The Constructed Worlds syllabus was a list of Gary’s favorite books and movies, without any due dates or assignments. We were just supposed to read books, watch movies, and discuss them in class. The discussions were never that great, because everyone chose different books and movies.
“Do I really have to give you assignments, like children?” Gary demanded, when it turned out that yet again no two people had read or watched any of the same things. “Fine. You all have to read Against Nature.”
At first I was excited about Against Nature, because Gary said it was about a man who decided to live according to aesthetic rather than moral principles, and that was something Svetlana had recently said about me: that I lived by aesthetic principles, whereas she, who had been raised on Western philosophy, was doomed to live boringly by ethical principles. It had never occurred to me to think of aesthetics and ethics as opposites. I thought ethics were aesthetic. “Ethics” meant the golden rule, which was basically an aesthetic rule. That’s why it was called “golden,” like the golden ratio.
“Isn’t that why you don’t cheat or steal—because it’s ugly?” I said. Svetlana said she had never met anyone with such a strong aesthetic sensibility.
I thought maybe Against Nature would be a book about someone who viewed things the way I did—someone trying to live a life unmarred by laziness, cowardice, and conformity. I was wrong; it was more a book about interior decoration. In his free moments from plumbing the subrational depths of upholstery, the main character devoted himself to the preparation of all-black meals, to hanging out with a jewel-encrusted tortoise, and thinking thoughts like, “All is syphilis.” How was that an aesthetic life?
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In literature class, we learned about Balzac. Unlike Dickens, to whom he was sometimes compared, Balzac didn’t care for or about children, and was essentially unhumorous. Children weren’t important to him at all—they barely figured in his world. His attitude toward them was dismissive, even contemptuous; and though he could certainly be witty, he wasn’t what you would really call funny, not like Dickens was. As the professor spoke, I became aware of a slight sense of injury. It seemed to me that Balzac’s attitude toward me would have been dismissive and contemptuous. It wasn’t that I was a child exactly, but I didn’t really have a history as anything else. At the same time, it was exciting to think that there was a universe—“a monde,” the professor kept calling it, annoyingly—that was completely other from everything I had been and done, up to now.
2. The Telephone Number
Nina thought about Ivan all week.
In a physics lecture: “Does Ivan not love me?”
On the tram: “Why Siberia? Why did he say nothing?”
In the laboratory: “Soon he’ll call and explain everything.”
Two weeks passed. Ivan didn’t call. Nina read and reread his letter.
?
Again, Nina knocked on the door of Ivan’s apartment. For a long time there was no answer. Finally, Ivan’s father said, “Who is there?”
“It’s me. It’s Nina again.”
Ivan’s father slowly opened the door.
“Alexei Alexeich, I must find Ivan,” Nina said. “Where do you think he is? Do you think he could be with his mother?”
Ivan’s father sighed. “In the letter, he says he is with my brother.”
“Would you call your brother and ask him if it’s true?”
“Impossible,” said Ivan’s father.
“Please, Alexei Alexeich. I need your help.”
Slowly, he took a pen and paper and wrote a number. “Here’s his number,” he said. “Please don’t come here again.”
Nina took the number and put it in her bag. “Thank you,” she said.
For a long time after she left, Alexei Alexeich stood and looked out the window. “Again my brother!” he thought, bitterly. “First, my wife. Now, my son . . .”
?
At home, Nina called the number that Ivan’s father had given her.
A woman’s voice could be heard. “Laboratory of Cosmology and Elementary Particle Physics.”
Nina was very surprised, and said nothing.
“Hello? Hello?” said the woman. “Is anyone there?”
“Excuse me,” said Nina. “Isn’t this the collective farm ‘Siberian Spark’?”
“No. This is the Laboratory of Cosmology and Elementary Particle Physics, at the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, in the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences.”
“I’m looking for Ivan Alexeich Bazhanov, a young physicist. Does he work at your laboratory?”
There was a pause. “The name isn’t familiar,” the woman said. She hung up without saying goodbye.
? ? ?
Ralph and I were reading in his room. He was reading The Canterbury Tales. For some reason, he was under tremendous pressure to finish The Canterbury Tales in that particular sitting. I read the second part of the story about Nina. Afterward, we went to the video store to rent a movie. It was late, and everything we wanted to see was out. Eventually we chose a foreign film called The Gift. The case had a photograph of a gift-wrapped woman, her face hidden by a scarf, a big red bow tied over her arms: “The touching story of an incapacitated wife who gives her husband the one anniversary gift he never expected—the gift of another woman!”
We went back to campus and found an empty room with a VCR player in the basement. The movie turned out to be a caustic invective against the British health-care system from the perspective of an aging blue-collar couple in Yorkshire. The wife was wheelchair-bound because of a “mistake under the surgeon’s knife.” For two and a half hours the husband wheeled her through mud to various doctors, while she made wisecracks that we couldn’t understand, because of her accent. The anniversary gift was a metal back brace. There was no other woman.
? ? ?
Svetlana and I took the T to Brookline to visit a Russian grocery store that rented out videos. The tracks ran along the middle of a two-way street lined by endlessly recurring churches, graveyards, hospitals, and schools: institutions of which Boston seemed to have an infinite supply. Svetlana was telling me about a dream she had that she went to Taco Bell and had to eat a burrito made of human flesh.
“I knew my father would be angry if I ate it, but also that he secretly wanted me to,” Svetlana shouted, to be heard over the train. “Okay, so the burrito is obviously a phallus, a human phallus: it’s simultaneously taboo, like cannibalism, and yet it’s something that has to enter your body. I guess I think my father has ambiguous feelings about my sexuality.”
I nodded, glancing around the train car. A 100 percent impassive old woman with a shawl over her head was glaring at the floor.
“Sometimes I wonder about the man I’ll eventually lose my virginity to,” Svetlana continued. “I’m pretty sure it’ll happen in college. I’ve had relationships that were intellectually erotic but nothing ever happened physically. In a lot of ways I feel like a sexual bomb waiting to explode.