But no matter how sickening prison morality may be, there is no other morality left at all, only the simulacra produced either by FSB prison guards or
sprintii
journalists specializing in the propaganda of liberal values . . .
Oh. I deliberately won’t cross out that last sentence, let the reader admire it. There you have it, the vulpine mind. After all, we were-foxes are natural liberals, in pretty much the same way as the soul is a natural Christian. And what do I write?
What do I write
? It’s terrifying. At least it’s clear where it all came from - I got the stuff about the sprintii journalists from the FSB prison guards. And the stuff about the FSB prison guards from the sprintii journalists. There’s nothing to be done: if a fox has heard an opinion, she is bound to express it in the first person. We can’t help it. We don’t have any opinions of our own on these human-related subjects (that’s the last thing we need), but we have to live among people. So we just return the serves. Yes, it’s a good thing I don’t have to write a book about Russia after all. What sort of Solzhenitsyn would I make? But I am digressing again.
I didn’t often discuss the nature of Alexander’s homophobia with him (he didn’t like to talk about it), but I was sure its roots had to be sought in the criminal catacombs of the Russian mind. His homophobia went so far that he rejected anything that was even remotely gay.
‘Why do you dislike gays so much?’ I asked him once.
‘Because they go against nature.’
‘But it was nature that created them. So how do they go against nature?’
‘I’ll tell you how,’ he said. ‘Children are hidden in sex, like the seeds in a watermelon. And gays are people fighting for the right to eat a watermelon without seeds.’
‘Who are they fighting against?’
‘The watermelon. Everybody else stopped caring a damn long since. But a watermelon can’t exist without seeds. And that’s why I say they go against nature. Will you say they don’t?’
‘A certain watermelon I used to know,’ I replied, ‘believed that the propagation of watermelons depends on their ability to implant in man’s mind the suggestion that it’s healthy to swallow the seeds. But watermelons overestimate their own hypnotic abilities. In actual fact the propagation of watermelons takes place through a process of which the watermelons are completely unaware, because they are unable to observe it. Because this process only begins where the watermelon ends.’
‘There you go tying those fancy knots again, Ginger, I can’t follow,’ he grumbled. ‘Save it. Let’s do without all this tricky queer stuff.’
Alexander particularly disliked Luchino Visconti. Any suggestion to put on something by this director (whom I consider one of the greatest masters of the twentieth century) was taken by him as a personal insult. I still have fragments of one of our arguments on tape. While the other dialogues in my journal are reproduced from memory, this one is absolutely accurate - the conversation was accidentally recorded on a dictaphone. I include it here because I would like to hear Alexander’s voice again - I can listen to it while I type.
AS:
Death in Venice
. This is getting tiresome, Ginger. What do you think I am, some kind of queer?
AH: Then how about
Conversation Piece
?
AS: No, let’s have Takeshi Kitano. Zatoichi punishes the geisha-assassin . . . And then the geisha-assassin punishes Zatoichi.
AH: I don’t want that. Let’s try
Gone with the Wind
again.
AS: Come off it. That staircase is too long.
AH: What staircase?
AS: The one I have to cart you up to the bedroom. And to add to the agony you make it five times longer. I was soaked in sweat last time. Seriously. Even though we never got up off the divan . . .
AH: I have to be spoiled sometimes . . . Okay, this time we’ll have a short staircase. All right?
AS: No, let’s . . . I fancy something with shooting.
AH: Then let’s have
Mulholland Drive
! There’s shooting in that. Oh, please!
AS: Back to the same old thing. I won’t do it, how many times do I have to tell you? Find yourself a queer out on the avenue and watch it with him.
AH: What’s that got to do with it? It’s lesbians in the film.
AS: What’s the difference?
(Here there is a pause in the recording, during which you can hear rustling and tapping as I rummage through the video discs scattered on the floor.)
AH: Listen, there’s a film from one of Steven King’s books.
Dreamcatcher
. Have you seen it?
AS: No.
AH: Let’s try it. We won’t be people, we’ll be aliens.
AS: What kind of aliens are they?
AH: They have a vertical mouth full of teeth running the entire length of their bodies and eyes on their sides. Imagine how bloody a kiss could be? And cunnilingus at the same time. I think that’s the way they reproduce.
AS: Darling, I get to see enough stuff like that at work. Let’s have something more romantic.
AH: Romantic . . . Romantic . . . Here’s
The
Matrix-2. How would you like to screw Keanu Reaves?
AS: Not a lot.
AH: Then I can screw him.
AS: Rejected. Is the third
Matrix
there?
AH: Yes.
AS: There could be an interesting possibility there with those machines.
AH: Which ones?
AS: You know, those humanoid robots with people sitting in them. They use them to fight off those black octopuses. Just imagine it, one of those robots has caught a black octopus, and . . . AH: Listen, how old are you, twelve?
AS: Okay, let’s forget
The Matrix
.
(Some kind of rustling again. I think I move on to another heap of DVDs.)
AH: How about
Lord of the Rings
?
AS: You’ll only come up with something weird again.
AH: Well I’m not going to spread my legs for a hobbit, that’s for sure. How come you’re so afraid of everything? Do you think they’ll find out at work? Your moral character?
AS: Why do think I’m afraid? I don’t want to, that’s all.
AH: Listen, there are some films in English here. An interesting selection.
AS: What have you got?
AH:
Midnight Dancers
. . .
Sex Life in LA
. . .
AS: No.
AH:
Versace Murder
?
AS: No.
AH: Why?
AS: Because.
AH: Do you know what the gays in Miami say instead of ‘vice versa’? ‘Vice Versace’. Just think of all those dark, convoluted meanings . . .
AS: First one of them shafts another up the backside, and then they swap places. That’s all your convoluted meanings.
AH: I’ll put it on then?
AS: I already told you. Go to the that cafe at Tverskaya, Gifts of the Sea or whatever they call it, find yourself a queer and have your fun.
AH: Listen, stop being such a reactionary. There are homosexual animals in wild nature, I’ve read about them. Sheep. Monkeys.
AS: As far as monkeys are concerned, I hardly think that’s an argument in favour of gays.
AH: Oh you’ve been well trained. No reforming you. What’s that disc you’ve got there?
AS:
Romeo and Juliet
.
(You can hear me snort contemptuously.)
AH: Bin it.
AS: Can’t we watch it just once more?
AH: How many times?
AS: Just one last little time. Come on! You’re a dead ringer for Juliet in that T-shirt.
AH: What can I do with you, Romeo? Go on. Only on one condition.
AS: What’s that?
AH: Afterwards it’s
Mulholland Drive
.
AS: Gr-r-r!
AH: Darling, really? So soon?
AS: Gr-r-r!
AH: Hang on, hang on. I’m putting it on. I’ll know this off by heart soon . . . ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean . . .’
AS: Whoo-oo-oo!
AH: I’m not criticizing your organization, you beast. Relax. That’s Shakespeare.
Love and tragedy go hand in hand. Homer and Euripides wrote about that, so did Stendhal and Oscar Wilde. And now it’s my turn.
Until I learned from my own experience what love is, I thought of it as a specific kind of pleasure that tailless monkeys can derive from being together, in addition to sex.
I formed this impression from the numerous descriptions I had come across in poems and books. How was I to know that the writers were not describing love as it actually is at all, but constructing the verbal imitations that would look best on paper. I thought of myself as a professional of love, since I had been inducing the experience in others for so many centuries. But it’s one thing to pilot the B-29 flying towards Hiroshima, and quite another to watch it from the central square of the city.
Love turned out to be nothing like what they write about it. It was ludicrous, rather than serious - but that didn’t mean it could be dismissed out of hand. It was not like being drunk (the most popular comparison in literature) - but it was even less like being sober. My perception of the world didn’t change: I didn’t think Alexander was anything like a fairy-tale prince in his Maibach. I could see all the sinister sides of his character but, strangely enough, those things only added to his charm in my eyes. My reason even came to terms with his barbarous political views and began to discover a certain harsh northern originality in them.
Love was absolutely devoid of any meaning. But it gave meaning to everything else. It made my heart as light and empty as a balloon. I didn’t understand what was happening to me. But not because I had become more stupid - there simply was nothing to understand in what was happening. They may say that love like that doesn’t run deep. But I think that anything that is deep isn’t love, it’s deliberate calculation or schizophrenia.
I myself wouldn’t even attempt to say what love is - probably both love and God can only be defined by apophasis, through those things that they are not. But apophasis would be wrong, too, because they are everything. Writers who write about love are swindlers, and the worst of them is Leo Tolstoy, clutching his programmatic bludgeon ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. Although I have a lot of respect for Tolstoy.
How could I have known that our romantic adventure would prove disastrous for Alexander? Oscar Wilde said: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . .’ He was a writer who lived in an era of primitive anthropocentrism, hence the word ‘man’ (sexism was also easy to get away with then, especially for gays). But in everything else, he was spot on. I killed the beast, the Thing. Beauty killed the beast. And the murder weapon was love.
I remember how that day began. After I woke up, I lay on my back for a long time while I surfaced from the depths of a very good dream that I couldn’t remember no matter how I tried. I knew that in cases like that the thing to do was to lie without moving or opening your eyes, in the same position you woke up in, and then the dream might surface in your memory. And that was what happened - after about a minute, I remembered.
I had been dreaming of a fantastic garden, flooded with sunlight and filled with the chatter of birds. In the distance I could see a strip of white sand and the sea. Immediately in front of me there was a sheer cliff, and in the cliff there was a cave, sealed off with a slab of stone. I was supposed to move the slab, but it was too heavy, and there was no way I could possibly do it. Summoning up all my strength, I braced my feet against the ground and strained every muscle in my body as I pushed on the slab. It fell away to one side and the black hole of the entrance was revealed, belching out damp air and an old, stale stench. And then, rising up out of the darkness towards the sunny day, chickens appeared - one, two, three . . . I lost count, there were so many of them. They just kept on walking towards the light and happiness, and now nothing could stop them - they’d realized where the way out was. I saw my chicken among them - the brown one with the white patch, and I waved my paw to her (in the dream I had paws instead of hands, like during the supraphysical transformation). She didn’t even look at me, just ran straight past. But I wasn’t offended at all.
What an amazing dream, I thought, and opened my eyes.
There was a little patch of sunlight trembling on the wall. It was my own virtual place in the sun, acquired without any struggle at all - it was produced by a little mirror that cast the ray of light falling from above against the wall. I thought about Alexander and remembered our love. It was as certain as that yellow patch of sunlight quivering on the wall. Something incredible had to happen between us today, something truly miraculous. Without even thinking what I was going to say to him, I reached for the phone.