In the Country of Last Things (18 page)

Once or twice a week, Victoria would ask me to accompany Boris Stepanovich on his rounds through the city—his “buy-sell expeditions,” as he called them. It’s not that I was able to help him very much, but I was always happy for the chance to leave my work, even if only for a few hours. Victoria understood that, I think, and she was careful
not to push me too hard. My mood remained low, and for the most part I continued to be in a fragile state of mind—easily upset, grumpy and uncommunicative for no apparent reason. Boris Stepanovich was probably good medicine for me, and I began looking forward to our little excursions as a break from the monotony of my thoughts.

I was never a party to Boris’s buying trips (where he found the food for Woburn House and how he managed to locate the things we ordered from him), but I often observed him as he went about the business of selling the objects that Victoria had chosen to liquidate. He took a ten percent cut from these deals, but to watch him in action you would have thought he was working entirely for himself. Boris made it a rule never to go to the same Resurrection Agent more than once a month. As a consequence, we ranged widely over the city, setting off in a new direction each time, often wandering into territories I had never seen before. Boris had once owned a car—a Stutz Bearcat, he claimed—but the condition of the streets had become too undependable for him, and he now did all his traveling on foot. Tucking the object that Victoria had given him under his arm, he would improvise routes as we walked along, always making certain to avoid the crowds. He would take me through back alleys and deserted paths, stepping neatly over the gutted pavement, navigating the numerous hazards and pitfalls, swerving now to his left, now to his right, not once breaking the rhythm of his step. He moved with surprising agility for a man of his girth, and I often had trouble keeping pace with him. Humming songs to himself, rattling on about one thing or another, Boris would dance along with nervous good humor as I trotted on behind. He seemed to know all the Resurrection Agents, and
each one called forth a different routine from him: bursting through the door with open arms on some, slinking in quietly on others. Each personality had its vulnerable spot, and Boris always worked his pitch to the heart of it. If an agent had a weakness for flattery, Boris would flatter him; if an agent was fond of the color blue, Boris would give him something blue. Some had a preference for decorous behavior, others liked to play at being chums, still others were all business. Boris indulged them all, lying through his teeth without the slightest twinge of conscience. But that was part of the game, and not for a moment did Boris ever think it was not a game. His stories were preposterous, but he invented them so quickly, came up with such elaborate details, kept talking with an air of such conviction, that it was hard not to find yourself getting sucked in. “My dear good man,” he would say, for example. “Take a careful look at this teacup. Hold it in your hand, if you wish. Close your eyes, put it to your lips, and imagine yourself drinking tea from it—just as I did thirty-one years ago, in the drawing rooms of Countess Oblomov. I was young back in those days, a student of literature at the university, and thin, if you can believe it, thin and handsome, with a beautiful head of curly hair. The Countess was the most ravishing woman in Minsk, a young widow of supernatural charms. The Count, scion of the great Oblomov fortune, had been killed in a duel—an affair of honor, which I need not discuss here—and you can imagine the effect this had on the men of her circle. Her suitors became legion; her salons were the envy of all Minsk. Such a woman, my friend, the image of her beauty has never left me: the brilliant red hair; the white, heaving bosom; the eyes flashing with wit—and yes, an ever-so-elusive hint of wickedness. It was enough
to drive one mad. We vied with one another for her attention, we worshiped her, we wrote poetry to her, we were all deliriously in love. And yet it was I, the young Boris Stepanovich, it was I who succeeded in winning the favors of this singular temptress. I tell you this in all modesty. If you had been able to see me then, you would understand how this was possible. There were trysts in remote corners of the city, late-night meetings, secret visits to my garret (she would travel through the streets in disguise), and that long, rapturous summer I spent as a guest on her country estate. The Countess overwhelmed me with her generosity—not only of her person, which would have been enough, I assure you, more than enough!—but of the gifts she brought with her, the endless kindnesses she bestowed on me. A leather-bound set of Pushkin. A silver samovar. A gold watch. So many things, I could never list them all. Among them was an exquisite tea set that had once belonged to a member of the French court (the duc de Fântomas, I believe), which I used only when she came to visit me, hoarding it for those times when passion flung her across the snow-driven streets of Minsk and into my arms. Alas, time has been cruel. The set has suffered the fate of the years: saucers have cracked, cups have broken, a world has been lost. And yet, for all that, a single remnant has survived, a final link to the past. Treat it gently, my friend. You are holding my memories in your hand.”

The trick, I think, was his ability to make inert things come to life. Boris Stepanovich steered the Resurrection men away from the objects themselves, coaxing them into a realm where the thing for sale was no longer the teacup but the Countess Oblomov herself. It didn’t matter whether these stories were true or not. Once Boris’s voice began
working, it was enough to muddle the issue entirely. That voice was probably his greatest weapon. He possessed a superb range of modulations and timbres, and in his speeches he was always looping back and forth between hard sounds and soft, allowing the words to rise and fall as they poured out in a dense, intricately fashioned barrage of syllables. Boris had a weakness for hackneyed phrases and literary sentiments, but for all the deadness of the language, the stories were remarkably vivid. Delivery meant everything, and Boris did not hesitate to use even the lowest tricks. If necessary, he would cry real tears. If the situation called for it, he would smash an object on the floor. Once, to prove his faith in a set of fragile-looking glasses, he juggled them in the air for better than five minutes. I was always slightly embarrassed by these performances, but there was no question that they worked. Value is determined by supply and demand, after all, and the demand for precious antiques was hardly very great. Only the rich could afford them—the black market profiteers, the garbage brokers, the Resurrection Agents themselves—and it would have been wrong of Boris to insist on their utility. The whole point was that they were extravagances, things to possess because they functioned as symbols of wealth and power. Hence the stories about the Countess Oblomov and eighteenth-century French dukes. When you bought an antique vase from Boris Stepanovich, you were not just getting a vase, you were getting an entire world to go along with it.

Boris’s apartment was in a small building on Turquoise Avenue, not more than ten minutes from Woburn House. After completing our business with the Resurrection Agents, we often went back there for a glass of tea. Boris was very
fond of tea, and he usually served some kind of pastry to go along with it—scandalous treats from the House of Cakes on Windsor Boulevard: cream puffs, cinnamon buns, chocolate eclairs, all bought at horrific expense. Boris could not resist these minor indulgences, however, and he savored them slowly, his chewing accompanied by a faint musical rumbling in his throat, a steady undercurrent of sound that fell somewhere between laughter and a prolonged sigh. I took pleasure in these teas as well, but less for the food than for Boris’s insistence on sharing it with me. My young widow friend is too wan, he would say. We must put more flesh on her bones, bring the bloom back to her cheeks, the bloom in the eyes of Miss Anna Blume herself. It was hard for me not to enjoy such treatment, and there were times when I sensed that all of Boris’s ebullience was no more than a charade he performed for my benefit. One by one, he took on the roles of clown and scoundrel and philosopher, but the better I got to know him, the more I saw them as aspects of a single personality—marshaling its various weapons in an effort to bring me back to life. We became dear friends, and I owe Boris a debt for his compassion, for the devious and persistent attack he launched on the strongholds of my sadness.

The apartment was a shabby, three-room affair, cluttered with years of accumulation throughout—crockery, clothes, suitcases, blankets, rugs, every manner of bric-a-brac. Immediately upon returning home, Boris would withdraw to his bedroom and change out of his suit, carefully hanging it in the closet and then putting on a pair of old pants, slippers, and his bathrobe. This last item was a rather fantastical souvenir from the bygone days—a full-length concoction made of red velvet, with an ermine collar
and cuffs, completely ragged by now, with moth holes in the sleeves and frayed material all along the back—but Boris wore it with his customary panache. After slicking back the strands of his thinning hair and dousing his neck with cologne, he would come striding out into the cramped and dusty living room to prepare the tea.

For the most part, he regaled me with stories of his life, but there were other times when we would look at various things in the room and talk about them—the boxes of curios, the bizarre little treasures, the detritus of a thousand buy-sell expeditions. Boris was particularly proud of his hat collection, which he stored in a large wooden trunk by the window. I don’t know how many he had in there, but two or three dozen I would think, perhaps more. Sometimes, he would pick out a couple of them for us to wear while we were having our tea. This game amused him very much, and I admit that I enjoyed it myself, although I would be hard-pressed to explain why. There were cowboy hats and derbies, fezes and pith helmets, mortarboards and berets—every kind of headgear you could imagine. Whenever I asked Boris why he collected them, he would give me a different answer. Once, he said that wearing hats was part of his religion. Another time, he explained that each of his hats had once belonged to a relative and that he wore them in order to commune with the souls of his dead ancestors. By putting on a hat, he acquired the spiritual qualities of its former owner, he said. True enough, he had given each of his hats a name, but I took those more as projections of his private feelings about the hats than as representing people who had actually lived. The fez, for example, was Uncle Abduhl. The derby was Sir Charles. The mortarboard was Professor Solomon. On still another occasion, however,
when I brought up the subject again, Boris explained that he liked to wear hats because they kept his thoughts from flying out of his head. If we both wore them while we drank our tea, then we were bound to have more intelligent and stimulating conversations. “
Le chapeau influence le cerveau
,” he said, lapsing into French. “
Si on protège la tête, la pensée n’est plus bête
.”

There was only one time when Boris ever seemed to let his guard down, and that was the talk I remember best, the one that stands out most vividly for me now. It was raining that afternoon—a dreary, all-day soak—and I dawdled longer than usual, reluctant to leave the warmth of the apartment and go back to Woburn House. Boris was in an oddly pensive mood, and for the better part of the visit I had done most of the talking. Just when I finally mustered the courage to put on my coat and say good-bye (I remember the smell of damp wool, the reflections of the candles in the window, the cavelike interiority of the moment), Boris reached out for my hand and held it tightly in his own, looking up at me with a grim, enigmatic smile.

“You must understand that it’s all an illusion, my dear,” he said.

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, Boris.”

“Woburn House. It’s built on a foundation of clouds.”

“It seems perfectly solid to me. I’m there every day, you know, and the house has never moved. It hasn’t even wobbled.”

“For now, yes. But give it a little time, and then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“How much time is ‘a little time’?”

“However long it takes. The fifth-floor rooms can hold
only so much, you understand, and sooner or later there won’t be anything left to sell. The stock is growing thin already—and once a thing is gone, there’s no getting it back.”

“Is that so terrible? Everything ends, Boris. I don’t see why Woburn House should be any different.”

“It’s fine for you to say that. But what about poor Victoria?”

“Victoria isn’t stupid. I’m sure she’s thought about these things herself.”

“Victoria is also stubborn. She’ll hold out until the last glot has been spent, and then she’ll be no better off than the people she’s been trying to help.”

“Isn’t that her business?”

“Yes and no. I promised her father that I would look after her, and I’m not about to break my word. If only you could have seen her when she was young—years ago, before the collapse. So beautiful, so filled with life. It torments me to think that anything bad could happen to her.”

“I’m surprised at you, Boris. You sound like a rank sentimentalist.”

“We all speak our own language of ghosts, I’m afraid. I’ve read the handwriting on the wall, and none of it encourages me. The Woburn House funds will run out. I have additional resources in this apartment, of course”—and here Boris made a sweeping gesture that took in all the objects in the room—”but these too will be quickly exhausted. Unless we begin to look ahead, there won’t be much future for any of us.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Make plans. Consider the possibilities. Act.”

“And you expect Victoria to go along with you?”

“Not necessarily. But if I have you on my side, at least there’s a chance.”

“What makes you think I could have any influence on her?”

“The eyes in my head. I see what’s going on over there, Anna. Victoria has never responded to anyone the way she has to you. She’s positively smitten.”

“We’re just friends.”