Appassionata (16 page)

Anzor’s breathing is coming harder, and she places a soothing hand on his chest. “Once …” he begins, and pauses, as if deciding whether to continue. “There was this Soviet recruiter who came from a university in Moscow to talk to me. I was fifteen. I really wanted to go. We all did. I mean, we were young and we were dying to get out, to be part of the world. So I suppose … I was nice to the recruiter. He was not much older than me, and I drank with him and maybe laughed too much.”

“What happened?” she asks, although she’s half afraid of what he’ll say.

“Nothing really
happened
,” Anzor says. “After the recruiter left, my father simply looked at me. He sat still and stared straight at me. His eyes were filled with this … contempt. Cold contempt. I tried to stare back, to say something icy and disdainful. But I couldn’t. I was … paralyzed. Finally, I looked away.” He pauses, before bringing out the next sentence. “I had been defeated.”

“And he didn’t say anything …” Isabel says wonderingly.

“He did. After he knew he’d … squashed me. He said, ‘We in this country have very little. But we have our pride. Our honor. Today you have dishonored yourself.’”

“But—” Isabel begins.

“No,” Anzor cuts in, curtailing her protest. “The old man was right. That day I lost some part of my honor.”

She has been following each turn of his account as if she had been part of the scene he has summoned; but she is suddenly impatient at the solemnity of his tone.

“Oh, come on,” she says. “Isn’t that a bit … exaggerated?” She hears him breathing harder, and backtracks. “I mean, aren’t you being hard on yourself?”

His voice is knife-sharp in its disdain. “Hard on yourself,” he
repeats, scornfully. “Those wonderful … phrases you have here. Hard on yourself. You can say that only if your life has been … very easy. If you don’t understand what people must do to retain their honor. Their dignity.”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I only meant—” He turns to her sharply. “I meant that you were so young,” she says, trying to sound casual, to dispel the tension. “You couldn’t be expected to behave like some … ancient Roman falling on his sword all the time.”

She thinks he might see the humor of it, but he doesn’t. “No, not Roman,” he says instead. “A Chechen. We have our sense of honor too.”

“Oh, I am sure …” she begins, and then realizes she is about to fall into some kind of deflating irony again; and that she mustn’t. For a moment, she wishes she could lighten up, crack a joke; wishes for Marcel’s blithe cynicism. But Anzor is speaking out of something entirely serious in himself; the core place untouchable by irony. The center, around which his urbanity is spun like a removable, flimsy fabric.

“You see,” he resumes, speaking again to her, seeking her understanding, “my father was a tyrant. Sometimes I wanted to hit out at him … punch him.” His voice is taut with old anger, then changes. “But I can’t stand what’s happening to him now. I can’t stand to think of him being treated … without respect.” She nods wordlessly. “I keep seeing him … You see … before I left, there was a bunch of these Russian … soldiers who burst into the house. These young thugs. They’re just thugs, you know, just stupid, illiterate … hooligans. Drunk out of their gourds, reeling and laughing. My father shouted at them to get out. In his most authoritative voice. But these bastards … just laughed. What is it, old uncle, you don’t like having us around? No? Ah, that’s not nice, we’re such good boys … Then one of them … he … shook my father, with a sort
of … insolence. It was sort of … casual.”

“Don’t tell me if you don’t want to,” she says quickly. She isn’t sure she wants to hear more.

But Anzor goes on, as he apparently must. “Then this thug … he took my father … by the ear … his earlobe between his fingers. And then he twisted, hard.”

Anzor stops, as if this were the truly unbearable thing, the detail on which torment hangs. Under her hand, she can feel his chest inflating and falling. She is afraid he is telling her too much, that he will later regret it. But he seems to be speaking to himself, as if the scene in his mind has to unfold till the end.

“You know,” he continues, “my father is in his way a simple man. Simple and proud. His pride is who he is. Or who he was … He tried to give them his stare. The stare which used to frighten me into submission. But they hardly … noticed. One of them laughed, with a kind of … merriment. As if they were just having fun. And then my father … he lowered his head.” Anzor falls silent.

When he speaks again, his voice is flat, as if he has reached a desolate plateau, his private bottom line of shame. “I stood there the whole time,” he says slowly. “And I … didn’t do anything. Nothing.”

“What could you possibly do?” she says.

“I wasn’t ready to take the risk.”

“But how could you …? There were several of them. You could have been …”

“It was … a failure.” He states this as if the right, the only conclusion has been reached. “You don’t know this … here, in your … nice countries. Your nice peaceful countries. But sometimes you have to be willing to risk … everything. You have to be willing to die. If that is what it takes to do the right thing. If you do not want to be ashamed. If you do not want your life to become worthless. What is the point of living a life of shame?”

He breathes deeply, as if he has said what needs to be said.

She takes his words with a kind of wonder; a sensation that is beyond, or beneath, fear or finicky doubt. She is close to some fundamental calculation, the axis around which choices about the human condition revolve; and she understands that in the calculation, it is possible to choose death.

Then the sensation passes, and she feels the dizziness of having traveled too far away from herself, lost in the antiseptic hotel room, in the alien city. Where has she wandered to, through the milky fog of her own freedom … She peers into Anzor’s eyes, which have become more deeply veiled through all his revelations.

“Your eyes,” he says. “Your wide green eyes.”

“Am I staring?” she asks, but feels a sort of shift, looking now at him directly from within, as he looks at her.

“I want to know you,” he says, intimately.

“What do you want to know?”

“You. You.”

Then their dance begins, urgent and lyrical, and she presses on, as if the lovemaking were also an inquiry, as if she could penetrate through Anzor’s body to some truth at the heart of his darkness. There’s that, she thinks—the music, the stillness of the stage before, and the different stillness after—and there’s this. That’s all I know. Or rather, she corrects herself, this is the only way I know how to know.

Budapest

In Budapest, she walks along the grand avenues and the ordinary streets, feeling the pull of their long narrow vistas, the somnolent gravity of the darkened stone. The city draws her into
itself as into a deep funnel, with the promise of age and richness, a languorous heaviness. Madeleines of the imaginary. For she has never been here, and yet the city corresponds to something she recognizes. She meanders into a spacious arched courtyard in which doves are cooing. She catches the soft, sublunar sounds of Hungarian. But throughout it all, she is waiting. Underneath the rhythms of the city, she’s suspended in waiting time, a time in which every second grows large and in which, beyond each second, there’s no extension. In which every second is distended with expectation and compressed with absence. Only the presence of Anzor will disburden her of this pressure, will restore time to its imperceptible flow. Is this kitsch, is she caught in a banality? She has no words for this, or at least none of which she’s not ashamed. She will not let them come, not even in her own mind. And yet, how is she to think about what she feels, unless she stifles it into silence, sours it in her skepticism? She thinks of Brahms and Schumann, and their simple, oh-so-simple melodies; the motifs which, through variation and alteration develop into sonatas and symphonies, epics and edifices. Begin with the cliché, she thinks, because that is where the heart begins. Then elaborate. She stops fending off Anzor from her mind, and thinks, better the clichés of love than no love at all.

On the way back to her hotel, the taxi stops suddenly, jolting her forward. She breaks her movement with her hand, winces at the twinge of the back-stretched wrist. The taxi driver rolls down the window and shouts at someone outside; then apparently realizes it’s hopeless and shakes his head in disgust. Now she hears and sees: the sound of shoes, or boots, stamping on metal, glass breaking, brutally loud, deliberately harsh young voices. A bunch of kids—that’s surely what they are, though the words don’t seem to fit—are jumping up and down on the hood of a car, while others are throwing stones at its windows. Another car is being tackled in the same way. The kids are very young,
some of them not grown to their full height. Their figures, illuminated by the yellow street lamps, look wild, baffling, unhinged. Their faces are distorted with a sort of orgiastic fury. She stops up her ears against the awful sounds, but keeps looking. She wonders if these are rites in some local gang war, but these youths—that’s better, youths—seem too aimless and bacchanalian for warfare, as if they were striving for some anarchic climax rather than a specific aim, some violent epiphany which will come God knows how.

“
Scheisse
,” the driver swears, apparently looking for a common language with his passenger, and hurtles on with a string of phrases in German.

“
Ist
… punk,” he says, changing his tactics when she doesn’t respond. “
Ist
… hooligan.” He blares his horn very loudly, and the car jumpers turn toward the taxi and hurl some mocking, threatening syllables at them. One girl makes an obscene gesture with her navel, touching herself on the crotch. The driver swivels his head and waves to the car behind them, signaling they should back off. They do so, a string of cars going into reverse and making their way carefully out of the street, as the sound of police sirens approaches from the opposite direction.

“Sorry,” the driver says when they’re finally in the clear, and he makes an abrupt, angry turn into another street. “
Ist … Scheisse
.”

She doesn’t respond, but she thinks, they must be unloved children, unloved and abandoned. Surely. No child which has been loved would turn that feral, that ugly. It’s the chain of uncaring, small and large. The history of cruelty, or of small uncaring, with its large, its enormous consequences. Kolya, she can no longer fend off Kolya, and with a twist at her heart, sees again his small hurt face as clearly as if he were very near, and raising his eyes toward her, with their burden of meaning.

The taxi driver repeats “
Ist Scheisse
… hooligan,” as if to
make sure she understands; then as she fails to respond again, shrugs his shoulders and they make the rest of the trip in silence.

At the hotel, she goes through her ablutions, tries to shake off the figures of the stomping youths. Instead, as she applies soothing night cream to her face, she sees Kolya’s face within her own in the mirror, staring back at her with its revenant presence, with eyes so much like her own, looking at her as they did that night. Yes, she knows it was that night, in the thudding disco in lower Manhattan, where the scene was in those days. She no longer remembers why she went along with Kolya and his buddies, the older sister, but not so much older as to constitute a restraint. She may have just wanted to see how he lived, her genius brother, who had moved into a world of incomprehensibly abstract mathematics, and whom she didn’t see very often anymore. She can still bring back the heated excitement of the cavernous room, the figures of the dancers leaping and twisting with the thudding, pounding rhythms of the music, faces emerging and disappearing under the rhythmic strobe flashes, distorted with angled light or their own ecstasy, half exalted, half infernal. The Dionysiacs of lower Manhattan, the Dionysiacs of Budapest … Kolya took her into some dimly lit back room, which was apparently the drug room. A young woman, thankfully only vaguely visible in a corner, was injecting something into her arm, and Isabel turned away so as not to see the needle working its way under the skin. Kolya was talking to a young man dressed in an incongruous blue blazer, who was handing him a plastic sandwich bag. A marijuana purchase, clearly routine. “My sister,” Kolya introduced her. “Bel, meet Rex.” “Didn’t know the genius had a sister,” Rex said. So Kolya was known to be exceptional, even here. “You should look after him,” the boy said. “Somebody should.” He was only a boy. She remembers a pang of resentful guilt. Why should she have to
look after Kolya? “You’re right,” she said. “I will.”

“You want some grass?” Kolya asked. “It’s good stuff. Isn’t it, Rex?” “Only the best,” Rex said, with the cheerful politeness of a good salesman. “You have no worries, I promise.” And so she smoked the thin cigarette, and when they went out on the dance floor, the ecstatic faces seemed even more luridly beautiful, more luridly grotesque. And at one point, Kolya brought his face toward hers—they were dancing together—and held her very tight. It was like looking into a powerfully angelic version of herself, with Kolya’s wide-spaced green eyes indistinguishable from her own. He kissed her, unequivocally, on the lips; and she returned the kiss, yes, she definitely returned it, bending her neck backward under his touch, accepting his tongue in her mouth. The sensation was so deep that it went beyond the erotic, to some perfect androgynous completion. A Wagnerian swoon, she thinks in her Budapest room …

They never alluded to that moment, which happened under the merciful cover of marijuana and the hypnotic lights. Transgression, her peers would have called it. Incest is nicest … Not that she ever told anybody. Still, she winces as she remembers Kolya’s face coming close to hers. Her reckless, abandoned brother, moving toward her in abandonment, wanting, perhaps, to avenge himself on Lena, who had abandoned him.

But after that evening, she started dropping in on him in his minuscule walk-up apartment in the East Village, to check that he was still there, that he was all right. Kolya seemed to keep up with his studies, and had written a paper for a professional journal that was thought to be precocious. He fed himself intermittently from the Chinese takeout below, and took marijuana, which, he said, helped him grasp the strange shapes of matter on which his equations were based. “I just don’t know how Einstein and those guys did without,” he said, humorously. There’s nothing more reassuring of a person’s sanity than the ability to
crack a joke. Except, Isabel now thinks, when it’s a sign of a deeper crack.