Now, when I recall those months, I think that if I did manage to stay relatively sane it was thanks to Nina Andropova, my Russian neighbor. My conversations with her had a calming effect as though Nina moved at a different speed, not connected to the urgencies of the moment. Again and again, I would dwell on my meetings with Ida and that afternoon when I saw her for the last time, in the department hallway, when she walked away with the letters in her left hand and a canvas bag over her shoulder. Was it the left one? But if she was left-handed, why was it that, according to the police sketch, it was her right hand reaching down in the car, searching for something on the floor? “Oh, my dear,” Nina said to me, “you’ll never figure out what happened like that.”
My conversations with Nina seemed destined to force me out of the Dostoevskian gloom I was buried in. It was as if her life story, which she told to me in bursts, and her brilliant conversation made me recall old times, meetings in smoke-filled rooms where politics was discussed, passionate women who led the charge in working-class neighborhoods, planning revolutions that would purify the world; all of that splendor seemed to linger in her serene, musical voice.
During those days I would hear a sentence in the street and think they were talking about me (“She was dressed in blue”). I lived in a world where everything held a secret meaning and every gesture or detail occupied a place that was valid only to me. Nina would listen to me patiently and then change the subject, as though all she wanted was to help me heal my wounds and survive. She was generous, and she would bring up her Russian years again and again as if to say that we had indeed lived through glorious times and great tragedies, fiery speeches, and mass oppressions carried out by our revolutionary heroes; private matters couldn’t be used as a means of suffering because there was no room left in the heart. Her mother had gone to live in a miserable village in Siberia in order to be close to the labor camp where her father would die. “Us as well,” I said. We too had been swept away into history and horror, and I could understand what she was talking about. “Oh yes, everything is understandable except for the violence of revolution and the euphoria of victory,” she said, carefully placing a cigarette in the white holder as if it still made sense to protect her lungs that way. She was almost eighty years old, closer to death than I could really imagine, yet she moved energetically all the same, never losing her spark.
Nina had survived in France during the war and the German occupation by working as a nanny among the circle of writers for La Nouvelle Revue Française (she’d raised and educated Jean Paulhan’s children) at the same time that, under the tutelage of Nikolai Berdyaev, she was writing her thesis, “Tolstoy’s Early Years.” In 1950 she left Paris and came to the United States. I left because I couldn’t stand the atmosphere of the left in France after the Liberation, with Sartre, Aragon, and other provincial dictators defending the repression in Russia with the theory that the old Bolsheviks had objectively been in service of the enemy, regardless of their intentions, Nina told me. At the end of Saint Genet, Sartre had written that Nikolai Bukharin, the brilliant cosmopolitan intellectual and theorist from the Communist Party, hadn’t been a victim of Stalin but rather a traitor to the revolution, rightly punished after his confession. They tortured them and took them to be executed by firing squad and forced them to confess to absurd crimes. “It was hard to be on the left in those days, and it still is,” Nina said. “But I’m Russian, dear, and it’s impossible for me to be a reformist,” and she emphasized the last word with a Russian pronunciation. She still thought that the czar and his court were responsible for the catastrophes in Russia and that the revolution had been a fire, first destroying its heroes and then terrorizing the whole town. That early morning when she took the train to Finland, she realized that a whole world was left behind, alongside the image of her parents in the faint light of the empty platform. Ever since she left Russia, she’d lived with the ashen taste of exile on her lips.
She had arrived in New York with seventy-five dollars in her pocket, a copy of the first volume of her biography of Tolstoy, and the resolve to start over. Nina remembered the imposing figure of Alexandra Tolstoy, the daughter of the count, who ran a foundation that was dedicated to supporting Soviet exiles who came to America, even as she waited anxiously behind the fence on the dock in the port of New York while Immigrations guards held her up with insulting questions, and the wharf slowly emptied until finally she was able to go through, dragging the suitcase that held what little she had.
Nina had done every kind of job imaginable and had to suffer for two years before she got a position as a Russian teacher at a college in New Jersey. In 1960, she published the second part of her monumental biography (Tolstoy, The Novelist) and earned a professorship in literature at the university’s Department of Slavic Languages. It was there that she met her husband, Albert Ostrov, a Russian geographer who researched the cartography of lunar volcanoes at the legendary Institute of Experimental Studies. But her beloved Albert had died, and she was alone now, retired from teaching and buried in her interminable book on Tolstoy’s final years.
We were in her house, in her study, with high picture windows that looked out onto the garden. Nina started wandering around the room, filled with tables covered with papers and books, among icons and antique furniture. The worst part, for her, was that she no longer had anyone to talk to in Russian. She talked to herself and sometimes recited Pushkin to the silent fish that swished their long tails in the circular tank. A Russian mathematician had come to the institute a while ago, she told me. But he refused to speak in Russian and communicated with everyone in a precarious English. Nina managed to invite him out to eat at the university restaurant and was ready for a conversation, but the mathematician was so quiet that Nina felt like an idiot all the way through the meal, making meaningless comments. That went on until, at the end of lunch, the mathematician stood up and said in Russian, in a voice of anger: “You believe in spirits?” And he left, crossing the room in long strides.
According to Nina, it was very Russian, that tendency to elevate all problems from the level of the comprehensible by means of an expression mystique. “Maybe it’s that spirituality I miss most,” Nina said, and burst into laughter. Long paragraphs, pseudo-philosophical and incomprehensible but very passionate, or a single unexpected word that reverses the trivial sense of the conversation. When you’ve stopped speaking Russian and then hear Russians talking, you don’t understand anything. Even the most precise of its concrete comments would always have enigmatic derivations that ended up being incomprehensible. The ultimate result of this kind of message, independent of the precision with which it is articulated, was that it elevated the meaning so far above everyday usage that the meaning would disappear completely. That explained the tendency among Russian writers—Gogol or Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn—to sermonize and go off on religious digressions. The language itself leads them down that hole, she said, smiling.
This tendency of the Russian language toward mystical expression was a kind of ontological defect that didn’t appear in other Indo-European languages. Verbs for action and subjective perception, carried over into their extraverbal usage, were rigorously coherent in practice in Slavic languages. The essential problem was that there were no terms in Russian for the typology of Western thoughts and feelings. Everything is passionate and extreme. It’s impossible to say good afternoon without it sounding like a threat. That’s why it’s so difficult to translate Russian and why Nabokov foundered in his catastrophic translation of Pushkin. He was arrogant, a sentimentalist, and believed that a literal translation of Eugene Onegin could convey the emotional inflections of Russian poetry. Impossible! You have to read Russian in order to hear that mysterious, mystical music.
“Tolstoy is our greatest writer because he struggled against that debility of the language, and it was through that struggle,” Nina said, “that he discovered ostranenie. That magical little word has no translation, but we might say distancing, estrangement, even the unheimlich, like Freud, or defamiliarization. A distortion that alters the trivial sense to reveal the clear light of the Russian language. Tolstoy used it, making it visible. He was an exceptional writer, yet his style is full of difficulties; it has nothing of elegance, and many have criticized it and accused him of writing badly, and he did write badly—he was no Turgenev—because he was seeking to disrupt that metaphysical scourge of the vernacular language. He transformed the way Russian is written. Without Tolstoy it would be impossible to conceive of Mandelstam, or Akhmatova, or Shklovsky. He gave form to that method, that light, that fine eye, the visual detail that speaks without saying that spiritual burden.”
When he was struggling against the sorrow of death, Tolstoy wrote an account of the execution of a poor peasant, an arsonist. The gallows, the executioner, the pallid face of the man about to be hanged, the poignancy of the situation. Tolstoy, in contrast to what any other journalist would have done, paused over the description of a servant who carried a bucket of soapy water to moisten the hangman’s noose so that it would slip more easily around the victim’s neck. That detail extinguished all metaphysics and made you feel the bureaucratic horror of the execution better than any emotional invocation, à la Dostoevsky, of the humiliated and the aggrieved.
Nina was smoking and drinking tea, one cigarette after another and one greenish cup after another from the silver samovar. She’d paused by the window, and the light illuminated her slightly bluish hair. Tolstoy struggled against the indomitable, diabolical depths of his mother tongue, describing the tiny details that survived beneath its metaphysical crust, and in that way he avoided the trap of the obscure, religious profundity of the language. His true disciple was Wittgenstein! What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
She’d paused by the window and remained quiet, as though enacting with her silence what she was trying to tell me. The winter light entered softly through the window. Squirrels ran to and fro along the frozen ground of the park in search of something to eat.
“The squirrels thrive here because there aren’t any stray dogs,” said Nina. “They should import street dogs.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about the empty hotel room, the neutral arrangement of furniture and objects, Ida’s tulle scarf, a reddish shadow covering the nightstand. A hotel obsession! Ida, stepping naked from the bathroom, nubile, her pubis, her soft hips. One afternoon, obsessing over these images that came back to me with the clarity of dreams, I drove the car out of the garage, took a few turns around town, crossed through the woods, and got on Route One heading back to the Hyatt Hotel. In the bar the pianist was still playing Ellington tunes (“Sweet Georgia Brown”), and I went up to the sixth floor to spend the night in a room like all the others. There was nowhere else I could feel safe, and maybe if I took up in that anonymous room, as I’d done so many times in my youth, I’d be able to get somewhere with the story I was struggling to write. It was there that I started working on these notes, trying to fill in the gaps and record the details and memories so that my life during those days might strike upon some form. (The anonymous, impersonal form of a hotel room.) It calmed me to think that this could work as an alibi, and if the police discovered my reservations at the Hyatt, I would say that I went to the hotel every now and then to shut myself in and write.
And that’s what I did. I placed the table next to the window that looked out over the road, watching the cars pass, below, like fireflies. Everything was so inseparable from Ida, from the memories of our nights together and our conversations, that I sometimes thought I could hear her voice, see her naked body against the mirror; these were the images that had followed me for weeks. I started by writing about the first time she called me, in December, when she tracked me down in Buenos Aires after a few days with no news from me.
At dawn I went surreptitiously back to town, driving along the freeway until the traffic circle on Washington Road with the same estranged feeling that I’d had when coming back from my meetings with Ida Brown. You can weave a spiderweb around yourself trying to justify your actions, yet it’s that web that finally smothers you in the end.
We had resumed courses in the middle of March after the week off following midterms. Everything remained in a strange unreality, as if Ida’s absence forced us to pretend that nothing was happening. A group of graduate students, driven by John III, had signed a letter addressed to the university’s authorities requesting clarifications about Professor Brown’s case, but they’d responded that everything was in the hands of the law and that the police had marked the case as closed, filed under “suspicious accidental death.” This meant that the investigation could be reopened if any new element came to the knowledge of the police, but it also insinuated that it might have been a suicide. The statement had outraged the students and the faculty as well. It was impossible to imagine Ida committing suicide, and I knew very well that this insinuation had nothing to do with the reality of the events. Several versions were circulating in the hallways, but today, by rereading my notes from that time, I realize it was Nina who first surmised what had actually happened. Only a few isolated notes in the newspapers could have allowed anyone to imagine that a series of strange incidents was taking place, and that Ida’s death might also be included among them.
From what she told me, a Yale professor, known for his research in molecular biology, had died under suspicious circumstances only a few weeks before. (What relationship could there be between that death and the accident of an English literature professor, an expert on Conrad?)
“Maybe professors were killing among themselves?” Nina said with irony. During her years in Russia, she’d learned the virtues of sarcasm. Nina knew the academic world well, and she considered it a jungle, more dangerous than the swamps of Vietnam. Very intelligent, very well-educated people dreaming of terrible vengeance in the night. She’d climbed all the ladders of a so-called academic career and knew the resentment and hatred that ran through university departments where professors must coexist for decades. What could have happened? We had to wait; the only certain piece of information available was that Professor Brown had picked up those letters from her mailbox. Was it possible to get a list of all the mail that arrived in the campus post office that day? “If we had that information,” said Nina, “we could find out who wrote to her, whose return addresses were on the letters.” Did she have a box in her hands, a package? Didn’t I remember? Maybe a parcel from UPS or FedEx? She was enthusiastic, developing conjectures and hypotheses that focused on the minutes after Ida left the meeting, entered the department office, had a conversation with the Graduate Studies receptionist, and saw me. What time was that? So, if the accident occurred at 7:00 p.m., everything had taken place within twenty minutes. “Often,” she said, “a time bomb will go off if something tears through the paper wrapped around the box or hollowed-out book it’s been set inside.”
Sometimes she lost heart. “What can one individual know,” Nina would say, “no matter how clever he or she might be? The complex weaving of deliberately distorted information, with versions and counter-versions, forms the dense space in which we imagine things that we cannot understand. It’s no longer gods that decide fate, it’s other forces that create the schemes to determine our fortunes in life, my dear. But don’t go believing there’s a hidden secret: everything is in plain sight.”
I’d cut my ties to Argentina as if nothing was left back there. Once in a while I did go to the library to read a back issue of one of the newspapers and find the lost tenor of my days in Buenos Aires. I’d look at what films were playing, what exhibitions were showing, I’d look at the weather report, at changes in the political situation, but all with an extreme indifference as though the things I read about were taking place in a remote past, and I was living in a distant, parallel time. A few months before the military coup, I’d resigned from my job at the newspaper, El Mundo, and then spent a couple of years shut away in an apartment on Calle Sarmiento, writing a novel that met with some modest success (the modest success that’s typical in Buenos Aires), but since then my life had been stagnant. One time I had the idea to take my car and drive along an open, cloudless beach in the south of Buenos Aires Province, and the car got stuck in the wet sand. It was impossible to get it out because, while I tried digging, water flowed up around the wheels with the rising tide, threatening to sweep the car away. In the end a local man pulled me out with a pair of carthorses as though I was on a ship stranded in the middle of the ocean.
Sometimes I even imagined what would have become of my life if I’d stayed in Buenos Aires. Maybe I would have patched things up with my ex-wife, maybe I finally would have won the favor of my upstairs neighbor, Margarita, but I surely would have kept on making the rounds, writing for literary supplements, having conversations with friends in La Paz bar.
It was possible to find connections, links, correlations, and parallels between one life and another, and that double bind protected me from the true memories. Sometimes messages I received from friends would bring me back to reality, though I never responded to them; they wrote me emails or left their voices recorded on the answering machine in my office, which they must have found in the university directory. “Che, Emilio, what are you up to? Give me a call, it’s Junior.” It was odd, why did he want to talk to me? I was surprised, but I wouldn’t answer. Several times I even got letters from certain friends—Anita, Gerardo, Germán—who resorted to the archaic method of sending mail by post to see if they’d get a response. But I never opened them. A few letters also came from Clara, my ex-wife, but I wrote back without opening them, imagining with total certainty the things she would be saying to me and knowing what she expected me to say, even though, by that stage, I was a stranger to her just as she was to me (in spite of the years we’d lived together).
A couple of times I called my mother, who lives in Canada with my brother and his family. I promised her that I’d come visit even though she and I both knew it would never happen, but still we said it, holding onto a ritual that consisted in expressing feelings now forgotten. The second time I called, I told her I’d met a woman had the same name as her. My mother laughed, and I think her response the same as Ida’s: it’s ridiculous, with so many women around. No one likes to have the same name as someone else, and even I get annoyed whenever I encounter some other Renzi among my acquaintances. “It can’t be,” she said, “I don’t like it,” and she changed the subject. “Your brother is doing very well, he bought a house on the beach, the kids are learning the flute and the violin, they started playing soccer in school, they’re always asking about you.”
As I was on my way to teach class and listened, in the hallway, to the soft buzzing of laughter and voices that you always hear before entering the classroom, I thought that the students must know everything I was thinking and that their network of informants and interpretations was impeccable. That laughter, was it aimed at me? I established connections between isolated incidents as if the impression that everything was connected was a sign of insight. That’s lunatic reasoning, I thought, as the afternoon light illuminated the hallways of the library where all the books in the world converged in one endless building, as in a story by Borges, another author for whom everything seems to have to do with everything else, the world responding to the diabolical logic of a raving deity.
That’s what I was doing when, in confirmation of my suspicions, Inspector O’Connor appeared one afternoon, accompanied by the same sallow-faced agent with Clippers sunglasses and straight hair who’d been with him the first time. They were waiting for me in the doorway to the seminar as if they wanted to broadcast that I was still presumed guilty. I didn’t like the way they were showing themselves to the students coming out of class, but that was their intention. Professor Brown’s case had been closed, O’Connor told me, I could move freely, but there were two matters they wanted to talk to me about. Then the man in dark glasses introduced himself to me as John Menéndez, special agent of the FBI. O’Connor looked at his notepad and revealed to me that they were, in fact, investigating a series of attacks in several different universities. Ida’s death seemed to be an accident, and they saw no evidence that it belonged to that series, but there were a couple of issues they wanted to clarify. It was their understanding that Ida had frequented the Hyatt Hotel. I know what those kinds of insinuations mean, so I said nothing and waited. Ida had gone to that hotel several times at the end of last year and also in January.
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“I was in Argentina during that period.”
Yes, they knew, but she hadn’t made any reference to those meetings or rendezvous?
“Not to me, at least.” I held back; were they aware that we’d been seeing each other but concealing the fact to see my reactions?
“We believe,” O’Connor said, “that she stayed at the hotel whenever she had to catch an early morning flight from Newark airport.”
“Was that all?”
“No, on the night of the accident, you didn’t hand anything to Professor Brown when you met her in the hallway?” The receptionist had seen us talking from her desk.
“Nothing,” I said. “We were at a meeting and she was indeed in the hallway when I left, but she was already carrying the mail she’d picked up from the department. Did they have a list of the letters she’d received?”
“We’re asking the questions,” Menéndez said in a low tone, almost a whisper.
“Perfect,” I said. “Excuse me, but I have to go back to work.”
“Yes, of course,” said O’Connor, and before leaving he advised me to get my disturbances looked at; a routine analysis never hurts, he said.
They withdrew and moved off down the hallway like two gravediggers. It was very strange. I had the feeling that they’d meant to inform me they knew all about my visits to the hotel. Was that it? And why had she been going to the Hyatt before I came here? Here I understood the means by which the police are constantly sowing doubts and obsessions among those accused in a case. Was it true that she’d gone to the Hyatt before, at night, alone? Or were they only warning me that they knew about my meetings with her? I was unsettled once again, and I made a few detours in the car to calm myself down before returning home; driving helps my nerves, and I headed in the direction of Philadelphia without getting on the highway. I made my way along side routes, among woods and country houses. I turned on the radio and listened to the news and the weather report. Then they started playing Bob Dylan songs. In Lawrenceville, a little roadside town, I stopped for something to eat and then left and turned around to take Nassau Street back toward town. As I turned onto Markham Road, I saw that the lights in my house were on. I parked in the entrance to the garage and went in through the side door. It was locked, and the main entrance was locked as well. Did I just forget and leave the light on myself? Had someone come in? Everything was in order; only a few pages of my class notes seemed to have moved. My notebooks were open on the desk.
There was nothing compromising; all of the names were initials and the places had been changed. I’ve been writing in those notebooks for years and have always tried to make it so that I’m the only person able to decipher them, but how would an officer read them? It was ridiculous to think of the FBI dedicating themselves to reading between the lines of my writing. Had they come in? I went through the rooms; they were in order. Of course, that could be proof that they had indeed entered surreptitiously. Had they taken anything? On a low table in Hubert’s library, there was an issue of Partisan Review magazine from 1988, open to an essay by Martin Jay, “The Fictional Terrorist.” And had I forgotten it there? I started to grow worried. I had to figure out what was happening to me.
I decided to call Ralph Parker, the detective I’d met through Elizabeth. The receptionist from the Ace Agency picked up. “I’m Emilio Renzi,” I told her, “a friend of Ms. Wustrin’s. I’d like to speak with Mr. Parker.” “He charges three hundred dollars for a consultation,” she said, “whether he proceeds with the case or not.” If the work did continue, the three hundred dollars would be deducted from the fees. The per diem rate depended on the type of investigation. She made me an appointment with Parker for the following week.