463 / Ina Room and a Half 12
Whatever monkey business he was up to while in China, our small pantry, our chests, and our walls profited from it considerably. What art objects the last displayed were of Chinese origin: the cork-cum-watercolor paintings, the samurai swords, little silk screens. The tipsy fishermen were the last of the lively population of porcelain figurines, dolls, and hat-wearing penguins that would only gradually disappear, victims of careless geshues or the need for birthday presents for various relatives. The swords, too, had to be surrendered to the state collections as potential weapons a regular citizen wasn't supposed to have. A reasonable caution, come to think of it, in light of the subsequent police invasions I brought upon our room and a half. As for the china sets, astonishingly exquisite even to my untrained eye—my mother wouldn't hear about a single beautiful saucer on our table. "These are not for slobs," she would explain patiently to us. "And you are slobs. You are very sloppy slobs." Besides, the dishes we were using were elegant enough, as well as sturdy.
I remember one dark cold November evening in 1948, in the small, sixteen-square-meter room where my mother and I lived during and right after the war. That evening Father was returning from China. I remember the doorbell ringing and my mother and I rushing to the dimly lit landing, suddenly dark with Navy uniforms: my father, his friend and colleague, Captain F.M., and a bunch of servicemen entering the corridor carrying three huge crates, with their China catch, splashed on all four sides with gigantic, octopuslike Chinese characters. And later on, Captain F.M.
and I sitting at the table, while my father unpacks the crates, my mother in her yellow-pink, crepe de chine dress, on high heels, clasping her hands and exclaiming "Ach! oh wunderbar!"—in German, the language of her Latvian childhood and present occupation—interpreter in a camp for German POWs—and Captain F.M., a tall wiry man in his dark-blue, unbuttoned tunic, pouring himself a glass from a carafe and winking at me as to a grownup. The belts with their anchor buckles and holstered Parabellums are on the windowsill, my mother gasps at the sight of a kimono. The war is over, it's peace, I am too small to wink back.
13
Now I am exactly the age my father was that November evening: I am forty-five, and again I see the scene with an unnatural, high-resolution-lens clarity, although all its participants save me are dead. I see it so well that I can wink back at Captain F.M . . . . Was it meant to be that way? Is there, in these winks over the space of nearly forty years, some meaning, some significance that eludes me? Is this what life is all about? If not, why this clarity, what is it for? The only answer that occurs to me is: So that this moment exists, so that it is not forgotten when the actors are gone, myself included. Maybe this way you understand indeed how precious it was: the arrival of peace. Into one family. And by the same token, in order to make it clear what moments are. Be they just a return of someone's father, an opening of a crate. Hence this mesmerizing clarity. Or maybe it's because you are a son of a photographer and your memory simply develops a film. Shot with your own two eyes, almost forty years ago. That's why you couldn't wink back then.
14
My father wore the Navy uniform for approximately two more years. And this is when my childhood started in earnest. He was the officer in charge of the photography department of the Navy Museum, located in the most beautiful building in the entire city. Which is to say, in the entire empire. The building was that of the former Stock Exchange: a far more Greek affair than any Parthenon, and far better situated as well, at the tip of Basil Island, which juts into the Neva River where it is at its widest.
On late afternoons, school over, I'd wade through the town to the river, cross the Palace Bridge, and run to the museum to pick up my father and walk home with him. The best times were when he was the evening duty officer, when the museum was already closed. He would emerge from the long, marbled corridor, in full splendor, with that blue-white-blue armband of the duty officer around his left ^rn, the holstered Parabellum on his right side, dangling from his belt, the Navy cap with its lacquered visor and gilded "salad" above covering his disconcertingly bald head. "Greetings, Commander," I would say, for such was his rank; he'd smirk back, and as his tour of duty wouldn't be over for another hour or so, he'd cut me loose to loiter about in the museum alone.
It is my profound conviction that apart from the literature of the last two centuries and, perhaps, the architecture of the former capital, the only other thing Russia can be proud of is its Navy's history. Not because of its spectacular victories, of which there have been rather few, but because of the nobility of spirit that has informed its enterprise. Call it idiosyncrasy or even psycho-fancy, but this brain child of the only visionary among Russian emperors, Peter the Great, seems to me indeed a cross between the aforementioned literature and architecture. Patterned after the British Navy, but less functional than decorative, informed more by the spirit of discovery than by that of expansion, prone rather to a heroic gesture and self-sacrifice than to survival at all costs, this Navy indeed was a vision: of a perfect, almost abstract order, borne upon the waters of the world's oceans, as it could not be attained anywhere on Russian soil.
A child is always first of all an aesthete: he responds to appearances, to surfaces, to shapes and forms. There is hardly anything that I've liked in my life more than those clean-shaven admirals, en face and in profile, in their gilded frames looming through a forest of masts on ship models that aspired to life size. In their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century uniforms, with those jabots or high-standing collars, burdock-like fringe epaulets, wigs and chest-crossing broad blue ribbons, they looked very much the instruments of a perfect, abstract ideal, no less precise than bronze-rimmed astrolabes, compasses, binnacles, and sextants glittering all about. They could compute one's place under the stars with a smaller margin of error than their masters! And one could only wish they ruled human waves as welclass="underline" to be exposed to the rigors of their trigonometry rather than to a shoddy planimetry of ideologues, to be a figment of the vision, of a mirage perhaps, instead of a part of reality. To this day, I think that the country would do a hell of a lot better if it had for its national banner not that foul double-headed imperial fowl or the vaguely masonic hammer-and-sickle, but the flag of the Russian Navy: our glorious, incomparably beautiful flag of St. Andrew: the diagonal blue cross against a virgin-white background.
15
On the way home, my father and I would drop into stores, buy food or photographic materials (film, chemicals, paper), stop by shop windows. As we made our way through the center of to^, he would tell me about this or that fagade's history, about what was here or there before the war or before 1917. Who was the architect, who was the o^er, who was the dweller, what happened to them, and, in his view, why. This six-foot-tall Navy commander knew quite a lot about civilian life, and gradually I began to regard his uniform as a disguise; more precisely, the idea of distinction between form and content began to take root in my schoolboy mind. His uniform had to do with this effect no less than the present content of the fagades he was pointing at. In my schoolboy's mind this disparity would refract, of course, into an invitation to lie (not that I needed one); deep do^, though, I think this taught me the principle of maintaining appearances no matter what is going on inside.
In Russia, the military seldom change into civvies, even at home. Partly, this is a matter of one's wardrobe, which is never too vast; mainly, though, this has to do with the notion of authority associated with uniform and thus with your social standing. Especially if you are an officer. Even the demobilized and retired tend to wear for quite some time, at home and in public, this or that part of their service attire: a tunic without epaulets, tall boots, a military cap, an overcoat, indicating to everybody (and reminding themselves of) the degree of their belonging: for once in charge, always in charge. It is like the Protestant clergy in these parts; and in the case of a Navy man, this similarity is all the stronger because of his white undercollar.