In this non-fiction novel – road trip, confession, and erotic tour de force – Emmanuel Carrère pursues two consuming obsessions: the disappearance of his grandfather amid suspicions that he was a Nazi collaborator in the Second World War; and a violently passionate affair with a woman that he loves but which ends in destruction. Moving between Paris and Kotelnich, a grisly post-Soviet town, Carrère weaves his story into a travelogue of a journey inwards, travelling fearlessly into the depths of his tortured psyche.
Emmanuel Carrère, novelist, filmmaker, journalist, and biographer, is the award-winning internationally renowned author of The Adversary (a Sunday Times bestseller and New York Times Notable Book, translated into twenty-three languages), Lives Other Than My Own, My Life as a Russian Novel, Class Trip, Limonov (winner of the 2011 Prix Renaudot), The Mustache and, most recently, The Kingdom.
The Mustache
Gothic Romance
Class Trip
The Adversary
I am Alive and You Are Dead
Lives Other Than My Own
Limonov
The Kingdom
The train is humming along, it’s nighttime, Sophie and I are making love in the berth and it really is her. In my erotic dreams, my partners are usually several women at once and difficult to identify, but this time, no: I recognize Sophie’s voice, her words, her spread legs. In the sleeping car compartment where we have so far been alone, another couple turns up, the Fujimoris. Mme Fujimori hops right into bed with us. The entente is immediately cordiale, with much merriment. Supported by Sophie in an acrobatic position, I enter Mme Fujimori, who soon comes ecstatically. M. Fujimori now announces that the train has stopped. It’s sitting in a station and has been there for perhaps some time. Motionless in the glare of the sodium lights, a policeman is watching us. Convinced that he’s about to get on the train to reprimand us, we hastily close the curtains, then rush to tidy up the compartment and put our clothes back on so we’ll be ready, when he opens the door, to assure him blithely that he hadn’t seen a thing, that he’d been dreaming. We imagine his suspicious, disappointed face. All this takes place in an exciting blend of panic and helpless giggling. I do point out, however, that there’s nothing to laugh about: we might get arrested, hauled off to the police station while the train goes on its way, at which point God knows what will happen. Vanishing without a trace in this muddy back of beyond, we’ll die in some dungeon deep in the Russian heartland with no one to hear our screams. My warnings send Sophie and Mme Fujimori into fresh gales of mirth and I end up laughing with them.
The train has stopped, as in my dream, at a deserted but brightly lit platform. It is three in the morning, somewhere between Moscow and Kotelnich. I have an achy head and parched throat—too much to drink at the restaurant before going to the station. Taking care not to wake Jean-Marie, stretched out in the other berth, I make my way among the crates of equipment cluttering the compartment and out into the corridor in search of a bottle of water. The dining car where we sluiced down our last vodkas a few hours ago is closed, the only illumination a single dim light at each table. Four soldiers, having planned ahead, are continuing to get plastered. As I go by they offer me a drink; I decline and, walking on, I recognize Sasha, our interpreter, sprawled on a banquette, snoring sonorously. I sit down a bit farther away, calculate the time difference—midnight in Paris, still okay—and try to call Sophie on my cell phone to tell her about this dream that seems to me extraordinarily promising. When I can’t get through, I take out my notebook instead and write it down.
Wherever did M. and Mme Fujimori come from? That’s not hard to figure out. Fujimori is the name of the former president of Peru, the subject of an article I skimmed on the plane. The corruption scandals that turned him out of office didn’t interest me much, but an article on the facing page caught my eye. It was about missing people in Japan whose families are convinced they’ve been kidnapped and held secretly in North Korea, some for as long as thirty years. No recent event had triggered the article, no demonstration organized by the families, no anniversary, no new development in the case, closed ages ago, if indeed it had ever been opened. It isn’t clear at all why the article appeared yesterday rather than some other day, this year rather than some other year; perhaps the journalist had run into a few people—in the street, in a bar—whose relatives had simply vanished back in the seventies. To bear up under the torment of uncertainty, families had come up with the kidnapping story and then, much later, told it to a stranger, who was now telling it to the world. Was it plausible? Was there any evidence—if not proof—to support the claim, or at least a likely explanation? If I had been the newspaper editor, I would have asked the journalist to dig a little deeper. But no, he simply reported that some Japanese families believed their relatives had disappeared into prison camps in North Korea. Dead or alive, who could say? Dead, most likely, of hunger or beatings by their jailers. And if alive, they probably no longer at all resembled the young men and women who vanished thirty years ago. If they were ever found, what would one say to them? And they, what would they say? Should one even want to find them?
The train sets out again, through forests. No snow. The four soldiers have finally gone off to bed. There’s no one left in the dining car, with its flickering table lamps, but Sasha and me. At one point, Sasha bestirs himself, sits halfway up. His big rumpled head appears suddenly above the backrest of his banquette. Seeing me at the table writing, he frowns. I gesture soothingly in his direction, as if to say, Go back to sleep, there’s plenty of time, and down he goes again, doubtless certain he’s been dreaming.
When I was a foreign aid worker in Indonesia twenty-five years ago, travelers used to pass around terrifying and mostly true stories about the prisons stuffed with people who’d been caught with drugs. In the bars of Bali, there was always some bearded guy in a sleeveless T-shirt going on and on about how he’d survived a close call that had left a less fortunate buddy serving 150 years of slow death in Bangkok or Kuala Lumpur. One evening after we’d been carrying on this way for hours with jaunty nonchalance, some guy I didn’t know trotted out another story, perhaps true, perhaps not. This was back when the Soviet Union was still around. When you take the Trans-Siberian Railway, he explained, you’re strictly forbidden to get off along the route, to stop at a station to do some sightseeing, for example, and then get on the next train. Well, it seems that in certain backwater towns, near the railroad tracks, you can find exceptionally hallucinogenic mushrooms (or really cheap rare carpets, jewelry, precious metals, whatever), so sometimes travelers dare to ignore the rule. The train stops for three minutes in a little station in Siberia. Bitter cold, no town, just a bunch of huts, a sinister mud hole that looks abandoned. Without anyone’s noticing, the adventurer gets off the train, which departs. Alone, he shoulders his pack and leaves the station—a platform of rotting planks—to flounder through muck and puddles, past wooden fences and barbed wire, wondering if the whole thing was such a good idea. The first person he meets is some sort of degenerate who, in a cloud of appallingly bad breath, delivers a speech in which all nuance is lost (the traveler knows only a few words of Russian, which might not even be what the wretch is speaking), but the gist is clear: he can’t go wandering around like that, he’ll get himself picked up by the police. Militsiya! … Militsiya! Then comes a torrent of incomprehensible language, but thanks to some mimicry, the traveler decides that the derelict is offering him shelter until the next train. It’s not a very appealing prospect, but what choice does he have and, who knows, maybe he’ll get a chance to talk mushrooms or jewelry. Following his host, he enters a disgusting hovel heated by a smoky stove, where he finds a gathering of even more sinister characters. A bottle of rotgut appears, they drink and stare at him while they argue, and the word militsiya crops up frequently, the only word he recognizes, so, rightly or wrongly, he figures they’re talking about what will happen if he falls into the clutches of the police. He won’t get off with just a stiff fine, oh no! They laugh till they fall over. No, he’ll never be seen again. Even if there are people waiting for him at the end of the line, in Vladivostok, they’ll simply decide he’s gone missing, that’s all. No matter how big a stink his family and friends make, they’ll never find out or get anyone else to find out what happened to him. The traveler attempts to calm down: maybe that’s not really what they’re saying, maybe they’re discussing their grandmothers’ homemade jams. But he knows perfectly well that’s not it. He knows they’re talking about what’s in store for him, he realizes he’d have been better off running into the corrupt police they’re threatening him with so merrily, in fact anything would have been better than this drafty shack, these jolly toothless vagrants now closing in on him, beginning—still in fun—to pinch his cheeks, give him little shoves, punches, to show him what the police will do, until the moment when they knock him senseless and he wakes up later, in the dark. He’s naked on a dirt floor, shaking with cold and fear. Reaching out, he discovers that they’ve locked him into some kind of shed and that it’s all over. Every now and then the door will open, the happy half-wits will slap him around, stomp on him, sodomize him—have a little fun, basically, which is hard to find in Siberia. Nobody knows where he got off the train, nobody will come to save him, he’s at their mercy. The bums probably hang around the station whenever a train is due, hoping some idiot will break the rules: that guy, he’s theirs. They find all sorts of uses for him until he croaks, then they wait for the next one. He comes to this conclusion not by thinking things through, of course, but more like a man regaining consciousness in a narrow box where he can’t see a thing, can’t hear a sound, can’t move. Only slowly does he understand that he’s been buried alive, that the whole dream of his life was leading to this, and that this is reality, the last reality, the true one, the one from which he will never wake.
There he is.
And in a way, there I am as well. I’ve been there all my life. To imagine my own situation, I’ve always turned to stories like that. I told them to myself as a child, and then I just told them. I used to read them in books, and then I wrote books. For a long time, I enjoyed doing that. I took pleasure in suffering in my own particular way, a way that made me a writer. But I don’t want that anymore. I can no longer bear to be locked into that bleak, unchanging scenario, can’t bear to find myself, no matter how I begin, always spinning a tale of madness, frozen immobility, imprisonment, fine-tuning the workings of the trap that will crush me. A while ago I published such a book, The Adversary, which held me captive for seven years and bled me dry. I thought: Now it’s over; I’ll do something else. I’ll go toward the outside, toward others, toward life. And a good way to do that would be to return to reportage, to shoot another film.
I spread the word and was soon offered a project. Not just any project: the story of an unfortunate Hungarian taken prisoner at the end of World War II who spent more than fifty years in a psychiatric hospital in the Russian hinterland. We thought it was just the thing for you, a reporter friend told me proudly, which of course exasperated me. That everyone thinks of me whenever there’s some poor soul shut up for life in an insane asylum—that’s exactly what I don’t want anymore. I don’t want to be the guy intrigued by that story. Which doesn’t prevent me, obviously, from being intrigued. Plus it takes place in Russia, not where my mother was born but where they speak her mother tongue, the one I spoke a little as a child and then forgot completely.
I said yes. And a few days later I met Sophie, which in another way made me feel I was moving on to something new. Over dinner at the Thai restaurant near the place Maubert, I told her the Hungarian’s story, and tonight, on the train taking me to Kotelnich, I think back on my dream, recognizing that everything that paralyzes me is in there: the policeman watching me as I make love, the threat of imprisonment, the certainty of a trap closing in. Yet the atmosphere in the dream, I reflect, is light, lively, joyous, like the knees-up party improvised with Sophie and the mysterious Mme Fujimori. I resolve that, yes, I will tell one last story of imprisonment, which will also be the story of my liberation.
Everything I know about my Hungarian comes from a few wire stories dated August and September 2000. After being dragged along by the retreating Wehrmacht, this nineteen-year-old country boy was captured by the Red Army in 1944. Interned at first in a POW camp, he was transferred in 1947 to the psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich, a small town five hundred miles northeast of Moscow. There he spent fifty-three years, forgotten by everyone, hardly speaking, because no one around him understood Hungarian and he, strangely enough, never learned Russian. He was discovered this summer, completely by chance, and the Hungarian government organized his repatriation.
I saw a few pictures of his arrival in Budapest, a thirty-second news item on television. The automatic glass doors of the airport slide open to admit a wheelchair in which huddles a frightened old man. The people around him are in short sleeves, but he is wearing a thick wool cap and shivering beneath a lap robe. One leg of his trousers is empty, folded back and fastened with a safety pin. The photographers’ flash-bulbs crackle, blinding him. He is bundled into a car mobbed by elderly women, who gesture wildly and shout different names: Sándor! Ferenc! András! More than eighty thousand Hungarian soldiers were reported missing after the war and everyone gave up waiting for them long ago, but now here’s one of them coming home, fifty-six years later. Basically, he’s an amnesiac; even his name is a mystery. The patient records of the Russian hospital, which constitute his only identification papers, refer to him variously as András Tamas, or András Tomas, or Andreas Tomas, but he shakes his head if someone addresses him by those names. He either cannot or will not say his name. This explains why at his repatriation, covered by the Hungarian press as a national event, dozens of families think they recognize him as their long-lost uncle or brother. In the weeks following his return, the press provides almost daily updates about him and the search for his identity. The authorities welcome and interview the families who claim him, while at the same time questioning the old man to try to awaken his memory, repeating to him the names of people and villages. One report mentions that the doctors at the Psychiatric Institute of Budapest, where the patient is being held under observation, have arranged for a steady procession of antiques dealers and collectors to show him military caps, gold braid, old coins, objects intended to evoke the Hungary he once knew. He reacts very little, grumbles more than he speaks. What serves him as language is no longer really Hungarian but a kind of private dialect born of the interior monologue he must have kept up throughout his half century of solitude. Scraps of sentences emerge, mutterings about crossing the Dniepr River, about shoes stolen from him or that he fears might be stolen, and especially about the leg that was cut off, back there, in Russia. He would like them to give it back or give him another one. A wire story headline declares, “The Last Prisoner of WW II Demands a Wooden Leg.”
One day someone reads him “Little Red Riding Hood,” and he weeps.
At the end of September, the investigation is closed, the result confirmed by DNA testing. The man back from the dead is András Toma (although in Hungary one says Toma András, Bartók Béla, the last name first, as in Japan). He has a younger brother and sister living in a village at the eastern tip of the country, the same village he left fifty-six years earlier to go off to war. They are ready to welcome him home.
Rooting around for more information, I learn that András will not be moved from Budapest to his native village for another few weeks and that the psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich will be celebrating its ninetieth anniversary on October 27. That is the place to start.
The train stops in Kotelnich for only two minutes, not much time for unloading our crates of equipment. I’m used to print journalism, which means working alone or occasionally with a photographer; a television crew, right off the bat that’s more cumbersome. Even though we’re the only passengers getting off and no one is getting on, the platform is fairly crowded, mostly with old women eager to sell buckets of blueberries; they shout at us when we point to all our stuff, indicating that we have enough to lug around as it is. The place looks a lot like the Trans-Siberian station in my story: beaten earth, mud puddles, flaking wooden fences behind which guys with shaved heads watch us with a curiosity that is frankly unpleasant. I find myself thinking it’s good that there are four of us here rather than just one. Jean-Marie grabs his camera, Alain pops his mike onto its boom, the old women get grumpier. Sasha goes in search of a car and soon returns with someone named Vitaly, who drives us in his Zhiguli of indeterminate age to the town’s only hotel, the Vyatka.
Vyatka is both the original and the recently restored name of Kirov, the next stop on the rail line and the capital of this region. During lunch at my parents’ apartment a few days before my departure, we discussed the places I would be visiting and my mother mentioned that the town was named Kirov during the Soviet era, in homage to the Bolshevik leader whose assassination triggered the purges of 1936. My father, who takes a passionate interest in my mother’s family, told me that in 1905 my great-granduncle Count Viktor Komarovsky was the vice governor of the city when it was still called Vyatka. The Hotel Vyatka, in any case, is one of those places familiar to travelers in Russia, where not only does nothing work (heating, television, elevator, all kaput), but you get the feeling that nothing has ever worked, not even on the first day. Two out of three lightbulbs are burned out. Tangles of poorly insulated electric wires snake along leprous paneling. Instead of standing upright against the walls, the useless radiators stick out horizontally toward the center of the rooms at the end of long pipes that bend in strange directions. Threadbare grayish sheets so small they seem like towels half cover the sagging single beds, and a coating of greasy dust clings to whatever passes for furniture. No hot water. The day before, when I’d naïvely asked Sasha if we could use a credit card to pay for the hotel, he’d looked at me in mock astonishment, shaking his head. A credit card … pfft. And since I speak a little Russian (chut’-chut’: just a tiny bit), he’d said, Tut, my na dne: We’re in the sticks here.
The pilgrimage to the places of András Toma’s lost life begins in the psychiatric hospital, in the office of the chief surgeon and director, Dr. Petukhov, who clearly feels that ideally our journey should end there as well. Not that Yuri Leonidovich, as he invites us to call him, is hostile to journalists. On the contrary, he proudly flips through the packet of business cards left by the representatives of various Russian and foreign media organizations: Izvestia, CNN, Reuters … But having perfected his spiel on the subject, he doesn’t really see what more we could possibly want. So: on January 11, 1947, the patient was transferred to the psychiatric hospital in Kotelnich from Bystryag, some twenty-five miles away, from a prison camp torn down in the fifties. The patient was received right here, in this well-heated little wooden house painted in pretty pastel colors and gleaming with polish, by Dr. Kozlova. She opened a file on him … and with a slightly theatrical gesture, Yuri Leonidovich in turn opens that file and invites Jean-Marie to zoom in for a close-up (as his predecessors have undoubtedly done) of Dr. Kozlova’s notes. Yellowed paper, faded ink, small, even handwriting. The patient was registered under the name of Tomas, Andreas, born in 1925, of Magyar nationality. The extra s and e caused much confusion after his return to Hungary, but it would be hard to hold Dr. Kozlova responsible since the patient answered none of her questions, seeming not even to hear them, so we must assume that any replies were given by the soldiers in his escort. His clothes were torn, dirty, too small, and, above all, not warm enough for January. The patient remained stubbornly silent but sometimes laughed for no reason. Back at the military hospital attached to the prison camp, he had wept, had trouble sleeping, often refused to eat, and occasionally been violent, behavior that had led to the diagnosis of “psychoneurosis,” justifying his transfer to a public hospital. Without much hope, I ask if Dr. Kozlova is still alive. Yuri Leonidovich shakes his head: no, there are no witnesses left to the arrival of András Toma or to the early years of his residency. When he himself took up his position about ten years ago, he continues, the patient was of no interest to a psychiatrist. Subdued, silent, withdrawn. In 1997, they’d had to amputate one leg.
And then, on October 26, 1999, exactly one year ago, some big shot in the department of health came to visit the hospital. Showing his guest around, Yuri Leonidovich paused to introduce the one-legged old man as their senior patient. Moved by the memory of that scene, the director smiles. I can just imagine him pinching Toma’s cheek, like Napoleon teasing his Old Guard veterans. A fine old fellow, nice and quiet, been here since the war and speaks only Hungarian, ha ha ha!
A local reporter happened to be covering the occasion, which wasn’t exactly a thrilling one, so she gave her story a theme: the last prisoner of the Second World War lives among us. The rallying cry was launched, one news agency picked it up, then another, and soon it was making the rounds. Alerted, the Hungarian consul came out from Moscow, followed by psychiatrists from Budapest, who wound up taking András Toma away. Yuri Leonidovich has since heard only excellent news of his former patient and is delighted by his progress, of which he is regularly informed by his Hungarian colleagues. I’m astonished at how casually he mentions that progress. He seems completely untroubled by the fact that within two months a man can return to life and language after fifty-three years in Soviet care, essentially reduced to a bump on a log, and it doesn’t occur to the good doctor that visiting journalists might therefore draw some cruel conclusions regarding psychiatry in his country in general or his hospital in particular. I see nothing defensive in the way Dr. Petukhov lays out Toma’s case, and although he won’t allow us to consult the file, I have the impression that his refusal springs less from distrust than from the desire to maintain his monopoly over the only newsworthy story that has ever turned up in Kotelnich.
Chief surgeon, director of the hospital, and deputy of the local Duma (as we will learn), Yuri Leonidovich hardly ever leaves his cozy wooden house and only rarely sees the patients. Vladimir Alexandrovich Malkov, to whom he consigns us after we insist on seeing a little more of the place, is the attending physician in charge of the wing where Toma spent so many decades of his life. Very tall, very blond, very pale, in a white lab coat and lightly tinted glasses, he has the cold demeanor that might have led a nineteenth-century novelist to remark that he looked like a German. Less jovial and cooperative than Yuri Leonidovich at first, he seems to have mixed feelings about the various crews of reporters whose business cards his boss collects. How can you live without hot water? a cameraman had asked him. His reply, with a shrug: You, you live. Us, here, we survive.
Ward 2. Nine beds. Toma’s was the first one to the left of the door, against the wall in a corner, and his former roommates are still assigned to the beds they had when he left. Slippers and sweats, and the gaunt faces of men stripped of everything. Some walk in the narrow spaces separating the beds, shuffling their feet and twitching their hands as they shuttle between the window and the door. Some sit on the edges of their beds, hour after hour. Some just lie there: one beneath a blanket drawn up over his face, which we never see; another stretched out like a recumbent figure on a tomb, arms crossed over his chest, face frozen into a rictus that has become his sole expression. They have washed up here because life outside was too hard, the alcohol too strong, their heads too filled with threatening voices, but they are not dangerous or even agitated. Stabilized, explains Vladimir Alexandrovich. The hospital’s budget has been steadily shrinking over the past ten years, so they have had to reduce the number of patients, sending away as many as possible, everyone who was doing better and had families to take them in, but these men here have no one, so what can you do? They keep them. They don’t really treat them or talk to them, but they keep them. It’s not much. It’s better than nothing.
They kept András Toma even though he had a country—and as it turned out, a family—to which they could have sent him; in theory there was no reason they could not have informed the Hungarian consulate in Moscow of his existence, but no one thought of that. It’s so far away, Moscow, let alone Hungary … He’d landed where he was and had remained there, like a package waiting to be picked up, and little by little even the pain of waiting had faded away.
But Toma had not spent his days lying on his bed like a stone figure on a tomb; he had preferred the carpentry shop, the locksmith’s workshop, the garage, and during the period when the hospital had a farm, you could always find him there. Quite clever with his hands, constantly busy, he came and went freely, that’s why Vladimir Alexandrovich thinks that business about his being the last prisoner of the war is a bit much. He wasn’t a prisoner at all, wasn’t even sick; he lived here, felt at home here, and that’s it. Sasha jumps right in: Not even sick, really? Not for years. He’d been diagnosed as schizophrenic when he arrived, but he’d been in a state of shock, a man who had known the horrors of war and spent three years in a prison camp. The psychotic period he went through had been a reaction to those traumas, and it never recurred. Toma must have decided, more or less consciously, that the best way to avoid a relapse was to lie low, unnoticed, mute, not understanding what was said to him. Melting into the background.
Back in Yuri Leonidovich’s office, whenever I could figure out a few words of the Russian, I had interrupted Sasha’s translation, saying, Da, da, ya ponimayu: Yes, yes, I understand. After we left, Sasha, exasperated, had told me, Listen, either you understand and you don’t need me, or you let me do my job, okay? I’d said okay, but now, talking to Vladimir Alexandrovich, I can’t help breaking in again. I explain as best I can that my mother is of Russian extraction, that I spoke Russian as a child, and that I’ve read—in Russian—“Ward No. 6,” a story by Chekhov that takes place in a provincial mental asylum. Irritated by my increasing fluency, Sasha is sulking, but Alain and Jean-Marie are impressed, while Vladimir Alexandrovich has thawed completely. I’m speaking Russian, I’ve read “Ward No. 6”! We’re friends now and, still on a roll, I boldly ask if there might be some way to consult the Hungarian’s file or, ideally, make a copy of it. Sure, of course, you have to ask Yuri Leonidovich. Yes, but the problem is, Yuri Leonidovich doesn’t approve. At that, Vladimir Alexandrovich frowns: If Yuri Leonidovich doesn’t approve, that’s definitely a problem.
Speaking a few words of Russian has intoxicated me, and when the four of us gather that evening at the only restaurant in town still open, I’m eager to forge ahead. The Troika is basically a filthy bar in a cellar patronized by seriously sozzled young people whom we suspect, at least where the male contingent is concerned, of being potentially dangerous. The place serves only pelmeni, those Russian tortellini, which I insist on washing down with vodka, and in spite of our bender the previous evening, I get no argument from Alain, a devoted lush, or Sasha, who immediately warms to me. Only Jean-Marie declines with a smile, as he did last night: he never drinks. As for me, I am already high on excitement even before the first glass and decide to test my linguistic prowess on two rather homely girls at a neighboring table who can’t wait to socialize. In my kindergarten Russian, I ask them about our Hungarian, their recent local celebrity. I can’t guarantee that I caught everything they said but according to one girl, I wrote in my notebook, he didn’t want to leave, they had to drag him back to Hungary by force, while according to the other he wasn’t nuts at all, he’d pretended to be crazy to avoid getting packed off to Siberia.
I vaguely remember, a little later, asking Sasha whether we could call France from the hotel and his scornful cackle (You’ll pay for it with your credit card, right?), and then staggering with him through deserted streets to the post office, which stays open late, a haven for the drunks turned away even by a bar as undiscriminating as the Troika. There one can find a bit of human warmth, enjoy a little light brawling, for which Sasha seems pretty game, and—incidentally—make a phone call. Even while carrying on a conversation that seems fated from the start to turn violent, Sasha rather sullenly helps me place my call. I wait in a wooden booth where someone has recently taken a piss, leaving me to choose between a heaving stomach if I close the door or, if I leave it open, the hubbub of the room, which drowns out the distant ringing on the line. When Sophie finally picks up, my choice is clear: I close the door and immediately begin to describe the phone booth urinal, the post office, the town, the asylum. Which must inevitably remind her of the story about the Trans-Siberian I told her in the Thai restaurant near the place Maubert where we had dinner that first evening, and yet I am euphoric: I tell her that today I began to speak Russian, that I will keep at it, really tackle the language, that it’s as important to me as my having met her, and that the swift succession of these two events, by the way, is no accident. I describe my dream on the train, emphasizing somewhat mawkishly the promise of liberation it represents but skimming over Mme Fujimori, because although I’ve known Sophie for less than two weeks I have already noticed how jealous she is. When I called her I was thinking that it would be late at her end, that perhaps she’d be in bed, naked, ready to touch herself at my request, but I’d been confused by the time difference: it’s actually evening in Paris and she’s still at the office. When she first heard my voice, she wondered whether I was in some kind of trouble, but now she understands that I’m simply drunk, flying high, even happy, and that the point of the whole thing is—I love her. So then she starts talking to me about my cock, telling me that she really loves cocks, and has known a good number of them, but that mine is the one she prefers above all others and that she would really love for me to stick it in her or—failing that—jerk off. As for her, she has closed the door to her office and slipped her hand up under her skirt, beneath her pantyhose, over her panties. She’s stroking the material, lightly, with her fingertips. I envision the marvelous blond hairs compressed by her panties, but I’ve got to tell her that, at my end, jerking off is impossible at the moment: through the glass panel of the phone booth door I can see Sasha and that guy working patiently to come to blows, they can see me as well, and I’ll have to wait till I get back to the hotel. Where there’s no heat and the sheets seem too grungy to actually slide between, so I’m already anticipating sleeping fully clothed, piling on whatever I can find in the way of blankets, but I promise to jerk off anyway and that, when I got back, is what I did.
Kotelnich is a hole but an important transportation junction as well, and not ten minutes go by without a train, often very long, rattling the windows of our rooms. I have no trouble sleeping through the racket. Alain does, and this morning, in the hotel’s café-restaurant (where two guys are silently downing what are doubtless not their first beers of the day, whereas we have to move heaven and earth for a cup of tea), he is even more wrecked than usual, but in a buoyant mood. To combat his insomnia, he spent the night recording the trains rumbling by, and he plays me back some samples. When I can’t easily tell one from the other, he tries to educate my ear, help it distinguish the chug-chug of a freight train from the clack-clack of an express; I nod, saying yes, yes, and he laughs: You’ll see; when you’re editing, you’ll be glad to have all this.
The last one down, Sasha joins us almost walking backward, looking behind him, turning this way and that, and when he finally decides to face us, we see that he’s sustained impressive damage. Black eye, swollen cheeks, split lip. Embarrassed, he offers a tangled explanation about how after he brought me back from the post office he set out for a walk to grab a snack in a café that turned out to be a hang-out for thugs, where he was trounced by guys who were either cops or robbers—hard to tell from his story—but in any case (and he insists that this has nothing to do with the café), he is not going back to the hospital with us this morning because he has an appointment with a fellow from the Federal Security Bureau about our passports. The FSB is what used to be called the KGB, and a French television crew digging in for a few days in a little town like Kotelnich is sure to attract their attention. So it would be good to distribute a little baksheesh to smooth out the irregularities that will inevitably crop up in our papers. I hand Sasha a hundred dollars; he says that ought to do, for a start.
All day long, we film the hospital. The meals, the routine, the empty lot that serves as a courtyard, where a military railway car from the last war is crumbling into rust. The gate by the rainy highway, and the buses that drive past every now and then, their windows all fogged up. The patients gardening, going about their business, rolling and smoking cigarettes, sitting for hours on benches. The bench András Toma particularly favored because from there he could see a walled farmyard that reminded him of Transylvania. At least that’s what Vladimir Alexandrovich says, from what I can gather, since in the absence of Sasha, busy negotiating with the FSB, I’m thrown back on my own linguistic resources. Intoxication galvanizes these skills, but a hangover knocks them sideways. Here’s this fellow I was ready to hug yesterday, whose esteem I was so proud to have earned—and today I don’t know what to say to him or how to say it, words fail me as I listen to him drone on, monotonously and incomprehensibly, in the carpentry shop where Toma liked to work. Dejected, I punctuate his litany with da, da, and sometimes konechno, which simply means “of course.” My apathy seems to disappoint Vladimir Alexandrovich, who would like to talk more about Chekhov and Russia and France. He dreams of going to France someday, and although his complete lack of French is a problem, he does happen to know a touch of Latin: De gustibus non est disputandum, he announces. You should be able to get by on that, exclaims Sasha encouragingly; he has just rejoined us, clearly perked up by his discussions with the FSB. The lieutenant colonel in charge of Kotelnich is also named Sasha, he says, hardly a miraculous coincidence in a country where they use only about thirty first names, tricked out with a battery of diminutives. But it just so happens that both men served in Chechnya during the war, the lieutenant colonel in the Russian army, our Sasha as an interpreter for a French television crew. That creates a bond, which a few drinks have apparently tightened, and Sasha is now raring to help me interview the patients deemed presentable by Vladimir Alexandrovich. Everyone says the same thing about their former companion: a quiet guy, obliging, who never said a word. Did he understand Russian? No one ever found out or seems even to have wondered whether he did or not.
When we leave the hospital at twilight, Vladimir Alexandrovich says do zavtra, not do svidaniya: “till tomorrow,” not “good-bye,” and it’s with the same casual manner that he hands me—just before I close the car door and he turns swiftly on his heel—a thick manila envelope. I open it in the Zhiguli: it’s a copy of our patient’s medical file. How about that, says Sasha, laughing, he’s really looking out for you!
Tonight we’re going to bed early, no drinking; we must be on our toes tomorrow for the hospital’s anniversary celebration. Sasha has asked around: there will be a banquet in our hotel dining room. I have high hopes for this banquet: I imagine a total immersion in the colorful Russian heartland, the highlight of which, amid enthusiastic toasts and a whirlwind of dancing, might be an encounter with an elderly retired nurse, a truculent babushka who will tell us all about the Hungarian’s arrival in 1947 and hint, with a malicious twinkle in her eye, that even though he never said a word, he had more than one trick up his sleeve, the old slyboots. Meanwhile, since our only alternative eatery seems to be the den of thieves where Sasha received his pounding, we head back to the Troika and its pelmeni, examining our loot along the way.
András Toma’s patient file contains forty-four pages, in different handwriting, covering the fifty-three years he spent in Kotelnich. The initial entries, which Yuri Leonidovich has already read and explained to us, are by Dr. Kozlova. Rather numerous and precise during those first weeks, the remarks soon grow less frequent, leading us to conclude that doctors are required to record comments on their patients’ condition only once every two weeks. These notes, which Sasha begins to translate aloud, do allow us to follow the trajectory of an entire life, however, and the one lived by András Toma, which must have resembled many others, is appalling: an inexorable process of destruction detailed in terse, flat, repetitive sentences. For example:
February 15, 1947: The patient is lying down; he tries to say something but no one understands him. When asked, How are you? he replies, Tomas, Tomas. He will not allow himself to be examined.
March 31, 1947: He is still lying down, with his blanket over his head. He says something angrily in his native language and shows us his feet. He hides food in his pockets. Physically, he is in good health.
May 15, 1947: The patient goes out into the courtyard but talks to no one. He does not speak Russian.
October 30, 1947: The patient does not want to work. If he is made to go outside, he shouts and runs in every direction. He hides his gloves and his bread under his pillow. He wraps himself in rags. He speaks only Hungarian.
October 15, 1948: The patient is exhibiting sexual behavior. He lies on his bed, laughing unpleasantly. He does not obey hospital regulations. He is courting a nurse, Guilichina. The patient Boltus is jealous. He struck Toma.
March 30, 1950: The patient is completely withdrawn. He stays on his bed. He looks out the window.
August 15, 1951: The patient has taken pencils from the nurses. He writes on the walls, the doors, the window frames, in Hungarian.
February 15, 1953: The patient is dirty, angry. He collects garbage. He sleeps in unsuitable places—in hallways, on benches, under his bed. He disturbs his neighbors. He speaks only Hungarian.
October 30, 1954: The patient is feeble and negative. He speaks only Hungarian.
December 15, 1954: No change in the patient’s state.
We are on page 6 of the file, with the feeling that the doctors are growing weary, as are Sasha and I. We skim through the rest. Sasha mutters, hums, and soon he’s chanting: No-change-in-the-patient’s-state-he-speaks-only-Hungarian, no-change-in-the-patient’s-state-he-speaks-only-Hungarian … Hold on, wait a minute: eight pages further along, we’re in 1965 and something happens. The patient has grown attached to the female dentist at the hospital and, to have a reason for seeing her again, he keeps baring his teeth “with a silly smile,” notes the dossier. The dentist reexamines him, everything’s fine. According to the notes made every two weeks, however, he keeps on displaying his teeth. Through gestures, he explains that he wants the dentist to pull them. It seems the best way he can find to establish a bond with her. She refuses to extract healthy teeth. So he shatters his jaw with a hammer. No luck: he’s given medical attention, but not by the dentist he loves. Poor old man, sighs Sasha. Poor old fellow … Maybe in all those years, he never fucked, not even once, and maybe he never did in Hungary, either. Maybe he hasn’t ever fucked in his whole life …
Another twenty pages, another twenty years:
June 11, 1996: The patient complains of pain in his right foot. Diagnosis: inflammation of the arteries. The patient’s relatives ought to be consulted about amputation. The patient has no relatives.
June 28, 1996: The patient’s leg is amputated, leaving two-thirds of the right thigh. No complications.
July 30, 1996: The patient does not complain. He smokes a great deal. He is beginning to walk with crutches. In the mornings, his pillow is wet with tears.
WHEN WE ARRIVE at the hospital the next day, a nurse informs us sternly that Dr. Petukhov wishes to see us. He lets us cool our heels for quite a while. To keep busy, Jean-Marie pans a couple of shots from the gray landscape framed in the windows to the Polynesian lagoon screen saver on the computer. The secretary asks him to stop filming and put away his camera. When she answers the phone a few minutes later, Sasha is outside smoking a cigarette and I have trouble understanding what she’s saying, but lowering her voice, she repeats the word frantsuzki: Frenchies, and I get the impression that the frantsuzki