The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (35 page)

One night, to my incredulity, he told me that he had been celibate for the past seven years. Seven years ago, he explained, he had experienced a period of total, shattering lucidity, and
fell in love with a girl who was obsessed with a Slovenian disc jockey. He had pursued the girl desperately, determined to tear her away from the DJ, regardless of whether he had to annihilate himself in the process. He got the girl, for a time, but they drove each other mad, quite literally. She ran away to Ljubljana. He followed her. She rushed to the top floor of her hotel and tried to throw herself from a window. Realizing he was on the verge of destroying both her and himself, Matej fled to Venice, holed himself up in a pension, and decided to read every book Nietzsche had ever written. In his state of lucidity, he not only understood immediately everything Nietzsche was trying to say, but also effortlessly identified where Nietzsche had made his mistakes. Matej began to write a philosophical work addressing the mistakes made by Nietzsche, but became distracted by a message being spelled to him by the keys hanging behind the desk of the pension. He spent three more weeks in Venice, obsessed by those keys, before he ran out of money and returned to Zagreb, where he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. He refused to take lithium. He said his brain was trying to convey a message to him, an important message about how he was living his life, and he had to figure it out on his own.

A few nights after this confession, when we had both drunk more than usual, Matej and I ended up in bed together. The next morning, I had never seen anyone in so black a mood, almost visibly black. It was as if I had stolen his soul.

People were usually surprised to learn that chain-smoking, hard-drinking Matej came from a seriously Catholic family. He was the eldest of eight brothers and sisters spaced out over fifteen years.

“Man, that is one long history of your dad banging your
mom!” yelled one of the weird characters who followed Matej everywhere—a Portuguese mathematician who I think had a mild form of Tourette’s.

“I’m glad to hear you have an accurate grasp of the mechanism,” Matej replied.

The most unexpected feature of Matej’s family background was his great-uncle Pavao, who was not only a cardinal but had been archbishop of Zagreb for more than twenty years. We only half believed in the existence of Matej’s ecclesiastical great-uncle—until the day he died and
The New York Times
ran an obituary remembering Pavao, aka “the Rock of Croatia,” for rebuilding the Croatian Church after communism and preaching tolerance during the Balkan wars.

In his capacity as a leftist Catholic intellectual, Matej had already read Girard in college, and at Stanford he persuaded us all to take a class on French social thought taught by a Girardian with a joint appointment at the École Polytechnique. And when Girard himself came out of retirement to teach a literature class on mimetic theory, we all signed up.

We were all fascinated by Girard’s theory, but it also irritated us. Matej said our resistance only testified to the strength of our romantic individualist delusions, and to the truth of mimetic theory. His Girardianism became the sign and symbol of his inaccessibility, the thing we all resented about him: the way he always came late and left early, inhabited a near-empty apartment, insisted on dining every day at exactly six fifteen at his depressing eating club. Such behavior was consistent with a Girardian mediator, with an iron-willed narcissist who “universalizes, industrializes asceticism for the sake of desire”; by acting in this way, Matej was thereby supporting his side in the ongoing argument, proving that we were all the slaves of our own egotistical desires.

After the night we spent together, Matej began avoiding
me. When I confronted him about it, he said that my obsession with him—it was true that by that time I, like everyone else, was obsessed with him—was a sign of sickness. “I can’t cure your metaphysical lack,” he told me irritably. “I can’t do anything for you. All I can do is make you miserable.” He paused and started patting his pockets, looking for his cigarettes. “You think I’m different from you; you think I have something you lack. But there’s no difference between us. You and I are very similar—we’re exactly the same.”

Matej often brought up the subject of our supposed similarity, which struck me as frankly ludicrous. What about us was the same? He had spent his high-school years drinking coffee in basements during bomb scares, reading Max Scheler, becoming convinced that he was a member of the zoo commission and had to inspect the living conditions of every elephant in Europe. He believed that the only way to be good was to imitate Jesus, that Kant’s categorical imperative represented a dilution of the Sermon on the Mount, that suicide was immoral because human life doesn’t belong to the individual. What did it mean to say we were the same, when all our experiences and beliefs were different?

In the final analysis, this is what was so hurtful about Girardianism: it made love totally worthless. The curiosity and empathy engendered by love, which I found so valuable, were redescribed as flaws of human nature. The drive to commit generous errors, which I thought of as the only possible egress from the prison of self-interest and inertia, was made out to be a form of egotism. “The characters in
The Possessed
offer themselves as sacrifice, and offer to Stavrogin everything that is most precious to them,” Girard writes, and such sacrifice is understood to be shameful, vain, the opposite of generous.

Furthermore, the entire Girardian enterprise began to strike me as hypocritical. If Girard was right about the
human condition, the only appropriate course of action was to stop what we were doing, all of us,
right now
. If novels were really about what he said they were about, then their production should cease. All we really needed was one novel, and we would all read it and realize, like St. Augustine, that the basic premises of literary narrative—love and ambition—could bring only misery. Renouncing our desires, we would give ourselves up to spiritual contemplation. We would abandon our program of becoming scholars: what use were scholars in a world where knowledge, learning, and the concept of difference turned out to be a mirage?

The mood in our circle became increasingly strained. Keren dreamed that the Turks had taken over the world, and that she herself had been complicit: she had had a job in Jerusalem interviewing people about their fears, and now the Turks were using this information to terrorize people into submission.

Fishkin, who was also in the Girard class, dreamed that he was beating up Matej, in a fight over the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans. Fishkin hit Matej in the face, and Matej, bleeding from his nose, kept saying: “We just can’t forget.”

I dreamed that Matej and I were in the Rose Garden in Konya, immobilized by swarming hordes of pilgrims. Matej wanted to go inside the mausoleum of Mevlana Rumi, which filled me with inexplicable dread. I tried to discourage him, but he dodged me in the crowd. I hurried up the steps after him, but couldn’t go inside—I didn’t have a head scarf. I asked the custodian to lend me one of the scarves they keep there for tourists. In my haste, I posed the request in an undiplomatic way, not bothering to hide that my aim was only to get my friend, and not to pay my respects to Rumi. The custodian drew himself up. “If you really want to get in,” he said, not meeting my eyes, “you have to tell me one thing: do you
know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost?”

I said I did.

“Oh? Then you can’t go in!”

“But—but I don’t really know the difference. I mean, I know they’re two separate parts of the trinity, but then they say the trinity is the same as the godhead . . . I hear that even for Catholics it’s supposed to be a big mystery. Anyway, if I’m not allowed in,” I added, “you should definitely send someone in there to get my friend, because he really
does
know the difference between the Lord our Father and the Holy Ghost.”

“Not my problem,” said the custodian, blocking the door. I tried to look around him, but all I could see was the tomb itself, covered with its green cloth.

Matej spent the summer in Croatia, and I managed to stop thinking about him. In fact, I ended up dating one of his best friends, Max, who had formed the deep conviction that he and I belonged together.

“I think it’s an illusion,” I told Max when he explained to me his views. “I can’t actually cure your metaphysical lack.” But I didn’t have it in my heart to turn away what looked to me, and what turned out really to be, love.

Nonetheless, when school started again in September, Matej and I found ourselves living in the same on-campus single-student residence, and somehow immediately lapsed into our old habits, meeting several nights a week, staying up half the night, talking about Proust (whom we were both reading for the first time), and making sentimental declarations to each other. “But what will become of us?” I remember asking.

“You’ll become a writer,” he replied.

“But what about you?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about me.”

The idea that I had fallen prey to Matej’s Onegin-like Byronism had meanwhile become a joke between us. One day as we were leaving his apartment, he picked up a scarf that Keren had forgotten there, and stuffed it in the back pocket of his jeans.

“OK, let’s go,” he said. I started to laugh. “What? Do I look ridiculous?”

“No—you look jaunty and Byronic!”

But then one night it happened again. We were talking about the problem of the person: “If you’re stroking someone’s hair, is that a sign of affection, or is that the affection itself?” We spent the night together, and I somehow even thought things might work out this time—I would just have to find some way of explaining it to Max. But the next morning, over stale English muffins, Matej informed me that he was thinking of joining a Carthusian monastery he had seen in Slovenia, where the monks grew some kind of herbs. Staring at him in disbelief, I said the first thing that came to my head: “But they take a vow of silence, and you can’t be quiet for two minutes straight!”

“That’s the point,” he snapped. “It would be hard for me.”

I threw out my half-eaten muffin and left, feeling like someone had kicked me in the stomach, like I had hit the bottom of some kind of abyss and had lost touch with everything real.

“There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in
Demons
.
“Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.

On the same subject, Proust writes of a moment when, “after a certain year,” extremely close friends, as if by agreement, “cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.” These lines occur in a passage about old age—about how death insidiously seeps into life toward the end, enveloping the stillliving subject in its chrysalis. But who knows how these things really happen? Maybe death didn’t separate those friends at all. Maybe they had to will themselves to stop seeing one another, precisely in order to let death in.

The last time I saw Matej was on a beautiful September afternoon in San Francisco. His eighteen-year-old brother, Luka, was visiting from Zagreb, and the three of us went to the zoo. I remember that Matej treated me with a certain extra gentleness—he had always opened my car door, but that day he also closed it after me. Luka turned out to be a younger and impossibly skinnier copy of Matej, with the same narrow, slightly squinting eyes. It was like meeting a Matej from the past, one lost to me forever. In the zoo we spent a long time watching the penguins, the varied saucereyed creatures of Madagascar, and the primates, Matej’s favorite: “Human, all too human,” he sighed before the longfaced patas monkey. Luka had never seen an anteater before, and squinted at it with almost frightening intensity. Last of all we visited the koalas. “ ‘Blind, helpless, and smaller than a nickel, the tiny embryo must find its way to its mother’s pouch,’ ” I read from the educational display, and Matej and
I both started laughing at the joke before he said it: “Such is the nature of life on this earth.”

Shortly after our trip to the zoo, Stanford comp lit held a departmental lunch for students and faculty. At this lunch, which I was unable to attend, Matej sat next to my adviser and told her, inaccurately and unaccountably, that I blamed her for my poor performance on the university orals exam the previous year, which I had passed, but just barely. (The exam had taken place at the height of the demonic period, during a record-setting heat wave, and I had delivered an apparently very weird talk on conspiracy theories in the nineteenth-century novel.)

To this day, I have no idea why Matej would have said such a thing to my adviser, with whom he wasn’t even acquainted; that was their first conversation, and was later relayed to me independently by both Luba and my adviser. I wrote Matej a caustic e-mail. He didn’t reply. A few weeks later I heard that he was dating an Israeli linguist who had been to high school with Keren; that Keren had passed her exams but had fallen into a depression and put on an improbable amount of weight; that the homeless guy, Bobby, had colonized Daniel’s bedroom and was using it to run a bicycle repair shop.