Russia.
“Yes?” I say finally, a little late, but nevertheless meaning to politely encourage him.
“Mr. Caragan, I thought when we met last Wednesday we agreed there would be no more letters.”
The man has me there. But I am an impulsive fellow and that was Wednesday. By Thursday I felt I owed him some kind of explanation as to what had moved me to write the first three letters. “That’s true,” I admit, “that was the understanding.”
“But?”
I shrug.
Dr. Herzl spreads a sheet of paper on his desk. His fingers rub diligently at the fold marks. When he is satisfied everything is shipshape, he begins to read to himself. I note a barely perceptible flicker in his upper lip. When he finishes, he looks up at me sharply. An old tactic that I recognize immediately. “This doesn’t make much sense to me,” he says.
“No?”
“Excuse me,” he says, pausing. “I’m not a critic…” The doctor smiles to signal me that this is an offering from his store of inexhaustible wit. “But I find your language rather… formal, stilted,” he says at last, finding the words he wants. “As if you are under great strain, as if you are trying to keep a lid on your feelings when you write me these letters.” He searches the page. “For instance, there’s this: ‘I answer in writing because my thought will thus be more fully expressed, and more distinctly perceived, like a sound amid silence.’ Doesn’t that sound a bit unusual to you?”
“There’s quotation marks around that.”
“Pardon?”
“I didn’t write that. There’s quotation marks around that.”
“Oh.” The doctor hesitates. “Who
“Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon.”
A doubtful look passes over his face. He suspects me of pulling his leg. Dr. Herzl considers me a great joker, albeit an unbalanced, a lunatic one.
“It’s true,” I assure him.
“I am not familiar…”
“So who is? But then, you don’t need to be,” I say. “I explained it all in the letter. It’s all in there. I used Gershenzon as an example. I was trying to help you see why I write -”
I am interrupted. “Yes, I’m sure. But you understand – fourteen pages in your tiny handwriting – I only skimmed it.”
“Of course.” I don’t know whatever led me to believe he would profit from the story of the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence. Or that anyone else would, for that matter. When I told Janet, who is young, an artist, and believes herself to be in possession of a sensitive soul, about the series of letters exchanged between Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanovitch Ivanov while they recuperated in a rest-home in Russia, she said: “I don’t get it. What’s a corner-to-corner correspondence?”
“It was called that because each of the correspondents was in opposite corners of the same room. That’s why it was called the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence,” I said, ending my obvious explanation lamely.
“They couldn’t talk? What was it, throat cancer?”
“No, as I said before, these guys were poets, philosophers, men of letters. Remember?” I prodded. “It was just that they felt more comfortable, surer of themselves, when writing. They had time to reflect on what they wanted to say, to test their ideas. To compose.”
“That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard – writing to someone in the same room,” she said. “That sort of thing just gets in the way of real feelings. It’s a kind of mask to hide who you really are, and what you’re all about.”
That was her final judgment, and from Janet’s considered decisions there is no appeal, as I have learned to my sorrow. Still, I was almost in love, and at that precarious point one imagines it is important to be understood. So at our next planned meeting, two days later, I took along with me a passage I had copied from one of Gershenzon’s letters. It was to demonstrate to her the subtleties which are the province of the written word, and, more importantly, to signal her what was going on in my mind.
“You see, honey,” I said, trying to explain what Gershenzon meant to me, “he felt out of step with things going on around him. He might have said to old Ivanov: ‘Viacheslav, what’s the matter with me? I don’t feel I belong, I don’t feel right. Why is it I don’t think what other people think, or feel what other people say they feel?’ He could have put it that way. He could have, but he didn’t. What he did do was write:
This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.
Of course, when I looked up from the page, it was only to discover that Janet had gone to the bathroom to apply her contraceptive foam.
“I hear that you’re still refusing to see your wife,” says Dr. Herzl, introducing a new topic.
“That’s not entirely true. I said I wouldn’t see her alone. If she brings our daughter with her, well, that’s a different story.”
“Why won’t you speak with your wife alone?”
“I explained that in my second letter -”
“Why don’t you explain it to me now. Face to face, without the pretences of these letters.” There is a measure of asperity in the good doctor’s voice. From the very beginning I knew he didn’t like me. I do not have a confessional nature and he holds that against me.
I stare back stolidly.
“Is it because you’re ashamed? Is that why you won’t allow your wife to visit?”
“Yes.” There is little harm in agreeing with him. He has made up his mind on this point long ago.
“Ashamed of what? Your affair? Or what you did at the gallery?”
Why not? “Both,” I affirm, blithely shouldering a double load, the tawdry fardels of sexual guilt.
“Speaking of the gallery,” says Dr. Herzl, “your wife agrees with me. She believes that the depiction of the penis was what triggered the incident there.”
“She does, does she?”
“She thinks you felt it was undersized. She says you’re prone to read a disproportionate significance into that sort of thing.”
This is so like Miriam that I offer no complaint against this preposterous interpretation of my actions. I had my reasons.
Dr. Herzl clears his throat. “How am I to understand your silence?”
“The suggestion is too silly to grace with a comment.”
“How did you feel when you did it?”
“Cold.”
“I see,” says the doctor, letting his fingers wander through the paper on his desk. “Well, I believe we’ve made some progress. We’ve begun to talk to one another, at any rate. Now is as good a time to stop as any.” He closes my file. Perhaps the fact that it bulges with my correspondence reminds him. “You do see that writing letters is a way of avoiding the problem?” he asks hopefully.
“I want to see my daughter. You tell Miriam to bring Cynthia here.”
“I’m sorry,” says Dr. Herzl. “Mrs. Caragan says that would be impossible.”
In my room I lie down on my bed and speculate how Miriam is making out. I know she is not starving. I am on full salary while incapacitated. The teachers’ federation knows how to negotiate a collective agreement, and insanity is paid its rich deserts.
As far as the other things go – the neighbours’ whispers, the long, woeful faces of acquaintances – the proud
