For it was as if he, Batyk, were—you know?—a bad writer. Attributing to himself an as yet undemonstrated ability to hold forth on the most unlikely subjects with the greatest aplomb. Sweeping everything aside at his passage, all that he touched with his poisonous tongue. A toad stewed in vile potions, a sponge soaked in venom, a repugnant man living under a stone, lurking there to stain everything with his absurd and uncalled-for commentaries. Adhering the suckers on his tentacles to any topic, with the unctuousness of the charlatan, the security and false erudition of the hack writer, convinced that simply by pointing at things with his finger, “telling it like it is …”
I’m contradicting myself here or appear to be contradicting myself, but that’s not the case.
A horror of a man, a man who would never take his hands off anything and spewed endless torrents of mistaken concepts, such as the notion that one can continue to wear nylon shirts decades after their appearance and apparent triumph in Europe, subsequently to be displaced, as we all know, by a return to natural fabrics, Egyptian cotton, Swedish linen. An inexhaustible source of interferences, a piece of ferrous metal, an ax beneath the compass, a block of confused signals sinuously dancing nearer, polluting the ether. And I incapable of finding one sensible word or commentary in this rain of ions, furious, white with rage or impotence, wondering at every step whether this wasn’t the way—his way of speaking, lifting his chin with utmost insolence—that I, too, should speak: “getting right to the point.”
And I, I repeat, who admire and ponder the Writer’s straightforwardness and steadfastness and wish for just such straightforwardness and steadfastness in any primary writer, any writer worthy of being qualified as such, could not cease to abhor and hate that man and the type of bloviator or pencil pusher he represented here, in your father’s court. Forever giving erroneous advice, a vision of the world that was incorrectly simplistic and fallacious buzzing in my ears like some indigestible substance accumulating in layers at the entrance to the ear canal. Until finally I was deaf, watching him open his mouth and repressing my desire to jump on him—you know?—and reduce the flow to zero by exerting pressure with both hands on his stupid glottis, watching him inflate below that point, swell up like a toad with his lies, mistaken ideas, and stupid strategies. Like the plan to elevate Vasily, your father, on an antigravity shield—never! never! never! His bony elbows, his ready-made phrases. All bad, as in a bad writer, primary or secondary, what does it matter. Bad, bad, bad.
To the point that Batyk had come up with the most idiotic, delirious, and ridiculous solution, one that violated the strict security measures he himself had so zealously forced us to observe: not to allow any unknown person into the house to break through our protective barrier and endanger the life and security of all Miramar.
So imagine how I jumped, adrenaline rushing up my neck, the afternoon I came back from the beach (without you, your mother had again forbidden you to go down) and heard the dogs barking and knew they were barking at a stranger.
My first thought: Kirpich (and then, Raketa), his silhouette outlined against the glass sun porch, come to negotiate the handing over or reimbursement of the money (I still imagined them wanting their money back, demanding restitution of the swindled sum). And I moved like an Italian cardinal in a court full of Frenchmen, to keep them from noticing me, to avoid alerting them to the presence of another person (never forgetting the night of the slaughter), an invisible witness who could testify to the strange visitor’s way of eating, his hand opening out in a fan over the plate from which he took not one nut or two but a whole fistful, which he threw into his mouth with sinister avidity.
No, not Kirpich or Raketa, but an accomplice of theirs: a man in a ridiculous checked suit worn-out at the elbows, bending over the plate of nuts with the debasement of having spent many years without eating as much as he wanted, little things like that.
But don’t they have lots of money, these mafiosi? Don’t they drink in bars that offer stylish ceramic dishes filled to the brim with assorted nuts or some variety of fritto misto di mare, on the house? Motionless on the grass, my back against the house wall, eyes on the swimming pool. Disbelieving my own ears: the most absurd and senseless plan.
That I would not have believed, Petya, I repeat, if I hadn’t heard it quite clearly as I stood there in the garden. A character straight out of a traveling medicine show, a fraudulent inventor (fraudulent two centuries ago, not today!) come to his king to sell him the secret of manufacturing diamonds: carbon and graphite in the heart of a cannon, the flame fanned unceasingly. Or another scientist, who in the solitude of his lab had determined the feasibility of the perpetuum mobile, a loom weaving day into night without stopping. And three days after it was set in motion, full of admiration for the machine’s autonomous movement, the vizier rushed to the royal chambers exclaiming loudly: “Yes! It’s true!: without effort and without expenditure, HRH! In appearance and, I must affirm, no less in reality. The shuttle has not stopped moving; Professor Astoriadis’s machine hasn’t paused for a second.”
Then he would bow obsequiously, thrusting forward his massive shoe with its enormous buckle, face toward the ground, his chin lost in his ruff. And now, here he was again centuries later, leaning on the living room table, the torso’s whole impulse and vectorial spin aimed at the small plate of nuts. A pettiness outdone only by Batyk himself, his way of pondering his kilims and the entirely mistaken explanation he gave of the professor’s idea, while Astoriadis—a patently false surname—never saw fit to shut him up or correct any point of his error-riddled presentation. Chewing without pause, the professor, nodding with the tranquillity of an Oriental in a teahouse who walks toward you thinking nonstop about how he’s going to swindle you.
And Vasily, to my infinite astonishment, falling for it. Thinking something like: if I, against all expectations and the jeering comments of my colleagues could make colored diamonds, then this man Astoriadis, also a scientist, perhaps true what he says about the annulment of gravity. Amazed by the flexible disk that would hold him up without bending beneath his weight, spinning at light speed like a top (the Writer notes in this passage, enchantingly), nibbling away with absolute efficiency at the gears of gravity. The user (he chose that ugly word) would perceive nothing at first; the very thin disk would be slipped beneath the user’s feet, spinning at the speed of light. But before long he would notice that the lipstick falling from his wife’s hand, the makeup case, the powder puff, were not dropping to the ground but remaining miraculously suspended in the air, free of the ties that bind us to the earth and, in the end, bring us down: Vasily, triumphant over them! No.
I perceived with clarity that a wave of indignation (these were lies! lies!) was welling up in me and moving forward out of the years when I was younger and more upright, only to lose its momentum in the subaqueous crags of my soul, without my managing to say what I was thinking, reveal my perspective, without my lips articulating a single word. Beneath the thick layer of oil which, in those adventure novels the Writer tells us he read as a boy, they poured out by the barrel to calm the angry sea and send out a boat, a whaler. Floating beneath that dense film of oil, the iron grip of its tiny molecular hands, watching them argue, the veins of the neck swelling, rocking to the rhythm of the waves, the tranquil viscosity of a jellyfish many kilometers long, swaying and dancing smoothly on the surface.
Thinking.
A danger to turn all the work in that direction, in terms of physics: to endow it with a mass that was difficult to steer when set against the infinite and far less tangible effect of an imposture. An intelligent man, Vasily, very intelligent! But far too attached to the high flame of bunsen burners, to alloys of iron and tungsten—which could not easily be replaced by the sale of small portions of colored air, easily transported in carry-on luggage, shaped at will.
Thinking.
It will be science, nevertheless, that places a new monarch on any throne from now on, whether in Russia or in Portugal. No one will have any objection to a scientifically distilled monarch, whose capacity for command we understand with scientific precision. A certain interior disposition that obliges a king to raise the napkin to his lips in a certain august manner, to sweep the room with august eyes. Without anyone having a second’s doubt about his capacity to reign. Not politicians—you know—party leaders, gobblers of greasy doughnuts, swillers of beer. Something in the last gene of the sequence that would move him to lift his arm in an unrepeatable gesture, a penetrating vision that would enable him to throw his gaze across the mass of problems and find, always, like the knife the Writer (Chuang Tse) speaks of, the most recondite interstices, without ever blunting the blade, the sharp edge. Simple, clear solutions where everyone else sees only the murkiest obscurity. Moving forward with grace, deactivating them, one by one. The ascendance and power of the one who knows.
And since his other talents would be known as well—that of growing diamonds, for example, gem-quality stones—there could be no doubt as to his capacity to rule. Like the man who, in Byzantium, from the depths of an encamped army, strode out onto a hillock and crossed the camp beneath a beam of light that shone on him from the zenith (and that light later passed into legend), to take command, to strip control from the Basileus, who was weeping and shivering. And no one—for they’d been raised to know that not all men are created equal, that there are superior men—no one ever doubted that he was the one.
With absolute certainty, inspired science. At one glance. Walking down a hill beneath that light, the last hill before the tent with the imperial flag, and then entering that tent to grasp the reigns of Empire, like Michael the Stammerer or Phocas the Usurper: men rough in aspect as they rode roughly across Asia Minor but who awoke one day suddenly knowing themselves to be kings.
And now: that certainty clarified by science. Because, I repeat, there would be or would exist some such genetic tendency or predisposition, blockages in their brains that would finally rearrange themselves one day, like an equation whose solution takes years to become clear, and then appears to them, lights up blinking in their minds, and they leap to their feet and stride outside to meet the army, the Empire, that awaits them.
Not the arbitrary process of the Tibetans who seek traits or certain signs of the Dalai Lama in the round faces of many babies. Until they find one on which they can stamp, by common consent, the mental image of a king. Though that works. They’ve been doing it for centuries, and it’s never failed!
A boy, a pure soul, a tabula rasa, who ends up reigning over them and they yield to his government with gratitude and wisdom. Without any sort of certainty or scientific evidence playing a role in the process, only such inexact techniques as smelling the breath, inspecting the urine, scrutinizing an iris. And without their ever being mistaken, neither with Lama two nor with Lama five, the favorites of Lhamo Thondup, the current Lama. Differing among themselves, each one capable of making his own mark.
Think now, linger a moment over a dynastic selection in which the electorate consists primarily of the scrawny-shouldered (in a manner of speaking—your papa is not scrawny of shoulder), and this selection, in the depths of the laboratory, delivers an unobjectionable result: the finest one. Not a group of the best and the brightest—the finest one of all!
Or as if a young dramaturge who once hailed from Stratford-upon-Avon were to appear miraculously right now and place three tragedies on the table during the meeting of a theater company in England or anywhere else. If only the people in the meeting knew how to read it, the professors, the trustees, should it happen that they were able to read it as I do, with the simplicity, the appreciation or perception of its entirety, the certainty that comes of being in the presence of a masterwork, as when (I remember it perfectly), at the age of nineteen (so early an age), on the semicircular front stairway of my school, I opened the Book and set my eyes on the first sentence of that volume (Swann in Love) and knew immediately that this was the Book, and that its author—a unique writer—was the Writer. That day. Like someone who finds the solution to a math problem.
Suddenly acquiring, over the course of just a few pages, the certainty that assaults you definitively as an adult, that now we’ll never love anyone else. At least not with a love like that. That we won’t fall in love again with the force and the intensity (and the abandon? and the abandon) with which we fell in love that one time, years ago. Never again. And without having lived much at all at that point, only seven years older than you are now, Petya, I perceived that truth. And yes, I have fallen in love, I have had loves, I have admired other writers and allowed them to enter my eyes and my soul. I’ve lived inside them, studied some of them, but have always gone back to the Writer, in the end. In the same way, if the trustees were to see two plays, two tragedies, three comedies, appear on the table next to their cups of steaming coffee, they wouldn’t be able to go on drinking their terrible coffee, they would sit stock still, as if struck by lightning. The government ministers, the doughnut-gobbling presidents, the owners of country estates, the false connoisseurs of Russian literature, the ridiculous opera-lovers, they would all stop in their tracks if their black souls permitted, to prostrate themselves before a king as the thing most healthy and natural to their hearts, acknowledging and proclaiming that not all men are created equal, that some are superior. And yet they are hardened, bad; they pretend to be equal. Equal to whom? To Shakespeare? To the Writer?
You had conceded, after a certain time, and without thinking it necessary to tell me in so many words, the reality of the story I’m telling you. Understanding that however fantastic it might appear, having heard me out to that point, it was entirely factual: names like Kirpich and Raketa existed, as well as the two scientists, old friends, who had imagined the most harebrained scheme, given proof of the most insane imagination, forced the limits of the credible, carried the plausible to an extreme. And you assimilated that, as well, you let the pages with fistfuls of diamonds pass, in Ophir, the Solomonic kingdom of Ophir, millions in stones, bezants, and florins flowing between your fingers into the gilded mouths of coffers. Luxury and wealth, Petya, to that degree. You’d heard me out, followed and believed up to this point, hadn’t you?
You didn’t even stand up or dismiss as impossible something that, in view of your young age and so as not to affect the balance of your tender and childish mind, I kept from telling you until the last moment. Your father: Emperor of Russia … This, too, you accepted and allowed, though with an understandable expression of amazement, making space in your mind for this new and implausible plot twist: your father, King. On behalf of which I had to present arguments to you, supported by much evidence taken from the Book. An explanation you were skeptical of at first, and I, too, had had to give in, adding 1 or 2 percent more spandex to my mind’s barrel staves, making room, putting my schoolmaster’s satchel on my knees so that your father’s other body could fit into the carriage that was now ready to flee, his symbolic body: the ridiculous little crown at the back of the head and Vasily smiling in embarrassment as if begging our pardon for not having a normal body like any other human being but—as the Writer explains and argues—a double body, the two bodies of the king. Fine like that? Comfortable? Let’s close the door and finally be on our way.
But not, for all that, to accept, now, the absurdity of antigravity.
To imagine it feasible for men to fly. That? No.
And your mother complained of it bitterly. Why on earth expose us to ridicule, risk everything, the truth of our story, with the absurd idea of antigravity? Undermine our plan with something like that, Psellus? What reader in all the earth would ever believe such a thing? Refutable, moreover—added your mother, to my astonishment, for she was right—by the simple experiment of a falling apple, if such a thing were necessary, if there were a need for empirical refutation. “You see?” She would say to that gentleman (she was referring to Astoriadis): “You see? I drop it, and it falls!”
Good, Nelly. Correct!
“You, Psellus, had brought your good sense and wisdom to bear, we had a plan—and only to endanger all of that now with the ridiculous idea, the childish notion, of levitation? A petty and fatuous fairground attraction, what is it but that, Psellus? Which he claims will sell for a billion or two to the president of General Motors, to John F. Smith Jr., at this autumn’s Salon de l’Automobile in Cannes. He hasn’t stopped pestering my husband about how the country will rise again, how to recover the money that Nicholas loaned to the British, how the nation can overcome the crisis and reconstitute its union into a single happy family of Bashkirs, Tajiks, and Buryats.”
Thus spoke Nelly, as if the Writer were speaking through her mouth. Turning against that repugnant and empirical being, a man who loved nothing more than rooting around in the mud of the physical world. All that Batyk imagined, the delirium that the vision of my success at court, my rise from tutor to Royal Councillor, gave rise to in him, stirring the bile of his envy. And he had cast caution to the winds, the security measures he’d so zealously forced us to observe. He started going out more often, to Puerto Banús (where he went to spy on me in Ishtar). He begged God to send him a solution, and one night he seemed to have come up with one and brought that man home with him, a stranger, a Russian, someone who might perfectly well have been an accomplice of Messrs. K and R, murderers. A Trojan horse, with his very strange way of moving, sneaking around next to the walls. The fifth column that would run out to draw back the bar on the gate; he was more of a traitor, that man, than a whole squadron of Saracens.
It hadn’t taken much effort to find him among the many Russians who visited Marbella, who came so far south to observe with their own eyes the life being lived here and how well set up they were here, those who robbed most. That it was true: all the Russians here, all the money. He invited him in, allowed him to move his things to the Castle for an indeterminate stay. The only profit in this being that any visitor who might come to see us, in the hypothetical case that such a thing might occur, would observe that our household was growing: two liveried lackeys now instead of just one.
Continually moved, it didn’t take long for me to realize, by the need to fill his belly, that Astoriadis. No thought of spying on us or alerting anyone else, that at least. Repressing with some difficulty—each time I found him on one of his nocturnal journeys to the refrigerator, closely studying its interior in front of the open door, valiantly stamping his many legs—my desire to jump on him, shouting: “The door! Haven’t you, a scientist, heard about the ozone layer?” God! How I would have liked to hit him. With the Book, if I’d had it at hand. Quite certain of the result, for it’s right there in the Writer: When a head and a book come into collision and one of them rings hollow, is it always the book?
What? From the Book, Petya? How could the sound come from a book? Is this a joke? Yes and notice, too, that he doesn’t speak of a physical book or a physical head, he refers—had you grasped this?—to the obtuseness of certain minds, calling our attention to the fact that there can be heads that are hollower than the emptiest book. The danger and senselessness of levitation illustrated, moreover, by the influence of Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier with such nefarious effect for the monarchy; the example of ascension, the mechanical ascension of goats and dogs in 1783, or, in successive demonstrations, of any hatter, however mad, which inflamed the French, filling their breasts with the absurd ambition to fly, the belief that they could go higher than the sun, higher than their own king.
Quite the contrary, in reality: never could there be flight, never could anyone ever fly as Astoriadis claimed, levitating, as we fly in our dreams. Vasily atop a wall, his hair tousled by the land breeze blowing out from among the orange trees, the sun now very low, his feet illuminated by the light that after traveling through space without interruption for eight minutes has come to collide against his laughable little shoes, suspended in the air by the grace and effect of Astoriadis’s ingenuity and that of the antigravity shield. The air, the emotion on his face turned to us down below: I’m flying! I’m flying! I see the air and walk upon the clouds!
To approach his ear, pressing myself into the spiral of his ear so my words would reach the soft mass of his brain and rescue him from his error. He landed gently on the grass, moved his feet toward me, raised his head. “It’s false, Vasily, no such thing as a gravity-blocking shield exists. It’s false. Can’t you see?”
(If, as the Writer affirms, the external world is pure phenomenon, that is, something that appears before our senses and whose appearance is constructed by us, and if, as the Writer never thought, that phenomenon is a pure projection of the self, a shadow with nothing else behind it, then the world is a fable and so is the sphere in which the will to power is exercised.)
I surprised him when I cried: “Majesty!” He shot me a look, raised his eyes, both at once, and since he was too far away to scrutinize my eyes and cheeks millimeter by millimeter as was his custom, he wondered if I might not be pulling his leg. He was eager to get up, come over to me, and drill his eyes into mine with the same intensity with which, in certain primitive Italians (Masaccio, for example), Jesus gazes into the traitorous eyes of Judas.
He wasn’t yet a monarch; there was no majesty in him. His far too expensive shoes peeked from beneath the hem of his pants as if placed there by a clever caricaturist who knew his trade well. All the absurdity of his repressed movement was concentrated in them, his need to cross the room and the manner in which he had to do it. A comic figure, or at least his pants fit badly. He should have paid only half the money he’d shelled out for that Versace to a tailor who could have cut him a good Savile Row suit with no gold-toned buttons, no fake monogram on the chest.
He stood there like that the whole morning, incapable of covering the distance that separated us, the sun shining through his translucent eyelashes. He had wanted to ask me: Is there something about this in the book you spend so much time reading? But my words had taken him by surprise, my brazen outburst, and now he would never dare ask me the question. Which I did not regret. He’d been needing a blow like that. To keep him far away, all the better to handle him with the long pole of the Book, maintaining the distance, exactly three and a half meters, that separated us, I calculated, looking down at my feet and lifting my eyes toward him as we do before snapping a photo.
I didn’t pretend to have been mistaken or to have used the word lightly, but with perverse purpose, rather. He was a smart enough man, but I had to manipulate him like a puppet, an animated figure in a theatrical presentation, that alone would get us out of there with our lives (get them out, get me out, with the money). I had simply assigned him to a role, as when we were children and would sing out: You? Cop! You? Robber! The game about to begin.
Slowly he began to understand, at the rhythm at which a splash of sunlight made its way across the floor: I in my study, he eternally at the window. When finally the sun had moved quite a way across the sky, he seemed to have understood. In his face began to appear, along with the greater darkness, the signs of an intelligence of his new role. It didn’t take him too much time, which says a lot for how clever he was: a test of anyone to accept a role like that, fallen from the sky, so quickly. To go from the white-collar worker one is, from the lowliest engineer on the project, from a doctor to His Imperial Majesty.
He seemed to understand, he no longer hesitated, but then he wondered: why now, we two, alone, in this room? And the public? The people before whom to …? To pretend?
You must pretend for yourself, Vasily, play the role for yourself and not abandon it ever again.
He understood finally and was about to move his lips but the sun went into hiding at that moment and the two of us stood in the dark.
I end here: the curtain falls. The show is over. As you like it.
It didn’t bother me for a second; the word didn’t cause any change in my expression. It rose to my lips in the most natural way; my heart expelled it in an uninterrupted column of air, and it broke with a click as it detached from my lips, calling out happily to your father: “Majesty! Prince!” For he was a superior man, whom I approached with the serenity and peace of mind of one who has discovered voluntary servitude. Never would a black soul, a mediocrity like the Commentator, a man suffering from a mania for precise adjectivization, understand this or understand the soft and delicate air of that morning. Never would he place on paper or accept those two adjectives which, in that air, were simple and true. Only those, nevertheless, did I permit myself, those two adjectives.
I floated on that air and through it drew close to Nelly. I saw Vasily walking toward the car, pulling hard at the door. And that air, soft and delicate, brought me the sound of its slam, Nelly’s friendly grimace and the angular elbows of Batyk who was running at top speed to feed him a lie without being able to address him as I had learned to do: Majesty! Prince!
Traveling now with Vasily to premiere his royal dignity, a place where he could stage a tryout of that other life (with symbolic intent? With symbolic intent). Approaching, across fields withered by the sun, the glittering isle of a shopping mall that we saw floating on the line of the horizon. Everyone in the car happy and dressed up for the occasion, you like a little boy in an engraving, wearing suspenders and ankle boots, your mother in her red dress, your father’s three-piece Armani suit.
Only the Buryat’s attire was out of sync, for he could never be convinced to change his fringed doublet, made of a striped cloth that was in very poor taste, suitable only for Cockneys or contemptible lackeys. Or, as the Writer calls Morel, the shadiest of secretaries. A man capable of splashing ink on all your papers, of muddying the most distant wellsprings of a day, who intuitively, among so many fine fabrics, had chosen this one with its very broad stripes, broader than good taste and decorum permitted (for no one had worn such a thing in public since 1975). He’d held it up against his torso and seen in satisfaction how the lines of the cloth perfectly matched the horrible lines on his face, and it’s here that the Writer exclaims: “Is it thoroughly clear to you that, if there be evil in your heart, your mere presence will probably proclaim it today a hundred times more clearly than would have been the case two or three centuries ago?”
A piece of intelligence, an astute observation, that was more than applicable, as well, to the fraudulence that encased Professor Astoriadis’s whole body, codified in his execrable table manners and the strange way he had of walking, lost in thought, while making two of his fingers, the index and middle finger, wiggle like a trolley car’s antennae. A trolley car deep in thought. His legs articulated at many points in addition to the hips, knees, and ankles of normal human beings, at least five more points, which made him totter as he moved, staggering in disarray, as if his energy were frequently shut off. Luck had decreed that he would meet up with Batyk: the two had approached each other, recognized each other, Batyk listened to him and conceived the notion of taking him to your father with this far-fetched and repellant—or rather, implausible and impossible—antigravity idea.
An idea that fell, I already told you, as music on your father’s ears and that I tried to negate with this excursion, a chance to go out and show off his royal dignity for the first time. It struck Vasily as a beautiful plan; he hesitated at first, but then it struck him as beautiful. He had hesitated: wouldn’t it be too much of an exposure, an unnecessary risk? But no, your mother convinced him, with Psellus nothing will go wrong; he’ll be our guide and translator.
To go out, Petya, and see for himself that the world outside had changed in the same way as the world inside him, that to the new arrangement of his cells corresponded a greater outward brilliance, at last identifying the new melody the wind drew from him as it blew through his altered reticular structure, the birds that flew into his chest, each seeking a hollow spot to stop and twitter in, as on a cliffside or a rock.
That solid.
Or with what the Writer calls the crushing force of monarchy. Hunching his shoulders now, Vasily, preceding us down the glass-enclosed gallery. Stopping in front of the shop windows that advertised sales, poking a thick index finger toward a pair of sweatpants (for what? your papa never played any kind of sport or went running) or a stereo speaker identical to the ones he already had throughout the house, bought in Cyprus or wherever he lied to us about having traveled. Like a Minotaur in a labyrinth of stores with Chinese wares, ill-suited to his dignity, and not knowing how to reach them, for the monster was unacquainted with the brittle nature of glass. How easily he could have made his way through the walls, lowering his head and neck for a second while the glass cascaded around him, crashing through like a giant purple automaton and carrying everything off with him: wireless phones, juicers, garlands of colored lights for the garden.
Hesitating between the symbolic intent of the journey and his desire to go in and listen to some very expensive speakers, importuning the salesman with questions about their frequency response (from twenty to twenty thousand, Vasily, your ears wouldn’t hear anything beyond that). Taking him aside most respectfully, without ever going nearer than the five steps he had required between himself and me, attempting to steer him away from his disproportionate interest in tabletop fountains with whispering waters, clocks that project time onto the ceiling, an enormous copper gong complete with a felt mallet, to announce visitors.
And in front of the window display of a store completely identical in every respect to another one several passageways and five turns behind us, he stopped to inspect some sneakers for his tired feet, for his son and his wife (for me? no thanks), sneakers with which to outfit themselves like those families whose every member wears identical shoes on Sunday afternoons, purchased in one fell swoop, scooped up during a foray into the depths of enemy territory, ripped from the saddlebags without dismounting, and then happy as children, raising them to the sky, inspecting them beneath the ruddy splendor of late afternoon. And through the glass, his gaze refocused on the brightly lit interior of the shop, your father saw that a small drama was being played out on the carpet, at the front lines of the combat between distant Taiwanese companies and all the gullible consumers in the world.
A small drama, I noticed it as well, because of the disposition of its participants in front of the row of chairs: the young salesgirls with long braids holding a sneaker by the heel. Opposed to and divided by the axis that the sneaker scored in the air from a colorful group of people strangely and miraculously grasping the other extreme of the sneaker, its toe, the hands of the whole group, or one hand and one arm, pulling on that sneaker. Motionless at the moment when His Serene Highness raised his eyes, perhaps in the intention of studying the interior of the store, finding a seat there in which to frame the calloused hillocks of his backside and point from within toward the window, the tennis shoe or sneaker that had caught his attention among the many on display there.
In front of which he continued to stand without taking his eyes from the tableau. As a principal and organizing element now of the gazes of astonishment and admiration for his incontestable distinction. Some not so admiring, some looks of hatred in the eyes of the crowd confronting the shopgirls. Where—Vasily is wondering—does Juan Carlos of Spain buy his sneakers? This is the type of small detail we’ve got to work on … The boy paralyzed at the center of the group, the gypsy boy (because no one else, etcetera), had managed to put on and was wearing one brand-new sneaker and the one he was holding was the right sneaker, interrupted on its way toward his unshod foot. And the ones in the shoebox were not, on closer inspection, new sneakers, but a very old and worn-out pair.
Vasily occupied the door frame for a second, sending a wave of silence out before him, an electromagnetic pulse that closed the mouths of both salesgirls and gypsies the moment it reached them. Their eyes could not sustain the force of his gaze and rolled back in their sockets just as children look away into space before breaking into speech. Before returning to the person in whom they discovered immediately, before Vasily had said a single word, an arbitrator. Either an inspector from the Better Business Bureau or a still greater personage—without, naturally, their being able to imagine his true rank: an Emperor.
Vasily gazed at them with the tired air of one who can easily imagine himself on the other side. He placed his hand on the shoe, a gesture that had the effect of deenergizing the group, which released it the moment that the force, which they instantly perceived, was transmitted. But with their hands freed from the physical effort necessary for hanging on to the sneaker, they quickly rechannelled that energy to their throats and began shouting at the referee.
The narrative of the whole story broke into little fragments that flew at him and accumulated on his shoulders and arms, on the hand he was still holding up in the air. He stopped to look at them for a second, at the words that were covering him as fast as the gypsy boys could release their lies and the shopgirls could try to catch them with open palms but without managing to keep them from adhering to Vasily with a slight click, attracted by the magnet of his body and his charisma. Configuring on his chest the false story of how they had gone in—in all innocence!—to try on those sneakers, keeping their eyes on the door they planned to escape through and where the salesgirls had caught them.
Vasily understood it all, blood pumping through the muscles of his neck, making those lies jump with the relaying pitter-patter of an electromechanical telephone switch. He placed both hands on the sneaker and allowed a current to rise through his arms toward the thieving boys with the following message: Hammurabi, the perfect king, am I, the king who is preeminent among kings. My words are precious, my wisdom is unrivaled. The perfect king am I.
Such a message, such a sentiment within him. To make justice flow not toward the gypsy boys, as many in Sweden or perhaps in Norway would have wanted, and which would have been wrong, but to the shopgirls. Without proffering a word, with the muteness of a king settling a dispute in a remote region of his kingdom where he does not speak the language. Making the balloons of his words float throughout the store. So that everyone could see them rising to his lips and read them as well, without need of any interpreter. I was the one who, on seeing them emerge and discovering the spatial disposition of those bubbles in the air that floated off into the most distant departments of Marks & Spencer, identified the words that the Writer places on the lips of a king, through a secondary character in the Book, and which mean: “I am the king preeminent among kings. My words are precious, my wisdom unrivaled. The perfect king am I.”
I was not the one who built the jets flying overhead across the skies of Marbella, my index finger had not followed their fuel and pneumatic lines, rendered in blue and red, across the blueprint. I overcame my fear each time I had to board one and fly in it across the firmament. And a jet would never stop in midflight or on the verge of takeoff, to open its mouth, lift its chin to the sky with these words on its propeller-lips, this absolute confidence in its own capacity for flight. “The perfect king am I.” Not a good king: “the king preeminent among kings.”
“Like Lufthansa?”
Better yet. Not a single accident in centuries, dynasty after dynasty, dynasties falling and rising, materializing in midflight. Why wouldn’t we entrust our lives to them? He was a new kind of machinery, your father, with less physical structure than a jet, but with the same instructions from centuries past, borne out in practice. The gravity and aplomb of a colossus who contained in his breast, packed tightly within him, all his servants, the whole crew, his blue warriors and their orange jumpsuits. Ready to propel with their own feet, should the fuel source give out, the dynamo of their king, make him advance, move his arm from right to left.
The visible fact, Petya, that leads us to the invisible one of: king.