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"Good Lord,
that was quite a noise I made," said Ivanov.

Then
they began to talk about the young Nadja, Nadesha, Nadiushka, Nadiushkina, and
Ivanov, before he would say anything, wanted to know whether they had made
love. And then he wanted to know how many hours they'd been at it. And then
whether Nadiushka was experienced or not. And then the positions. And since
Ansky answered all his questions in full and with no hesitation, Ivanov went
off on a sentimental tack. Fucking youth, he said. Goddamn fucking youth. Oh,
the little slut. What a pair of filthy beasts. Ah, love. And the sentimental
side of things, a side he could only imagine and not touch, made him remember
that he was naked, not sitting there at the table, where in fact he was wrapped
in a red robe, a robe or a dressing gown, to be precise, with the emblem of the
Communist Party of the Russian Federation embroidered on the lapel, and a silk
handkerchief around his neck, the gift of a faggoty French writer he'd met at a
conference and whose work he'd never read, but naked in the figurative sense,
naked on every other front, political, literary, economic, and this awareness
made him lapse again into melancholy.

"Nadja
Yurenieva, I believe, is a student or young poet," he said, "and she
hates me with a passion. I met her at
Gorky
's
burial. She and two other thugs slung me out. She isn't a bad person. The
others aren't either. I'm sure they're fine Communists, staunch, good-hearted
Soviets. Believe me: I understand them."

Then Ivanov
motioned Ansky to his side.

"If
it had been up to them," he whispered in his ear, "they would've shot
me right there, the sons of bitches, and then they would have dragged my body into
a mass grave."

Ivanov's
breath smelled of vodka and sewers, sour and heavy, like something rotting,
reminiscent of empty houses near swamps, nightfall at four in the afternoon,
vapors rising from the sickly grass and fogging the dark windows. A horror film,
thought Ansky. Where everything has come to a halt, and it comes to a halt
because it knows it's lost.

But
Ivanov said ah, love, and Ansky, in his fashion, also said ah, love. So over
the next few days he set out in tireless search of Nadja Yurenieva, and at last
he found her, wearing her long leather jacket, sitting in one of the lecture
halls at the University of Moscow, looking like an orphan, a self-designated
orphan, listening to the rousing remarks or poems or rhymed nonsense of some
pretentious idiot (or whatever he was!) who recited with his gaze fixed on the
audience while in his left hand he held the silly manuscript that every so
often he glanced at in a theatrical and unnecessary way, since his memory was
clearly sharp.

And
Nadja Yurenieva saw Ansky and got up discreetly and left the hall where the bad
Soviet poet (as oblivious and foolish and prissy and gutless and affected as a
Mexican lyrical poet, or actually a Latin American lyrical poet, that poor
stunted and bloated phenomenon) reeled off his lines on the steel industry
(possessing the same crass, arrogant ignorance as a Latin American poet
speaking about his self, his era, his otherness), and she went out into the
streets of Moscow, followed by Ansky, who instead of approaching her remained
some fifteen feet behind, a distance that shrank as time passed and they walked
farther. Never before had Ansky better understood or delighted more in
suprematism, Kazimir Malevich's invention, nor the first tenet of Malevich's
declaration of independence signed in
Vitebsk
on November 5, 1920, which proclaims: "The fifth dimension has been
established."

In
1937 Ivanov was arrested.

Once
again he was subjected to a long interrogation and then they left him in a dark
cell and forgot about him. His interrogator didn't know
a
thing about
literature. His principal interest was finding out whether Ivanov had met with
members of the Trotskyist opposition.

During his time in the cell,
Ivanov made friends with a rat he called Nikita. At night, when the rat came
out, Ivanov held long conversations with her. As one might imagine, they didn't
talk about literature, and certainly not about politics, but about their
respective childhoods. Ivanov told the rat about his mother, who was often in
his thoughts, and his siblings, but he avoided talking about his father. The
rat, whose Russian was scarcely a whisper, talked in turn about the
Moscow
sewers and the
sky in the
sewers, where because of the blossoming of certain debris or an inexplicable
phosphorescent process, there were always stars. She also talked to him about
her mother's warmth and her sisters' foolish capers, how she had laughed at
those capers, even now as she remembered them they brought a smile to her
narrow rat's face. Sometimes Ivanov let himself succumb to despair and he
rested his cheek on his palm and asked Nikita what would become of them.

Then
the rat looked at him with sad, perplexed eyes and her look told Ivanov that
she was even more innocent than he was. A week after he had been locked in the cell
(although for Ivanov it seemed more like a year) he was interrogated again and
no one had to hit him to make him sign various papers and documents. He wasn't
returned to his cell. They took him straight out to a courtyard where he was
shot in the back of the head and his body tossed on the bed of a truck.

After
Ivanov's death, Ansky's notes grow chaotic, apparently haphazard, although amid
the chaos Reiter divined a structure and a kind of order. Ansky talks about
writers. He says the only viable writers (though he doesn't explain what he
means by viable) are those from the underclass and the aristocracy. Proletarian
and bourgeois writers, he says, are merely decorative figures. He talks about
sex. He recalls Sade and a mysterious Russian monk, Lapishin, who lived in the
seventeenth century and left various writings (complete with the corresponding
illustrations) on group sexual practices in the region between two rivers, the
Dvina and the
Pechora
.

Only sex? nothing
but sex? Ansky asks himself repeatedly in notes written in the margins. He
talks about his parents. He talks about Doblin. He talks about homosexuality
and impotence. The American continent of sex, he says. He jokes about Lenin's
sexuality. He talks about the drug addicts of
Moscow
. About the sick. About the killers of
children. He talks about Flavius Josephus. His discussion of the historian is
tinged with melancholy, though it might be a feigned melancholy. But for whom
is he feigning if he knows very well no one will read his notebook? (If it's
God he has in mind, then he treats God with a certain condescension, perhaps
because God was never lost on the
Kamchatka
peninsula, cold and hungry, as he was.) He talks about the young Russian Jews
who made the revolution and who now (this is probably written in 1939) are
dropping like flies. He talks about Yuri Piatakov, assassinated in 1937, after
the second Moscow Trial. He mentions names Reiter has never heard before. Then,
a few pages on, he mentions them again. As if he were afraid of forgetting them.
Names, names, names. Those who made revolution and those who were devoured by
that same revolution, though it wasn't the same but another, not the dream but
the nightmare that hides behind the eyelids of the dream.

He
talks about Lev Kamenev. He mentions his name along with many other names also
unknown to Reiter. And he talks about his adventures in different houses in
Moscow
, with friends who
presumably helped him and whom Ansky, to be safe, identifies by numbers, for
example: today I was at 5's house, we had tea and talked past midnight, then I
walked home, the sidewalks were covered in snow. Or: today I saw 9, he talked
to me about 7, and then he began to ramble about illness, whether or not it was
a good idea to find a cure for cancer. Or: this afternoon I saw 13 in the
metro, though he didn't notice me, I was sitting there half asleep and I let
the train go by, and 13 was reading a book on a bench nearby, a book about
invisible men, and then his train came and he got up and got on the train without
closing his book, even though the train was full. And he also writes: our eyes
met. Fucking a snake.

And he doesn't feel
sorry for himself.

It's in Ansky's notebook, long
before he sees a painting by the man, that Reiter first reads about the Italian
painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho or Josephus Arcimboldo or
Arcimboldi or Arcimboldus (1527-1593). When I'm sad or bored, writes Ansky,
although it's hard to imagine Ansky bored, busy fleeing twenty-four hours a
day, I think about Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the sadness and tedium vanish as if
on a spring morning, by a swamp, morning's imperceptible advance clearing away
the mists that rise from the shores, the reed beds. There are also notes on
Courbet, whom Ansky considers the paradigm of the revolutionary artist. He
mocks, for example, the Manichaean conception that some Soviet painters have of
Courbet. He tries to imagine the Courbet painting
The Return from the
Conference,
which depicts a gathering of drunken priests and ecclesiastical
dignitaries and was rejected by the official Salon and the Salon des Refuses,
which in Ansky's judgment casts the reject-rejectors into ignominy. The fate of
The Return from the Conference
strikes him as not only inevitable and
poetic but also telling: a rich Catholic buys the painting and no sooner does
he get home than he proceeds to burn it.

The
ashes of
The Return from the Conference
float not only over
Paris
, reads Reiter with tears in his eyes, tears that
sting and
rouse
him, but also over
Moscow
and
Rome
and
Berlin
. Ansky talks about
The Artist's
Studio.
He talks about the figure of Baudelaire that appears on the edge of
the painting, reading, and stands for Poetry. He talks about Courbet's
friendship with Baudelaire, Daumier, Jules Valles. He talks about the
friendship of Courbet (the Artist) with Proudhon (the Politician) and likens
the sensible opinions of the latter to those of a pheasant. On the subject of
art, a politician with power is like a colossal pheasant, able to crush
mountains with little hops, whereas a politician without power is only like a
village priest, an ordinary-sized pheasant.

He
imagines Courbet in the Revolution of 1848 and then he sees him in the Paris
Commune, where the vast majority of artists and men of letters shone
(literally) for their absence. Not Courbet. Courbet takes an active role and
after the repression he is arrested and locked up in Sainte-Pelagie, where he
occupies himself drawing still lifes. One of the charges the state brings
against him is that of having incited the multitudes to destroy the column in
the Place Vendome, although Ansky isn't quite clear on this point or his memory
fails him or he relies on hearsay. The monument to Napoleon in the Place
Vendome, the monument plain and simple in the Place Vendome, the Vendome column
in the Place Vendome.

In
any case, the public office that Courbet held after the fall of Napoleon III
made him responsible for the protection of the monuments of
Paris
, which in view of later events must
certainly be taken as a monumental joke.
France
, however, wasn't in the mood
for jokes and all the artist's assets were seized. Courbet left for
Switzerland
,
where he died in 1877 at the age of fifty-eight. Then come some lines in
Yiddish that Reiter can't quite decipher. He supposes them to be expressions of
pain or bitterness. Then Ansky goes off on a tangent about some Courbet
paintings. The one called
Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet
suggests to him the
beginning of a film, one that gets off to a bucolic start and gradually lapses
into horror.
The Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine
recalls spies or
shipwrecked sailors enjoying a brief rest, and Ansky goes on to say: spies from
another planet, and also: bodies that wear out more quickly than other bodies,
and also: disease, the transmission of disease, and also: the willingness to
stand firm, and also: where does one learn to stand firm? in what kind of
school or university? And also: factories, desolate streets, brothels, prisons,
and also: the
Unknown
University
, and also: meanwhile the
Seine
flows and flows and flows, and those ghastly faces of whores contain more
beauty than the loveliest lady or vision sprung from the brush of Ingres or
Delacroix.

Then
there are chaotic jottings, the schedules of trains leaving Moscow, the gray
noon light falling vertical on the Kremlin, a dead man's last words, the flip
side of a trilogy of novels whose titles he notes:
True Dawn, True Dusk,
Tremble of Twilight,
whose structure and plots might have lent a bit of
order and dignity to the last three novels published under Ivanov's name, the
ice-beam of the tapestry, though Ivanov probably wouldn't have agreed to take
them under his wing, or maybe I'm mistaken, Ansky thinks and writes, perhaps I
judge Ivanov unfairly, since based on all the information I possess he didn't
betray me, when it would have been so easy, so easy to say he wasn't the author
of those three novels, and yet that was the one thing he didn't do, he betrayed
everyone his torturers wanted him to betray, old friends and new, playwrights,
poets, and novelists, but he didn't say a word about me. Accomplices in
imposture until the end.