A New Soul

YOU CAN RECOGNIZE THEM, BUT ONLY IF YOUYOURSELF ARE one of them. There are signs, and eachsign happens twice. Those who see the signs don’t everunderstand what they’re seeing. The heart flutters for asecond, that’s all. A tear clouds the eye, but the memoryremains out of reach. Twin souls have passed one anotherin space.

It’s also called love at first sight (and you may never havethat sight again).

The double sign, the light from the proper direction, ahouse lit up by it—then the person will recognize the place.But everything that came before, and after, and why thisplace, and why this light, this house, this wind—the exiledsoul won’t ever understand it. The soul will never return tothat former time, that other life. It needs to drag along in thiscurrent one, unfortunately.

Because it’s the former life that’s always dearest to us.That’s the life colored by sadness, by love—that’s wherewe left everything connected to what we call our feelings.Now everything is different; life just carries on, without joy,without tears.

But this is all a prologue. The fact is a man is rushinghome from a business trip. He’s late for his flight, he’scaught a cab, they raced to the airport, but the cab gotpulled over, the driver had to pay a fine, that took upprecious minutes, and arriving finally at the gate the manfinds nothing: the plane is gone.

He was rushing, this man, because the next morning hisson is being drafted into the army—suddenly, without anywarning, they’re taking him right out of college. The manlearned about it this evening: he’d finally gotten a chance tocall home from the post office to say that everything wasfine, he was catching a flight in the morning, to which hiswife barked back—“It’ll be too late!”—before telling him thenews. So off he went—to say good-bye! Their beloved, only

child was leaving for two years; their clumsy little boy,unprepared for the difficulties, and cruelties, for the ways ofthe army—their gentle little boy, loving, domestic, kind. Hewas always getting beaten up in the yard when he was little;in school there’d also been problems and sadists; now hewas at the university, all that was behind them. He’d foundfriends like himself, well-mannered, thoughtful boys andgirls—and suddenly there you go, they’re taking him in themorning.

This man, the father, was no longer young, and themother also was no longer very young. They’d met whenneither of them was very young, and gave birth,miraculously, to this joy, this angel, whose peers, theparents believed, didn’t appreciate him, as a tribe neverappreciates its first prophet.

The father already had a daughter—his elderly daughter,as he liked to say, which was true, actually. She was theproduct of an early marriage, and what’s more the girl’smother was older than the father by eleven years. Theirmarriage collapsed when he was forty-two and she fifty-three—how do you like that? A desperate age for husbandand wife both. And then suddenly the husband met the loveof his life. She too was not young, but was full oftenderness, with a cloud of hair around her golden headand blue eyes—she had just joined his firm. Everything wassettled for them, and then they gave birth to this miracle, afragile, golden-haired angel of a son. They lived together foreighteen years and a smidgeon, clinging to each other,living what seemed like an extra, bonus life, but alwaysworrying about their little boy.

And finally the payment had come due—the tears andthreats of the first wife, her curse had come to pass: mayeverything that you put me through return to you in spades.

The father has missed the plane. Nor are there any seats

on the morning flight.

He gets a partial refund for his plane ticket and hurlshimself into the late bus, which takes him to the trainstation, where he somehow manages, tearfully, to saysomething to the conductor, a few simple words about hisson, so that she steps aside and allows him on the train—which is already moving—and even, after hearing his fewsimple words, puts him into her own compartment, which isoverheated, and where, on the top bunk, the father lies intorment until the morning. As soon as the train arrives heraces to the apartment, but it is already empty: things arescattered on the floor; the phone is off the hook, beeping;his son’s unmade bed gapes like the bed of a condemnedman on the day of his execution.

The father quickly finds his bearings, learns the addressof the draft board from a neighbor in the next entryway,where his son’s classmate lives—the boy was in fact hisson’s tormentor, but who cares about that now. That boy’sgrandmother tells the father where to run; her own familyhas gone to see off their child after a night of partying.

The father makes it in time. He sees his son a crowd ofpale, hungover, moronic, defeated boys.

The father takes hold of his son’s sleeve, begins toscream, and wakes up in the United States, in the form ofan unhappy immigrant named Grisha, who’s beenabandoned by his hardworking wife six months after theyarrived in the States. She went to work as a cleaning ladyat the mall and then married a professor, an old childhoodfriend, whom she’d accidentally met there. A happycoincidence! And she cast Grisha away like an old rag.

At the moment we’re describing, Grisha has just beenreleased from the mental hospital, where, not knowing thelanguage, he’d spent all his time in front of the television,though without participating in the vicious arguments aboutwhich channel to put on. He’d landed in the mental wardafter his third unsuccessful suicide attempt.

Somehow or other, one day he began to talk in animpoverished television language with a crazy black man,who was always yelling—nonstop—about how he was

going to kill all the white people, that filth, how he’d killedten of them already and he wanted to kill an eleventh, hewas willing to go to the electric chair for it, to become amartyr for his beliefs. He was the first one Grishaunderstood, and he answered him in his own way, in thevoice of a television anchorman. Kill me, said Grisha. Goahead, pleeze—strangle me, if you’d like, or some otherway, I don’t care, said Grisha, utterly surprised by his abilityto form English words, and unaware that the soul of thatunhappy father was already knocking about inside him andthat it knew many things (including five languages). Theweeping Grisha was taken to his room and tranquilized.

The black man, Jim, was stopped short, knocked fromhis imaginary universe of righteous racial vengeance bythis actual white person who was asking for his own death.Jim began wondering whether he could do it—commit thisact for, he claimed to himself, the eleventh time, andimmediately he went to find out what had happened to thispiece of filth, who had turned out in fact to be a dirtyRussian, which on the table of ranks in Jim’s head placedhim below just about everyone. Jim was, after all, a full-fledged citizen of the United States.

And he began to defend the rights of this dirty Russian.He taught him to recognize the main enemies ofdemocracy on television—the senators and presidents andnewspeople who spread their lies. Jim taught Grisha agreat many things, nodding his wise old head and spinninghis thin fingers, and Grisha just kept crying.

He didn’t know he was crying for his wife and son, whomhe’d left that day in the Moscow street outside the draftboard, weeping on their knees next to his body. He didn’tknow that the boy hadn’t been taken into the army after all,that his wife had managed to hide him even while herselfwailing terribly. That is to say she wept loudly next to thebody of her collapsed husband but in the meantimewhispered to the boy, “Hide out at your Aunt Valya’s in thecountry,” and off he’d gone even before the ambulancearrived.

Grisha wandered around, weeping, unable to reachhimself. He discovered a little hole below his neck, like an

extra eye, from which tears poured out. He saw strangedreams—in which a cloudless joy and love surrounded him,sang lullabies to him, calmed him.

The shots they gave him made him dizzy, high, andcaused him to stop crying, but the little eye below his neckkept pouring out tears.

With time the shock subsided, and Grisha was releasedwhile Jim was transferred to another building, where hefound himself a protégé in the form of a little black-and-white kitten, from whom he never parted, as it too was amember of an oppressed race—America had no room inits heart for a homeless kitten. But he’d come fromsomewhere, and Jim had found him, and when visitingGrisha to say good-bye he showed him the little treasure inhis hands.

And Grisha eventually returned to his cave. He rented abasement room from a Russian woman—it had a toilet butno bath.

Not long after his release from the hospital, Grisha’slandlady had a visitor—her cousin, a sad-looking gray-haired widow with a son back in Moscow. Grisha caughtjust a glimpse of her while going down to his basement; shewas sitting on the porch drinking tea. She was stirring andstirring the tea with a spoon, and a speck of reflected lightdanced upon her face. Her face was tearful, dead.

The woman stirred the spoon in her tea listlessly, and thelittle point of light bouncing off the surface of the tea blinkedon her little red nose and in her blue eye. The blue eyeespecially was lit up in a very poetic way—it flashed likesome living precious jewel.

It was a genuine double recognition: two souls met anddidn’t know it.

Five minutes later, Grisha was up the stairs and sittingacross from this old woman, this widow. His landlady, hercousin, had gone off to the college where she taught. Thisold woman never did get around to drinking any of her teaor lifting her gaze. Grisha fell in love with her with all hisbroken heart, married her, and came to Moscow to meether melancholy, pale, blond and curly-haired son.

When he shook hands with this son, this Alyosha, a tearrolled from the third, unseen eye below Grisha’s neck—abitter, tiny tear from the dead father. Alyosha avoided thedraft in the end: his father had died, as Grisha’s new wifeexplained it, and so the son became the lone provider for apensioner (his mother), and by law such a person is exemptfrom army service. At the draft board that day they keptyelling and insisting that he should start serving now, they’drelease him later (they needed to fill a quota, apparently,and without him they’d be one short). So the mother had torun around and gather the necessary papers while Alyoshawas hiding—the police would come to the apartment atnight looking for him—and meanwhile the funeral had to bearranged! Grisha listened to all these tales and wept everytime, no matter how often he heard them.

But Alyosha never accepted this new father. He wasshocked by the speed with which his mother hadexperienced a change of heart. It seemed like a betrayal—she still wore the same slippers she wore while his fatherlived, and now she’d flung herself into another marriage.Alyosha refused to go to America with them. But hismother, looking younger than herself by twenty years,blossoming, golden-haired, blue-eyed, in love, flew off withher new husband to the place where her first husband’ssoul now lived—and no one ever did explain it to either ofthem.