Mother Russia (25 page)

Mother Russia

Post Scriptum: It strikes me rereading this that the difference between the written and the oral is that in the written you get no sense at all of my silences. Half a millimeter separates sentences but I crawl across the gap like a microscopic inch-worm, sometimes in an hour, sometimes (if I am preoccupied) in a day. Without a sense of my silences what can you know about me? Ha! Without my silences I am all talk. But that’s another story
.

2 May

Dear Mister Singer
,

Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section

United States of America Ministry of Trade
,

Export Section

United States of America Embassy, Moscow

Soviet Foreign Ministry

United States of America Foreign Ministry

Chief Editor, The New York Times

Chief Editor, Pravda

Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine

Chief Editor, Time magazine

Chief Editor, L’Express

E. Kennedy

J.-P. Sartre

A. Malraux

B. Russell

S. de Beauvoir

Amnesty International

For God’s sake, forget the Shuttle Race, I don’t want it anymore. You remember my attic with the pale nails I told you about, well he’s been arrested. He was telling the truth in Red Square when they pounced on him. He is innocent and his arrest only proves what I always said, which is that innocence isn’t pertinent anymore. I haven’t the time to send you details of how he got where he got but only ask, even beg, you: HELP
.

Mother Russia

Post Scriptum: I should have seen the handwriting on the wall when the blue-coated brutes let Vladimir Ilyich escape. But that’s another story
.

26 May

My very dear Mister Singer
,

Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section

United States of America Ministry of Trade
,

Export Section

United States of America Embassy, Moscow

Soviet Foreign Ministry

United States of America Foreign Ministry

Chief Editor, The New York Times

Chief Editor, Pravda

Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine

Chief Editor, Time magazine

Chief Editor, L’Express

E. Kennedy

J.-P. Sartre

A. Malraux

B. Russell

S. de Beauvoir

Amnesty International

Chief Psychiatrist, Soviet Ministry of Health

Chief Psychiatrist, United States of America

Ministry of Health

World Health Organization, Mental Department

Vladimir Ilyich (I apologize profusely for not explaining) is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, my parrot who flew the coop when the boys in blue with their sad sagging eyelids and expressionless mouths were searching for certain manuscripts which prove a certain author is a plagiarist. As for my attic, he was, I found out after several weeks of nosing (do you say the same thing?) around, in an insane asylum, which is an institution the less said about the better. A very greasy doctor with a mental stutter who directed one of these state hotels once told me in all seriousness that the great combats in the world are not between Capitalists vs. Communists or haves vs. have-nots or heads vs. hearts or blacks vs. whites or young vs. old or warm vs. cold or south vs. north or even men vs. women but (are you ready for this one?) oral vs. anal. This is not so of course because as every sane person knows the great combats in the world are between those who try and those who don’t My attic tried and for his trouble was hauled off to the loony bin on the grounds that an attempt to uncover a truth is prima facie evidence of insanity, when everyone knows that insanity is really a question of where the majority is. Here I know horn painful personal experience they can lock you in the bin and throw away the key for being too calm or too passionate or too sexy or too sexless. What (I put it to you) are irritability, neurasthenia, neurosis, hypochondria, anxiety, insomnia, agitation, absent-mindedness, eccentricity except manifestations of normality, but our hyenas of psychiatry (and I suspect yours too) take the absolutely scandalous view that people create the problems they enjoy not coping with and then lock them up for not coping. God help each and every one of us when we live in an epoch where eyebrows are raised it you are imaginative enough to see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower. Well, I’m doing everything under the sun to get my attic out of the bin, which is why I don’t understand at all your attitude about it being inappropriate for Singer to interfere in the internal affairs of another country. There is only one country in the world and we are all (God help us) in it I’ve practically chained myself to my old Remington and fired off zingers to (among others) the head of the Soviet Academy of Science, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, the Prosecutor General and my old slow-witted school chum who is, believe it or not, none other than the Secretary General of the Central Committee, little Leonid Brezhnev. So far all to no avail and I am getting desperate because (dear God, how can I explain it to you so you will understand?) my attic hasn’t been charged with any crime, he has simply and utterly been swallowed by a building that seems to have more shadows than others. All this (I give you my word of honor as a Libra) because he knew something that was true and tried to tell others about it, because he tried to walk on water, move mountains, work up a sweat from a noneconomic activity, which now that I think about it is something you, dear Mister Singer, could do too. Hoping against hope that you can bring this matter to the attention of someone who can help I remain more than ever convinced that (in the words of our angelic Mendelstam) the earth for us has been worth a thousand heavens
.

Mother Russia

Post Scriptum: Rereading your letters I can see you really don’t understand my comment that the only way to observe life is to sit like A. Toklas with your back turned to it Why I think this is because more often than not observing tends to distort what we are trying to observe and hence renders it unobservable. Like for instance a television camera at a mob scene, or better still a blind man trying to feel the shape and texture of a snowflake with his fingertips. From whence Bows my theory that we are permitted (even obliged) to participate. But no just looking. But that’s another story
.

14 July

Mister Singer
,

Copies to: Soviet Ministry of Trade, Import Section

United States of America Ministry of Trade
,

Export Section

United States of America Embassy, Moscow

Soviet Foreign Ministry

United States of America Foreign Ministry

Chief Editor, The New York Times

Chief Editor, Pravda

Chief Editor, Newsweek magazine

Chief Editor, Time magazine

Chief Editor, L’Express

E. Kennedy

J.-P. Sartre

A. Malraux

B. Russell

S. de Beauvoir

Amnesty International

Chief Psychiatrist, Soviet Ministry of Health

Chief Psychiatrist, United States of America

Ministry of Health

World Health Organization, Mental Department

R. Nixon, President of the United States of America

L. Brezhnev, Secretary General of the

Central Committee of the Soviet Union

I ask you to excuse this long delay in answering your last burst but I have my hands (and come to think of it my heart) more or less full with my attic with the pale nails. He has emerged, thanks God, from the building with more than its share of shadows, in what condition I won’t tell you, suffice it to say that he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) talk except in his sleep. He ran a fever which is gone now during which he tossed and turned and ranted on about coming from the future or the past (I’m not sure which) and shattered eyeglasses and bucks never stopping and riding animals he was afraid to identify. The single thing that I understood was that they had tricked him (I’m still not sure how) into telling where he had hidden the original manuscripts, which was in a snake pit in a village near Moscow where an apprentice hustler raises vipers to sell to the militia, which is something my attic did when he was just starting out. As soon as he was up and around, he took the electric train to the suburbs to make sure the manuscripts were gone, which I don’t need to tell you they were, for which I was frankly just as happy because it meant the affair was finished, only it wasn’t. It wasn’t because (and this I only just found out) the attic went to an American journalist he knows to get him to publish chez vous the truth about the plagiarist, but the journalist said that rumors of the plagiarism have been around forty years and without proof (which is to say without the original manuscripts) there was nothing to be done. But he (if I have the sequence right) told the attic he could put him in touch with someone who might be able to help him get the manuscripts back and the attic, with his skin now paler than his nails and all the time writing notes instead of talking, said all right, though there was more involved in organizing the meeting than simply agreeing to it The attic had to write a particular phrase on a particular wall, something about how he’s seen the future and it needs work (whatever that means) after which he would find behind a radiator in the lobby of a public building a slip of paper giving him the time and place of the rendezvous, and it is here that the story will interest you, Mister Singer, because the rendezvous turned out (at least so the attic says) to be with the new Moscow representative of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, a man with a shiny bald scalp and long pinky nail who said his name was Kolwradenor, which he jokingly explained stands for Kolchak-Wrangel-Denikin-Organizers of Counter Revolution. Kolwradenor (are you still with me, Mister Singer?) took the attic for a walk in a park where they couldn’t be overheard and told him that although there was no possibility of regaining possession of the lost manuscripts he (which is to say Kolwradenor) had friends who could fabricate the manuscripts. To which my poor attic scribbled on a pad that you couldn’t prove a truth with a nontruth. To which Kolwradenor replied that the lost manuscripts had been fabricated too. I will admit to you, I weep as I write this. The lost manuscripts were fabricated! As for my attic, he removed his broken heart from the presence of the Singer Sewing Machine Company representative, who from my attic’s description sounds like none other than Chuvash Al-hakim bi’amrillahi, the seventy-first incarnation of God, and also Melor, a certain KGB interrogator, all wrapped up into one. For a long while I thought my attic was off his rocker and inventing all of the above. You, my dear sheltered Mister Singer, will probably think we’re both stark raving, my attic and me, but we finally figured it all out and here it is: Your CIA and our KGB are the same organization, there is no other explanation for it And Kolwradenor-Melor-Chuvash is their Moscow bureau chief. Which has the advantage of cutting down on overhead and salaries and permitting a degree of coordination that wouldn’t be possible it they had separate offices. Being a businessman yourself you will appreciate the cost-effectiveness of the scheme immediately. It was Kolwradenor (I’ll bet my remaining parrots) who organized it so we would all wind up in the same house and then dropped the fabricated manuscripts in our collective laps. Why? I can hear you asking. My guess is that it wasn’t to expose the plagiarism (what does he care about plagiarism?) but to set the bosses on the Politburo against each other. I’m as certain of it as I am that I am perfectly sane that your CIA meant for it to be discovered that the manuscripts were fabricated, and that it was the falsity which would cause the dissension, since one side would assume the other had fabricated the evidence in order to discredit it. Melor of course was simply playing the game and doing his best to avoid the dissension by preventing the manuscripts (which he knew were fabricated) from surfacing. My attic asked Kolwradenor what his bosses would do to him now that he had failed and he claims Kolwradenor replied that since the combat in the world is the Intelligence people vs. Everyone, he had nothing to worry about inasmuch as it is the intelligence people who decide between themselves who will win what round, the important thing being to keep the game going. All of which (you can imagine, can’t you?) left my attic in quite a fragile state, so much so that he wrote across Kolwradenor’s door with some kind of cream he squeezed from a tube that he hoped in his next incarnation he would again be a victim. On his way back here the attic spotted by chance in a pharmacy window a new product called the cotton toothpick, which turns out to be the very same Q-Tips I told you about (do you remember?) some letters back. It seems they are quite poor specimens inasmuch as there is not enough cotton at the points, which are in any case dangerously sharp. A thousand applications is what the publicity boasted, but there was one they never imagined in their wildest moments. The attic (poor dear) was very agitated, he kept asking how can you prove a truth with a nontruth? and writing that there were some things in the world which he couldn’t bear to hear. Right there in front of my eyes (do you have a strong stomach, Mister Singer?) he punctured his ear drums with the sharp tips of the cotton toothpicks. First one, then the other. He didn’t bleed very much you’ll be relieved to know, but it was extremely painful and he did make himself deaf, which has a certain symmetry because the only one in the world he really wants to hear isn’t able to speak. The newfound deafness drove him into a depression from which he seems (thanks God) to be finally emerging, though he still doesn’t touch wood. He has started learning to lip-read and only yesterday, smiling in a way I had never seen him smile before, he handed me a note saying something about how if Q-Tips come can vaginal deodorant spray be far behind. Trusting you too, dear Mister Singer, will be a victim in your next incarnation I remain