alone, or vice versa.

What barbs or medical and culinary advice, what tips about goods suddenly available in this or that store are traded in the communal kitchen in the evening when the wives cook their meals! This is where one learns life's essen­tials: by the rim of one's ear, with the corner of one's eye. What silent dramas unfurl there when somebody is all of a sudden not on speaking terms with someone else! What a school of mimics it is! What depths of emotion can be con­veyed by a stiff, resentful vertebra or by a frozen profile! What smells, aromas, and odors float in the air around a hundred-watt yellow tear hanging on a plait-like tangled electric cord. There is something tribal about this dimly lit cave, something primordial—evolutionary, if you will; and the pots and pans hang over the gas stoves like would-be tom-toms.

6

I recall these not out of nostalgia but because this was where my mother spent one-fourth of her life. Family peo­ple seldom eat out; in Russia almost never. I don't recall either her or my father across the table in a restaurant, or for that matter in a cafeteria. She was the best cook I ever knew, with the exception, perhaps, of Chester Kallman; but then he had more ingredients. I recall her most fre­quently in the kitchen, in her apron, face reddened and eyeglasses a bit steamy, shooing me away from the stove as I try to fish this or that item from the burner. Her upper lip glistens with sweat; her short, cropped, dyed-red but otherwise gray hair curls disorderedly. "Go away!" she exclaims. "What impatiencc!" I won't hear that anymore.

Nor shall I see the door opening (how did she do it with both her hands holding a casserole or two big pans? By lowering them onto the latch and applying their weight to it?) and her sailing in with our dinner/supper/tea/dessert. My father would be reading the paper, I would not move from my book unless told to do so, and she knew that any help she could expect from us would be delayed and clumsy anyway. The men in her family knew more about courtesy than they themselves could master. Even when they were hungry. "Are you reading your Dos Passos again?" she would remark, setting the table. "\Vho is going to read Turgenev?" "What do you expect from him?" my father would ccho, folding the paper. "Loafer is the word."

7

How is it possible that I see myself in this scene? And yet, I do; as clcarly as I see them. Again, it is not nostalgia for my youth, for the old country. No, it is more likely that, now that they are dead, I see their life as it was then; and then their life included me. This is what they would re­member about me as well, unless they now have the gift of omniscience and observe me at present, .«sitting in the kitchen of the aparhnent that I rent from my school, writing this in a language they didn't understand, although now they should be pan-glot. This is their only chance to see me and America. This is the only way for me to see them and our room.

8

Our ceiling was some fourteen, if not more, feet high, adorned with the same Moorish-style plaster ornamenta­tion, which, combined with cracks and stains from occa­sionally bursting pipes upstairs, tiurned it into a highly detailed map of some nonexisting superpower or archi­pelago. There were three very tall arched windows through which we could see nothing except a high school across the street, were it not for the central window, which also served as a door to the balcony. From this balcony we could view the entire length of the street, whose typically Peters- burgian, impeccable perspective ended up with the silhou­ette of the cupola of St. Panteleimon's Church, or—if one looked to the right—the big square, in the center of which sat the Cathedral of the Savior of Her Imperial Majesty's Transfiguration Battalion.

By the time we moved into this Moorish wonder, the street already bore the name of Pestel, the executed leader of the Decembrists. Originally, though, it was named after that church that loomed at its far end: Panteleimonovskaya. There, at the far end, the street would fling around the church and run to the Fontanka River, cross over the Police Bridge, and take you into the Summer Garden. Pushkin once lived on that part of the street, and somewhere in a letter to his wife he says that "every morning, in nightgown and slippers I go across the bridge for a stroll in the Summer Garden. The entire Summer Garden is my orchard ..,"

His was Number 11, I think; ours was Number 27, and that was at the end of the street, which flowed into the cathedral square. Yet, since our building was at the street's intersection with the fabled Liteiny Prospect, our postal address read: Liteiny Pr. #24, Apt. 28. This is where we received our mail; this is what I wrote on the envelopes addressed to my parents. I am mentioning it here not be­cause it has any specific significance but because my pen, presumably, will never write this address again.

9

Oddly, the furniture we had matched the exterior and the interior of the building. It was as busy with curves, and as monumental as the stucco molding on the fat;ade or the panels and pilasters protruding from the walls inside, skeined with plaster garlands of some geometrical fruits. Both the outside and the inner decor were of a light-brown, cocoa-cum-milk shade. Our two huge, cathedral-like chests of drawers, however, were of black varnished oak; yet they belonged to the same period, the tum of the century, as did the building itself. This was what perhaps favorably dis­posed the neighbors toward us from the outset, albeit un­wittingly. And this was why, perhaps, after barely a year in that building, we felt we had lived there forever. The sensation that the chests had found their home, or the other way around, somehow made us realize that we, too, were settled, that we were not to move again.

Those ten-foot-high, two-story chests (you'd have to take off the corniced top from the elephant-footed bottom when moving) housed nearly everything our family had amassed in the course of its existence. The role played elsewhere by the attic or the basement, in our case was performed by the chests. My father's various cameras, developing and printing paraphernalia, prints themselves, dishes, china, linen, tablecloths, shoe boxes with his shoes now too small for him yet still too large for me, tools, batteries, his old Navy tunics, binoculars, family albums, yellowed illustrated supplements, my mother's hats and scarves, some silver Solingen razor blades, defunct flashlights, his military deco­rations, her motley kimonos, their mutual correspondence, lorgnettes, fans, other memorabilia—all that was stored in the cavernous depths of these chests, yielding, when you'd open one of their doors, a bouquet of mothballs, old leather, and dust. On the top of the lower part, as if on a mantelpiece, sat two crystal carafes containing liqueurs, and a glazed porcelain figurine of two tipsy Chinese fishermen dragging their catch. My mother would wipe the dust off them twice a week.

With hindsight, the content of these chests could be com­pared to our joined, collective subconscious; at the time, this thought wouldn't have crossed my mind. To say the least, all these things were part of my parents' conscious­ness, tokens of their memory: of places and of times by and large preceding me; of their common and separate past, of their own youth and childhood, of a different era, almost of a different century. With the benefit of the same hind­sight, I would add: of their freedom, for they were born and grew up free, before what the witless scum call the Revolution, but what for them, as for generations of others, meant slavery.

10

write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under "a foreign code of conscience," I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resur­rect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crema­torium than the Russian. To write about them in Russian would be only to further their captivity, their reduction to insignificance, resulting in mechanical annihilation. I know that one shouldn't equate the state with language but it was in Russian that two old people, shuffling through numerous state chancelleries and ministries in the hope of obtaining a permit to go abroad for a visit to see their only son before they died, were told repeatedly, for twelve years in a row, that the state considers such a visit "unpurposeful." To say the least, the repetition of this utterance proves some fa­miliarity of the state with the Russian language. Besides, even if I had written all this in Russian, these words wouldn't see the light of day under the Russian sky. Who would read them then? A handful of emigres whose parents either have died or will die under similar circumstances? They know this story only too well. They know what it feels like not to be allowed to sec their mothers or fathers on their deathbed; the silence that follows their request for an emergency visa to attend a relative's funeral. And then it's too late, and a man or a woman puts the receiver down and walks out of the door into the foreign afternoon feeling something neither langiage has words for, and for which no howl will suffice, either ... What could I possibly tell them? In what way could I console them? No country has mas­tered the art of destroying its subjects' souls as well as Russia, and no man with a pen in his hand is up to mend­ing them; no, this is a job for the Almighty only, this is what He has all that time of His for. May English then house my dead. In Russian I am prepared to read, write verses or letters. For Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky, though, English offers a better semblance of afterlife, maybe the only one there is, save my very self. And as far as the latter is concerned, writing this in this language is like doing those dishes: it's therapeutic.

11

My father was a journalist—a newspaper photographer, to be more precise—although he wrote articles as well. As he wrote mostly for small dailies that are never read anyway, most of his articles would start with "Heavy, storm-laden clouds hang over the Baltic ... " confident that the weather in our parts would make this opening newsworthy or per­tinent. He held two degrees: in geography, from Leningrad University, and in journalism, from the School of Red Jour­nalism. He enrolled in the latter when it was made clear to him that his chances to travel, especially abroad, weren't worth reckoning: as a Jew, a son of a print-shop owner, and a non-member of the Party.

Journalism (to a certain extent) and the war ( substan­tially) restored the balance. He covered one-sixth of the earth's surface (the standard quantitative definition of the territory of the U.S.S.R.) and a great deal of water. Al­though he was assigned to the Navy, the war started for him in 1940, in Finland, and ended in 1948, in China, where he was sent with a bunch of military advisers to help Mao in his endeavors and from where those tipsy porcelain fishermen and the china sets my mother wanted me to have when I got married came from. In between, he was escorting the Allies' PQs in the Barents Sea, defending and losing Sevastopol on the Black Sea, joining—after his tor­pedo boat was sunk—the then Marines. During the siege of Leningrad, he was dispatched to the Leningrad front, took the best pictures I've seen in print of the city under siege, and participated in the siege's dislodging. (This part of the war, I believe, mattered to him most, since it was too close to his family, to his home. Still, for all his prox­imity, he lost his apartment and his only sister: to bombs and to hunger.) Afterward, he was sent back to the Black Sea, landed at the ill-famed Malaya Zemlya, and held it; then, as the front advanced westward, went with the first detachment of torpedo boats to Rumania, landed there, and, for a short time, was even the military governor of Constanza. "We liberated Rumania," he'd boast some­times, and proceed to recall his encounters with King Michael. That was the only king he had ever seen; Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, not to mention Stalin, he regarded as upstarts.

463 / Ina Room and a Half 12

Whatever monkey business he was up to while in China, our small pantry, our chests, and our walls profited from it considerably. What art objects the last displayed were of Chinese origin: the cork-cum-watercolor paintings, the samurai swords, little silk screens. The tipsy fishermen were the last of the lively population of porcelain figurines, dolls, and hat-wearing penguins that would only gradually dis­appear, victims of careless geshues or the need for birthday presents for various relatives. The swords, too, had to be surrendered to the state collections as potential weapons a regular citizen wasn't supposed to have. A reasonable cau­tion, come to think of it, in light of the subsequent police invasions I brought upon our room and a half. As for the china sets, astonishingly exquisite even to my untrained eye—my mother wouldn't hear about a single beautiful saucer on our table. "These are not for slobs," she would explain patiently to us. "And you are slobs. You are very sloppy slobs." Besides, the dishes we were using were ele­gant enough, as well as sturdy.

I remember one dark cold November evening in 1948, in the small, sixteen-square-meter room where my mother and I lived during and right after the war. That evening Father was returning from China. I remember the doorbell ringing and my mother and I rushing to the dimly lit landing, sud­denly dark with Navy uniforms: my father, his friend and colleague, Captain F.M., and a bunch of servicemen enter­ing the corridor carrying three huge crates, with their China catch, splashed on all four sides with gigantic, octopuslike Chinese characters. And later on, Captain F.M.

and I sitting at the table, while my father unpacks the crates, my mother in her yellow-pink, crepe de chine dress, on high heels, clasping her hands and exclaiming "Ach! oh wunderbar!"—in German, the language of her Latvian childhood and present occupation—interpreter in a camp for German POWs—and Captain F.M., a tall wiry man in his dark-blue, unbuttoned tunic, pouring himself a glass from a carafe and winking at me as to a grownup. The belts with their anchor buckles and holstered Parabellums are on the windowsill, my mother gasps at the sight of a ki­mono. The war is over, it's peace, I am too small to wink back.

13

Now I am exactly the age my father was that November evening: I am forty-five, and again I see the scene with an unnatural, high-resolution-lens clarity, although all its participants save me are dead. I see it so well that I can wink back at Captain F.M . . . . Was it meant to be that way? Is there, in these winks over the space of nearly forty years, some meaning, some significance that eludes me? Is this what life is all about? If not, why this clarity, what is it for? The only answer that occurs to me is: So that this moment exists, so that it is not forgotten when the actors are gone, myself included. Maybe this way you understand indeed how precious it was: the arrival of peace. Into one family. And by the same token, in order to make it clear what moments are. Be they just a return of someone's father, an opening of a crate. Hence this mesmerizing clarity. Or maybe it's because you are a son of a photog­rapher and your memory simply develops a film. Shot with your own two eyes, almost forty years ago. That's why you couldn't wink back then.

14

My father wore the Navy uniform for approximately two more years. And this is when my childhood started in earnest. He was the officer in charge of the photography department of the Navy Museum, located in the most beau­tiful building in the entire city. Which is to say, in the entire empire. The building was that of the former Stock Exchange: a far more Greek affair than any Parthenon, and far better situated as well, at the tip of Basil Island, which juts into the Neva River where it is at its widest.

On late afternoons, school over, I'd wade through the town to the river, cross the Palace Bridge, and run to the museum to pick up my father and walk home with him. The best times were when he was the evening duty officer, when the museum was already closed. He would emerge from the long, marbled corridor, in full splendor, with that blue-white-blue armband of the duty officer around his left ^rn, the holstered Parabellum on his right side, dangling from his belt, the Navy cap with its lacquered visor and gilded "salad" above covering his disconcertingly bald head. "Greetings, Commander," I would say, for such was his rank; he'd smirk back, and as his tour of duty wouldn't be over for another hour or so, he'd cut me loose to loiter about in the museum alone.

It is my profound conviction that apart from the litera­ture of the last two centuries and, perhaps, the architecture of the former capital, the only other thing Russia can be proud of is its Navy's history. Not because of its spectacular victories, of which there have been rather few, but because of the nobility of spirit that has informed its enterprise. Call it idiosyncrasy or even psycho-fancy, but this brain child of the only visionary among Russian emperors, Peter the Great, seems to me indeed a cross between the afore­mentioned literature and architecture. Patterned after the British Navy, but less functional than decorative, informed more by the spirit of discovery than by that of expansion, prone rather to a heroic gesture and self-sacrifice than to survival at all costs, this Navy indeed was a vision: of a perfect, almost abstract order, borne upon the waters of the world's oceans, as it could not be attained anywhere on Russian soil.

A child is always first of all an aesthete: he responds to appearances, to surfaces, to shapes and forms. There is hardly anything that I've liked in my life more than those clean-shaven admirals, en face and in profile, in their gilded frames looming through a forest of masts on ship models that aspired to life size. In their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century uniforms, with those jabots or high-standing collars, burdock-like fringe epaulets, wigs and chest-crossing broad blue ribbons, they looked very much the instruments of a perfect, abstract ideal, no less precise than bronze-rimmed astrolabes, compasses, binnacles, and sextants glittering all about. They could compute one's place under the stars with a smaller margin of error than their masters! And one could only wish they ruled human waves as well: to be exposed to the rigors of their trigonometry rather than to a shoddy planimetry of ideologues, to be a figment of the vision, of a mirage perhaps, instead of a part of reality. To this day, I think that the country would do a hell of a lot better if it had for its national banner not that foul double-headed imperial fowl or the vaguely masonic hammer-and-sickle, but the flag of the Russian Navy: our glorious, incomparably beautiful flag of St. Andrew: the diagonal blue cross against a virgin-white background.

15

On the way home, my father and I would drop into stores, buy food or photographic materials (film, chemicals, pa­per), stop by shop windows. As we made our way through the center of to^, he would tell me about this or that fagade's history, about what was here or there before the war or before 1917. Who was the architect, who was the o^er, who was the dweller, what happened to them, and, in his view, why. This six-foot-tall Navy commander knew quite a lot about civilian life, and gradually I began to regard his uniform as a disguise; more precisely, the idea of distinction between form and content began to take root in my schoolboy mind. His uniform had to do with this effect no less than the present content of the fagades he was point­ing at. In my schoolboy's mind this disparity would refract, of course, into an invitation to lie (not that I needed one); deep do^, though, I think this taught me the principle of maintaining appearances no matter what is going on inside.

In Russia, the military seldom change into civvies, even at home. Partly, this is a matter of one's wardrobe, which is never too vast; mainly, though, this has to do with the notion of authority associated with uniform and thus with your social standing. Especially if you are an officer. Even the demobilized and retired tend to wear for quite some time, at home and in public, this or that part of their service attire: a tunic without epaulets, tall boots, a military cap, an overcoat, indicating to everybody (and reminding them­selves of) the degree of their belonging: for once in charge, always in charge. It is like the Protestant clergy in these parts; and in the case of a Navy man, this similarity is all the stronger because of his white undercollar.

We had lots of those, plastic and cotton ones, in the chest's upper drawer; years later, when I was in the seventh grade and a uniform was introduced into school, my mother would cut and sew them to the standing collar of my rat- gray tunic. For that uniform, too, was semi-military: tunic, belt with a buckle, matching trousers, a cap with a lac­quered visor. The earlier one starts to think of himself as a soldier, the better it is for the system. That was fine with me, and yet I resented the color, which suggested the in­fantry or, worse still, the police. In no way could it match my father's pitch-black overcoat with two rows of yellow buttons that suggested an avenue at night. And when he'd unbutton it, underneath you'd see the dark-blue tunic with yet another file of the same buttons: a dimly lit street in evening. "A street within an avenue"—this is how I thought about my father, looking askance at him as we walked home from the museum.

16

There are two crows in my backyard here in South Hadley. They are quite big, almost raven-size, and they are the first thing I see every time I drive to or leave the house. They appeared here one by one: the first, two years ago, when my mother died; the second, last year, right after my father died. Or else that's the way I noticed their presence. Now they always show up or flap away together, and they are too silent for crows. I try not to look at them; at least, I try not to watch them. Yet I've noticed that they tend to stay in the pine grove that starts at the end of my back yard and slopes for a quarter of a mile to a meadow that edges a small ravine with a couple of big boulders at the edge. I never walk there anymore because I expect to find them, the crows, dormant atop those two boulders in the sun­light. Nor did I try to find their nest. They are black, but I have noticed that the inside of their wings is the color of wet ash. Tie only time that I don't see them is when it's raining.

17

In 1950, I think, my father was demobilized in accordance with some Politburo ruling that people of Jewish origin should not hold high military rank. The ruling was initiated, if I am not mistaken, by Andrei Zhdanov, who was then in charge of ideological control over the armed forces. By that time my father was already forty-seven, and he had to, as it were, begin his life anew. He decided to return to jour­nalism, to his photoreportage. To do so, however, he had to be employed by a magazine or a newspaper. That t^ed out to be quite difcult: the fifties were bad years for the Jews. The campaign against the "rootless cosmopolites" was in full swing; then, in 1953, came the "Doctors' Case," which didn't end in the usual bloodbath only because its insti­gator, Comrade Stalin himself, all of a sudden, at the case's nadir, kicked the bucket. But long before, and for some time after, the air was full of rumors of the Politburo's planned reprisals against the Jews, of relocating all those "paragraph five" creatures to Eastern Siberia, to the area called Birobidzhan, near the Chinese border. There was even a letter in circulation, signed by the most prominent "paragraph five" individuals—chess champions, composers, and writers—containing a plea to the Central Committee of the Party, and to Comrade Stalin personally, to permit us, the Jews, to redeem with hard labor in remote parts the great harm we had inflicted upon the Russian people. The letter was to appear any day now in Pravda as the pretext for our deportation.

What appeared in Pravda, however, was the announce­ment of Stalin's death, although by that time we were pre­paring to travel and had already sold our upright piano, which nobody in our family could play anyhow ( notwith­standing the distant relative my mother invited to tutor me: I had no talent whatsoever, and even less in the way of patience). Still, in that atmosphere, the chances for a Jew and a non-Party member to be hired by a magazine or a paper were dismal; so my father hit the road.

For several years he freelanced all over the country under contract to the All-Union Agricultural Exhibit in Moscow. This way we occasionally would get some marvels on our table—four-pound tomatoes or apple-cum-pear hybrids; but the pay was less than meager, and the three of us ex­isted solely on my mother's salary as a clerk in the borough's development council. Those were our very lean years, and it was then that my parents began to get ill. All the same, my father looked his gregarious self and he frequently would take me about town to see his Navy pals, now run­ning a yacht club, minding old dockyards, training young­sters. There were quite a lot of those, and invariably they were pleased to see him (on the whole, I've never met any­one, man or woman, who held a grudge against him). One of them, the editor in chief of the newspaper for the re­gional branch of the Merchant Marine, a Jew who bore a Russian-sounding name, finally hired him, and until my father went into retirement he worked for that publication, in the Leningrad harbor.

It appears that most of his life was spent on foot ("Re­porters, like wolves, live by their paws" was his frequent utterance), among ships, sailors, captains, cranes, cargo. In the background, there was always a rippled zinc sheet of water, masts, the black metal bulk of a stern with a few white first or last letters of the ship's home port. Except in winter, he always wore the black Navy cap with the lac­quered visor. He liked to be near the water, he adored the sea. In that country, this is the closest one gets to freedom. Even looking at it is sometimes enough, and he looked at it, and photographed it, for most ofhis life.

18

To a varying degree, every child craves adulthood and yearns to get out of his house, out of his oppressive nest. Out! Into real life! Into the wide world. Into life on his own terms.

In time, he gets his wish. And for a while, he is absorbed with new vistas, absorbed with building his ovwn nest, with manufacturing his ownwn reality.

Then one day, when the new reality is mastered, when his own tenns are implemented, he suddenly learns that his old nest is gone, that those who gave him life are dead.

On that day he feels like an effect suddenly without its cause. The enormity of the loss makes it incomprehensible. His mind, made naked by this loss, shrinks, and increases the magnitude of this loss even further.

He realizes that his youthful quest for "real life," his de­parture from the nest, have rendered that nest defenseless. This is bad enough; still, he can put the blame on nature.

What he can't blame on nature is the discovery that his achievement, the reality of his ovwn manufacture, is less valid than the reality of his abandoned nest. That if there ever was anything real in his life, it was precisely that nest, oppressive and suffocating, from which he so badly wanted to flee. Because it was built by others, by those who gave him life, and not by him, who knows only too well the true worth of his own labor, who, as it were, just uses the given life.

He knows how willful, how intended and premeditated, everything that he has manufactured is. How, in the end, all of it is provisional. And even if it lasts, the best way he can put it to use is as evidence of his skill, which he may brag about.

Yet, for all his skill, he'll never be able to reconstruct that primitive, sturdy nest that heard his first cry of life. Nor will he be able to reconstruct those who put him there. An effect, he can't reconstruct his cause.

473 / In a Room and a Half 19

The biggest item of our furniture—or rather, the one that occupied the most space—was my parents' bed, to which I think I owe my life. It was a large, king-sized affair whose carvings, again, matched to a certain degree the rest, yet they were done in a more modem fashion. The same vege­tation motif, of course, but the execution oscillated some­where between Art Nouveau and the commercial version of Constructivism. This bed was the object of my mother's special pride, 'for she had bought it very cheaply in 1935, before she and my father got married, having spotted it and a matching dressing table with three mirrors in some second-rate carpenter shop. Most of our life gravitated toward this low-sitting bed, and the most momentous deci­sions in our family were made when the three of us gath­ered, not around the table, but on that vast surface, with myself at my parents' feet.

By Russian standards, this bed was a real luxury. I often thought that it was precisely this bed that persuaded my father to get married, for he loved to tarry in it more than anything else. Even when he and my mother were engaged in the bitterest possible mutual acrimony, mostly on the subject of our budget ("You are just hell-bent to dump all the cash at the grocer's!" comes his indignant voice over bookshelves separating my "half" from their "room." "I am poisoned, poisoned by thirty years of your stinginess!" re­plies my mother), even then he'd be reluctant to get out of it, especially in the morning. Several people offered us very good money for that bed, which indeed occupied too much space in our quarters. But no matter how insolvent we were, my parents never considered this option. The bed was clearly an excess, and I believe they liked it precisely for that.

I remember them sleeping in it on their sides, backs turned to each other, a gulf of crumpled blankets in be­tween. I remember them reading there, talking, taking their pills, fighting this or that illness. The bed framed them for me at their most secure and most helpless. It was their very private lair, their ultimate island, their own inviolable, by no one except me, place in the universe. Wherever it stands now, it stands as a vacuum within the world order. A seven- by-five-foot vacuum. It was of light-brown polished maple, and it never creaked.

20

My half was connected to their room by two large, nearly- ceiling-high arches which I constantly tried to fill with various combinations of bookshelves and suitcases, in order to separate myself from my parents, in order to obtain a degree of privacy. One can speak only about degrees, be­cause the height and the width of those two arches, plus the Moorish configuration of their upper edge, ruled out any notion of complete success. Unless, of course, one could fill them up with bricks or cover them with wooden boards. But that was against the law for this would result in our having two rooms instead of the one and a half that the borough housing order stated we were entitled to. Short of the fairly frequent inspections of our building's super, the neighbors, no matter how nice the terms we were on with them, would report us to the appropriate authorities in no time.

One had to design a palliative, and that was what I was busy at from the age of fifteen on. I went through all sorts of mind-boggling arrangements, and at one time even con­templated building-in a twelve-foot-high aquarium, which would have in the middle of it a door connecting my half with the room. Needless to say, that architectural feat was beyond my ken. The solution, then, was more and more bookshelves on my side, more and thicker layers of drapery on my parents'. Needless to say, they liked neither the solution nor the nature of the problem itself.

Girls and friends, however, grew in quantity more slowly than did the books; besides, the latter were there to stay. We had two armoires with full-length mirrors built into their doors and otherwise undistinguished. But they were rather tall, and they did half the job. Around and above them I built the shelves, leaving a narrow opening, through which my parents could squeeze into my half, and vice versa. My father resented the arrangement, particularly since at the farthest end of my half he had built himself a darkroom where he was doing his developing and printing, i.e., where the large part of our livelihood came from.

There was a door in that end of my half. When my father wasn't working in his darkroom, I would use that door for getting in and out. "So that I won't disturb you," I told my parents, but actually it was in order to avoid their scrutiny and the necessity of introducing my guests to them, or the other way around. To obfuscate the nature of those visits, I kept an electric gramophone, and my parents gradually grew to hate J. S. Bach.

Still later, when books and the need for privacy increased dramatically, I partitioned my half further by repositioning those armoires in such a way that they separated my bed and my desk from the darkroom. Between them, I squeezed a third one that was idling in the corridor. I tore its back wall out, leaving its door intact. The result was that a guest would have to enter my Lebensraum through two doors and one curtain. The first door was the one that led into the corridor; then you'd find yourself standing in my father's darkroom and removing a curtain; the next thing was to open the door of the former armoire. Atop the armoires, I piled all the suitcases we had. They were many; still, they failed to reach the ceiling. The net effect was that of a barricade; behind it, though, the gamin felt safe, and a Marianne could bare more than just her breast.

2 I

The dim view my mother and father took of these trans­formations brightened somewhat when they began to hear from behind the partition the clatter of my typewriter. The drapery muffied it considerably but not fully. The type­writer, with its Russian typeface, was also part of my father's China catch, little though he expected it to be put to use by his son. I had it on my desk, tucked into the niche created by the bricked-up former door once connecting our room and a half with the rest of the enfilade. That's when that extra foot came in handy! Since my neighbors had their piano on the opposite side of this door, I fortified my side against their daughter's "Chopsticks" with a walled book­case that, resting on my desk, fit the niche perfectly.

Two mirrored armoires and the passage behveen them on one side; the tall draped window with the windowsill just two feet above my rather spacious brown cushionless couch on the other; the arch, filled up to its Moorish rim with bookshelves behind; the niche-filling bookcase and my desk with the Royal Underwood in front of my nose—that was my LebeiiSraum. My mother would clean it, my father would cross it on his way back and forth to his darlcroom; occasionally he or she would come for refuge in my worn- out but deep armchair after yet another verbal skirmish. Other than that, these ten square meters were mine, and they were the best ten square meters I've ever known. If space has a mind of its own and generates its own distribu­tion, there is a chance some of these square meters, too, may remember me fondly. Now especially, under a different foot.