Less Than One: Selected Essays

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I am prepared to believe that it is more difficult for Russians to accept the severance of ties than for anyone else. \Ve are, after all, a very settled people, even more so than other Continentals (Germans or French), who move around a lot more, if only because they have cars and no borders to speak of. For us, an apartment is for life, the to^ is for life, the country is for life. The notions of permanence are therefore stronger; the sense of loss as well. Yet a nation that has lost in half a century nearly sixty million souls to its carnivorous state (which includes the twenty million killed in the war) surely was capable of up­grading its sense of stability. If only because those losses were incurred for the sake of the status quo.

So i f one dwells on all this, it is not necessarily to comply with the native realm's psychological makeup. Perhaps what is responsible for this outpouring is exactly the oppo­site: the incompatibility of the present with what's remem­bered. Memory, I suppose, reflects the quality of one's reality no less than utopian thought. The reality I face bears no relation and no correspondence to the room and a half and its two inhabitants, across the ocean and now non­existent. As alternatives go, I can't think of anything more drastic than where I am at. The difference is that between two hemispheres, between night and day, between a city- scape and a countryside, between the dead and the living. The only points in common are my own frame and a type­writer. Of a different make and with a different typeface.

I suppose that had I been around my parents for the last twelve years of their life, had I been around them when they were dying, the contrast between night and day or between a street in a Russian town and an American coun­try lane would be less sharp; the onslaught of memory would yield to that of utopian thinking. The sheer wear and tear would have dulled the senses enough to perceive the tragedy as a nahtral one and leave it behind in a natural way. However, there are few things more futile than weigh­ing one's options in retrospect; similarly, the good thing about an artificial tragedy is that it makes one pay attention to the artifice. The poor tend to utilize everything. I utilize my sense of guilt.

23

It is an easy sentiment to master. After all, every child feels guilty toward his parents, for somehow he knows that they will die before him. So all he needs to alleviate his guilt is to have them die of natural causes: of an illness, or old age, or both. Still, can one extend this sort of cop-out to the death of a slave? Of someone who was born free but whose freedom was altered?

I narrow this definition of a slave neither for academic reasons nor out of lack of generosity. I am willing to buy that a human being born in slavery knows about freedom either genetically or intellectually: through reading or just by hearsay. Yet I must add that his genetic craving for freedom is, like all cravings, to a certain degree incoherent. It is not the actual memory of his mind or limbs. Hence the crnelty and aimless violence of so many revolts. Hence, too, their defeats, alias tyrannies. Death to such a slave or to his kin may seem a liberation (the famous Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Freel Free! Free at last").

But what about someone born free but dying a slave? Would he or she—and let's keep ecclesiastical notions out of this—think of it as a solace? Well, perhaps. More likely, they would think of it as the ultimate insult, the ultimate irreversible stealing of their freedom. Which is what their kin or their child would think, and which is what it is. The last theft.

I remember how once my mother went to buy a railroad ticket to the south, to the Mineral Waters Sanatorium. She had her twenty-one-day vacation after two straight years in her borough development's office, and she was going to that sanatorium because of her liver (she never learned it was cancer). In the city ticket office, in the long queue where she had already spent three hours, she discovered that her money for the ticket, four hundred rubles, had been stolen. She was inconsolable. She came home and stood in our communal kitchen and cried and cried. I led her to our room and a half; she lay on her bed and kept crying. The reason I remember this is that she never cried, except at funerals.

24

In the end my father and I came up with the money, and she went to the sanatorium. However, it wasn't the lost money she was crying about . . . Tears were infrequent in our family; the same goes to a certain extent for the whole of Russia. "Keep your tears for more grave occasions," she would tell me when I was small. And I am afraid I've suc­ceeded more than she wanted me to.

I suppose she wouldn't approve of me writing all this, either. Nor would, of course, my father. He was a proud man. When something reprehensible or horrendous was drawing near him, his face assumed a sour yet at the same time a challenging expression. It was as if he were saying "Try me" to something that he knew from the threshold was mightier than he. "What else could you expect from this scum?" would be his remark on those occasions, a re­mark with which he would go into submission.

This was not some brand of stoicism. There was no room for any posture or philosophy, however minimalist, in the reality of that time, which compromised every conviction or scmple by demanding total submission to the sum of their opposites. (Only those who did not return from the camps could claim intransigence; those who did were every bit as pliable as the rest.) Yet that was no cynicism, either.

It was simply an attempt to keep one's back straight in a situation of complete dishonor; to keep one's eyes open. That's why tears were out of the question.

The men of that generation were the either/or men. To their children, much more adept in transactions with their conscience (very profitable at times), these men often seemed simpletons. As I said, they were not terribly self- aware. 'Ve, their children, were brought up—or rather brought ourselves up—to believe in the complexity of the world, in the significance of the nuance, of overtones, of gray areas, of the psychological aspects of this and that. Now, having reached the age that equates us to them, hav­ing acquired the same physical mass and wearing clothes their size, we see that the whole thing boils do^ precisely to either/or, to the yes/no principle. It took us nearly a lifetime to learn what they seemed to lrnow from the outset: that the world is a very raw place and doesn't deserve better. That "yes" and "no" pretty well embrace, without anything left out, all that complexity which we were dis­covering and structuring with such relish, and which nearly cost us our wiUpower.

Had they looked for a motto for their existence, they could have taken a few lines from one of ^knmatova's "Northern Elegies":

Just like a river,

I was deflected by my stalwart era. Tley swapped my life: into a different valley, past different landscapes, it went rolling on. And I don't know my banks or where they are.

They never told me much about their childhood, about the families they were from, about their parents or grand­parents. I know only that one of my grandparents (on my mother's side) was a Singer sewing machine salesman in the Baltic provinces of the empire (Lithuania, Latvia, Poland) and that the other (on my father's side) was a print-shop owner in St. Petersburg. This reticence had less to do with amnesia than with the necessity of concealing their class origins during that potent era, in order to survive. Engaging raconteur that my father was, he would be quickly stopped in his reminiscing about his high-school endeavors by the warning shot of my mother's gray eyes. In her turn, she would not even blink at hearing an occa­sional French expression on a street or coming from some of my friends, although one day I found her with a French edition of my works. \Ve looked at each other; then she silently put the book back on the shelf and left my Lebensraum.

A deflected river nmning to its alien, artificial estuary. Can anyone ascribe its disappearance at this estuary to natural causes? And if one can, what about its course? What about human potential, reduced and misdirected from the outside? Who is there to account for what it has been deflected from? Is there anyone? And while asking these questions, I am not losing sight of the fact that this limited or misdirected life may produce in its course yet another life, mine for instance, which, were it not precisely for that reduction of options, wouldn't have taken place to begin with, and no questions would be asked. No, I am aware of the law of probability. I don't wish that my par­ents had never met. I am asking these questions precisely because I am a tributary of a turned, deflected river. In the end, I suppose, I am talking to myself.

So when and where, I ask myself, does the transition from freedom to slavery acquire the status of inevitability? When does it become acceptable, especially to an innocent bystander? At what age is it most harmless to alter one's free state? At what age does this alteration register in one's memory least? At the age of twenty? Fifteen? Ten? Five? In the womb? Rhetorical questions, these, aren't they? Not really. A revolutionary or a conqueror at least should know the right answer. Genghis Khan, for instance, knew it. He just carved up everyone whose head was above a cart wheel's hub. Five, then. But on October 25, 1917, my father was already fourteen; my mother, twelve. She already knew some French; he, Latin. That's why I am asking these ques­tions. That's why I am talking to myself.

27

On summer evenings all three of our tall windows were open, and the breeze from the river tried to acquire the rank of an object in the tulle curtains. The river wasn't far, just ten minutes' walk from our building. Nothing was too far: the Summer Garden, the Hermitage, the Field of Mars. Yet even when they were younger my parents seldom went for a stroll, together or separately. After a whole day on his feet, my father wasn't terribly keen on hitting the streets again. As for my mother, standing in queues after eight hours in the office produced the same results; besides, there were plenty of things she had to do at home. If they ven­tured out, it would be mostly to attend some relatives' gathering (a birthday or a wedding anniversary), or for a movie, very seldom for the theater.

Living near them all my life, I wasn't conscious of their aging. Now that my memory is shuttling between various decades, I see my mother watching from the balcony the shuffling figure of her husband down below and muttering under her breath, "A real oldster, aren't you. A real decided oldster." And I hear my father's "You're just bent on driving me into the grave," which concluded their quarrels in the sixties, instead of the door bang and receding sound of his steps a decade earlier. And I see, while shaving, his silver- gray stubble on my chin.

If my mind gravitates now to their images as old people, it has to do presumably with the knack of memory for re­taining last impressions best. (Add to this our addiction to linear logic, to the principle of evolution—and the in­vention of photography is inevitable.) But I think my own getting there, to old age, also plays some role: one seldom dreams even about one's ovwn youth, about, say, being twelve. If I have any notion of the future, it is made in their likeness. They are my "Kilroy was here" for the day after tomorrow, at least visually.

28

Like most males, I bear more resemblance to my father than to my mother. Yet as a child I spent more time with her— partly because of the war, partly because of the subsequent nomadic life my father had to lead. She taught me how to read at the age of four; most of my gestures, intonations, and mannerisms are, I presume, hers. Some of the habits, too, including the one of smoking.

By Russian standards, she was fairly tall, five foot three, fair, and on the plump side. She had dishwater-blond hair, which she wore short all her life, and gray eyes. She was especially pleased that I inherited her straight, almost Roman nose, and not the arching majestic beak of my father, which she found absolutely fascinating. "Ah, this beak!" she would start, carefully punctuating her speech with pauses. "Such beaks"—pause—"are sold in the sky"— pause—"six rubles apiece." Although resembling one of the Sforza profiles by Piero della Francesca, the beak was clearly Jewish, and she had reasons for being glad that I didn't get it.

In spite of her maiden name (which she retained in marriage), the "fifth paragraph" played in her case a lesser role than usual: because of her looks. She was positively very attractive, in a general North European, I would say Baltic, way. In a sense, that was a blessing: she had no trouble getting employment. As a result, however, she had to work all her conscious life. Presumably having failed to disguise her petit bourgeois class origins, she had to give up her hopes for higher education, and spent her entire life in various offices, as either a secretary or an accountant. The war brought a change: she became an interpreter in a camp for German POWs and received the rank of junior lieuten­ant in the Interior Ministry forces. When Germany signed the surrender, she was offered a promotion and a career within that ministry's system. Not anxious to join the Party, she declined and returned to the graph sheets and abacus. "I don't intend to salute my husband first," she told her superior. "And I don't want to turn my wardrobe into an arsenal."

29

We called her "Marusya," "Manya," "Maneczka" (my fa­ther's and her sisters' diminutives for her), and "Masya" or "Keesa," which were my inventions. With the years, the last two acquired a greater currency, and even my father began to address her in this way. With the exception of "Keesa," all these niclrnames were diminutive forms of her first name, Maria. "Keesa" is a slightly endearing form for a female cat, and she resisted being addressed in this way for quite some time. "Don't you dare call me that!" she would exclaim angrily. "And in general, stop using all these feline pet words of yours! Else you'll end up having cat brains!"

That meant my predilection as a boy to enunciate in a catlike fashion certain words whose vowels seemed to me to invite such treatment. "Meat" was one, and by the time I was fifteen, there was a great deal of meowing in our family. My father proved to be susceptible to this, and we began to address or refer to each other as "Big Cat" and "Little Cat." A "meow" or a "purrmeow," or a "purr-murr- meow," covered a substantial part of our emotional spec­trum: approval, doubt, indifference, resignation, trust. Gradually, my mother started to use it, too, but mainly to denote detachment.

"Keesa," however, stuck to her, especially when she got really old. Rotund, wrapped in a couple of brown shawls, with her terribly kind, soft face, she looked very cuddly and very much self-contained. It seemed as if she might purr. Instead, she would say to my father: "Sasha, have you paid this month's electricity?" or to nobody in particular: "Next week is our turn for cleaning up the apartment." Which meant scrubbing and washing the floors in the corridors and the kitchen, as well as cleaning the bathroom and the john. She would address nobody in particular because she knew it was she who had to do it.

30

How they managed all those chores, cleanups especially, for the last twelve years, I have no idea. My departure, of course, meant one less mouth to fill, and they could hire someone from time to time to do these things. Still, knowing their budget (two meager pensions) and my mother's char­acter, I doubt that they did. Besides, in communal apart­ments, this practice is rare: the natural sadism of neighbors, after all, needs some degree of satisfaction. A relative, per­haps, may be allowed, but not a hired hand.

Croesus though I became, with my university salary, they wouldn't hear of exchanging U.S. dollars into rubles. They regarded the official rate of exchange as a rip-off; and they were both fastidious and fearful of having anything to do with the black market. The last reason was perhaps the strongest: they remembered how their pensions had been revoked in 1964, when I received my five-year sentence, and they had to find work again. So it was mostly clothes and art books that I sent them, since the latter command very high prices with bibliophiles. They relished the clothes, especially my father, who was always quite a sharp dresser. As for the art books, they kept them for themselves. To look at after scrubbing the communal floor at the age of seventy-five.

31

Their reading tastes were very catholic, with my mother preferring Russian classics. Neither she nor my father held definite opinions about literature, music, art, although in their youth they knew personally a number of Leningrad writers, composers, painters (Zoshchenko, Zabolotsky, Shostakovich, Petrov-Vodkin). They were just readers— evening readers, to be more precise—and they were always careful to renew their library cards. Returning from work, my mother would invariably have in her string bag full of potatoes or cabbage a library book wrapped in a newspaper cover to prevent it from getting soiled.

It was she who suggested to me when I was sixteen and working at the factory that I register at the city public library; and I don't think she had in mind only to prevent me from loitering about in the streets in the evening. On the other hand, as far as I knew, she wanted me to become a painter. At any rate, the rooms and corridors of that former hospital on the right bank of the Fontanka River were the beginning of my undoing, and I remember the first book I asked for there, on my mother's advice. It was Gulistan (Tile Garden of Roses) by the Persian poet Saadi. My mother, it turned out, was fond of Persian poetry. The next thing that I asked for, on my own, was Maupassant's La Maison Tellier.

489 I In a Room and a Half 32

What memory has in common with art is the knack for selection, the taste for detail. Complimentary though this observation may seem to art (that of prose in particular), to memory it should appear insulting. The insult, however, is well deserved. Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show. The conviction that we are somehow remembering the whole thing in a blanket fashion, the very conviction that allows the species to go on with its life, is groundless. More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.

33

The way other people mark the growth of their children with pencil notches on the kitchen wall, every year on my birthday my father took me out to our balcony and photo­graphed me there. In the background lay a medium-size cobblestone square with the Cathedral of the Savior of Her Imperial Majesty's Transfiguration Battalion. In the war years its crypt was designated a local bomb shelter, and my mother kept me there during air raids, in a big box with remembrance notes. This is one thing that I owe to Ortho­doxy, and it has to do with memory.

The cathedral, a six-story-tall classicistic affair, sur­rounded by a considerable garden full of oak, linden, and maple, was my playground in the postwar years, and I remember my mother collecting me there (she pulls, I stall and scream: an aUegory of cross-purposes) and dragging me home to do homework. With similar clarity I see her, my grandfather, and my father, in one of this garden's narrow alleys, trying to teach me to ride a two-wheel bicycle (an allegory of common goal, or of motion). On the rear, eastern wall of the cathedral, there was, covered with thick glass, a large, dim icon depicting the Transfiguration: Christ floating in the air above a bunch of bodies reclined in fascination. Nobody could explain to me the significance of that pichire; even now I am not sure I grasp it fully. There were a great many clouds in the icon, and somehow I associated them with the local climate.

34

The garden was surrounded by a black cast-iron fence held up by equally spaced groups of cannons standing upside- down, captured by the Transfiguration Battalion's soldiers from the British in the Crimean War. Adding to the decor of the fence, the cannon barrels (a threesome in each case, on a granite block) were linked by heavy cast-iron chains on which children swung wildly, enjoying both the danger of falling on the spikes below and the clang. Needless to say, that was strictly forbidden and the cathedral wardens chased us away all the time. Needless to say, the fence was far more interesting than the inside of the cathedral, with its smell of incense and much more static activity. "See those?" asks my father, pointing at the heavy chain links. "What do they remind you of?" I am in the second grade, and I say, "They are like figure eights." "Right," he says. "And do you know what the figure eight is a symbol of?" "Snakes?" "Almost. It is a symbol of infinity." "What's infinity?" "That you had better ask in there," says my father with a grin, his finger pointed at the cathedral.

35

Yet it was he who, having bumped into me on the street in broad daylight when I was skipping school, demanded an explanation, and, being told that I was suffering from an awful toothache, took me straight to the dental clinic, so that I paid for my lies with two hours of straight terror. And yet again it was he who took my side at the Pedagogical Council when I was about to be expelled from my school for disciplinary problems. "How dare you! You who wear the uniform of our Army!" "Navy, madam," said my father. "And I defend him because I am his father. There is nothing surprising about it. Even animals defend their young. Even Brehm says so." "Brehm? Brehm? I ... I wili inform the Party organization of your outfit." Which she, of course, did.

36

"On your birthday and on the New Year you must always put on something absolutely new. At least, socks"—this is the voice of my mother. "Always eat before going to see somebody superior: your boss or your officer. That way youl have some edge." (This is my father speaking.) "If you've just left your house and have to return because you forgot something, take a look in the mirror before you leave the house again. Else you may encounter-trouble." (She again.) "Never think how much you've spent. Think how much you can make." (That's him.) "Don't you ever walk in town without a jacket." "It's good that you are red-haired, no matter what they say. I was a brunette, and brunettes are a better target."

I hear these admonitions and instructions, but they are fragments, details. Memory betrays everybody, especially those whom we knew best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. It is a fishnet with a very small catch, and with the water gone. You can't use it to reconstruct any­body, even on paper. What's the matter with those reputed millions of cells in our brain? What's the matter with Pasternak's "Great god of love, great god of details"? On what number of details must one be prepared to settle?

37

I see their faces, his and hers, with great clarity, in the variety of their expressions—but these are fragments also: moments, instances. These are better than photographs with their unbearable laughter, and yet they are as scattered. At limes, I begin to suspect my mind of trying to produce a cumulative, generalized image of my parents: a sign, a formula, a recognizable sketch; of trying to make me settle for these. I suppose I could, and I fully realize how absurd the grounds of my resistance are: these frag­ments' lack of continuum. One shouldn't expect so much from memory; one shouldn't expect a film shot in the dark to develop new images. Of course not. Still, one can re­proach a film shot in the daylight of one's life for missing frames.

493 I 1 ii a Room and a Half 38

Presumably the whole point is that there should be no continuum: of anything. That failures of memory are but a proof of a living organism's subordination to the laws of nature. No life is meant to be preserved. Unless one is a pharaoh, one doesn't aspire to become a mummy. Granted the objects of one's recollection possess this sort of sobriety; this may reconcile one to the quality of one's memory. A normal man doesn't expect anything to continue; he expects no continuity even for himself or his works. A normal man doesn't remember what he had for breakfast. Things of a routine, repetitive nature are meant to be forgotten. Break­fast is one; the loved ones is another. The best thing to do is to attribute this to economy of space.

And one can use those prudently saved brain cells for pondering whether failures of memory are not just a mute voice of one's suspicion that we are all but strangers to one another. That our sense of autonomy is far stronger than that of unity, let alone of causality. That a child doesn't remember his parents because he is always outbound, poised for the future. He, too, presumably, saves his brain cells for future use. The shorter your memory, the longer you live, says a proverb. Alternatively, the longer your future, the shorter your memory. That's one way of deter­mining one's prospects for longevity, of telling the future patriarch. The drawback, though, is that patriarchs or not, autonomous or linked, we, too, are repetitive, and a Big Somebody saves His brain cells on us.

39

It is neither aversion to this sort of metaphysics nor dislike of the future, evidently guaranteed by the quality of my memory, that keeps me poring over it in spite of meager returns. The self-delusions of a writer, or the fear of facing the charge of conspiring with the laws of nature at the expense of my father and mother, have very little to do with this also. I simply think that natural laws denying continuum to anyone in concert with (or in the guise of) deficient memory serve the interests of the state. As far as I am concerned, I am unwilling to work for their advancement.

Of course, twelve years of dashed, rekindled, and dashed- again hopes, leading a very old couple over the thresholds of numerous offices and chancelleries to the furnace of the state crematorium, are repetitive in themselves, considering not only their duration but the number of similar cases as well. Yet I am less concerned with sparing my brain cells this monotony than the Supreme Being is with His. Mine are quite polluted, anyway. Besides, remembering even mere details, fragments, not to mention remembering them in English, is not in the interests of the state. That alone can keep me going.

40

Also, these two crows get a bit too brazen. Now they have landed on my porch and loiter about its old woodpile. They are pitch-black, and although I avoid looking at them, I notice they differ in size somewhat from each other. One is shorter than the other, the way my mother was up to my father's shoulder; their beaks, however, are identical. I am no ornithologist, but I believe crows live long; at least ravens do. Although I can't make out their age, they seem to be an old couple. On an outing. I don't have it in me to shoo them away, nor can I communicate with them in any fashion. I also seem to remember that crows do not migrate. If the origins of mythology are fear and isolation, I am isolated all right. And I wonder how many things will remind me of my parents from now on. That is to say, with this sort of visitor, who needs a good memory?

4 1

A mark of its deficiency is that it retains odd items. Like our first, then a five-digit, phone number, which we had right after the war. It was 26^39, and I suppose I still remember it because the phone was installed when I was memorizing the multiplication table in school. It is of no use to me now: in the same way as our last number, in our room and a half, is of no use anymore. I don't remember it, the last one, although for the past twelve years I called it almost every week. Letters wouldn't go through, so we settled for the telephone: it is evidently easier to monitor a phone call than to perlustrate and then deliver a letter. Ah, those weekly calls to the U.S.S.R.! ITT never had it so good.

We couldn't say much during those exchanges, we had to be either reticent or oblique and euphemistic. It was mostly about weather or health, no names, a great deal of dietetic advice. The main thing was hearing each other's voice, assuring ourselves in this animal way of our respective existences. It was mostly non-semantic, and small wonder that I remember no particulars except Father's reply on the third day of my mother's being in the hospital. "How is Masva?" I asked. "Well, Masya is no more, you know," he said. The "you know" was there because on this occasion, too, he tried to be euphemistic.

42

Or else a key is thrown up to the surface of my mind: a longish, stainless-steel key which was awkward to carry in our pockets, yet which fit easily in my mother's purse. This key would open our tall white door, and I don't understand why I recall it now, for that place doesn't exist. I doubt that there is any erotic symbolism to it, for among us we had three replicated versions. For that matter, I don't understand why I recall the wrinkles on my father's fore­head, and under his chin, or the reddish, slightly inflamed left cheek of my mother's (she called it "vegetative neuro­sis"), for neither those marks nor the rest of their bearers exist any longer either. Only their voices somehow survive in my conscience: presumably because my own blends them the way mv features must blend theirs. The rest—their flesh, their clothes, the telephone, the key, our possessions, the furniture—is gone, and never to be found, as if our room and a half had been hit by a bomb. Not by a neutron bomb, which at least leaves the furniture intact, but by a time bomb, which splinters even one's memory. The build­ing still stands, but the place is wiped out clean, and new tenants, no, troops, move in to occupy it: that's what a time bomb is all about. For this is a time war.

497 I In a Iioom and a Half 43

They liked opera arias, tenors, and the movie stars of their youth, didn't care very much for painting, had a notion of "classical" art, enjoyed solving crossword puzzles, and were bewildered and upset by my literary pursuits. They thought me wrong, worried about the way I was going, but sup­ported me as much as they could, because I was their child. Later on, when I managed to print something here and there, they felt pleased, and at times even proud; but I know that should I have turned out to be simply a grapho- maniac and a failure, their attitude toward me wouldn't have been any different. They loved me more than them­selves, and most likely wouldn't understand my guilt feel­ings toward them at all. The main issues were bread on the table, clean clothes, and staying healthy. Those were their synonyms for love, and they were better than mine.

As for that time war, they fought it valiantly. They knew that a bomb was going to explode, but they never changed their tactics. As long as they were vertical, they were moving about, buying and delivering food to their bed­ridden friends, relatives; giving clothes, what money they could spare, or refuge to those who now and then happened to be worse off. They were that way always, for as long as I remember them; and not because deep down they thought that if they were kind to some people, it would somehow be registered on high and they would be treated one day in kind. No, this was the natural and uncalculated generosity of extroverts, which perhaps became all the more palpable to others now that I, its main object, was gone. And this is what ultimately may help me to come to terms with the quality of my memory.

That they wanted to see me before they died had nothing to do with a desire or an attempt to dodge that explosion. They didn't want to emigrate, to live their last days in America. They felt too old for any sort of change, and at best, America for them was just the name of the place where they could meet their son. It was real for them only in terms of their doubt whether they could manage the trip should they be allowed to travel. And yet what games these two old, frail people tried to play with all that scum in charge of granting permission! My mother would apply for a visa alone to indicate that she was not intending to defect to the United States, that her husband would stay behind as a hostage, as the guarantee of her rehirn. Then they would reverse roles. Then they wouldn't apply for a while, pretending that they had lost interest, or showing the authorities that they understood how difficult it was for them to make a decision under this or that climate in U.S.-Soviet relations. Then they would apply just for a one-week stay in the U.S., or for permission to travel to Finland or Poland. Then she would go to the capital, to seek an audience with what that country had for a President, and knock on all the doors of the foreign and internal ministries that there are. All was in vain: the system, from its top to its bottom, never made a single mistake. As systems go, it can be proud of itself. But then inhumanity is always easier to structure than anything else. For that job, Russia never had to import the know-how. In fact, the only way for that country to get rich is to export it.

499 I In a Room and a Half 4 4

And so it does, in ever-increasing volume. Yet one may derive some comfort, if not necessarily hope, from the fact that, if not the last laugh, then the last word belongs to one"s genetic code. For I am grateful to my mother and my father not only for giving me life but also for failing to bring up their child as a slave. They tried the best they could—if only to safeguard me against the social reality I was born into—to hirn me into the state's obedient, loyal member. That they didn't succeed, that they had to pay for it with their eyes being closed not by their son but by the anony­mous hand of the state, testifies not to their laxness but to the quality of their genes, whose fusion produced a body the system found alien enough to eject. Come to think of it, what else could be expected from the combined strength of his and her ability to endure?

If this sounds like bragging, so be it. The mixture of their genes is worth bragging about, if only because it proved to be state-resistant. And not simply state but the First Socialist State in the History of Mankind, as it prefers to bill itself: the state specifically adept at gene splicing. That's why its hands are always awash in blood, because of its experiments in isolating and paralyzing the cell responsible for one's willpower. So, given that state's volume of export, today if one is to build a family, one should ask for more than just the partner's blood group or dowry: one should ask for her or his DNA. That's why, perhaps, certain peoples look askance at mixed marriages.

There are two pictures of my parents taken in their youth, in their twenties. He, on the deck of a steamer: a smiling, carefree face, a smokestack in the background; she, on a footboard of a railroad carriage, demurely waving her kid- gloved hand, the buttons of the train conductor's tunic behind. Neither of them is as yet aware of the other's existence; neither of them, of course, is me. Besides, it is impossible to perceive anyone existing objectively, physi­cally outside your own skin, as a part of yourself. ". . . but Mom and Dad/Were not two other people" as Auden says. And although I can't relive their past, even as the smallest possible part of either one of them, what is there to prevent me, now that they are objectively nonexistent outside my skin, from regarding myself as their sum, as their future? This way, at least, they are as free as when they were born.

Should I brace myself then, thinking that I am hugging my mother and father? Should I settle for the contents of my skull as what's left of them on earth? Possibly. I am presum­ably capable of this solipsistic feat. And I suppose I may also not resist their shrinkage to the size of my, lesser than their, soul. Suppose I can do that. .Am I then to meow to myself as well, after having said "Keesa"? And into which one of the three rooms I am now living in do I have to run to make this meowing sound convincing?

I am them, of course; I am now our family. Yet since nobody knows the future, I doubt that forty years ago, on some September night of 1939, it crossed their mind that they were conceiving their way out. At best, I suppose, they thought of having a child, of starting a family. Fairly young, and born free on top of that, they did not realize that in the country of their birth it is now the state which decides what kind of family one is to have, and whether one is to have a family at all. When they realized that, it was already too late for everything except hope. Which is what they did until they died: they hoped. Family-minded people, they couldn't do otherwise: they hoped, planned, tried.

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For their sake, I would like to think that they didn't allow themselves to build up their hopes too high. Perhaps my mother did; but if so, that had to do with her own kindness, and my father didn't miss a chance to point this out to her. ("Nothing pays less, Marusya," he used to retort, "than self- projection.") As for him, I recall the two of us walking one sunny afternoon together in the Summer Garden when I was already twenty or perhaps nineteen. We'd stopped before the wooden pavilion in which the Marine Brass Band was playing old waltzes: he wanted to take some pictures of this band, White marble statues loomed here and there, smeared with leopard-cum-zebra patterns of shadows, people were shuffling along on the gravel, children sluieked by the pond, and we were talking about the war and the Germans. Staring at the brass band, I found myself asking him which concentration camps in his view were worse: the Nazis' or ours. "As for myself," came the reply, "I'd rather be burned at the stake at once than die a slow death and discover a meaning in the process." Then he proceeded to snap pictures.

LITERATURE / CRITICISM la&N 97в О 374 SZOSS 7