Mr. Gorbachev, dressed in a pink ballerina tutu dances with the spider to the music of Swan Lake. I sit in the bleachers, along with Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, and just to my right, John F. Kennedy and we watch the ballet of Mr. Gorbachev and the spider, beneath the star-studded tent and oh, how quiet is the audience as it watches the show.
“Profiles in courage,” whispers Mr. Kennedy.
“Merde,” whispers Alexis, over and over again, “I knew this was going to happen. Merde, merde, merde.”
The music changes from Swan Lake to early sixties rock and Mikhail Gorbachev does the watusi. The spider backs away and some people cheer. Not too far away, I see Dostoyevsky taking notes and then scratching his head. He frowns, looks confused, then hesitantly smiles. Solzhenitsyn fervently underlines some words on a yellow legal pad and ends up ripping the page.
Jefferson, sitting next to Benjamin Franklin studies the spider, then he looks to his notes. “Ben,” I can hear him say, “I really don’t understand what went wrong. I really don’t understand. I thought we created something elegant, that soared and was proud—not—not something that’s dark and scrambles. What’d we do wrong? I don’t understand!”
“Nor do I,” sighs Ben, “nor do I.”
At this point, three clowns in scorpion suits rush out and try to assail Mr. Gorbachev; but he laughs, grabs each one, rips off their costumes; Brezhnev is revealed, naked, and he runs to the shadows. Gorbachev rips off another costume and Stalin is revealed wearing a red and white fur-trimmed g-string. He is laughed at and, covering his groin with bloody hands, he alternately backs away, turns about confused, and makes it to the shadows. Mr. Gorbachev grins and does a beautiful turn on one foot as though he had been a ballerina since birth. The last clown comes at Mr. Gorbachev, a fearsome scorpion indeed and Mr. Gorbachev simply grabs him as the others; off with the costume, and Beria, with a necklace of guns, is flipped by Gorbachev, and goes head over heels, lands with a wham; he stands up, dazed, rubs his behind and begins to cry and wail like a child, “Staaaaaaleeeeeeen!” And runs into the shadows.
Then Khrushchev bounces out in an ill-fitting tutu and wearing a necklace of missiles. He means to engage Gorbachev in pas de deux, but trips, stumbles and before he can stop himself, he gets too close to the spider—it attacks, bites; Khrushchev screams once...
Kennedy looks down. “I don’t know...” he whispers. “I don’t know.” He sighs. “Even now, I don’t rest easy; my flesh does not decay, held together by doubt, by remorse... those advisers in Viet Nam. Am I less guilty than Khrushchev? If he is devoured by the spider, shouldn’t I be as well?” He begins to stand, then sits, and shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe I was devoured by the spider and didn’t know it.”
“Your problem,” I whisper, “may be that you experience emotions and guilt in a mercantile society that has no use for emotions other than profit.”
“Dear God,” whispers Kennedy, “what went wrong? What went wrong?”
The music has changed; it’s now the Blue Tango and Gorbachev changes his dance. He goes up to the spider, grabs two front legs, and tries to get it to dance; instead, the spider tries to attack. He gives a shout of delight, yells, “Glasnost” and flips the spider over on to its back; the spider lands with a whump and the whole place shakes. Enraged, the spider rises and tries to attack Gorbachev again, but he deftly grabs the spider by its front legs again and spins it about, then he lets it go and it slides across the floor and slams into the wall. Crash! And the body of the spider obscures a bright Coca Cola sign. Then the body abruptly bloats and explodes in dishwashers, toasters, jogging shoes, tires, VCRs, televisions and finally three smaller spiders, with the heads of Reagan, Nixon and Bush, come scampering out from the body. The one with the face of Nixon screams, “I am not a crook!” The crowd roars in laughter as he goes up to the body of the spider and begins to push it. The spider with the face of Reagan says, “Well, I don’t know, I just can’t remember. You know how it is,” and the crowd applauds and yells, “Hooray!” The spider with the face of Bush says, “No second-rate Slavic is gonna make a fool of us! We gotta get a proper spin on this.” And the crowd laughs again at the humor and Nixon scampers over, manages to awkwardly throw junk bonds toward Gorbachev and screams, “We will bury you!” and the three spiders drag the big, dazed spider away into the shadows.
“Come on baby, let’s do the twist...” The music roars and Gorbachev dances. He does the twist better than Chubby Checker.
I hear fervid whispering in the back and turning about, I see Arnold Toynbee talking to Lenin, “... it’s all the same, be it the new Soviet Man or the Rugged Individualist. It’s impossible for two mirrors to have a dialogue and yet—“
Lenin answers, “...and yet we must dance, mustn’t we? Until all workers of the world unite, we still must dance, mustn’t we?” He stands, grabs Arnold by the hands and says “My dear comrade, shall we?”
“Nyet!”
Gorbachev is standing there, looking at them, waving his hands and repeating, “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!”
He then points.
To the left, where the scorpion clowns emerged—movement.
The music to the final act of Swan Lake is playing and Gorbachev does the ballet beautifully and Kennedy whispers, “...and the torch is passed to a new generation?” But I notice that he says it in the form of a question.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin look at their notes and continue to mumble, “What the hell happened? What happened? I thought we had it all figured out...”
Alexis De Tocqueville continues to rock back and forth, covering his eyes, muttering, “Merde, merde, merde.”
The music soars and swells, and Gorbachev continues to dance and the darkness moves. It moves, it flows, it congeals.
“Ahh,” I hear Lenin. “Ah. The partner that Mikhail must dance with or not dance at all. This is truly the dance of the hour, of the ages, of history.”
Which history? I wonder. Whose history? Is he dancing with that which creates the spider or some Russian monster? Or that which creates both? I glance to De Tocqueville, to Toynbee and I shudder.
The darkness oozes out to Gorbachev. And stops. Gorbachev turns to face it. The darkness moves and takes on form, a hunched, broad shouldered, brutish dark form that keeps changing. And it is impossible to say exactly what it is. Its eyes are dusky and distinct and they watch Gorbachev. And Gorbachev, in his pink tutu, with Swan Lake elegant and majestic, tries to get the beast to dance. But the beast just watches. And watches. And waits.