Wide Open Burrows

Andrey Matveev

trans. Mariya Gusev

Wide-Open Mink-Holes^[1]

Smart people wanted me to title this text “America, Which We Had Lost”.

But I’ve decided to title it something else, even though it’s the same thing.

Simply, I have taken the phrase “wide-open mink-holes” from one American novel, which I lost a long time ago. It’s been absent from my bookshelves for many years now, it has vanished, dissolved, disappeared somewhere among the now unknowable dimensions of my past.

“Wide-open mink-holes”--a phrase from the Russian translation of a novel by the American writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., called Breakfast of Champions: or Goodbye, Blue Monday. There was also a character there, Kilgore Trout, who in fact was also in other novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., which I had read so long ago it is difficult for me to recall exactly when.

What “wide-open mink-holes” are I will explain later, but first about America which we had lost.

One of those smart people who wanted me to title this text as such, the very same smart person who just a week ago was sitting in the now-empty chair next to me, had indeed simply decoded this concept for me.

Apparently, the deal is that back in the day, when all of us still read great numbers of different books, books which were first and foremost American, we weren’t reading them by accident!

-- O yes! I was nodding enthusiastically. Definitely not by accident!

-- And why? I was hearing in response.

-- In them, we were searching for freedom, I was answering. In them, we were looking for that individual freedom, of which our own lives had been devoid. We wanted that freedom, we were dreaming about it, we desired only one thing--for this wretched State to leave us alone, to stop bugging us, but it was impossible, oh, definitely impossible. Yes, impossible, and so we read the American novels, which were all about this very thing…

-- About what?

-- About freedom!

-- Correct, replied the very smart person, sitting in the now empty rocking chair next to me. But they were not just about freedom, not so much about inner freedom, but the external, about escapism, about running, about leaving…

-- Which is the same thing, I added.

-- Yes, the same thing, but not exactly…

And here I became distracted; I got sidetracked from the conversation and began thinking about all of the American books which I had once read.

And most of which had now been lost. They are absent from my bookshelves, as are books by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Well, maybe a few are still there, but even those I haven’t re-read in a long time.

Books big and small, classics and non-classics, masterpieces and not.

All together in one large sack, as it were, into which one puts his hand and pulls out what it first touches.

Serious books and action thrillers, fantasy and simple average-level American novels.

I pull them out from the sack, glance at their titles, and toss them away. There is no need to re-read them; I remember everything as it is.

In fact, each book, each title also stands for some event in my own life. It just so happened, simply, that when one reads a great number of books--and at one point, I indeed was reading quite a lot--each book tends to superimpose onto the exterior circumstances of one’s life, as well. Both onto the exterior and the interior.

Technically, in this I am not original. An Austrian writer Peter Handke, in his “American” story “Short Letter, Long Farewell,” had included an amazing scene, in which the main hero, who is wandering across America in an attempt to disappear, dissolve, avoid a meeting with his ex-wife, who obsessively dreams about murdering him--I just love re-telling plots--ends up at his old friend’s place, whose favorite occupation is remembering the names and melodies of well-known songs and remembering what they were doing, while they were listening to these melodies.

For me, this is connected with books, specifically--American books.

For example…

For example, Bradbury. Ray. Ray Bradbury. A book named Martian Chronicles. Thirty-one years ago. It’s the beginning of June, city botanical gardens; I am taking a walk there in the evening, not alone. The girl I’m with will later become my first wife. Further--leaving out the emotions, we are just walking, and I, like a fool, begin re-telling Bradbury to her, a story named “And the Moon Be Still As Bright.” Later, several years down the line, while reading The Ugly Swans by brothers Strugatsky^[2]--still the hand-typed version, after a terrible New Year’s hangover--I come across a wise thought by Viktor Banev, the protagonist of this Strugatsky’s novel. He runs into his ex-wife, and is thinking: “Wow, and to this woman I had read Baudelair!”

Wow, and to this woman I was re-telling Bradbury--dog’s delirium, said the Sarge!^[3]

By the way, also this quote, but this time from a different American writer.

His name was Joseph Heller, and he has already passed away. A couple of years ago, I think, at the end of 1999. And it was him specifically that has written about everything in this world being “Delirium of a dog! said the Sarge.”

In the book Catch-22, which means “Ammendment-22”. But it’s only now become fashionable to translate it as Ammendment-22, and I much prefer the other version, the one which, by the way, back in 1976 (God, when was that?), was published by the Ural journal, under the name “Trick-22”. Which turned out to be the last straw for the gentlemen from the regional Party Committee, leading to termination from employment for the main editor of the journal, the dearest uncle Zhora Krasnov--for me, he was uncle Zhora, back then, and I learned about the reason for his termination only many years later.

Currently, uncle Zhora is no longer with us, same as Joseph Heller is no longer here. But there is “Trick-22”, at the very least, for us, Russians, it is still a “trick”. For the Americans, in that America which we had lost, amendments to the Constitution are something similarly sacred, as the cow is for the Hindus, but for us--it is a trick, a ploy, so yet again--dog’s delirium, said the Sarge!

However, Heller’s true magnificence was revealed to me in 1978 (if my memory isn’t tripping) when, having already read Catch-22, I came across chapters from late Joseph’s second novel, published in the Foreign Literature magazine.

Something Happened--“Something Had Occurred”.

To this day, I get the willies when I see an open door--pardon, an open cover of this novel.

As you can guess, I had just remembered the first quote.

This novel, too, had escaped, it disappeared into thin air, fell into yesteryear from my book shelves same as did the Breakfast of Champions, with its “wide-open mink-holes”.

The part about the willies is not my favorite, though; there are some things that are even cooler there--for example, the part about who I want to be when I grow up.

The protagonist says this, the forty-something Bob Slokum--now, at times, I understand him, or rather, I understand, what he wanted and still wants to say: “I know at last what I want to be when I grow up. When I grow up I want to be a little boy.”

And that Foreign Literature issue I had also read with a terrible hangover, at work. I was drinking strong tea and reading about Bob Slokum. And it was fall. This was during the period of my second wife, by the way, this division of my life into periods by wives—it is also from American literature, from the very same Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Only this is from a different novel, from Cat’s Cradle, which begins with all of it taking place so-many-hundred cigarettes, so-many-liters of whisky, and two (I remember this correctly) wives ago.

But now I am not talking about Vonnegut, I am still talking about Joseph Heller. Or rather, about that freedom which we had wanted to find, and about that America which we had lost. Even though at that moment when I, with an ailing, hungover head, steeping myself in strong, bitter-nonsweet tea, was reading chapters from the novel Something Happened for the first time, I wasn’t thinking about anything like that. As I read I was amazed by how many times, in which context, in which conjugation, and in which combinations the term “to screw” is used in this novel. And “screwing”. And “screwed”. By the way, before Something Happened was translated into Russian, this term was absent from popular vocabulary. But after the translation, by some strange magic--it shouldn’t be assumed that all (or almost all) citizens of our great and mighty nation had read this nearly seven hundred page long (in its complete form) work by a curly American Jew--it had become widely used. But a fact is a fact--before its appearance, the word “screwed” did exist in the Russian language, but was used more or less “locally.” But after, it spread through the masses. Although--possibly--I am simply imagining all this.

In short, “wide-open mink-holes,” Saint Elmo’s fires appearing in the morning--as well as in the evening--fog that has covered the bogs of memory. The very same sack of phrases, into which you put your hand every once in a while, and pull out that something that had once been very dear and close to you, even though never material, just another shadow, which once had been sharply printed words on a still white page.

For example, “… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces… O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

No great mystery, it’s Thomas Wolfe, specifically Thomas, and not Tom, even though there is a Tom also. But that was Thomas, Look Homeward, Angel, I am eighteen, I am reading at night, until the morning, head ringing from coffee, and cigarettes, and from that tremendous flood of words which are filtering through me. Many years later the circle completes, it is night also, only this time without coffee, a similarly thick book, but it is named something else, You Can’t Go Home Again this book is called, and there were also Only The Dead Know Brooklyn, Of Time And The River, and also something else, something else, but the hand is already reaching for the sack, more Saint Elmo’s fires are winking, circling above me in these miasmic bogs of my memory, who will it be, this time?

Anybody, really, Flannery O’Connor, for example, an American lady from the American South, who disproves the law that women--as a rule--cannot write real prose. She could, and had died young, she wasn’t even fifty yet. A story named “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”--the last phrase states--again, from memory--that “she was a good old lady, I’d shoot them every day! said the Outcast”^[4].

And if it’s the South, the American South, the hand reaches for the sack of its own volition, knowing ahead of time, what you will pull out next. A whole stack of books, tied with yellowed paper string, there is no need to untie it, it’s enough to throw a quick look at the spines:

The Sound And the Fury, As I Lay Dying, A Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Mansion, The Town, Sanctuary, Intruder in the Dust…(the first one read, early summer of seventy-two, the beginning of June, crazy nights, and equally crazy days) and much, much more, including the short stories and sketches by this Southern gentleman, at times so similar (I see it to this day) to my late grandfather, especially in that picture where Faulkner--and we are talking about him, of course--is standing in some sort of a padded jacket, next to a barn in the backyard of his farm, an elderly Faulkner, who has left us so many good phrases.

For example – and I’m quoting from memory: “He lived, wrote books, and died. And his name was William Faulkner”.

Or this one: “A big defeat is much more important than a small victory”.

And here’s another one, probably, the most important: “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail!”

That is, not the State, but an identity taken separately, meaning that each one of us must be convinced that he will prevail. That is, the expectation of freedom, the understanding that a disbelief in victory already gives birth to defeat.

Which, by the way, we had all suffered, because--another phrase by Faulkner--“Problems of spirit no longer exist…”. The rest I remember vaguely, so I’m cutting this quote short, and only would like to add that the Americans understood this much earlier than you and I, because of which, in general, we had lost America.

But there remain the “wide-open mink-holes”, which means we can continue this sweet madness of remembrance.

For example, to remember Sylvia Plath, about how, in the very beginning of the eighties, I had visited the old “World of Books”, which was then located on the street named after a certain K. Libkneht, and had found in a stack of books a modest small volume, with a white cover, and in English. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. This volume had also long disappeared from my bookshelves, but it has played a specific role--the main heroine of my novella How We Were was a translator, and the hero presents her with this book, which title he had translated himself as The Crystal Bell, even though the recently bought book (thank God, someone had translated it) carries the title Under a Glass Hood, however, I still like my version of it better, but having suffered through the book in English, I had never finished reading the Russian translation, because I understood that a time for certain books in my life had already passed forever.

That is, you will never reread these books again.

Not Salinger, and not the aforementioned Thomas Wolfe.

Not Fitzgerald--the once famous red trilogy, published in the late seventies, given to me in the winter by one girlfriend, which was, at that point, a permanent substitute of that same second wife--the first volume, This Side of Paradise and The Great Gatsby, the second volume, Tender is The Night, the third volume, The Last Tycoon, stories and essays from the well-known book The Crack-Up, Crash, Wreck, i.e. a story by Fitzgerald himself about what happened to him when he drank a lot. A whole lot. He drank and wrote about it truthfully, and I, also a drinker then, a big drinker, was reading him, knowing that I’m also a shit. Although I had quit drinking much later, when I had already stopped reading Fitzgerald.

When I quit drinking, I was reading Trout Fishing In America, by Brautigan. Or rather, I was trying to read it--this thin book was given to me by Boris Borisovich Grebenshikov^[5], and I sat, cramped in my chair, and was trying to understand, what this thing means--Trout Fishing In America.

I had first read about Brautigan while reading Aksenov. In his Twenty-Four Hours Non-Stop. I had been attending some sort of practice in Khabarovsk, and was on a business trip to Birobidzhan. It was a hot Amur autumn, I was wearing a new Icelandic sweater, very warm and very scratchy, outside the window floated the smoke of forest fires, the train, as is its wont, was noisily crossing the bridge over Amur, I was reading an issue of the New World magazine that contained this publication by V.P.Aksenov, his second to last publication in this wretched country. In it, he wrote about Brautigan, that he was a good writer. This was in 1976. Eight-and-a-half years later (short, long, longer still), I tried to see this for myself, and was able to only partially--due to my poor knowledge of the language--so I had asked a friend of mine, Ilya Kormiltsev^[6], to translate Brautigan, which he did, and had even sent his manuscript to the old Ural journal, which of course did not result in anything good, as V.P.Lukyanin^[7] had kicked it right back to him, saying that all of it is delirium.

Even though it’s not delirium, it’s simply Trout Fishing In America.

By the way, “America which we had lost” was also thought up by Kormiltsev, and it was him that was trying to convince me to use it as a title for this text.

But I am much more partial to the name “Wide-Open Mink-Holes.” If only just because I know what it signifies, due to my familiarity with Vonnegut’s novel. It signifies that which is between a woman’s legs, i.e. the hole in the crotch, in English this place is called the cunt, by the way, yesterday I suddenly decided to re-read a novel by another American, which for some reason hasn’t disappeared off my bookshelves--Phillip Roth’s Portnoy’s Disease (I prefer the alternate translation of the name--Portnoy’s Complaint), and I laughed a lot, because everything in this book was about the cunt. It’s about how a Jewish teenager Alex Portnoy becomes a Jewish man-lawyer^[8] and about how he tries to screw all of the mink-holes that cross his path. And about how it’s total bombsville for him in that respect, most of the time, many failures he has with this, even though he has a very large member, still he mostly gets nowhere--because he has a great many complexes.

Which, by the way, is another reason why we (it’s now possible to say this with full conviction) were reading American books. There were no complexes contained in the Russian books of our youth. In American books--there were. When you are still a very young person, you have many complexes. If you are reading books, you naturally want to read as if about yourself. And this is why we were reading about our complexes by those authors, who wrote about it with full sincerity, because back then American writers truly wrote about all this sincerely. Also those, which I had already mentioned. And others: for example, Truman Capote, John Cheever, John Updike, and even Irwin Shaw. And also many others, whom I could list below, but will not, because all of this is beginning to remind me of the fairytale about the white bull, which never ends, the same way that the wide-open mink-holes never end--I’m omitting the quotation marks, for now.

Of course, “mink-holes” (in quotes again) were best written about not by Vonnegut. The greatest describer of mink-holes (again without quotes) is Henry Miller, but for me Henry Miller signifies that America which I hadn’t yet lost. Because it’s not really America, it’s different literature from a different country, in the same way as William Burroughs, as--to a degree--John Barth, as, in the end, the strange man named Thomas Pynchon. This literature is about the search for another freedom, not as much the external, but the internal. This is very morbid literature, even though at times it forces you to not just laugh, but to laugh hysterically. But this is not “American” literature, even though it is written in English.

I, however, was trying to think specifically about American literature. This turned out to be difficult for me, because it turned out like Hemingway’s prose--three parts of an iceberg on the surface, seven underwater.

This means that we indeed had lost that America, but this is not that bad. The good writers will always remain the good writers, even if no one is re-reading Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, or Thomas Wolfe--I am naming the recognized classics of the past century.

Even if no one re-reads anything any more, or even if no one reads anything at all--they lived, they wrote books, we read them, and we are still alive.

Which means their phrases, and the names of their books, are still alive in us. As is the case with Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and his “wide-open mink-holes”.

So in the end, it’s not really a very big deal, let it be, that America which we had lost--after all, the numbers of our losses are already so great, one can sometimes get tired counting them.

And then you look at the emptied book shelves and you think: I wonder, who exactly is now reading all of these books, which were at one point mine?

^[1] Vonnegut had used the phrase “Wide-open beavers” in his book, which through a clever move by a Russian translator became “Wide-open mink-hole”, the word “mink” in Russian also meaning “a hole in the ground, in which the animal lives”. By using this play on words, the translator was able to retain an element of the original, while remaining true to his understanding of the issues, addressed by Vonnegut. As this was the only translation available, several generations of Russians came away from reading “Breakfast” with an image of these metaphorical warrens or holes, open and hidden away simultaneously, which imparted a new shade of meaning to their understanding of Vonnegut’s impression of American reality. Thus, the author uses “mink-hole” instead of “beaver” here.

^[2] The pre-eminent authors of “intellectual” science fiction in the Soviet Union.

^[3] Originally a quote by Groucho Marx, that appeared in Heller’s Catch-22: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.” Translated as “Dog’s delirium, said the Sarge”, it has now become a well-used Russian expression, denoting that which constitutes total absurdity.

^[4] Originally: “She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

^[5] Founder and frontman of the cult rock group Aquarium.

^[6] A contemporary Russian literary translator and critic.

^[8] A pun on the theme of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a Russian populist politician, leader of the anarchico-conservative Liberal-socialist party, a Jew of anti-semitic bent, who once famously, when asked about his father’s ethnicity, replied that his father had been a lawyer.