The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (7 page)

I reported these findings to Grisha Freidin. “Well look, there he is! Squadron Commander Trunov!” he exclaimed, peering at the film still I had brought, showing King Kong and the navy planes. “The image must have been in the collective unconscious,” he mused. “You know what we should do? We should go back to Hoover and look at all the anti-Bolshevik posters. I am certain that we will find one representing Bolshevism as a giant ape.”

He telephoned the archive directly and asked them to run a search for
ape
and
propaganda
in the poster database. The eighteen-page printout was waiting for me when I got there. Unfortunately, it included not just the keyword
ape
but any word beginning with
ape-
in any language.

The actual apes, once isolated from items such as “
Apertura a sinistra
” and “
25 lat Apelu Sztokholmskiego
,” proved to be few in number. First was a German poster of an ape in a Prussian hat, grabbing a woman in one paw, and holding in the other a club labeled “
Kultur
.” I had no idea how to interpret this image, but decided it wasn’t related to Bolshevism. Next was a Hungarian poster whose central figure, described in the catalogue as an “ape man,” looked more like an extremely ugly human, covered in blood, which he was attempting to wash off in the Danube at the foot of the Parliament.

Just as I was starting to wonder how I would break the news to Freidin, I happened upon an Italian World War II poster: “
La mostruosa minaccia torna a pesare sull’Europa
.” The monstrous menace of Bolshevism was represented as a bright red, embarrassed-looking ape, standing on a map of Europe and brandishing a sickle and hammer. The artist, possibly concerned that the ape hadn’t come out menacing enough, had taken the precaution of representing a masked figure of Death standing behind its shoulder.

One ape on a map of Europe, the other on the Empire State Building. I took off the white gloves; my work here was done.

Or so I thought. First, my copy was sent back to me with a note: “Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters.” I tried to explain that I myself wasn’t calling the Cossacks primitive monsters—I was only suggesting that others had felt that way. The exhibit coordinator disagreed. Others, she said,
didn’t
consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters: “In fact, Cossacks have a rather romantic image.”

I debated citing the entry for Cossack in Flaubert’s
Dictionary
of Received Ideas
—“Eats tallow candles”—but instead I simply observed the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim.

“Well, that’s really not the point. Anyway, you never know in California.”

A few days later, I began to receive phone calls about the “three-dimensional objects.” “Elif, glad I caught you! How would you feel if we put a fur hat in your Red Cavalry display case?”

I considered this. “What kind of fur hat?”

“Well, that’s the thing, I’m afraid it’s not quite authentic. Someone picked it up at a flea market in Moscow. But it looks, you know, like a Russian fur hat.”

“Thanks so much for asking me,” I said, “but I really think it should be up to Professor Freidin.”

“Oh,” she said. “Professor Freidin is not going to want that hat in the display case.”

“No,” I acknowledged.

The next day, the telephone rang again. “OK, Elif, tell me what you think: we’ll put, sort of lying along the bottom of your display case—a Cossack national costume.”

“A Cossack national costume?” I repeated.

“Well—well—OK,
the problem is
that it’s child’s size. It’s sort of a children’s Cossack costume. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, because it’s in a child’s size, it will definitely fit in the case, which might not happen with an adult-size costume.”

Nearly every day they thought of something new: a samovar, a Talmud, a three-foot rubber King Kong. Finally they settled on a giant Cossack saber, also, I suspect, acquired at the Moscow flea market. They put the saber in a case that had no semantic link to sabers, so people at the exhibit kept asking me what it meant. “Why didn’t it go in the display about
‘My First Goose’?” one visitor asked. “At least that story has a saber in it.”

By that time, the conference had begun. Scholars arrived from around the world: Russia, Hungary, Uzbekistan. One professor came from Ben Gurion with a bibliography called “Babelobibliografiya” and a talk titled “Babel, Bialik, and Bereavement.” But the star guests were Babel’s children: Nathalie, the daughter from his wife Evgeniya; and Lidiya, the daughter from Antonina Pirozhkova, with whom Babel lived his last years.

When it turned out that Antonina Pirozhkova would be in attendance, my classmate Josh was ecstatic. Josh’s parents were
Star Wars
fans and his full name is Joshua Sky Walker; to differentiate him from other Joshes, he was often called Skywalker. Skywalker was also working on the exhibit and, based on photographs from the 1930s, had developed a crush on Pirozhkova.

“Man, do I hope I get to pick
her
up from the airport,” he said.

“You do realize she must be more than ninety years old?”

“I don’t care—she is so hot. You don’t understand.”

I did understand, actually. I had noticed some Cossacks in the Rodchenko book whom I would gladly have picked up from the airport, were it not that, in accordance with my prediction, none of them came to the conference.

Skywalker, however, got his wish: he and his friend Fishkin, a native Russian speaker, were appointed to pick up Pirozhkova and Lidiya, the Sunday before the conference. I was initially supposed to pick up Nathalie Babel, but Nathalie Babel had called the department to warn that she
had a very heavy trunk: “You must send me a strong male graduate student. Otherwise, do not bother. I will take a bus.” So a male graduate student had been sent, and I had the afternoon free. I was cramming for my university orals, trying to read all eighteen pounds of the
Human Comedy
in one month, and was desperately speed-reading
Louis Lambert
when the telephone rang. It was Skywalker, who had apparently broken his foot the previous night at the Euromed 13 dance party, and wanted me to go pick up Pirozhkova and Lidiya. “You can’t miss them,” he said. “It’ll be, like, a ninety-year-old woman who is gorgeous and a fifty-year-old woman who looks exactly like Isaac Babel.”

“But—but what happened to Fishkin?”

“Fishkin went to Tahoe.”

“How do you mean, he went to Tahoe?”

“Well, it’s kind of a funny story, but the thing is that their plane lands in half an hour . . .”

I hung up the phone and rushed outside to dump all the garbage that had accumulated in my car. Realizing that I didn’t remember Antonina Pirozhkova’s patronymic, I ran back inside and Googled her. I was halfway out the door again when I also realized I had forgotten how to say “He broke his foot” in Russian. I looked that up, too. I wrote
BABEL
in big letters on a sheet of paper, stuffed it in my bag, and ran out the door, repeating “Antonina Nikolayevna,
slomal nogu
.”

I got to SFO ten minutes after their plane had landed. For half an hour I wandered around the terminal holding my
BABEL
sign, looking for a gorgeous ninety-year-old woman and a fifty-year-old woman who looked like Isaac Babel. Of the many people at the airport that day, none came close to matching this description.

In despair, I called Freidin and explained the situation.
There was a long silence. “They won’t be looking for you,” he said finally. “They’re expecting a boy.”

“That’s the thing,” I said. “What if they didn’t see a boy and, you know, they took a bus.”

“Well, my gut feeling is that they’re still there, in the airport.” He had been right about the Bolshevik ape, so I decided to keep looking. Sure enough, ten minutes later I spotted her sitting in a corner, wearing a white headband and surrounded by suitcases: a tiny elderly woman, nonetheless recognizable as the beauty from the archive photographs.

“Antonina Nikolayevna!” I exclaimed, beaming.

She glanced at me and turned slightly away, as if hoping I would disappear.

I tried again. “Excuse me, hello, are you here for the Babel conference?” She quickly turned toward me. “Babel,” she said, sitting up. “Babel, yes.”

“I’m so glad—I’m sorry you were waiting. A boy was going to get you, but he broke his foot.”

She gave me a look. “You are glad,” she observed, “you are smiling, but Lidiya is suffering and nervous. She went to look for a telephone.”

“Oh no!” I said, looking around. There were no telephones in sight. “I’ll go, I’ll look for her.”

“Why should you go, too? Then you’ll both be lost. Better you should sit here and wait.”

I sat, trying to look appropriately somber, and dialed Freidin again.

“Thank goodness,” he said. “I knew they would still be there. How is Pirozhkova? Is she very angry?”

I looked at Pirozhkova. She did look a bit angry. “I don’t know,” I said.

“They told me they would send a Russian boy,” she said loudly. “A boy who knows Russian.”

•   •   •

The atmosphere in the car was somehow tense. Lidiya, who did indeed look very much like her father, sat in the front seat, reading aloud from every billboard. “ ‘Nokia Wireless,’ ” she said. “ ‘Johnnie Walker.’ ”

Pirozhkova sat in the back and spoke only once the whole trip: “Ask her,” she told Lidiya, “what is that thing on her mirror.”

The thing on my mirror was a McDonald’s Happy Meal toy, a tiny stuffed Eeyore wearing a tiger suit. “It’s a toy,” I said.

“A toy,” Lidiya said loudly, half turning. “It’s an animal.”

“Yes, but what kind of animal?”

“It’s a donkey,” I said. “A donkey in a tiger suit.”

“You see, Mama?” said Lidiya loudly. “It’s a donkey in a tiger suit.”

“I don’t understand. Is there a story behind this?”

The story, to my knowledge, was that Tigger had developed a neurosis about being adopted and having no heritage, so Eeyore put on a tiger suit and pretended to be his relative. As I was thinking of how to explain this, another patch of orange caught my eye. I glanced at the dashboard: it was the low fuel warning light.

“It’s not my donkey,” I said, switching off the fan. “It’s my friend’s donkey.”

“What did she say?” Pirozhkova asked Lidiya.

“She said that it’s her friend’s donkey. So she doesn’t know why he’s wearing a tiger suit.”

“What?” said Pirozhkova.

Lidiya rolled her eyes. “She said that the donkey put on the tiger suit in order to look stronger in front of the other donkeys.”

There was a silence.

“I don’t think she said that,” said Pirozhkova.

We drove by another billboard: “ ‘Ted Lempert for State Senate.’ ”

“Ted Lempert,” Lidiya mused, then turned to me. “Who is this Ted Lempert?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he wants to be senator.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Lempert. I knew a Lempert once—an artist. His name was Vladimir. Vladimir Lempert.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to think of something to say. “I’m reading a novel by Balzac now about somebody called Louis Lambert.” I tried to pronounce “Lambert” to sound like “Lempert.”

We drove the rest of the way to the hotel in silence.

Babel’s first daughter, Nathalie, looked younger than her age (seventy-four), but her voice was fathomless, sepulchral, with heavy French
r
’s.

“YOUR HAND IS VERY COLD,” she told me when we were introduced. It was later that same evening, and all the conference participants were heading to the Hoover Pavilion for an opening reception.

“We have black squirrels here at Stanford,” another graduate student told Nathalie Babel, pointing at a squirrel. “Have you ever seen a black squirrel?”

Nathalie glanced vaguely in the direction of the squirrel. “I CANNOT SEE ANYTHING ANYMORE,” she said. “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk. For this reason,” she continued, eyeing the steep cement stairway to the pavilion, “everyone thinks I am always drunk.”

At the top of the stairs, two Chinese men were taking turns photographing each other with Viktor Zhivov, a Berkeley professor with a kind expression and a tobacco-stained Old Believer beard.

“Lots of Chinese,” I overheard someone say in Russian.

“True. It’s not clear why.”

“They’re taking pictures with Zhivov.”

“They want to prove that they’ve been to California. Ha! Ha!”

The two Chinese were in fact filmmakers, whose adaptation of the
Red Cavalry
cycle,
Qi Bing Jun
, was supposed to premiere in Shanghai the following year. (I believe the project was eventually canceled.) The screenwriter was tall, round-faced, smiled a lot, and spoke very good English; the director was short, slight, serious, and didn’t seem to speak at all. Both wore large cameras around their necks.

In the Chinese
Red Cavalry
, the screenwriter told us, Cossacks would be transformed into “barbarians from the north of China”; the Jewish narrator would be represented by a Chinese intellectual. “There are not so many differences between Jews and Chinese,” he explained. “They give their children violin lessons, and they worry about money. Lyutov will be a Chinese, but he will still have ‘spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.’ ” At
nose
, he touched his nose, and at
heart
, he struck his chest. The director nodded.