— You can never tell, Gospodin Hull, because my condition is the following …
I had stopped rocking and fanning. I didn’t know whether to give in to my first inclination, which was to laugh, or surrender to the deeper feeling engendered by the sight of this man — so protected by his clothes and yet so mercilessly exposed by a sun that allowed him no more shade than the bony ridges over his eyes and the wrinkles of his aged skin — which was to take his words seriously indeed.
— Yes, sir?
— Gospodin Hulclass="underline" you will come to visit me only on the day of your own death, to let me know, as I have done today with mine. That is my condition.
— But you will be dead then — I began, logically, almost happily, although I quickly abandoned that tack — I mean, the day I die you will no longer be living …
— Don’t be so sure of that — now he opened the umbrella with nervous haste and shaded himself with it — and respect my last wish. Please. I am so tired.
As I relate this, I recall many of our chance meetings at the corner of Drayton Street and Wright Square, in the cemetery, or in the mall. We never exchanged many words (except the afternoon of the pistachio ice cream), but we were neighbors, and without ever paying each other a formal visit, we passed along snatches of information, like the pieces of a puzzle. What did I know about him, really, on that day when he predicted his death in such a strange manner? What did I know about him? Two or three vague facts: he was a theater actor in Russia, although he really wanted to be a set designer and stop acting. It was the era of Stalinist terror, life was difficult for everyone, as bad for those who submitted as for those who resisted the madness of personal power posing as collective power. Who didn’t suffer? Even the executioners, Mr. Plotnikov said one day, they, too, breathe, and their breath was like a forest felled. He left Russia and found asylum in the United States, which offered it to so many refugees from a Europe convulsed by ideology, in those generous years when America was America; he smiled at me, recalling some Jews, some Spaniards, who couldn’t get through the doors of our democratic refuge. But what could you do; we received so many more, Germans, Poles, Russians, Czechs, French … Politics is the art of limits. Art is the limit of politics.
— Respect my last wish. Do not come to my wake tonight or accompany my funeral procession tomorrow. No. Visit me in my house on the day of your death, Gospodin Hull. Our well-being depends on it. Please. I am very tired.
What could I say, seeing him there on that street-scene stage, with the garbage beginning to distract us from the colonial grandeur of Savannah; what could I tell him, that the day of his funeral I was going to be in Atlanta taking care of patients less lucid, more impatient than he? What could I tell him, to show my respect for something that I understood, I appreciated, I was grateful for, that this was perhaps his final performance, the final act of a career brutally interrupted — I deduced — by political adversity and never taken up again outside Russia.
— I needed — he explained to me one day, or I imagined or dreamed, I’m no longer sure of the truth — the Russian language, Russian applause, to read the reviews in Russian, but above all I needed the test of the Russian heart in order to present myself in public, acting; I couldn’t communicate as an actor apart from the Russian language, space, applause, time, testimony, intent. Did I understand that, in my country of wild syncretisms, of political pastiche and migratory melting pots and maps stuck up with chewing gum, could I possibly understand?
What could I tell him, I ask again, except, yes, Mr. Plotnikov, I agree, I will do what you say.
— Very good. I thank you. I am too tired.
With that, he bowed and walked stiffly away in the blazing sun to his house next to mine, near Wright Square.
4
Almost in spite of myself, I went into the house. I wanted to tell my wife what had happened. I wanted to tell her how deeply Monsieur Plotnikov had disturbed me, enough to make me take the unusual step of interrupting Constancia’s nap. I was beyond observing that tacit prohibition, so great was the turmoil my Russian neighbor had caused in me. But my astonishment grew when I realized that Constancia was not in her bed, that it had not even been slept in. The shutters were closed, but that was normal. And it would have been normal, too, if Constancia, finding she had to leave the house — I looked for her on all three floors and even in the unused cellar — had wanted to tell me she was leaving, but saw me in the rocking chair and, giving me a fond smile, went out without waking me. In that case, a note would have been enough, a few scribbled words, saying:
— Don’t worry, Whitby. Be back soon.
And, on returning, what pretext would she give me?
— I don’t know. I decided to lose myself in the plazas. This is the most beautiful and mysterious aspect of the city — the way one plaza always opens onto another, like a Russian doll.
And other times: —Remember, Whitby, your wife is Andalusian and we Andalusians don’t accept age, we fight it. Look, who dances peteneras better than an old lady, have you noticed? — she said, laughing, imitating a sexagenarian flamenco dancer.
I imagined her lying down, nude, in the shade, telling me these things: Sometimes, on dog days like these — understand, love? — I go out looking for water, shade, plazas, a maze of streets, ah, if you knew what it was to be a child in Seville, Whitby, that other city of plazas and mazes and water and shadows … You know, I walk through the streets seeking my past in a different place, do you think that’s madness?
— You’ve never tried to make friends here, you haven’t even learned English … Even my name gives you trouble— I smiled—
— Hweetbee Howl— She smiled in turn, and then said to me:
— I haven’t criticized your Savannah, we’ve made our life here, but leave me my Seville, at least in my imagination, my love, and tell yourself: It’s a good thing Constancia knows how to find the light and water she needs here in my own American South.
I would laugh then, pleased to think that the South, the South with its names full of vowels — Virginia, Georgia, the Carolinas — is the Andalusia of America. And Spain, I tell her, as an old reader of Coustine and Gautier, is the Russia of the West, just as Russia is the Spain of the East. Again I laughed, observing to Constancia that only Russia and Spain had come up with the idea of changing the width of their train tracks to forestall foreign invasion; that is to say, the aggression of other Europeans. What paranoia — I laughed in mock amazement — what love of barriers, whether the steppes or a mountain chain: to be the others, Russians and Spaniards, unassimilatable to Western normality! But, after all — I defended myself against Constancia — perhaps normality is mediocrity.
I think, naturally, of our neighbor, the Russian actor, when the conversation takes this turn. With the skilled touch of the bibliophile, I run my hands over the dark spines and gilded, dusty edges of the books in my library, the coolest and darkest place in the house on Drayton Street, and I secretly pride myself that the flexibility of my hand is a perfect reflection of the quickness of my sexagenarian mind. I was — I am — a man of letters, part of an inheritance that does not flourish in the United States and is kept alive mainly in the South, the land of William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Robert Penn Warren, and its Dulcineas with a pen, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, and Shirley Ann Grau. I often think that even self-exiled Southerners — I’m talking about diabolically self-destructive gnomes like Truman Capote as well as painfully creative giants like William Styron — are like the carriers of a literary aristocracy that is unwanted in a country that craves proof that its Declaration of Independence is right, that all men are created equal, but what this equality (proposed by a group of exceptionally learned aristocrats, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jay, Adams — the golden youth of the colonies) really means is the triumph of the lowest common denominator. Why do we elect retarded presidents like Reagan if not to prove that all men are equal? We prefer to recognize ourselves in this idiot who talks like us, looks like us, makes our jokes, shares our mental lapses, amnesias, prejudices, obsessions, and confusions, justifying our own mental vulgarity: how consoling! A new Roosevelt a new Kennedy would force us to admire them for what we are not, and that’s an unsettling feeling. Still, I’m a quiet American who sticks pretty close to his library, almost to the point of neglecting my practice, doesn’t need many friends, has chosen to exercise his profession in a modern and impersonal city that shuts down at five, the blacks given over to lassitude and nocturnal violence and the whites locked away in their mansions surrounded by savage dogs and electric fences. And I spend three nights of the week in a hospital room so as to perform heart operations early on Wednesdays and Thursdays. In our time, it is impossible to be a surgeon without the support of a great medical center.