The “horse” came up again a week later …

His friend Zhurbin had got them two small parts in a film. “You stooge around for two or three hours and end up earning what you get for five nights at the slaughterhouse. Not bad, eh?”

The scene to be filmed is short: some “revolutionary sailors,” guns in hand, faces smeared with black (“I look like a chimney sweep,” Oleg says to himself), are supposed to invade a palace.

The director is not happy with the way they attack. First he finds them too slow, then he bawls them out for galloping along “like a pack of monkeys in rut” …

To be an authentic son of the people Oleg has removed his glasses. Without his being able to identify them, his foggy gaze lights on a couple standing close to the camera. The umpteenth assault by the sailors has been judged acceptable. The actors put down their weapons, begin removing their makeup … As he puts his glasses back on, Oleg gives a start: at the other end of the studio the director is talking to Valentin Zyamtsev and Lessya. Having arrived in the middle of the filming they must have seen this shortsighted sailor bounding up the staircase …

“Hi, Erdmann. This must make a change from your work at the slaughterhouse!” Zyamtsev pats him on the shoulder. “I guess Stanislavsky never knew that to prepare for the role of a sailor you need to train with pigs’ carcasses, eh?”

It was Lessya’s laughter that sounded the most disdainful: “Oh, and apart from the pigs, how’s your Catherine the Second screenplay coming along? Have you finished episode a hundred and fifty yet?”

The director gives Oleg a pitying look: “A screenplay about Catherine? Deadly!”

Oleg is just about to move off when Lessya calls out to him in a voice whose mocking chill freezes him: “So where’s she got to with her sleeping around, your Cathy? Who’s her boyfriend now? Korsakov? Or is it Lanskoy?” And in a muttered aside, she adds: “Filthy sow! She had the hots for all of them …!”

There are hoots of laughter; a smutty remark made by a woman generally gives rise to wild hilarity in men. Oleg feels the flush rising to his neck. He sees Zhurbin on the far side of the studio coming toward them. And just then he makes this unpremeditated reply: “No, Lessya. We’ve moved on from pigs. What Catherine prefers now is studs, especially tall, dark ones. And, do you know …”

She slaps him, hitting him more on his brow than his cheek. His glasses fly off. Zhurbin makes a dive, falls, catches them, and exclaims: “What a save!” He gets up, hands Oleg his glasses, mutters a brief “There you go again!” and accosts Zyamtsev: “As for you, Valentino, why don’t you get yourself a sailor’s uniform and join the assault with the rest of us, instead of writing dumb screenplays like that? …” And to the director: “OK, chief. When do we get our dough?”

In the street night has fallen. “It’s just like coming out after a movie,” remarks Zhurbin. “Except that we were in the movie …” His voice is a little mournful. “Don’t let it upset you, Erdmann. Women, men, love … that’s all a big movie, too. At the time you feel sad, but when it’s all over, you don’t even remember the actors’ names … Well, so long then! Don’t throw yourself in the Griboyedov Canal. It’s too dirty. Tomorrow at the slaughterhouse we’ll try to grab some calf’s liver. OK?”

He goes off. Oleg does not stir. He ends the sentence Lessya interrupted. “And do you know … I’m toting horsemeat around too …” It had been intended as a joke against himself. The impossibility of retrieving it now is so complete that it brings with it a certain relief. The last tie is cut, that of speech, which yesterday could still bring him Lessya’s voice, her breathing. From now on nothing more. So what was it Zhurbin said? You’ll end up forgetting even the actors’ names …

His footsteps lead him away from the district where he lives and for an hour this distancing serves as an end in itself.

The tourists’ Leningrad gives up the ghost, changing into suburban streets, dreary faded walls, ground floors spattered with dirty snow thrown up by trucks. Warehouses, factories, and dwellings whose occupants one pictures with perplexed compassion, yes, some old woman hesitating to cross this thunderous ditch of a road.

His destination is an apartment building that looks like a lone mountain crag. A narrow structure on three stories, which chaotic urban planning has left behind in a running noose of lines of communication: a cat’s cradle of railroad tracks and viaducts with rusty skeletons. Against all logic, lighted windows can be seen, potted plants behind the panes of glass, little tulle curtains … People are still living there!

But then, after all, this is where Oleg spent most of his childhood.

He goes in at the main entrance, cocks an ear to the echo from the stairwell, begins climbing. At the top landing a staircase leads up between floors to an attic door. There is a lock whose creaks and groans he knows how to master. He closes the door behind him, remains in the darkness, waits for the beating of his heart to calm down.

Feeling his way along the top of some shelving he locates an electric flashlight. He has no need to explore the premises. To the left a corner that served both as kitchen and bathroom. A zinc bathtub is there, thrust beneath the angle of the stairs. And this memory: his father pouring warm water over his back, it is winter, the steam makes a rainbow around the lightbulb … To the right a bed made of thick planks and a little couch, which gives the measure of the body that used to curl up there. There are ankle boots neatly lined up against the wall. Their wrinkled leather reminds him of the pain of the great frosts: the child walks along, counting the crossties, then, having lost all feeling in his toes, remembers tales of frostbite, runs, climbs the staircase, comes in, squeezes up against the great stove on which a bucket of water is heating. Soon it will be paradise, a hot stream of water, the resinous smell of the soap, his father softly whistling a tune …

Oleg walks over to a drawing board: his father’s “office.” Huge sheets of paper, sketches of pediments, of blind arcades … the beam from the flashlight slips across a tiny window and suddenly conjures a confused structure out of the darkness, a towering mass of columns, galleries, spires, cupolas.

A model of a palace, at least six feet high, the summit of which touches the attic ceiling.

The chaotic nature of this construction has a hypnotic effect. The eye follows the curves of a spiral staircase, becomes lost amid flying buttresses … It is a mixture of all styles. Classical facades are loaded with baroque sculptures, surging ogives rest upon antique colonnades … A castle? A cathedral? Or perhaps a whole city compressed by a violent folding of the rocks beneath? Fragments under construction blend in with ruins cunningly re-created.

There is also this mystery: directed at a certain angle, the beam lights up a forgotten object at the heart of this labyrinth, which looks like a fragment of coral.

Oleg calls to mind the child who spent hours in front of this model. In his daydreams he thrust open the gates, made his way in beneath the vaulted ceilings. Prophetically, his father’s voice used to ring out: “Here there will be a narthex with unfluted columns. And over there a hall in the form of a basilica … Palladio … Piranesi …” These mysterious mantras were part of the joy of being with his father, the smell of wood glue and the scent of the fire on which their evening meal was cooking … “The Gallery of Mirrors at Herrenchiemsee Castle … The abbey at Ottobeuren.” These strange syllables were lodged in his memory, notations of a happiness that would turn out to be all too transient.

It never occurred to him that what this palace betokened was a descent into madness. Granted, his father sometimes flew into a rage, smashed a part of the structure. “They said Renaissance perspective was illusionism. Idiots! Everything is illusion. Our lives, our passions … And even matter. Look, I’m going to break this staircase and then it will lead into nothingness!”

But the child knew he would soon start building again, a pediment would be added, a line of pillars … And that life would return to its simple pleasures: hot water in the bathtub, the spicy odor of the soap, his father whistling tunes to himself.

He was all the more shocked when the break came because it occurred during one of those periods of calm. One day the teacher told him he would not be going back home because his father had “health problems” … He did not weep. Not thanks to any particular stoicism but because he was overcome by obscure feelings of guilt: he had concealed the fact that his father was constructing this insane palace and that sometimes he used to speak in German …

Shame helped the child to endure the separation, the transfers from one educational establishment to another and the mockery—his schoolfellows always ended up learning the truth: “Your dad’s crazy, is that it? And I guess you’re nuts too! So are you a Nazi, Erdmann, like your old man?”

These insults would follow him throughout his school days, even during the months when the doctor allowed his father to return home. Increasingly the boy rebelled against such reunions, dreading the brief paradise and the inevitable subsequent banishment.

Adolescent selfishness liberated him from feelings of guilt. It was now his father who was the accused, a man incapable of finding anything better than his job as a land surveyor and this life in the attic. His son even held their German name against him—“a Nazi name!” But above all this palace, forever growing taller, collapsing, making a spectacle of incredible ruins. No longer seeing this father of his allowed him to feel like the others …

He must have reached the age of eighteen when, right at the center of the city, close to the Admiralty, he came across this thin little old man, his pate covered with silver threads. His father! The stab of pity Oleg felt was so sharp that the other emotions came only later: his old shame at having such a father and his current shame at having abandoned him. He lacked the courage to go up to him—the old man went on his way, muttering in a mixture of Russian and German, his gaze, now hazy, now piercing, alighting on the facades of buildings. To make up for his cowardice, Oleg went to visit him that same evening.

On this occasion there was no grand reunion. The old man seemed no longer aware of the passage of time. He spoke as if his son had just slipped out for a moment. “Look, I’ve constructed this colonnade but as time goes by only ruins will be left of it. Ruins are beauty liberated from time. Painters depict ruins without imagining the complete building. But we architects have to create the building and wait for it to collapse … Life is nothing more than waiting for that collapse. We spend our lives amid the ruins of what we have loved …”

Oleg began coming to see his father every day. The remarks that in the old days had seemed obscure to him now revealed their meaning: the phantasmagoria of the palace brought together projects that had been too ambitious ever to be realized. “Bernini designed the Louvre, but for lack of money his dream never saw the light of day. Fischer von Erlach, for his part, drew up plans for Schönbrunn Castle. Nobody dared to give physical form to such splendor …”

This architectural utopia epitomized his father’s whole life. His Russian sorrows, his German dreams, that apartment building choked by railroad tracks, monumental structures dreamed of in his ancestors’ fatherland. “Now, you’ve never seen the monastery at Wiblingen and its baroque library … What perfect proportions!”

On occasion he had a great desire to hug the old man, to extricate him from his delusions: “But Papa, you’ve never seen it either!” Oleg did not do so, aware that the delicate equilibrium his father now enjoyed depended on the continuity of his illusions.

One day, with his head thrust deep into the entrails of his model, his father murmured: “And here I’m going to install a Great Hall of the Knights, like the one at Weikersheim Castle. Part of our family came from there …”

Oleg whispered to him softly, as one addresses a sleepwalker engaged in his perilous progress: “… so they lived not far from that castle: What did they do in life?”

His father must have taken these words for the echo of his own thoughts. He continued the story and swiftly told the tale of the life closest to them, the one that had led to them, him and his son, ending up in this building like a mountain crag amid the railroad tracks.