Anzor’s eyes return to her, still occluded, still looking into another distance; then they gather toward a more focused light. His face is for a moment fully unmasked, and he directs at her a
stare that takes her in with a kind of encompassing ferocity. She stares back. He is very near and at a great distance. She knows nothing about this man, except the sudden power of his presence. A line of attraction and danger seems to vibrate between them in a tense ostinato. She feels she could travel a long way along that line, beyond the dark glow of his gaze, and into whatever lies within. For a moment, their eyes lock.
Then the moment is over, and they start walking back to the car. On the way down the winding road, they talk politely, as people who are getting acquainted talk. She asks him how he has come to know so much about the technique of the paintings in the monastery, and he tells her he once went to an art school in Moscow for a year. Many people in Chechnya went to school in Moscow, it was necessary if you wanted to get professional credentials. But while he had great ambitions, he tells her with some bemusement, he had no talent whatsoever. “I probably could have come up with some gimmick and deluded myself it was art,” he says. “Painting over portraits of Lenin or Stalin to make them look grotesque in some way. Or desecrating some religious imagery. One of my friends got very famous painting various Russian and Soviet symbols in weird ways. I mean, famous in the West.” There’s a sudden sharpness to his tone, a bite of old rivalry, perhaps; or of genuine disdain. Then he shrugs, as if to dispel the brusqueness with which he’s spoken. “Anyway, art is not so important in my country,” he says. “We have to win our independence first. Then we can have a few extras, like pictures.”
She asks him what he did instead and he says, ruefully, that it was nothing useful after all. He studied linguistic philosophy, even though his father had wanted him to become an engineer. He’d been an engineer himself. “That would have been a better thing to do,” Anzor says. “Then at least I could have built bridges. My country needs bridges. Especially after they get
destroyed, which happens regularly. But you know how it is with fathers and sons.”
She nods. She knows, at least, what it is like with mothers and daughters, though she isn’t going to disclose this to Anzor. She isn’t going to say much about herself; somehow, that would be out of place. This seems to be the subliminal compact between them: it is his to disclose, and hers to listen and appraise. And yet, she feels his candor as a form of gratifying approval. Across all their barriers, he trusts her to understand …
“But what I really love,” he brings out suddenly, and then brakes back his tone in some embarrassment: “What I really … admire … is … your art. This great music you play. It reminds me of freedom. Or the love of freedom. If we ever achieve a revolutionary victory in my poor country, I hope it will be to the sounds of Chopin.”
“A revolutionary victory …” she repeats.
As if to defuse the fervor with which he’s spoken, Anzor adds in a lighter tone, “These days, of course, each soldier could choose his own victory music. Earphones under the helmets. It would probably be heavy metal for most.” Incongruously, she thinks of Schumann’s phrase for Chopin’s melodies: flower-covered guns.
They drive silently for a while, along the barely visible road, framed by the looming, dense forest. Has anything passed between them, back there, over the small ravine? A ghost of a gaze, that’s all. She contemplates the deepening dark, returns to Anzor’s lean hand on the steering wheel. It pleases her, the suppleness of his wrist, the calm with which he maneuvers the small Fiat over the difficult road. There’s quietness now in his face and posture, and the composure gives him a kind of natural force. Simple presence … There seems to be no need to speak. No need to keep the ball rolling, to keep it up … Silence. Unstrained silence, of the kind she hardly remembers … Which
is hardly possible in her world, where a pause in the conversation bespeaks a failure of ingenuity as well as of politeness. In the intimate, smoothly moving capsule, she feels herself relax, watch the rhythmically passing shadows. No need to be on the qui vive. Is it, she thinks, because the man beside her is from … there?
But they chat again, politely, once they enter the better lit city. “I think there is a big exhibition of Russian art in London,” Anzor tells her. “Are you going there as part of your tour?”
She says yes, she is scheduled to play in London in about ten days. She’ll look out for the exhibition. At the hotel where he drops her off, he says good-bye with a courteous incline of the head, and takes her hand briefly between his. In his eyes, as he raises them to her face, there is the merest allusion to what happened on the edge of the ravine. He says he hopes to see her again. Since they are both itinerants, perhaps their paths will again fortuitously cross. He’ll look out for her concerts; perhaps he will come backstage if he can attend one. She wouldn’t mind that, would she? She says no, of course not. It would be nice if he did.
In Between
In the air, in no place. Her fingers flex almost unconsciously over the arm of her seat, moving through basic exercises. She peers into the confined space, trying to discern something within it. Did it matter, that line of tension between them near the ravine … or the pinpoint light of Anzor’s eyes … Where’s she going, where is her restlessness taking her … Sometimes she feels she can almost grasp it, the aim of her yearnings, the shape of her strange, free condition. This is the illusion of flight: that she can gain a bird’s-eye view of her situation, of herself. But in this
resistless space, her thoughts are too resistless themselves. Nothing to hold her, except the borders of her own body. She can almost feel her bird-like thoughts beating against the walls of her mind. She wonders where Anzor may be now. She didn’t ask him where he was going next. He may also be somewhere in mid-space, in flight. She probably won’t see him again; it was another brief encounter, that’s all. She reaches for her steady companion, Wolfe’s
Journal
.
July 10, 1982
A lesson with Isabel Merton. A strange avatar, this young girl with her naive expressions. She played Schubert’s Impromptus, then Schoenberg. She is learning, drinking in every suggestion. Once again, I felt the temptation to tell her … everything. Perhaps she would understand why I have chosen this life. The renunciation of this solitude. Perhaps her understanding would assuage my loneliness, which sometimes I can hardly bear. But of course, I stopped myself. What would I have said to her, anyway? What do I say to myself, except that I was born into a contaminated world, a contaminated country. And that, for a while, I wanted to sweep the decks clean. Or to pour my rage over everything like purifying fiery water over a bloodied deck. Just one burst, one bomb, one Molotov cocktail, one explosive sound, so that I could consider myself a moral being.
Then of course I realized it cannot be done. The decks can never be swept clean. The Augean stables of history can never be emptied of disorder and filth. Even if these pristine woods seem remote from all filth and danger. And yet, my boyhood keeps coming back to me this summer, and I cannot deny that sometimes I long for Berlin, the betraying city. Berlin of my childhood. Perhaps there is something about these woods that reminds me of the wooded parks where I roamed with my pals, in all kinds of weather. I can still hear our voices calling out to each other, enlivened by our boyish affection and all we knew of each other’s curiosity, our appetite for the world. The appetite which was already being perverted by the Führer. For we were also strangely susceptible to his menacing appeal. I can still feel—hear—our tussles as our vigor got the better of us and threatened to spill into God knows what. One day, I made them listen to one of my compositions. I think it was some imitation of Mozart’s Turkish March, almost the same thing; but they sat through it abashed, and then made embarrassed noises of appreciation.
Our further histories do not bear thinking about. There were those who murdered, and those who were murdered. Those who did worse than murder, those who were worse than murdered. The horror of it, the utter horror. It sometimes threatens to explode within me, tear my body apart. My human frame can hardly contain that much horror, that much rage. Then I have to retreat to my whitewashed cottage and my composition. Reduce everything to my distilled sound. It is the only way I can continue. The only way I can live.
No, I have no right to burden Isabel Merton with any of this. In any case, I doubt, after all, that she would understand. She seems to perceive the world musically, in its affective-sensuous aspect. But like all of them, she is innocent of the past; the vileness that is history.
So I stopped myself. I let her gather up her scores and leave. I think she realized I was leaving something unsaid. She looked back at me from the door, pausing, as if to give me a chance. But I let her leave, as I do each time. As I am fated to do. That too is my atonement. My penance.
… See him there, in his not completely clean T-shirt and two days’ stubble, pacing up and down his small room as if it were a cage. Not quite his room, not quite a cage. He moves from one such space to another, they’re prepared for him by his comrades. His brothers. This one has a bad smell in it, probably of vermin poison. See him sitting down at the portable computer, to look at information coming out of his country. The news is bad. The news is shockingly bad. A familiar name catches his attention, someone who’s been wounded, and something snags at his throat, his chest. Fury. A sad, sad ache. An ache surging into a rage so bitter that he could … kill. Or leap out of his skin, his situation, get out of it once and for all, leave it, forget it. Forget his country and his comrades. He wasn’t meant for this. He could have been an artist, or a scholar. He could have lived a studious life, contemplating the migration of languages, or the transmigration of the soul. But that is not to be. This is what he is becoming; this is now his fate. See him there, getting out of the stuffy room, shutting the door roughly behind him, striding across the darkened street in nothing but his jeans and T-shirt. A lean, fast-moving man with gloom-darkened eyes. What you cannot see is that he carries in his mind the long history of his country, a history so bitter and so violent that only new violence, he knows, can do it justice. More violence, till justice is done … Till the bitter end. The history pursues him as he strides down the quiet street, like a massed black cloud moving across mountains. It is a heavy, coal-black darkness. Ahead of him, he imagines Isabel like a Renaissance angel, in winged flight. She’s sailing through the air, as she sailed on the music, her reddish
hair streaming with streaked light. Onstage, she was a vision. The power of her art is such that it matches the violence within him. In her translucent eyes, he has seen something that meets his yearning. Something entranced.
See him walk faster, hunched now against the cold, as if he wanted to get away from what’s trailing him, the massed darkness. As if he wanted to catch up with her instead. He wants to seize her, hold her, fuck her. To see desire in her eyes. He’s seen it already, the lighting of a spark. Desire for him. Esteem for him. From a woman like that, one of the precious creatures. He wonders briefly if he’ll cause her trouble, if this is fair. Then he pushes the thought away, shaking with inward protest. Fair: a dim bloodless word he’s picked up in their bland, tepid countries. A word which has nothing to do with justice. Or passion. For justice rises out of passion, out of love and hate, not out of their petty reasoning, their on the one hand and on the other. He must watch out, mustn’t get infected by their blanched, weak words. He’s studied philosophy enough to know that language can infect you with ideas. His resentment rises till he could hit out at something from the twisting bitterness of it, hit out at the trivial flat world he’s found himself in and his utter impotence within it. He’s seen their eyes, has seen them glaze because they were talking to an inferior, has seen them narrow with suspicion because they were talking to a barbarian.
See him turn back, slow down his step, thinking of her. He wants to take her shining hair in his hand and push it back from her face, and light her eyes with the fierceness he has seen when she plays. He will make her come to him. He doesn’t want to hurt her, no. But he deserves … He must have her, before his life ends. For he will die soon, he’s sure of it. That is now his destiny, and he is only its instrument. He sees that with startling clarity and feels relief at the thought. Death will be a lovely release. From his anger, his impotence, his sad, sad ache. He
doesn’t know how he will meet it, but he wants to travel toward it as toward a dark light. He must not be diverted by their shallow pleasures, their trivial arguments.
What he cannot see is the spaciousness of the world outside his dedication, his suffering country. There is nothing outside. His thoughts have their own absoluteness, straight like an arrow moving along its appointed path till it meets its target. His mind is its own black box, and the information it contains will not be unloaded till later.
Berlin
She doesn’t expect to see him again. But she does, or she thinks she does. She thinks she glimpses him in east Berlin, in a half-renovated, atmospherically lit courtyard flanked by some art galleries. This is in the old East, which is trying to retain some traces of being East still: discreetly ravaged, discreetly picturesque. In the yellow half-light of street lanterns, she thinks she sees him in an open space across the courtyard. She stares at the man who might be Anzor, but he is in profile, and she can’t see him clearly. He seems to be contemplating an installation she has just rather fruitlessly scrutinized, consisting of a long nylon string, stretched as if for hanging laundry, but hung instead with large, dangling, variously broken and twisted dolls. His hands are in the pockets of a long coat, and the slight forward tilt of the lean silhouette seems to be Anzor’s. But the silhouette is mostly turned away, and before she can ascertain whether it is him, he walks into a passageway on the other side of the courtyard. She has an odd sensation of a perceptual warp, as if a dim electronic sound had bent itself in an unexpected way, though its source is impossible to discern.