Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by Jose Manuel Prieto

killing in cold blood? Clean interrogations, straight from a mind that spun in the void, entirely uncontaminated by any practical matter. She evaluated the possibility of taking drugs or committing suicide in the same way. When we were traveling through Central Asia, I knew she was fully capable of stepping off any train at any unknown stop and disappearing into the STEPPE . I, lying on my cot, the train already back underway, gazing out at the scorched grass in stupefaction.
    At first K** didn’t want to know I was a writer. The weighty tomes of my Vasari had impressed her, the vast collection of T HELONIOUS M ONK records, the K LIMT reproductions in my room, but since she thought too much she projected herself far from the insignificance of my articles, the sporadic evidence of certain publications of mine left lying about. When one day the mail brought a magazine containing a story I’d written about our stay at a mountain lake, this was her reaction: “It must be an однофамилец”— odnofamilets, someone with the same name—“no?” Which left me speechless. There is no way toobject to so simple a refutation. If someone denies your identity, he says to you, “You are not you,” and there exists no way of effectively demonstrating the contrary. Show your birth certificate, your identity card? Come on! These are mere pieces of paper. The solemn heart of the matter is that you are not you, you are anyone else but you. I could not convince her that this story was mine, that I was a writer—a beginner, yes, but a writer. Afterward, meditating on it, I reached the conclusion that she was right: the writer was someone else, not me. Wasn’t Nabokov, to give an example, someone else? We arrive in a world overflowing with books and are told to believe they’ve been created by people who are called Nabokov, Conrad, Borges, individuals who evidently had nothing to do with the appearance of books that, nevertheless, we attribute to them. K** would not have believed their assertions, their protests to the contrary, either; if she’d managed to convince me, why wouldn’t she have convinced them, too? As a result, I’ve lived all these years without being a writer. When this ENCYCLOPEDIA is published I will not be its author, only an odnofamilets, someone whose last name I share. Perhaps one day the magic of publicity will succeed in merging us into one and the same man, and then my face alone will suffice to accredit me as a writer, a solution that will be valid only as far as the marketing campaign extends: beyond that I would never be able to prove my condition ontologically. (For K**, the idea of God was not an effect of the existence of God.)
    K LINGSOR’S L AST S UMMER (see: ⁄ LTIMO VERANO DE K LINGSOR ).
    K LIMT, G USTAV. In the sense that a mane of hair in the hue known as red ochre held great meaning for me. I’d taken a long while to develop this passion but it had the impact of a sudden awakening when it finallybloomed within me, as when we’re no longer hoping for anything from a boring opera and then, in the last act, a backdrop is lowered with a beautiful waterfall or a Chinese pagoda. To discover the splendor of red hair was to set foot for the first time upon the sands of a terra incognita: a new displacement of the soul which, within my sentimental education, acquired the worth of a pilgrimage to Tibet.
    I. At a spot along Nevsky Prospekt, L INDA , who, as I would later learn, was named Anastasia Stárseva, was waiting for me. She’d been playing the FLUTE in the portal of the Kazan Cathedral and T HELONIOUS stopped to listen to her. Moved, he thought of the M AGIC F LUTE and his adolescent years, and allowed himself to be carried off by the FLUTE’S trill, the human warmth of its metallic resonance. When he reopened his eyes onto that morning—Saint Petersburg, the cathedral’s colonnade—he discovered in surprise that a halo surrounded the flautist. Then he took a closer look and was