Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY
As you will soon realize, the whole thing is far from clear. Moreover, across the dense layering of years the fragmentary testimony of the participants is hard to separate from putative reconstructions. Yet the existence behind it all of a real cluster of stories is for me no less evident than the certainty that hidden behind the verdure of this park and the screams of playing children is an equestrian statue of Louis XIII, however little he may have seemed worthy of immortalization by The Three Musketeers.
Let me begin with the indisputable fact (albeit one that defies precise dating) that at some point in the seventies Lyusik and Eva were in their Moscow apartment, waiting for an Italian colleague. Dr. Orlando was due to appear any minute with news from Boris, their old friend and idol, better known as Gensex (at a time when General Secretaries were still in vogue and parties capitalized). Boris had long ago emigrated to France, but kept dutifully filling the ominous void with a flow of gifts and letters to ensure that his orphaned acolytes might stay au courant of his successes. Indeed, judging by Orlando’s call, they could expect a further installment of artefacts from the mysterious West.
Boris did not earn his honorary title straightaway. At school, they used to call him Marcel for living with an uncle fixated on Proust. Once upon a time, in his remote childhood, his uncle had distinguished himself by announcing (as he rushed into the courtyard where his younger brother was playing with the little girl they both liked), “Marcel Proust is dead!” After a while Proust published another sequel to his saga. Asked why he had lied, the future Marcel replied, “You two were so absorbed in each other I just had to overwhelm you with something.”
But that same year Proust did die, and the news transformed Boris’s uncle drastically. He started studying French in earnest and collecting Proust’s works and all that pertained to him. Meanwhile, his brother married the girl from the courtyard, they had Boris, were both arrested, and disappeared forever. Boris was brought up by his uncle, who had remained a bachelor and lived exclusively through Proust (he ended up developing asthma and dying at the age of fifty one). Boris never so much as opened Proust, considering him effete rubbish; he made fun of the uncle’s hobby (parading Andre Gide’s famous gaffe: “Too many duchesses,” to which he added: “… and fairies”), and if he did master French, it was to charm girls. He also inherited from the uncle — if not from Proust — certain literary talents.
Left on his own, he went on (behind his uncle’s front) making good money with technical translations from and into French and turned the centrally located Moscow flat he acceded to into a sort of sexual shooting gallery. He owed his dashing sobriquet of Gensex not only to an irrepressible libido, generously discharged onto individuals of the feminine sex without any discrimination of age, appearance, or social class, but also to a narratorial endowment that made the legends of his past escapades the path to new conquests. If the current object of his attentions were for some reason unaware of his record, he would personally stop the gap, apparently in no hurry at all to proceed to the amorous agenda proper. In such cases, the affair tended to last longer, and the more experienced contestants deliberately faked ecstasies of naive ignorance. Of children he had none, legitimate at least.
Boris had once tried to seduce Eva with the story of a youngish widow at whose place they arranged for him to stay while lecturing in Budapest. On learning that her guest was from Russia, she boasted of Russian words, her husband had brought back from the snow-swept Eastern front.
“Khe-leb, ma-la-ko, yay-ka,” she said, mouthing the usual soldier’s fare of bread-milk-egg with foreign woodenness, “and one very odd word he never translated.”
“Namely?”
“Shchi-KOHT-nah,” the buxom Hungarian intoned meticulously, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of some giddy Riazan giggler of times truly des neiges d’antan. “Could you possibly tell me what it means?”
Gensex demurred tantalizingly, and only after insistent and increasingly passionate coaxing on the part of the flushed hostess did he agree to demonstrate the circumstances under which the magic word is uttered.
Retelling this linguistic skit [charade] to Eva, he attempted to stage it there and then, out she declined the role assigned her, saying she knew perfectly well what ’tickling’ meant. She was clearly gearing up for a prolonged siege. Shrewd provincial that she was, only just arrived in Moscow (with, it appears, a child of a previous marriage), she had quickly learned to profit from her acquaintances and did not conceal it.
“I have many interesting friends,” she said. “For example, one of them can get me theater tickets, another is a… Frenchman and he brings me foreign records.” (With the Frenchman she was, one has to admit, stretching it a bit: he was at best an Algerian, an Arab, but he was quite probably good for a steady supply of records). “What can you offer?”
“I know just how I can be of use to you: I will awaken a selfless love in your heart.”
As if to confirm his emphasis on higher values, Gensex told her about a dinner at an ex-girlfriend’s, where he met two unofficial celebrities, the poet and the poetess. Even though he sat at the far end of the table, he could make out how the two exchanged poems, compliments and barbs, the poet, in somewhat feminine tones, the poetess, with manly bluntness. The story worked, probably not so much for its poetic overtones as for its aura of unattainable elitism.
Eva grew up in a lowbrow family, but at one point her mother worked as the assistant manager of an Architects’ Sanatorium on the Baltic Coast. Fancily dressed up, the little girl mingled with the holiday makers, and stuck in her memory forever would be the colorful cottages, the garden populated by flirting beaus and belles, and several faces, hairdos, and phrases that were to acquire a magic power over her tastes: an agile young thing with a doll-like face, wavy hair, and the exotic name Naomi that so became her; her plump admirer with thick glasses, the scion of a prominent literary dynasty; and a tall blonde with finely chiseled features and a straight, longish nose, recently divorced, as Eva eventually realized (as she would wistfully recall the line from their amateur performance: “Irene, formerly Beynard”); the blonde was being courted by the unappealing Rapha Reperovich (“the balding baby Raphael”).
The next year her mother was transferred to the Urals but Eva continued to visualize herself in the arms of Naomi, coyly using her as a young page to fend off the passes of her suitor, while Eva gazes after Irene walking down the alley in a long flowery dressing-gown, which shows a bit of a naked leg above the knee, and she wants to become — or is it to possess? somehow, but how? — both of them simultaneously. . .
That is how, by chance rather than design (psychological subtleties not being his forte), Gensex’s prestigious story hit the mark, though the ambiguous sexual underpinnings of the episode may have helped too. But having reaped the fruits of his success, he immediately, as was his wont, lost all interest in Eva. She was not ready for that. At first, she simply could not understand where he had gone to; then hurt pride reared its head, and, finally, — a refusal to be dislodged from the foothold she had gained… She pursued him in person and over the phone, now invoking a pregnancy and threatening “not to leave it at that,” now tenderly imploring him to return. In a word, she totally lost her head.
Gensex repelled her attacks with polite firmness, but one day his patience snapped and he asked her tartly whether all this wasn’t a symptom of a selfless love awakening, after all, in her heart? She burst out laughing and in a matter of weeks was married, with Gensex’s blessing, to Lyusik, who hung on his every word. What was funniest of all was that everyone, including Lyusik, knew the yarn of selfless love by heart, but apparently he was the only one who hadn’t grasped who was who and would gladly spin it for the new believers in Gensex.
Lyusik was a typical egghead who spent his whole life in the company of books, but, given the spirit of the times, he felt uneasy about being an intellectual. One day, he had some business with the editor of a literary magazine, a man he revered from afar, a man who had spent ten years in the camps. He went to see him in his office and the problem was soon resolved to their mutual satisfaction; but Lyusik was struck by the incongruous sight of the giant Georgian in white shirt sleeves rolled up over his powerful arms (a gulag lumberjack!), his hands nimbly writing out useless letters.
From then on, Lyusik did his best to cultivate the beast in himself, contending (thus echoing Gensex, who, in turn, referred to some sultry mountain-climber of the fifties) that a real man must be gloomy, fierce, hairy — and stink, and generally modeling himself after his legendary friend (whose entire body, incidentally, was covered, back and belly included, with curly fur). In particular, he would bubble over repeating Boris’s favorite argument against anal sex: “I too suffer from constipation, but I only enjoy it when I get rid of it, just like the masochist who loved hitting his dick with a hammer, but only when he missed.” For all that, Lyusik remained a humble husband and loyal member of the museum staff; his only window on the big wide world was Gensex. With the latter’s departure, that world had become wider still, but had retreated accordingly into a semi-abstract distance.
The information from out there was somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Gensex apparently continued to make it big. In one of his early releases (to beat the odds of post-office censorship and assure mass circulation of his missives, he mailed numbered xerox copies, keeping the originals), he described the accidental encounter in Notre-Dame with a married couple who had owed him a substantial sum since their Moscow days; thus with one stroke he shored up his initially somewhat shaky financial situation, secured a Paris roof over his head, and reconfirmed, this time in the international arena, the basis for the noble title of Gensex.
Gradually, however, rumors began trickling in, rumors to the effect that more and more often women had the cheek to snub him — some, for moral reasons, others, disappointed with his ars amatoria, still others, preferring younger partners and, on occasion, partneresses — but all somehow failing to see the point of sleeping with him. To be sure, his letters gave no ground for such suspicions, replete as they were with jubilant reports of encounters with Danish, French, and Japanese women, to say nothing of a native speaker of Guarani. Eva, Lyusik, and the others held steadfastly to their belief in Boris as their sexual plenipotentiary; yet, even as they refuted, letters in hand, the blasphemous innuendoes, they could not help wondering about their persistence. Dr. Orlando might shed light on the matter.
The long-awaited visit, however, posed more riddles than it solved. To begin with his looks — the perm, the false purple eyelashes, the layered pink mantles, Hindu style. The hosts exchanged surprised glances, differing (for the time being, mentally) as to gender. Lyusik took their guest to be a man, Eva, a woman. The first name, Dominique, was of no help either. The answer was probably there in black and white in Boris’s note, but they were both so disconcerted they could not bring themselves to open it in the presence of the bearer.
As a result, the conversation took a rather bland course, focusing on the comparative etymology of the names of the gifts remitted: dzhin, “gin,” and dzhinsy, “[blue] jeans.” Lyusik, immediately burying himself in dictionaries, announced that gin was a contraction of geneva, of course, not in the sense of the Swiss city but of the Dutch liquor, genever, pronounced khe-NEH-fer and made of juniper berries, juniperus in Latin. Contrary to all expectation, it had nothing to do with the bottled Oriental dzhinn “jinn (jinni, jinnee),” despite that jinni’s kinship with two different roots for “spirit”: Arabic djinni and English genie. The latter, a borrowing from the French genie, went back to the Latin genius, “spirit, genius,” via which it was related to the entire lexical cluster of genesis, generation, gender, genre, etc. — all the way to the latest genes. The interest in lexicographic intricacies soon flagged and might have waned altogether were it not for the timely punning bridge back to Boris timely thrown up by Dr. Orlando:
“In that case, your friend is sending you, through me, his blue genes?”
“I wouldn’t mind exchanging a couple of words with the good doctor in the genetic code, unless, as I fear, his genitals are of the wrong genre,” said Lyusik punningly to himself, but aloud he said:
“Dzhinsy” jeans“come from Genoese, referring to the origins of the strong, twilled cotton they are made of. You wouldn’t by any chance come from Genoa, would you?”
“No, nor from Geneva. Sorry, but I must be on my way. It was nice meeting you, and I’d be happy to see both of you again.”
After a confident good-bye peck, Western style, Dominique took his leave. Lyusik and Eva were even quite glad to see him go, because they could at last share their impressions and read Gensex’s note. It turned out to be brief: Domi Orlando was a run-of-the-mill scholar but a pal, quirks or no quirks. That unfortunately left the gender issue moot, since in Gensex’s vocabulary a “pal” could be anybody whatsoever. There was, however, a promising reference to Missive No. — . The three-year-old xerox was promptly retrieved and resolved the argument in Eva’s favor; the letter was a love story casting Dominique in the role of a stunning brunette taking Gensex’s course at the International Summer School in Bellagio.
“No to szczesciarz z niego!” said Lyusik and Eva in unison, spontaneously declaiming the punch line of another Gensex story, this one about how in Zakopane, his first time ever in an all-night bar, he and a Polish friend kept trying to decide whether the two skiers next to them were a man and a woman or a man and a scary virago. But then Andrzej came upon the problematic creature exiting from the ladies’, and, back at the table, pronounced the boyfriend a lucky one. But Domi was of course no virago, each thought, mentally surveying the opportunities the new information offered them respectively. Both had racked their brains over the Bellagio episode and were now reviewing it with new interest, trying it out on their recent guest variation after variation.
“‘… She was built somewhat disproportionately, not very tall, but with a large head. She had huge blue eyes, shining out from under a low brow, and succulent deep-purple lips… ’ As usual, Gensex lays the colors on thick, assuming we’d never see the original,” Lyusik ventured gingerly, trying to conceal his excitement.
“Well, the original has been painted over too — and more than once,” Eva retorted. “But the purple motif is well done.”
“‘… I eyed her for several days; she stared back, unfriendly or at least puzzled. One day after lunch I chanced upon her in an alley. I suggested a walk, she accepted. I treated her to the choicest morsels in my repertory. My only reward was a tense silence. ’You don’t seem to like my stories?’ — ’We don’t discuss these things. ’ I drew her to myself, and drowned completely in her studiously passionate, endless, succulent kiss. . . ’ The ’studiously passionate’ business is not so bad, but when it comes to the ’endless succulence,’ I don’t think Uncle Marcel would have stood for it.”
“Cut the bravado, will you. You wouldn’t mind drowning either. Go back to the text.”
“‘She preferred her place…’” (“That’s what they say in the West,” the well-read Lyusik couldn’t help inserting: ’“Your place or mine?’) „’… and insisted on total darkness. In a businesslike manner we established that each had a five o’clock class, but we almost missed dinner. To keep the censors from seizing this letter as porn, I omit the peripeties of our record-shattering match, though it may be of ethnographic interest for you that Italian hotels, especially converted palazzi, are known for the fanatic narrowness of their beds and the marmoreal coldness of their floors. The latter, incidentally, was quite welcome, given the unbearable heat, but, when, proud of how well my Italian was holding up, I whispered into her ear that it would be cooler at night, she, without relaxing for a second the tempo of osculations…’ This must be an allusion to Pushkin’s „With a rush of fiery caresses and the sting of her osculations/ She hastens the moment of final convulsions!“
“Or, more likely, to bona fide convulsions, which Gensex is much better at than at Pushkin. Unlike certain others, who need all the help they can get with their convulsions.’
“‘… she said: ’Non ce l’abbiamola notte,’ and to all my baffled queries about why we shouldn’t resume at night she kept restating there were simply no nocturnal activities in the cards. I knew it meant losing face, but still I risked nothing, in a semi-exploratory mode, that, after all, things seemed to be going as they should, didn’t they?! ’Si, si,’ she acquiesced, ’ma lo voglio unico!’ And I couldn’t get another word out of her… The stupid bitch!“ shouted Lyusik the hypocrite, mentally settling for an unico.
„I’m not so sure, not so sure,“ said Eva, her tone suddenly pensive.
“‘… My overtures on subsequent days were equally futile, and this morning, as I was sitting down to this letter, she announced publicly she was leaving because her fiance had come for her. I even had the opportunity to shake his honest hand and wish them a buon viaggio. I felt a total idiot, if not worse, say, a jilted mistress. But that’s the way they are — cosi fan tutte. In Rome do as the Romans do… ’”
Trying not to look each other in the face, Lyusik and Eva started going on about cultural relativity, which still eluded Boris, despite his prolonged exposure to the West. As they did so, Lyusik probably wiped his glasses in a pointedly detached manner, but then dropped them on the floor, while Eva, overcome by vindictive solidarity with Dominique and something else, obscure, but agreeable, started, say, clearing the table and broke a plate…
Dominique did in fact phone and invite them to drop in at the Europe. In those times, hotel visits to foreigners were still ticklish, but the temptation was too much for them and they went. From that moment on, the story is clouded in especially dense fog; I am only relating what little I managed to pry out of Eva (Lyusik proved absolutely unapproachable).
Was it Dominique who sent word through the doorman asking them to come up in turns, or the doorman himself who told them only one guest at a time was allowed? Or maybe they brought their child along and one of them had to mind it in the lobby. In any event, both were so dazed that they complied. The first to go up was Lyusik; Eva went as soon as he came back. Neither has said a thing about what happened in the room. But both are known to have asked Dominique the same question: What was the matter that time in Bellagio? They received different answers.
Lyusik was told she was searching for a feminist identity and was obsessed with erotically manipulating men (uom’oggetto), so no matter how Gensex may have gratified her, she had to replace him immediately with others, no less unique. Lyusik dutifully relayed this to Eva, who compared it with what she had heard herself, namely, that since childhood Dominique had had the mixed feelings of love-hate-envy for men and had even contemplated a transsexual operation. Hence the macho treatment of Gensex and (though this is my own conjecture) the invisibility requirement.
By the way, I don’t consider the mystery of what transpired in Europe in the least impenetrable. I can clearly see Lyusik emerging from the lift, knocking on the door, and finding himself-flustered, overwhelmed, happy-in a pitch black room in Orlando’s aromatic arms, where, under their new friend’s tender guidance, he receives, without realizing it, his first and only lesson in male possession. Then comes Eva’s turn. Sensing something, though far from everything, she explores the docile body with her caresses, then gives her own up to it, but all of a sudden and in the most unexpected place she is pierced by a powerful male assault, and instantly melts, as if finally relieved of a lifelong burden. Then they lie there together, gossiping about Lyusik and Gensex and fondling each other languidly, and Dominique makes her a gift of her battery-powered plastic Dutch jinnee.
When it is time to go, they descend to the lobby, to Lyusik, and this I see with the sharpest clarity. They are all three of them standing with their arms around one another, Dominique in the middle, between my poor dear parents (alas! alas!), who seem to be both clinging to and shying away from her and casting apprehensive glances at me, while the grinning Domi says something along the lines of O. K., that’s cool, no problem, what if she does remember this, I wonder how she’ll turn out.
Even on her deathbed, my mother claimed that I was too small at the time, that she couldn’t have taken me to Europe that day. Be that as it may, I understand Dominique much better than our, yours and mine, Russian forebears. I now live partly in Moscow, partly in Paris, partly in New York, but I feel as comfortable in Riazan, Bellagio, and Bloomsbury. All I have to do is take a train, check into a hotel and go near a place that has associations for me. My girlfriend says I would feel most at home in Combray.
I am putting this down for you, my future tot, should I fail to survive labor. With organisms such as mine the statistics of artificial insemination statistics are not encouraging. I am writing at a sidewalk cafe in the Place des Vosges; I can hear children playing in the park. A mother and daughter are passing by. The girl inspects me with curiosity, nudges her mother, and whispers something. Her mother scowls at me and says: “Qui? Ce pede a l’air… normal? (You mean that… garden-variety queer?).” But the girl, who reminds me of Gensex’s childhood pictures, turns for a last look. She has apparently appreciated the involuntary irony of her mother’s remark, and we exchange a wink.
P. S. Thoughts of the horrible epidemic raging all around continue to torment me. I fear for you more than for myself. Thank God there is still time to change my mind, seek out that little girl and readdress this letter to her.