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Each with a temperature of 102 degrees, the two men cross
Peking
and escape. Horses and provisions await them in
the countryside. The Chinese leader has never ridden before. The young man
teaches him how. During the trip they cross a forest and then some enormous
mountains. The blazing of the stars in the sky seems supernatural. The Chinese
leader asks himself: how were the stars created? where does the universe end?
where does it begin? The young man hears him and vaguely recalls a wound in his
side whose scar still aches, darkness, a trip. He also remembers the eyes of a
hypnotist, although the woman's features remain hidden, mutable. If I close my
eyes, thinks the young man, I'll see her again. But he doesn't close them. They
make their way across a vast snow-covered plain. The horses sink in the snow.
The Chinese leader sings. How were the stars created? Who are we in the middle
of the boundless universe? What trace of us will remain?

Suddenly
the Chinese leader falls off his horse. The young Russian examines him. The
Chinese leader is like a burning doll. The young Russian touches the Chinese
leader's forehead and then his own forehead and understands that the fever is
devouring them both. With no little effort he ties the Chinese leader to his
mount and sets off again. The silence of the snow-covered plain is absolute.
The night and the passage of stars across the vault of the sky show no signs of
ever ending. In the distance an enormous black shadow seems to superimpose
itself on the darkness. It's a mountain range. In the young Russian's mind the
certainty takes shape that in the coming hours he will die on that snow-covered
plain or as he crosses the mountains. A voice inside begs him to close his
eyes, because if he closes them he'll see the eyes and then the beloved face of
the hypnotist. It tells him that if he closes his eyes he'll see the streets of
New York
again, he'll walk again toward the hypnotist's house, where she sits waiting
for him on a chair in the dark. But the Russian doesn't close his eyes. He
rides on.

It
wasn't only Gorky who read
Twilight.
Other famous people did, too, and
although none of them wrote to the author to express their admiration, they
didn't forget his name, because not only were they famous, their memories were
good, too.

Ansky
cites four, in a kind of dizzying ascent. Professor Stanislaw Strumilin read
it. It struck him as hard to follow. The writer Aleksei Tolstoy read it. It
struck him as chaotic. Andrei Zhdanov read it. He left it half finished. And
Stalin read it. It struck him as suspect. Of course, none of this reached the
ears of our friend Ivanov, who framed
Gorky
's
letter and hung it on the wall, well within eyesight of his increasingly
numerous visitors.

Meanwhile, his life changed
considerably. He was allotted a dacha outside of
Moscow
. Sometimes he was asked for his
autograph in the metro. There was a table reserved for him each night at the
writers' restaurant. He spent his holidays in
Yalta
, along with other equally famous
colleagues. Ah, those evenings at Yalta's Red October hotel (the
former English
and French hotel), on the huge terrace overlooking the Black Sea, listening to
the distant strains of the Blue Volga orchestra, on warm nights with thousands
of stars twinkling up above, as the fashionable playwright of the day dropped a
clever remark and the metallurgical novelist responded with an unassailable
parry, those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka
without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the
Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary
advice at four in the afternoon.

Sometimes, when he was alone, and more often when he was alone in
front of a mirror, poor Ivanov pinched himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming,
that it was all real. And in fact it was all real, at least in appearance.
Black thunderclouds hovered over him, but he noticed only the long-yearned-for
breeze, the scented breath of wind that wiped his face clean of so much
misfortune and fear.

What was Ivanov
afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as
a longtime Bolshevik he'd had many brushes with arrest, prison, and
deportation, and although he couldn't be called a brave man, neither could it
fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov's fear was of a
literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine
(or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the
practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no
good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear
that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that
leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow
prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of
failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no
good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears,
thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with
semblances.
As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were
inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based
on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to
another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only
seem
and never
are,
things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and
even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of
Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women
deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.

In
any case, storm clouds hovered over Ivanov, though he never even dreamed they
were there, because Ivanov, at this point in his life, saw only Ivanov,
attaining the height of ridiculous self-regard during an interview conducted by
two young men from the Literary Newspaper of the Komsomols of the Russian
Federation, who asked him, among many other questions, the following:

Young Komsomols: Why do you think your first great work, the one
that won the acclaim of the worker and peasant masses, was written when you
were already nearly sixty? How many years did it take you to come up with the
plot
of
Twilight? Is
it the work of a writer in his prime?

Efraim Ivanov: I'm only fifty-nine. I won't he sixty for some
time. And may I remind you that Cervantes wrote
Don Quixote
more or less at the same
age I am now.

Young Komsomols: Do you believe your novel is the
Don Quixote
of Soviet
science fiction?

Efraim Ivanov:
There's something to that, no doubt.

So
Ivanov considered himself the Cervantes of fantastic literature. He saw clouds
in the shape of a guillotine, he saw clouds in the shape of a shot in the back
of the head, but really he saw only himself riding alongside a mysterious and
indispensable Sancho across the steppes of literary glory.

Danger,
danger, said the muzhiks, danger, danger, said the kulaks, danger, danger, said
the signers of the Declaration of 46, danger, danger, said the dead Orthodox
priests, danger, danger, said the ghost of Inessa Armand, but Ivanov was never
known for his hearing or his sensitivity to the approach of clouds or the
nearness of a storm, and after a more or less mediocre turn as a columnist and
lecturer, at which he succeeded brilliantly since he hadn't been asked to be
anything more than mediocre, he shut himself up in his Moscow room again and
stacked up reams of paper and changed the ribbon on his typewriter, and then he
went in search of Ansky, because he wanted to deliver a new novel to his editor
in four months, if not sooner.

About this time Ansky was
working on a radio project meant to cover
all of Europe and extend to
the very edge of
Siberia
. In 1930, said the
notebooks, Trotsky was expelled from the
Soviet Union
(although he was actually expelled in 1929, a mistake attributable to the lack
of transparency in the Russian press) and Ansky's spirits began to flag. In
1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide. By 1930, no matter how naive or foolish one
was, it was clear that the October Revolution had failed.

But Ivanov wanted
another novel and he went in search of Ansky.

In 1932,
Ivanov's new novel, titled
Midday,
was published. In 1934, another novel
appeared, titled
Dawn.
Both featured an abundance of extraterrestrials,
interplanetary travels, fractured time, the existence of two or more advanced
civilizations that periodically visited Earth, the struggles (often treacherous
and violent) of these civilizations, roving characters.

In
1935, Ivanov's novels were withdrawn from bookstores. A few days later, an
official notice informed him of his expulsion from the party. According to
Ansky, Ivanov spent three days unable to get out of bed. On the bed were his
three novels and he reread them constantly, searching for something that might
justify his expulsion. He moaned and whimpered and tried unsuccessfully to take
refuge in his earliest childhood memories. He stroked the spines of his books
with heartbreaking melancholy. Sometimes he got up and went over to the window
and spent hours looking out into the street.

In 1936, at the start of the first great purge, he was arrested.
He spent four months in a prison cell and signed all the papers that were put
before him. When he got out and his former literary friends treated him as if
he had the plague, he wrote to
Gorky
to ask him
to intercede on his behalf, but
Gorky
,
gravely ill, didn't answer his letter. Then
Gorky
died and Ivanov attended the burial.
When he was spotted, two young members of
Gorky
's
circle, a poet and novelist, approached him and asked whether he wasn't
ashamed, whether he had gone out of his head, whether he didn't understand that
his very presence was an insult to the great man's memory.

"
Gorky
wrote to me,"
answered Ivanov. "
Gorky
liked my novel. This is the least I can do for him."

"The
least you can do for him, comrade," said the poet, "is to commit
suicide."

"That
is a good idea, isn't it?" said the novelist. "Throw yourself out a
window, problem solved."

"What are you
saying, comrades?" sobbed Ivanov.

A
girl in a leather jacket that hung almost to her knees came over to them and
asked what was going on.

"It's Efraim
Ivanov," answered the poet.

"Oh, never
mind, then," said the girl, "make him leave."

"I can't
leave," said Ivanov, his face wet with tears.

"Why can't
you, comrade?" asked the girl.

"Because my
legs refuse to move, I can't take a step."

For
a few seconds the girl searched his face. Ivanov, his arms firmly in the grip
of the two young writers, couldn't have looked more pathetic, which finally
convinced her to help him out of the cemetery. But once they were in the street
Ivanov was still unable to get along alone, so the girl walked with him to the
tram station and then decided (Ivanov couldn't stop crying and seemed close to
fainting) to get on the tram with him, and in this fashion, putting off her
departure several times along the way, she helped him up the stairs of his
house and helped him unlock the door to his room and lie down in bed, and as
Ivanov dissolved in floods of tears and incoherent words, the girl examined his
collection of books, which happened to be rather unimpressive, until the door opened
and Ansky walked in.

Her
name was Nadja Yurenieva and she was nineteen. That very night she made love
with Ansky, once Ivanov had managed to fall asleep after several glasses of
vodka. They did it in Ansky's room and anyone who saw them would have said they
fucked as if they had only a few hours left to live. Actually, Nadja Yurenieva
fucked like many Muscovites that year of 1936 and Boris Ansky fucked as if when
all hope was lost he had suddenly found his one true love. Neither of the two
thought (or wanted to think) about death, but both moved, twined their limbs,
communed, as if they were on the edge of the abyss.

At
dawn they fell asleep, and when Ansky awoke, just after midday, Nadja Yurenieva
was gone. What Ansky felt first was despair, and then fear, and after he had
dressed he went running to see Ivanov, to get some clue that would lead him to
the girl. He found his friend busy writing letters. I have to clear things up,
said Ivanov, I have to untangle this mess and only then will I be saved. Ansky
asked what mess he was talking about. The damned science fiction novels,
shouted Ivanov with all his strength. The shout had a rending violence, like a
claw, but not a claw that did any damage to Ansky's or Ivanov's real
adversaries. Instead it was like a claw that pounces and floats in the middle
of the room, like a helium balloon, a self-conscious claw, a claw-beast that
wonders what in God's name it's doing in this rather untidy room, who that old
man is sitting at the table, who that young man is standing with tousled hair,
then falls to the floor, deflated, returned once more to nothing.