Long Made Short
Long Made Short
Stephen Dixon
To Sergei Dovlatov
1941–1989
CONTENTS
LONG MADE SHORT
I can be such an egotistical self-righteous pompous son of a bitch; unaccepting, nonaccepting,
I can’t think of the right word but it’s what I so often am and all of it’s what I
was again. Moscow, my wife and I, she to research a book she’s anthologizing and introducing,
I just to accompany her and see a city and be in a country I’ve never been to, and
it’s really just the extra airfare, since restaurants are very cheap and the hotel
room’s the same for one or two. She—Marguerite—speaks Russian, will be working all
day in libraries and with Russian contacts so, through a colleague in America weeks
before we left, got an interpreter for me for the five weekdays. Svetlana shows up
at our hotel at nine, half-hour before she’s supposed to. I’m squatting in the little
tub, reach over and push the door shut, and Marguerite lets her in. I overhear them:
Good mornings in Russian, then “Please, if it’s possible, everything in English from
now on. I want to sharpen my interpreting facilities even better from your trip, and
I’m planning of visiting America in a year. And my earliness—tardiness?—earliness
is because the metro got here faster than I thought and was less crowded than expected.
Then our brave police downstairs let me up with a wave when I thought I’d have more
difficulties. And I didn’t want to walk around in the slippery cold or sit in the
dreary lobby with everyone blowing smoke and sturgeon fumes on me and talking in their
loud German and English and American voices, present employers—employees?—excluded
of course. I had a stroke, you see, two years ago. Recovered from this side being
paralyzed to where I could barely walk. Twelve almonds a day, a healer from Kiev said—the
doctors could offer no medicine but time for me. You might think it madness, I know
so much how Americans rely on science, but the almonds worked, I’m sure of it, and
I don’t want to get excited. I can’t afford to, you say?—by having to tell them off
to their faces, all those bloated businessmen elephants blowing loud smoke and talk
on me. I am one of those rare Muscovites who—whom? Let me get it correct now,
who
. Who detests those burning props.”
I get dressed in the bathroom, come out, introduce myself, make coffee for us, take
out sugar packets and coffee cake and tiny Edam cheeses we got on the plane with our
dinner and snack, offer her peanut butter and dried salami and crackers we brought
with us. “You don’t get anything like this here,” she says, “unless you wait on line
for hours or buy it in the dollar stores, which I’ll take you to,” she says to me.
“Hams in tins, coffee in cans, the best sardines and cheeses and most overpriced caviar.
You won’t need those perhaps, for only a week’s visit in a hotel. But if you have
Russian friends who do or you want to make a gift out of to them, that’s also what
they have there. And lemon and peppered vodka and Scottish scotch and Ararat, you
know what that is?” “Da,” I say. “Ah, listen, wonderful—possible he doesn’t need an
interpreter. But people say it can be as good or as better as the best French cognac.
I wouldn’t know since I’m also rare in Moscow in that I’ve never had a taste for alcohol.
Maybe for my bad tooth, as a girl, but nothing else. And also at the Beriozka American
cigarettes to kill people is what you get there too. One carton of them, none other
than Marlboros, would be equivalent to, at black market rubles for dollars, a month’s
wages for the average worker here, or fifty rubles less. If you want to, we’ll go.
For if you return to America and your wife tells Millie you didn’t have an opportunity
to buy the best Russian whiskies and gifts, because I was taking you to all the more
cultural places, I shall be very embarrassed and dismayed.”
“No no,” I say. “Any place you take me to is fine, since it’ll all be new to me. Though
if we want Ararat and vodka, better I hear at the duty-free store at the airport going
home.”
“But for use in your room? Marguerite tells me she’ll be entertaining scholars here.
Perhaps you brought the much preferred American whiskey with you. Or you don’t drink
or once did but went A. A., which is only beginning here. It’s not that? If it was,
or should it be ‘were’?” He throws up his hands, points to Marguerite and says “She
knows.” “Oh, small difference, since we both know what I meant, and I have the few
places and hours the A.A. clubs meet each week. Anyway, it’s all up to you. I am simply
here to coast you through. And the truth of the matter is that the Beriozkas, though
something to see for their glamorous contradictions if not outright falsehoods to
the rest of Moscow and present Russian life, have no real appeal to me.”
But what am I getting at with all this? I had an idea of saying right at the start
“Happens again,” and then explaining what does. She gets a stroke our third weekday
here, dies, and I didn’t especially care for her almost from the moment I heard her
through the bathroom door—actually got irritated, but not visibly, by her almost incessant
talking and parading of her knowledge and vast learning. She seemed to know something
or a lot about everything we spoke about or saw. She was familiar with the details
of Marguerite’s project and doctoral dissertation and knew the works of the people
Marguerite was going to see, as well as every writer, painter and composer I mentioned
and building we visited or I pointed out. Knew the dates, history, influences, inner
meanings, could quote lines, cite pages and recite poems and so on—I, what? I forget
what I started out saying. But she has this stroke, dies, police have to break down
her apartment door to get her two days after her stroke and I feel very bad about
it of course and guilty I bad-mouthed her so much to Marguerite and asked her to phone
her to call her off after the second day, at least for a day and then I’d see how
I felt. “I want to walk around alone, not meet any schedules, get lost on the metro
if I want with only the few Russian words I know. Find a farmers’ market by myself
and the Tolstoi museum and Tolstoi’s house again if I like, which I think I would
but without her telling me who painted what picture on the wall and who the people
are in the portraits and what famous composer played what famous composition on the
grand piano there. I just want to feel the place, guess which side of the bed Tolstoi
slept, and those desks of his and Sofia’s and no electric lights and that sad room
behind theirs where their youngest son—I forget his name, though she told me, and
I think he was the youngest—died of scarlet fever in that oversized crib she said
was a typical seven year old’s bed then, or maybe he died in the hospital and she
said he only got sick at home. For sure she had it right, whatever she told me. Or
just to stay in our room finishing
War and Peace
and maybe going downstairs to the hotel café for a coffee and bun.” And I feel if
I had let her continue being my interpreter and guide, though we never used that word,
instead of giving her a paid day off—paid, it’s so absurd, since it was so little
money and because she has no survivors we now don’t know whom to send it to—she might
have somehow survived, or at worst been with me when she had the stroke and I could
have got help for her and saved her life. Or been with us, if we again took her to
the hotel restaurant for dinner that night—and why not? since she knew which foods
were freshest, so was an asset of sorts, and she didn’t ask for more wages and the
dinner was certainly cheap enough. But she died in her room that Wednesday, might
not have had anywhere to go except to stand in the cold for hours on different food
lines—she was retired but not even sixty. And maybe was incensed at me—knew I didn’t
like her much for not very good reasons but stayed because she needed the money—or
worried the job wouldn’t work out because of what she sensed I felt about her, or
grieved or got angry over it or both or something else and that somehow provoked the
stroke. But I feel partly responsible for it, also that I wasn’t there when I possibly
could have been to help her when she got the stroke. And when I say “happens again”
I mean because I’ve done things like that before. Bad-mouthed people for inadequate
reasons—there probably aren’t any good ones—just to avoid seeing them that night,
for example, because they were preventing me from doing something I thought I might
want to—just their presence would—or they had achieved some sort of stature or success
that let’s say I secretly wanted, which I’m not saying she did though I have to admit
I admired her intelligence tremendously, and though nothing so bad as a stroke or
anything near it happened to any of them I always knew I was wrong in this attitude
and regretted it and told myself I wouldn’t do it again and sometimes only told myself
I should try my hardest not to.
I didn’t say what I really wanted to there, only because for whatever it is—my inability
to say things clearly and straight and because I really don’t have the means to—the
language, words, I’m simply unable to do it well, on paper and orally most of the
time also, besides not probably having the necessary kind of intelligence and insights.
I don’t even know if what I just said makes much sense, but let me get on with this.
I was where before? Where was I? I’m trying to convey another person and, without
being explicit, a person’s feelings about her death and the way it changes ordinary
life when it suddenly comes and what it can bring out in himself. That and more. Anyway,
first place she takes me to that first day—Monday—is Red Square.
“Krasnaya
—‘red’—I’d also like to teach you Russian words connected to the places we go to,
which is the easiest way to learn them—through practical identification. Like
ulitsa
—‘street’—which you’ll see everywhere after a word like Herzen or Gorki on buildings
and street-post signs, but first I must also teach you the Russian alphabet. And we
might as well get Krasnaya Ploschad out of the way—see what I mean now? You understood
without questioning me. But you can’t be allowed to return home without saying you’ve
been there, can you?”
“I think I can. But okay. Even though Marguerite and I went there the Saturday we
got here—she insisted I see it at night—I never saw it in the day and nothing was
open.”
“Shall we walk? It’s only two kilometers or and a half, and I can walk that far. It’s
supposed to be healthy for me besides.” I ask how the sidewalks are—“It looks cold
and wet out”—and she says icy and I suggest we take the metro or a cab. I didn’t want
her falling or holding on to me for so long a walk. “If you have dollars to pay or
packs of American cigarettes to show and give away we can get a cab, something most
Muscovites can’t do here. I doubt you’ll want to see inside the Kremlin buildings.
They’re rather vulgar—glittery jewels and gold and thrones—though you might want to
see the domes over the Kremlin. But Saint Basil’s in Krasnaya Ploschad has some of
the best of those and later today or tomorrow we’ll go to Novodevichy—
novo
, which is one of the forms of ‘new’—which I think has the city’s most beautiful of
them. And I’d like taking you by train to Novgorod, which to me has the world’s most
beautiful of all.”
She goes on like that. Steers me where she wants to go, doesn’t think much of my suggestions.
Arabat Street, where I’d like to get my gift buying done with:
matryoska
or
maritroska
dolls—I can never seem to get the word right—and painted wooden boxes and barrettes
and decorated potholders and things like that. “Exclusively for tourists,” she says,
“who want their pockets combed through and gypsy beggar boys to steal their wallets
and socks and shoes. Oh, they’ll do it, and with baby brothers on their backs to distract
you. But if you insist to go there, I won’t stop you, but it’s walk walk walk through
unruly crowds for practically one of your miles.” Chekhov Museum—“Ugly, not at all
brings to vivid life the personality and living style of the man. But you love him,
is that why? He’s not Tolstoi, but I like his work very much too.
‘Toska’
—that’s ‘misery’ or ‘grief or really ‘long drawn-out sorrow’-not translatable as one
word, and you can always remember it by the opera of the same name. A touching story.
Very few as good except ‘Ivan Ilyich,’ which is more than touching—it’s terrifying.
This man reconciling himself to death after such an empty, trivial—how should I say
it?—unenlightened life? I read it once a year. Just as your
War and Peace
there I try to every three years or anytime I need some tranquillity of spirit and
mind. You were right to bring only that book with you—it serves the place of an entire
library. Unfortunately there is little left of the Russian soul that’s in that novel.”
The most grandiose metro stations—“For tour buses to empty themselves out into only,
except for regular riders like myself who truly use it. You’ll be staring up at the
statuary and chandeliers while getting bumped by our rudest inhabitants, too ignorant
or impolite or perhaps too eager in a rush to excuse themselves, even to foreigners.
But you wish to see these stations—and the deepest you say, for some unexplained reasons?—then
we’ll go to these too.”