Isabel still remembers the shock of that sentence. The Retreat was dedicated to the cult of the difficult, to art as heroic effort, the most exalted of quests. If art wasn’t that, then what was it?
Standing on the dappled path, she finally asked, “No pain, no gain?”
“Oh c’mon, don’t let them sell you that,” Jane snorted. “No gain is worth the pain, that’s the real truth of it.”
A smooching couple seated on a bench briefly pauses in their transactions as Isabel walks by through a little square. The world is becoming lighter by the minute … Sometimes, she can almost catch the drift of Jane’s way, the insouciant logic of her proposition. Why should being-in-the-world be difficult, when there’s no choice but to be in it? Why should anything be difficult at all? Just go for it, girl, she hears Jane’s voice say. Go for it! And yet … some intricate complexity is working its way through her, and she probes it, listens; she wants to know what is in it. What sort of creature is she, what is she driven by and toward … She wants to grasp it all, as music grasps it, in its wholeness; its essence. Her meaning bug, undoubtedly. A flicker of apprehension seems to illumine the transience of the moment, a brush as of a wing against her mind. She tries to catch it, but cannot. A line of longing shoots up through her body and consciousness, out into the Copenhagen street and beyond, seeking something beyond its own horizon, and then turning, with a sort of inevitability, toward Anzor.
*
Warsaw
They are meeting in Warsaw, the next step on her itinerary. Anzor has assured her that he has reason enough to go there, lots of things to do. The Poles are more sympathetic to the Chechens than the rest of Europe, they’ve had their own history with the Russians. There are people to see, groups to talk to. There are the refugees, who are living in pretty terrible conditions, idle and disoriented. He should visit them. “So you see,” he said, tracing the outline of her cheekbone with his fingers, “I have good reasons to meet you there.” She narrowed her eyes at him mischievously, bemused by his anti-sentimental reassurance. He knew she would have been nervous if he followed her yet again for her own sake. Now she’s sitting at an outdoor café, in the city’s old square, rebuilt from its wartime rubble. The city of Wolfe’s Passion; but now it has the pastel-colored charm of any old quarter of a bustling, mid-sized European city. The scars covered up, even here.
She looks up as if in response to an unheard signal and sees Anzor across the square, walking toward her with his long, rangy stride. His jacket, loose over his shirt, swings open lightly in the breeze. It is the way he moves that rivets her, paying no attention to himself, or even to the surroundings. A presence, vivid and palpable, against the meandering topology of the crowd.
And now, she is already half out of herself, halfway between herself and him, somewhere in the pure visual field, pure seeing. She has leapt out of herself, and he has to take her up, or else she will be nowhere. At least so it is in this moment. She directs her gaze straight toward him. He’s still at some distance, but he catches her signal as if it were carried by some invisible transmission line. She’s picked him out, or he’s picked her out; and they hone in on each other through some inaudible ultrasound. She feels a sort of delight, tension mingling with deep concentration,
as at the beginning of a concert, before the full plunge. In this moment, that’s all there is.
He takes her hand in his and inspects it tenderly. He asks her details of the last few days; they are now in the phase of details. She tells him about Jane’s concert and their rivalry at the Retreat. They’ve also entered a phase in which she’s beginning to disclose personal information to him, as much as the other way around. Some balance between them is quickly changing. She’s telling him about Wolfe’s
Journal
, when a compact, broad-faced man in a leather jacket approaches their table, and, without acknowledging her presence, speaks to Anzor in a foreign tongue. Anzor turns away from her without letting her finish a sentence; and the two men talk as if picking up a conversation they had interrupted shortly before. Isabel looks up, startled by the suddenness of the intrusion, and then by something else. Anzor’s voice is quite different in his own language, deeper and more guttural. His gestures have altered too, to something more abrupt and rougher. It gives her an instant glimpse of the modifications he has made in himself for her; for his life here. She thought she’s seen him exposed … But this is in some way more serious than their intimacy. The men are speaking to each other in sharp, businesslike tones. There’s no pleasantry in their expressions, no camouflage of polite restraint.
The stranger leaves as unceremoniously as he’d come, and Anzor, running his hand through his hair distractedly, tells her he must go to see some of his people who are living in Warsaw. Does she want to come along? He needs to talk to them about new information which has emerged regarding the situation in Chechnya. It’s very urgent, he must go immediately. She hesitates, then says yes. She’s suddenly in the midst of an unfamiliar world, and she feels briefly nervous. Maybe she should go back to her nice hotel and rest. But of course she cannot draw back, she wants to know what is behind Anzor’s
forehead, wants to enter his mind more deeply … Besides, she’s not ready yet to leave his physical presence, the honeyed mutual draw of their bodies.
Anzor gets up abruptly and flags a taxi, which takes them to another part of the city, where the buildings are ugly and drab. He holds her elbow reassuringly as they walk through the grim hallway and ascend in the metallic, urine-permeated elevator. How do people living here bear it, she wonders, how do millions upon millions bear their lives … The door he knocks on is opened by an old woman in a kerchief, bent into diminutiveness by osteoporosis, with a heavily wrinkled face which lights up with deferential pleasure when she sees Anzor. From her bent frame, she directs a questioning look at Isabel, and Anzor says a few words to her in Chechen.
The room they enter is small and dismal, with frayed brown sofas and an ancient TV placed on a pile of carton boxes. A sickly odor of stale cigarette smoke thickens the air. Not a madeleine shabbiness, this, Isabel thinks, trying to get her bearings. This is something more deeply impoverished, or damaged. Three men sit at a Formica-topped table, drinking and smoking. One of them seems older and more authoritative. It is he who gets up to greet Anzor and who embraces him vigorously, shaking his hand at the same time. He gives Isabel a brief, unsmiling glance and indicates she should sit on one of the frayed sofas. She hesitates; she’s not feeling entirely comfortable, not comfortable enough to settle in. She leans against the kitchen counter instead; another man, who has been making coffee, joins her, introducing himself in English as a Polish journalist. He pours her a cup of strong, thick coffee and she stands beside him, sipping. He follows the conversation intently, and from time to time, translates for her benefit. The men at the table are talking about the refugees, there are more of them coming in and it’s hard to know what to do with them.
The ones in the camps are beginning to fight among themselves, from inactivity and frustration. There are fears of infiltration, by spies. “Spies from where?” Isabel asks in an undertone, but the journalist says, “Wait, this is important,” and listens closely, as the conversation gets more heated and escalates into an outbreak of shouting—until the older man raises a warning finger, and says something in a voice of such steely authority, that Isabel instinctively stops sipping her coffee. She’s now staring at the group around the table together with the journalist. Anzor begins speaking agitatedly, jabbing the air with his forefinger. She is, again, startled by the rough authority of his hand. Nothing urbane or tender about it. This is another Anzor, drawing on some more primal, more direct repertory of gestures. Now the older man places both his palms on the table with a thud, as if to say “enough,” and Anzor instantly stops. The older man speaks, the others follow, nodding. Anzor’s olive skin, in the yellow light, looks nearly transparent. There is something in the undivided attentiveness he directs to the older man that makes Isabel feel an incongruous pang of jealousy. She wants to pull him away from the rectangular table, wants to turn the attention, the focus of his eyes, toward herself.
“What is this about?” she asks the journalist, in an undertone.
He hesitates. “There’re all these factions,” he says, as if trying to explain in shorthand. “In Chechnya. There’s a question of methods. Which are the most effective to use.”
“Which faction is … this?” she asks, indicating the table; but he again raises a hushing finger. The conversation proceeds in softer tones; then Anzor puts his face between his hands, as if some piece of terrible news has been delivered to him. Another gesture from the deep. “Anzor …” she begins, but her voice comes out as a wispy trace of itself. She doesn’t register here. Anzor’s lower lip, as his face emerges from between his hands,
hangs low in some distress. For a long time, a few minutes it seems, the men at the table sit silently, stolidly, as if they were experiencing something together with Anzor, or thinking in tandem, without having to speak. What is she witnessing here? The scene has an esoteric familiarity. Has she dreamt something like it, seen it in the movies, read it?
“Which faction are they?” she again asks the journalist. He is slim and intelligent-looking, he induces trust. He looks at her with quick sympathy. “They’re OK,” he says. “I believe so.”
One of the men nods his head slightly, as if, in their silence, they’ve reached a conclusion. They begin to talk in a different register, low and steady. She can almost feel their gathered, concentrated heat. They’re a quartet, acting in concert … She understands this, the currents of energy traveling back and forth through the small group, as they travel through a group of players, till they are all encompassed in the thing itself, a piece of music or a common task.
The leader writes something on a piece of paper he has torn out of a notebook, and hands it to Anzor, placing a large hand on his shoulder. The men clasp hands in some sort of compact, or promise. Then the conversation is abruptly over, and, to her surprise, the older man comes toward her, and clasps her hand in turn, looking closely into her eyes. The hand clasp seems to declare her a comrade, a friend; but his eyes examine her with chilly antipathy, and for a moment, she thinks she sees in them a sort of disgust. He turns away from her without smiling, and gestures to the Polish journalist to translate something for her. “He says you shouldn’t talk about what you’ve seen here,” he says. “It would be unwise.”
“I haven’t seen anything …” she begins, but Anzor signals her to leave. The old woman reappears from another room, and bows from her already bent frame as she lets them out, with a pleading, trusting expression directed at Anzor. Then they’re
out in the bleak corridor. Anzor looks straight ahead, and says nothing.
“What is going on?” she asks, as they descend in the foul elevator. “What was that about?”
“There’ll be another war,” Anzor says, in a choked voice. “That’s all. Another war. They want to grind us into dust. The bastards.” His face seems distorted by something in the elevator’s yellow light, though she cannot tell whether it’s by distress, or anger, or something like inadmissible fear. Now she is frightened, too. The word “war” seems too big for this dirty metallic box. She puts her hand on Anzor’s for some kind of reassurance, but he winces, as if she’s hurt him.
“Is your family in danger?” she asks as they emerge from the oppressive building. It’s drizzling grayly, and the area seems stripped of life.
“It isn’t only about my family,” he retorts sharply. “It isn’t so … personal.” He sounds as if she’s insulted him, and she walks alongside him in baffled silence.
“Isabel,” he says after a while, grasping her by the elbow, “let us not talk about this. I don’t want to draw you into this … matter. Into my country’s affairs. They’re not your affairs.”
“I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,” she says.
“Nothing yet,” he says, in a voice that is less bruised, more like his own. “So let us stop talking about it. I want to be with you. For as long as I can.”
But later, in the hygienic hotel room, between the white sheets, he says, “I didn’t tell you the truth earlier. My uncle … he died. He wasn’t killed, but he had a heart attack after the Russians came through his village.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says, and is afraid to say more, afraid that Anzor will wince again, at whatever words she might choose.
“He was old,” Anzor says. “But my father will be right if he doesn’t forgive me. I should be there, with them.”
“Tell me about your father,” she says. “If you want.” She realizes she knows nothing of Anzor’s family, his actual history. The narrative. She knows only the way he moves and seeks her behind her eyes; the way his voice travels to certainty or fills with feeling. Perhaps the narrative matters too.
“He’s an engineer,” Anzor answers, with some reluctance. “Soviet-trained. Everybody had to be, if they wanted to be professionals. He had good training.”
“But what is he like?” she asks, and this time he doesn’t answer for a while. “Do you know Gorky’s book about his childhood?” he finally says. “Those scenes in the peasant hut with everyone beating each other, all the time. Men beating women, women beating children. The stronger beating the weaker, and the weaker taking it as their due. Everyone sleeping in the same bed and beating each other.” His voice has gone grainy with the effort of saying all this; but he doesn’t break contact with her. “Well, my father—that’s where he came from, that kind of place. He was just one generation removed from such scenes. They’re in his bones … He is a Soviet engineer, but he is also … a peasant … peasant patriarch.”
Anzor’s voice has traveled into some bitter past; and she remembers a shack she once happened upon on the pampas, with a drunken man in it and a large-eyed child crouching in the corner. The history of cruelty, she thinks, everywhere, so close and so ordinary. The intimate history of violence. “But he didn’t beat …” she begins, and Anzor quickly interrupts. “No,” he says, and stops again, as if trying to find the right words. “He was just educated enough to stop himself from beating us. But he didn’t need to. He just … stared. That was sufficient. He is not a large man, but he had a sort of … force. They do, in my country. But his power was … unusual. He had very strong arms. A bull’s neck. And the eyes … that was where the power came from. Sometimes he raged, and shouted. But it was when he got
very still that he was … really dangerous.”