Skip to main content

Collection

A textile design by Varvara Stepanova, 1924.

 

The other day I stopped to see a friend, the journalist Misha Kovrov. He was sitting on his couch, cleaning his fingernails and drinking tea. He offered me a glass.

“I don’t drink without bread,” I said. “Let’s get some bread!”

“Under no conditions! I’d offer an enemy bread, certainly, but never a friend.”

“That’s peculiar. Why not?”

“This is why. Come here!”

Misha walked me to the table and pulled out a drawer:

“Look!”

I looked into the drawer and saw distinctly nothing.

“I don’t see anything … Rubbish of some sort … Tacks, rags, some little rat tails … ”

“Take a look at exactly that! I’ve been collecting these rags, twine, and tacks for ten years! A remarkable collection.”

And Misha gathered up all the rubbish and shook it out on a sheet of newspaper.

“See this burnt match?” he said, showing me an ordinary, slightly charred one. “This is an interesting match. Last year I found it in a baranka pastry bought at Sevastianov’s bakery. I nearly choked. My wife, thankfully, was home to pound me on the back, or it would have lodged in my throat, this match. See this fingernail? Three years ago it was found in a sponge cake bought at Fillipov’s bakery. The sponge cake, you understand, lacked hands, lacked feet, but had nails. A freak of nature! Five years ago, this green scrap inhabited a sausage bought from one of the best Moscow shops. This dried roach once swam in a cabbage stew that I ate at the counter of a railroad station, and this tack—in a meatball, at the same station. This rat tail and bit of dress hem were both found in one and the same Fillipov loaf. This sprat, of which now only bones remain, my wife found in a torte, presented to her on her name day. This creature, known as a bedbug, was brought to me in a mug of beer in a German beer hall … And this little piece of guano I nearly swallowed while putting away a little stuffed pie at an inn. And so forth, my dear man.”

“A wonderful collection.”

“Yes. It weighs a pound and a half, not counting everything I’ve carelessly swallowed and digested. And I’ve swallowed, probably, five or six pounds … ”

Misha carefully lifted the newssheet, briefly admired his collection, then shook it back into the drawer. I took up my glass and began to drink the tea, no longer suggesting that we send for bread.

 

Translated from the Russian by Elina Alter. 

Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Look for her translations of Chekhov sketches each day this week on the Daily.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2xv6cpQ
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Beautiful Faraway: Why I’m Grateful for My Soviet Childhood

At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white horse. From the early ‘80s to the early ‘90s, my childhood was formed by the images, atmosphere, and allusiveness of Soviet songs. I grew up in an artistic family where emotions flew high. I was the kind of imaginative child who could spin an entire tale from an oblong stain on the kitchen table. But there’s more to it than that. My family was not always idealistic or romantic, especially not in New York in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Philistines

Welcome to Disney World! Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. 1. Once I had to go to Disney World with my small children. On the way to the airport our taxi driver exhibited signs of Obsessive Disney Disorder—when he found out where we were going he started obsessively describing and listing and explaining everything that had to do with Disney World, even though he was a grown man. We stayed at the Portofino Bay Hotel, a Disney-owned property that is a replica of the storied village on the Italian Riviera. There were imitation Renaissance churches and Mediterranean piazzas clustered around a fake harbor with old Fiats parked on the cobblestones and fishing boats moored in the fake bay. Outside cafés ranged on the harbor, serving espresso under green-and-white striped awnings. Italian cypresses were planted along the pools. If you didn’t know it was a Disney replica of a real place, it would have to be characterized as being extremely tasteful and lovely. So you did tend to ge...
Post a Comment
Read more

Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog: Kafka’s Philosophical Investigations

Nicolas Gosse and Auguste Vinchon, Cynic philosopher with his dog (1827). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons . Franz Kafka’s story “Investigations of a Dog” might be retitled “Portrait of the Philosopher as a Young Dog.” In any event, Kafka did not assign a title to the story, which he left unpublished and unfinished. It was Max Brod who named it Forschungen eines Hundes , which could also be translated as “Researches of a dog,” to give it a more academic ring. But the term investigations has its fortuitous resonances in the history of modern philosophy. The dog’s investigations belong to a great line of theoretical endeavors, like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations , with its retinue of animals, dogs included; or Husserl’s Logical Investigations , which launched his new science of consciousness, phenomenology; or Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom , even more to the point since this is how the dog’s investigations end, with the ...
Post a Comment
Read more