PROLOGUE (December 1999)

THINK OF me as real. Whether or not I am is unimportant, an idle theoretical question.

Same goes for truth. Consider it irrelevant! There’s no such thing as a true story, only credible or questionable ones: those we believe, and those we don’t. As to this story, think of it as not just one but several, nested inside each other. Like a Russian matryoshka, one of those rotund wooden dolls with a horizontal seam around its middle. You pop open the doll and inside is a slightly smaller version, which you also open, which contains another, smaller one—and so on, till you reach the tiniest, most enwombed of all.

Russians use matryoshkas to teach their children the mathematical concepts of volume and proportion. But these nested dolls are also useful for communicating a fact about history and, more broadly, about time: any event, human or natural, is simultaneously prefiguration and echo, forerunner and follow-up. Knowing this, people may find it easier to conduct the business of living with some appreciation for absurdity, some tolerance for paradox; even, from time to time—though this is less common—with some glee.

Seva was capable of that: of gleefulness. Which is why I so enjoyed our collaboration.

IN MOSCOW, a while back—during the early decades of the twentieth century (which in a few weeks we’ll be calling “the last century,” the one we just fled, whose teeth marks are still visible)—in Moscow lived a theater director and set designer named Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Seva had luminous dark-brown eyes, a pronouncedly curved nose, and mobile, almost twitchy features. His hair was perpetually tousled, as if it had never occurred to him to comb it. A true maverick, Seva believed that all the usual, tired rules of stage performance existed merely to be broken. Curtainless stages and exposed wings, revolves and ramps and multilevel sets, montages and freezes and action amidst the audience—all these were Meyerholdian innovations. He knew what he wanted: an overthrow of expectations, a revolution! Russia’s theater had never seen anyone remotely like him before. And neither Russia nor the rest of the world would see anyone quite like him again.

Seva was thick-skinned. He loved it when spectators were outraged by his productions—the more jeers, the better. Mostly, though, his audiences were exhilarated, like children in a fun house full of distorting mirrors. “Mystery and the desire to solve it,” he wrote, “are what draw so many people to the theater.” In the theater, if not in life, people thrill to bewilderment.

SEVA LOVED Paris almost as much as he loved plays. Though he visited it only a few times, the French capital was a site to which he returned frequently in his reveries.

He could readily summon to memory the city’s views and sounds, and when he was feeling low, the smell of French tobacco renewed him—as did a certain fragrance his wife liked to wear, which she’d obtained in Paris. For Seva, whose nose was nearly as sensitive as a perfume maker’s, simply remembering the odors of Paris was profoundly comforting. Not unlike daydreaming, to which he often had recourse, especially while in prison . . .

I’ll get to all that. But before I go any further, I ought to explain what I’m doing here, why this story’s being told by me and not by somebody else. In theory anyone could tell it (anyone, that is, willing to lay claim to a certain kind of omniscience, as storytellers must), but in practice I’m it—there’s no one better suited.

I’M HERE for the simple reason that I was Seva Meyerhold’s doppelganger, his double. Everybody has one, of course. You can’t go through a lifetime without one, acknowledged or not. A doppelganger is simply an alternate self, invoked as needed, active as required: the ego’s private retainer. Loyal, yes, but also reliably independent. When necessary, an agent provocateur.

Perhaps as a child you played with a friend termed imaginary by your parents? When you recount a personal experience, are you tempted to pretend it happened to somebody else? Ever worn a costume and felt that powerful elation which results from having become, for a few intensely satisfying hours, an utterly different I? Then I’m sure you know what I mean. There’s nothing at all unusual in this: having an incorporeal double is one of life’s inevitabilities. It’s of a piece with having a shadow for your body, an echo for your voice, a reflection for your face as you peer in the mirror and wonder (aloud or silently, unnerved or excited), Just who am I now?

As for what doppelgangers actually do, the possibilities are limitless! We’re prompters; we get balls rolling. In some circumstances we furnish the so-called voice of reason; at other times, a sublime hint of eros, a refreshing shower of humor, a jolt of fear, a flash of fury: whatever’s useful at the moment. There are no straightforward guidelines, only improvisation.

SEVA SIGNED me on because he was starting to encounter impediments. He sensed what was coming: his government was locking up its artists, and colleagues were turning one another in. Seva understood that in life as onstage, a double is good protection, a safety net for the self. The only question in his mind was what exactly to do with our partnership.

Here I let him take the lead, and eventually things got dicey. Just as transactions between people are sometimes botched, so too a person’s relationship with his or her double can founder. Under extreme circumstances, it can even be sundered altogether. Though I should’ve been more insistent, Seva had me lulled into a false feeling of security . . .

In the early days of 1940, he died in prison, and I sidelined myself.

What can I say? My stint in Butyrka, waiting with Seva in his dank cell, nearly did me in. My sense of failure was profound. And although I hoped for a new partner to show up quickly (someone beguiling, to help me get over Seva), the right candidate simply didn’t appear.

I WAS not, however, entirely unemployed. For reasons and in ways I’ll explain before long, I infiltrated various individuals’ dreams.

I did this under Seva’s auspices, in the guise of the director himself. And each person on whose nocturnal stage I performed was connected in some way with theater—hence amenable to my appearances, however unexpected they may have been.

All dreams, I think, are essentially rehearsals. The dreamer tries out speeches and gestures, not for an audience but to see where improvisation might lead. To “mysterious allusions, deception and transformation,” as Seva once said, and thence, if the dreamer is lucky, into the clear.

My most recent oneiric intervention involved a woman named Camilla Archer, a fifty-year-old American residing in New York City. I was drawn to her partly because she loved theater, which meant she knew a fair bit about Seva’s career and accomplishments. Plus, someone else linked us: her father, Jordan Archer. Seva had met him many years earlier, in Paris. About Jordan, more anon—but first a few words on his daughter, before I let her speak for herself.

CAMILLA WAS in considerable distress when I first encountered her.

In a nutshell: her cousin, Eve Pell, had just died unexpectedly, and the deceased’s sole offspring—a young woman—had begun asking questions about Eve’s past. These inquiries made Camilla quite uneasy, which I found curious. Wouldn’t a daughter naturally want to learn as much as possible about her dead mother? Camilla’s resistance to her young relation’s inquiries reminded me of a bear doing its best to prolong hibernation, even though in some recess of its mind, it knows the season for sleep is over.

What’s causing this woman to stonewall? I wondered. My question soon gave rise to an idea. I could mastermind a series of nocturnal vignettes for Camilla that would have the effect of rousing her, not swiftly (as if the bedsheets, so to speak, were being yanked off) but ineluctably—as though a feather were tickling her mind while she slept and the only way to get the tickling to stop would be to wake up . . .

Yet why, one may ask, would I bother to intercede in such a situation? What, in short, did it have to do with me?

Remorse, for starters. I was swimming in it.

As Seva’s partner I’d urged denial upon him (Just look the other way!), and history had pounced, tearing him to bits. After his passing, I had but one aim: to perpetuate the remarkable mental energies that had been generated by our collaboration. Like two sticks rubbing together, a human being and his or her double always give off mental heat. Sometimes it’s mild, sometimes strong, sometimes—as with Seva—nearly incandescent. This was, after all, a man of rare talent. And when such a human being dies, the heat that’s been created is dispersed, like flying sparks, in other minds. Which it then warms. Or ignites!

Ergo my draw to Camilla, who struck me as fine tinder for Seva’s sparks.

IN THE first of Camilla’s dreams, I took a recent event, a shooting spree at an American high school, and mingled it with one from the distant past: an outdoor theatrical spectacle. I had in mind the sort of thing that used to take place on Russian streets during the Revolution—lively, ribald, didactic. Into these entwined events I introduced Vsevolod Meyerhold.

In addition, I gave Camilla’s father a key part in that first dream. Jordan Archer’s presence on her nighttime stage got his daughter’s attention immediately. Thereafter it was easy to proceed with additional episodes and keep the pressure mounting. By the time her final dream rolled around, in a few months, my collaborator would feel deeply rattled, and just as deeply invigorated.

I CONFESS that by urging this woman to dream in a certain direction, I was also satisfying my own desire to revisit days past. If only Seva and I could have teamed up in a different era!

Silly longing; I should know better. The Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner said it straight out: “Nothing on this earth is cruder than to beg for time or blame the hour.” Seva’s mise-en-scène wasn’t a pretty one. The utopia he (and so many others!) tried to conjure was nothing but a catastrophe in the making. All that midcentury savagery—see what’s come of it? First that series of outlandish spy games between Russia and America; and now, as the century draws to its close, the entire house of cards is collapsing. Russia’s old thugs have been reanointed as its new oligarchs.

As for the West, it’s in a nasty muddle of its own. Warring in the Balkans yet again! And peeking anxiously eastward toward the next outbreak, another likely bloodbath, this time in a hot, sandy place . . . One needn’t, however, look to the latest battlefield to see what’s wrong. One has merely to visit any shopping mall, wander its halls, finger its goods, play the video games, watch the rapt faces of the children as the fireballs descend and the villains cackle maniacally till the good guys arrive to blow their faces off.

Ah, I long for a new kind of drama to spook us, embolden us! As Chekhov put it, in The Seagull: “One must portray life not as it is, and not as it ought to be, but as it appears in our dreams.” Well, we can only wish. I can safely assert, though, that my American’s nighttime dream-labor was worth the disruption it entailed. To her came a peek behind appearances, the best thing a dream can offer.

TIME TO take off! I could make a few additional remarks, but I don’t wish to prejudice you. Seva felt strongly about this. The audience, he insisted, should always be defamiliarized.

ON THAT note, the curtain. New York City, May 1999. Enter CAMILLA.