Bakhtin Goes to Atlasov
July 23rd 2001
I knelt to examine a shard of yellowed paper bearing the image of a youthful, goateed Comrade Lenin, sitting tactlessly aside water-stained wallpaper with little neon palm trees emblazoned in the height of Soviet kitsch. ‘Anton, careful’, Evgeni cautioned me, concerned about my recent knee replacement but also that I might do something unpredictable, something of postponed regret here on the barren shores of Atlasov Island some 6 decades after the war had faded into bronze plaques and school curriculums. ‘It’s fine my friend; I have business here, I didn’t come all this way to neglect the details’, I countered. That I had been able to persuade Evgeni to join me was remarkable itself, but in a sense we were both old men in search of the lost pieces of life that collect themselves at the end. The endless wind shook the abandoned cabin, and the faint rumble of the volcano, in a perpetual state of low-grade displeasure, competed with the shrill cawing of seabirds outside. I wanted to be composed, reflective; prepared to close things, but instead the buzz in my head merely built into the shadows of boxed memories, the voices that spoke in their own strange inflections here in the Arctic tropics.
While news of progress on the Eastern Front filtered through stuffy bureaucratic channels in Moscow and Leningrad, two young men wrestled alone on a somber andesite beach under the Arctic sun, the true Eastern Front somewhere between Japan and forever; military duties and restless love. I wondered what the authorities would think, what god would think, what my mother would think, but none of this mattered- I had found Alexei the rainy, cold day we left Vladivostok; the day a few dozen scared and vaguely patriotic young men were shipped to the arrogant edges of manifest destiny, of brassy imperialism and fantastic places that dwelled in the creases government maps. ‘Think we could stay here when our tour is up; just us?’, I asked into the warm place between the itchy wool blanket and his strong pale shoulders that night, the eve of my 23rd Birthday. ‘We’d get by’, I added in muffled sincerity. ‘No; I want to go to Moscow, I want to be an artist- we can rent a flat together’ protested Alexei playfully, the vast black space beyond the oily glass windows sparkling under the slight glow of a peak more beautiful, more symmetric than Mount Fuji. I knew what would happen to us in Moscow. He could be an artist though- he was an artist, not just ‘Alexei Zherov, U.S.S.R naval cadet 45683’, as the dog tag which brushed against his perfect chest proclaimed. Paintings of the island’s surreal commas of black sand and my embarrassed smile hung askew beside maps of the supposed ‘progress of the American fleet’, which of course never materialized. From the lofty position of 50 degrees north, 155 degrees east, and half a bottle of smuggled vodka, Alexei complained into my softly rising chest that the world was mostly mindless breeders, intent on settling on something before the notion of their actuality, their irreplaceable being surfaced amongst all this state-sponsored consciousness. He’d been reading too much Bakhtin; I decided, how he even got the books here was remarkable, and I pushed him deep into the sighing mattress springs. I loved how difficult he was.
Anton, my friend, the boat is here, Evgeni interjected. My mind raced- images of my wife back in Moscow, the grandchildren multiplying under the modest immortality of 21st century Western capitalism, the fading wallpaper of my own Glasnost –era apartment on the fading banks of the Yauza River. My eyes caught a ripped photograph on the floor. It was grainy, bleached from sun and wind and the mumbling waves of time, but I recognized the two young men who stood on the beach behind an ash-speckled sky, their pose the unmistakable form of 20-something attitude. A single tear ran lazily down my cheek like the lava down Vulcan Atlasov, and in one the strange coincidences Bakhtin might have dismissed God with, might have given him a lower-case ‘g’, my cell phone rang. I fished it out of my pocket, and propelled its little black plastic heft across the beach and into the arms of a receding wave. I smiled. Alexei would have been proud.
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