THE WORLD IN A BLACK BOX

HE LEFT THE TELEVISION ON day and night. He ate with it, laughed at it, and pleasured himself to it, before falling asleep. He immersed himself in it so completely that he began to hear the theme songs to his favourite shows in his dreams.

Sometime during the winter of 1994, he received a letter that had been addressed to him in Rostov and then forwarded to Moscow by the new owners of the dacha. It was from Iosif’s sister. He hadn’t spoken to Tanya in a generation.

The letter was written in French. Reading a letter composed in the language of his former mentor was no longer an easy task. He spent an entire afternoon deciphering her handwriting, comparing i’s with l’s, a’s with o’s, and sometimes r’s and i’s because she didn’t dot them and left the tail off her a’s. She hadn’t lost her dramatic style or her poetic flair. Her letter began with a line of poetry in Russian, taken from the The Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelstam: Да, я лежу в земле, губами шевеля.

In the envelope, he found a newspaper clipping about a German filmmaker by the name of Hans-Jürgen Schaeffer. In her letter she didn’t mention the clipping, but talked about the birth of her daughter in 1969 and her subsequent divorce. She had invited Kolia to celebrate the new year, which was now well past. She had also included her phone number.

He said nothing to Masha. The next day, he began to dial the number, but the receiver slipped out of his sweaty palms. He would call her on the weekend. On Sunday, calling her felt too much like a chore, and he put it off till Monday. On Tuesday, he drank a beer first and then hung up as soon as he heard a woman’s voice. On Wednesday, on the verge of a heart attack, he finally dusted off his French. On Friday, he pulled on a pair of his most presentable black jeans and a grey T-shirt — on which he’d had printed the words My hand in your pocket — grabbed his Walkman and a New Order tape and left the apartment, completely forgetting to comb his hair.

He found Tanya Branch sitting in the cafe they had agreed upon.

She kissed him.

“Did you read it? Have you seen the film?”

Tanya didn’t ask him anything at all about his life or tell him anything about hers. All she could talk about was her rediscovery of Mandelstam. Her familiarity with the poet surprised him — from memory she recited the poem “Yes, I’m lying in the earth, moving my lips” in both Russian and French, providing her own translation. Then she launched into a discussion of the director in the newspaper clipping and his “oeuvre.” The film in question had played in Moscow at the beginning of the year. At least a quarter century had passed without them saying a single word to each other, and all she wanted to talk about was this man. For a moment, Kolia wondered if Iosif hadn’t assumed a new identity in Germany. But that was not the case. Tanya answered his question before he could even formulate it.

Yes, he’d read the article. Yes, there was a certain similarity between his life and the events portrayed in the film, but nothing more than that. No, he hadn’t seen the film. It had stopped playing in Moscow a month and a half ago. He had checked.

“It’s obvious that you haven’t seen it.” She handed him a videocassette. “This is it. Do you have a VCR?”

“No.”

“We can look at it at my place. My daughter’s staying over at her fiancé’s tonight.”

He followed her. She lived in a two-bedroom flat, and had her own kitchen and shower. The ceiling was low and the walls were white, except in the kitchen where her daughter smoked. In the living room, there was a map of the world with coloured thumbtacks pressed into it, pinpointing several cities in Russia and a few locations in the West. Yellow somewhere in Switzerland, purple for Moscow, red at Magadan. There was a pink thumbtack placed in the middle of western Siberia. A black one in Romania.

He asked her if her daughter travelled a lot. Tanya looked at him, astonished. No, of course not. She switched on the VCR, slid in the cassette, flicked the TV to the right channel, and then dimmed the lights and sat down on the sofa, tucking one leg under the other and popping a stick of Wrigley’s in her mouth. For the first half an hour, she popped a bubble every thirty seconds.

Kolia watched as the story of his childhood was told by another man. The film was in German, but the Russian subtitles made it obvious that the director leaned towards melodrama. He had something of a reputation for producing “docu-fiction” and for being a bit of a megalomaniac. He considered himself to be another Werner Herzog. The film was shot in Poland and depicted the harsh life in Siberian work camps. The way the hierarchy of the camps was portrayed lacked subtlety — the brutes were simply brutes, the prisoners were all hopeless imbeciles. But there was absolutely no doubt in Kolia’s mind that the protagonist was him.

At the end of the credits, he sat up and flexed the arm he’d been leaning on. It had gone to sleep. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand. He waited until she spoke. Tanya explained that after reading the article in the newspaper last year, she had contacted the journalist who wrote it. He agreed to forward a letter to the filmmaker on her behalf. The director had come to Moscow to meet her and had described exactly how he stumbled across her brother. At the same time as his official disappearance in 1953, Iosif had successfully entered the Red Army — thanks to his benefactor in the camp — and then he made his way to Romania in the winter of that year. It was in Romania two years later that the filmmaker met Iosif, who had talked at length about Kolia, his birth in the Kolyma camp, teaching him French, and so on.

“Where is he now?”

“Iosif is dead, Kolia.”

“When did he die?”

“Schaeffer said he died in 1955.”

“How does he know?”

“He found him.”

“What do you mean he found him?”

“Well, he found him.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Iosif committed suicide, Kolia.”

“I want to know how he died. It’s been forty years, but I want to know.”

“He didn’t tell me. I have his number in Berlin. He speaks Russian but not French.”

She lit a cigarette. He took a shot of vodka to dampen the shock. He asked her if she needed anything, if things were going okay for her. As an answer, she kissed him, forcing her tongue into his mouth. Kolia pushed her back, but she persisted. When she grasped his sex with her teeth through the fabric of his jeans, he gave in. It felt like an eternity since a woman had thrown herself on top of him.

The cumulative effect of the film, their discussion afterwards, and now Tanya lying there beside him made Kolia feel like his whole world was coming undone. He got up and got dressed. She stopped him at the door.

“You’re forgetting the director’s phone number.”

“I’ve got it memorized. You know that.”

“Put it in your pocket.”

He asked her if she could still pull some strings for him.

“If I need to get to Romania, can you help me?”

“Yeah, it’s easy now.”

“I just got out of prison.”

She let out a gust of disappointment.

“What did you do to wind up in there?”

“I got caught doing a little pickpocketing at the train station,” he said, pointing to his T-shirt.

“It’s doable,” she said.

He gave her two quick pecks on the cheek, and took a taxi home.