Pattern crimes

THE WIRE IN THE BOTTLE

"You hate me. That's only natural," Targov said.

The old man shook his head.

"But that's impossible, Sergei. You have to hate me. You have to. You simply must."

Something shriveled about him, Targov thought, as they examined one another now in silence. The room was small and simply furnished-new immigrant's furnishings in a room without character, in a basic housing block without style, in a barren neighborhood southwest of the city. All the flats here were identical; aside from the numbers on the doors the only way to tell them apart was by the laundry hanging from the balconies. Now night was closing in. The room was dark except for the single unshielded low-wattage bulb that burned from a fixture in the wall. Targov pulled his chair forward. He knew he must engage this man. But Sergei sat staring at him refusing to be engaged, huddled in his chair, shriveled, wrinkled, withered, and, Targov hated to admit this, looking almost, yes… almost repulsive.

The glossy black hair that had waved up straight up from his forehead was all gone now. His teeth were rotten and his mouth, that mouth Targov had seen one cold afternoon pressed so ardently against Irina's throat, reminded him of a misshapen piece of clay.

But it was Sergei's eyes that frightened Targov most, for they lacked all trace of glimmer. Sergei stared at him with eyes so dead they showed nothing, no pain, not even contempt.

"Listen to me, old friend. We both know what happened. Each of us knows what he did to the other and can see the disproportion. Now I've come to you with a way to even up the score and at the same time stick it to our common enemy. But you say nothing. Don't even bother to refuse. Surely you must feel something about my coming here. Or at least about my plan…"

Silence again, and that implacable deadening stare, the stare that said it didn't matter, nothing did, that life was the same as death.

"I'm recalling now…" At last he was speaking! "… how you always liked it when the irregularities were balanced. In painting, sculpture, architecture most of all. Many times, when we'd walk in Moscow, you'd see it in a building and point it out. 'Look, Sergei Sergeievich! The beauty of it! The subtle symmetry!' I remember…so many years ago. And now, well…" he smiled, "your taste is still the same."

"You haven't answered me."

"What exactly is your question?"

"Will you do it?"

"I don't despise it," Sergei said. "But it wouldn't mean anything."

" It would!"

"To you, perhaps. But not to me." He shrugged. "Now, Sasha, tell me about your work…"

It was only toward the end that Targov saw how cleverly he'd been baited. Those occasional little nods, tight little smiles-small encouragements, perhaps, but large enough to make him boast. Too late he realized he'd sounded like a pompous ass. But why, anyway, was Sergei so interested in his success? He didn't seem like a man who reveled in envy. Why then? What was he after? What did he really want?

Targov found himself beginning to dislike him. He asked himself: Do I really want to put myself into the hands of this withered old man with dead eyes and foul-smelling teeth and a horrible uncentered mouth?

"You needed me as nourishment, to feed yourself…" What was he talking about? "If I'd been killed you'd have forgotten me quick enough. But alive, locked up, degraded, my condition incited you to greater triumphs. You had to make up for what you'd done so you became a better artist than you had any right to be. Without me, Sasha, you would have been mediocre. Did you ever think of that?"

No, he hadn't thought of it, but now he saw how the camps had turned Sergei mean. "Is that why you sent the postcard-to tell me this? You've been expecting me, haven't you? You knew one day I'd come."

Sergei shrugged. "I thought you might. But it wouldn't have mattered if you hadn't."

His eyes were very bad, he said; he'd lost seventy percent of his sight. But still he could work, he said, though in a different style and on a much grander scale.

"Do you have a studio?" Targov looked around. He could see no workspace in the little room.

"Don't need one. I lost my touch. I don't work with my hands anymore. I do conceptual pieces now, design them. The bulldozers do all the work."

Conceptual pieces? Bulldozers? Now what the hell was he talking about?

"Only a year here but already I've received a major commission. They've carved it out in the Negev." He stood. "Come, I'll show you." He motioned Targov toward the second room, where, in the gloom, Targov made out a narrow bed and several open suitcases containing neat piles of clothes.

A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. Sergei grabbed hold of it, switched it on, then flung it out by its cord. It swung crazily back and forth casting rapidly moving shadows on drawings and photographs tacked up to the walls.

"What is this?" Targov caught glimpses of an enormous four-sided trench.

"An environmental sculpture. An earthwork."

"Really? Remarkable. But, tell me, what does it mean?"

Sergei turned to him. "Nothing. It means nothing at all."

"So you've become an abstractionist?"

A small smile. "You could put it that way. No more daintily crafted ballerinas or tourist gift shop junk. My sight's too dim for that." He glanced mischievously at Targov. "It does surprise you, doesn't it? And the scale too. Well, it is very big." For a moment, Targov thought, Sergei actually seemed to gloat.

"How did you conceive of such a thing?"

"No studios in the Gulag, though some men do nice work with pipe cleaners, discarded chess pieces, assorted odds and ends. I worked differently. I designed sculptures in my mind. And now this one," he said proudly, "has actually been dug. Dug out in the Holy Land."

Targov examined the photographs. He could see trucks, bulldozers, men laboring beside an enormous trench. The shape itself was very simple: a modified rectangle, something like a trapezoid, containing a circle near its center. Simple, geometric, highly abstract, and, according to Sergei, meaningless. It was difficult to believe that this shriveled broken man beside him had been responsible for such an outpouring of human labor.

"It must mean something."

Sergei grabbed hold of the cord, stopped the lamp from swinging. "Why must it? Why?"

"But it does, doesn't it?"

Then, just before Sergei shut off the light, Targov thought he caught a glimpse of a malignant grin.

"I want you to try and understand. We were victims of the apparatus. The men who ran it were evil. They hurt us both, and now we must hurt them back."

Sergei yawned. "You've already told me this."

"But I promise you, it will work. I'll be punished for the terrible thing I did, and you'll have the pleasure of wielding the punishing instrument. Then we'll both be free, you from all your bitterness, I from all my guilt. A private matter, strictly between the two of us. As for the rest of the world, they will see something else."

"Yes, of course, the famous emigre artist assassinated beside his sculpture in honor of refusnik Soviet Jews. Who else but the KGB would do such a wicked thing? They'll be hated by everyone. Ridiculed. Despised."

"So you do understand."

"Oh, I understand all right. And so what? Two days later no one'll give a shit. Aren't you ashamed, Aleksandr Nicholaivich, to come to me with such a deal? To ask me, of all people, to free you from your pain?"

Now he was confused. The meeting was not going well. He was the famous one, the strong one who'd come from halfway around the world with the startling, original, gorgeously conceived and balanced scheme. But things had gotten mixed up, he had misjudged his old friend's feelings, and now Sergei, nearly blind, had somehow gained the upper hand.

"Don't you wonder how it feels?"

"What?"

"To sit here now across from you."

"I--"

"You know only how you feel, Sasha. Don't you wonder what it must feel like to be me?"

"Yes, of course," Targov said. "Please tell me. I would like to know."

Sergei nodded. "There's an old story by Komroff. A convict is released from prison after many years. As he leaves his guard asks him: 'How does it feel to be free?' The convict goes back into the world but he doesn't fit in. He becomes eccentric, turns his little room into a jail cell, and begins to collect odd little pieces of wire which he imprisons by twisting them, then stuffing them into a bottle. One day, when the bottle is filled, he decides to break it open. But the pieces of wire don't spring back into shape. Rather they remain twisted, a mass in the shape of their old prison, the bottle, from which, in a certain sense, you could say they were 'released.' "

It was difficult to arrange. Rokovsky had to plead. The director of Mishkenot Sha'ananim had received many odd demands from exalted guests, but a private plane, to fly out over the Negev so that Targov could view an "earthwork" that no one on the staff had even heard about, a plane, moreover, that must actually be able to land on the sand beside the site-this one was quite incredible.

Still, Aleksandr Targov was a sculptor of international repute who had every right to view a piece of contemporary Israeli art no matter how obscure. So-okay. The director would do her best. "Here in Israel we have a motto: Nothing is impossible!"

"While I'm away," he told Rokovsky, "take Irina to him. Leave them alone together, wait outside for her in the car. But check your watch -I want to know how much time she spends."

It had to mean something. There'd have been no point in creating it if it didn't. Sergei had pointed him toward it, had wanted him to see it. But why? And what did it mean?

He had the pilot fly over it several times. The work was huge, its sides a good five hundred meters long. An enormous trapezoid enclosing a circle near its center-it looked exactly as it had in the drawings and photographs, except now there were some craters near the circle.

New embellishments or damage created by the wind? In the latter case, Targov knew, the piece would never last. But perhaps that was the point: It wasn't meant to last, was meant to erode and thereby express the relentless forces of time.

Targov knew about time-dimensional sculpture, but he did not respect it. For him the whole point of a sculpture was that it outlast its maker; art was an act of striving against the certainty of death.

As the pilot made a final pass Targov wondered if the piece might be a kind of signature. Two forms opposed: the sharply angled trapezoid and the smooth-sided circle inside. Sergei's mark, his way of saying: "I lived and one day I was here."

It was hot on the sand. He felt dizzy, nauseous. His eyeballs, shielded by dark glasses, felt as though they were being scorched. The pilot loaned him a hat, handed him a canteen of water, then waited in the plane while he trudged the four outer walls of the enormous thing. It took him nearly thirty minutes to make the march, a tortuous and monotonous inspection that yielded him no new ideas.

Then just as he was about to turn toward the center to inspect the inner circle, he heard a noise, looked up, and saw a lone military jet racing toward him out of the oscillating air. An extraordinary sight because the plane was flying extremely low, perhaps no more than a hundred feet above the sand.

The noise was deafening. He pressed his palms against his ears and flung himself into the deep trench that lined the earthwork's outer wall. He turned onto his back. The plane was a fighter and it was screaming at him. Suddenly it soared up. He watched it, saw it pass directly overhead, plunge down again, then fly off into the haze from which it sent back a terrifying boom.

Ears ringing, Targov rushed back to his own small waiting aircraft.

"To Jerusalem," he yelled at the startled pilot. Then, when they flew over Sergei's earthwork, he looked down upon it a final time. He shook his head, furious with himself that having made such a perilous journey he still could not decipher it.

Irina wanted to fly back to California. That very night if Rokovsky could find her a seat.

"He's awful, Sasha. Twisted. A mean little man with nasty empty eyes and terrible stinking breath. To think how all these years I longed to see him. Now I never wish to see him again. Not ennobled either by his tragedy-in fact just the opposite, a deformed old zek. So maybe that's the lesson: that in the end we must wear the face of the monster, the one who lives inside."

"You sound more disgusted than heartbroken, Irina."

"I am disgusted. Now I want to go."

"Won't you at least stay for my unveiling?"

She shook her head. "I know you don't want me there. Better to wait for you at home. Our life together could be different now, Sasha. We could change it if we tried. You could give up your girls and I my bitterness. We could forgive each other. If we could do that then maybe some good will have come out of all our pain."

There was something about that earthwork, he decided: something tormenting, something not right. It was the one thing about which Sergei had boasted, swinging the bare bulb, then grinning furtively, maliciously, as he'd suddenly switched off the light. He was concealing, or at least pretending to, and, like a damn fool, Targov thought, I was suckered in. I flew out there, thinking I'd discover its meaning at the site, then nearly got mowed down by that hotshot Israeli pilot doing bumpety-bumps in his ear-splitting jet.

But it did mean something. Why else would Sergei have designed it? And there was something strange about that too-digging those trenches, creating those walls must have cost a fortune. Who was the sponsor? Who had assigned him such a grand commission? And since when does a trinket carver such as Sergei Sokolov arrive out of the Soviet camps to find Israeli bulldozers ready to execute his "conceptual art"?

It was a task for Rokovsky. Let Tola track the sponsor down. Meantime, now that Irina had left, he would watch Sokolov himself. His old friend, nearly blind, wouldn't even notice that he was there.