LET'S PISS INTO IT ! (EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL CHESS ON THE ISLAND)

 

… The next day Gorky gets Ilyich off the island—though perhaps it is the other émigrés he is rescuing from him—by suddenly proposing a trip to Pompeii. “And Vesuvius,” Lenin adds, evidently pleased at the prospect of meeting, at last, something of his own temperament. The lanky, wild-haired writer, in sandals and dark glasses, and the stocky little man, mopping his celebrated Socratic brow with a handkerchief, duly make their way to the rim of the crater. The eruption two years earlier has destroyed the famous funicular, so from the carriage terminus onwards there is nothing for it but to climb. It is much as it was in Goethe’s day—he made the ascent three times. Smart Neapolitan peasants, their clean-shaven jaws blue beneath the skin, wait for the tourists with broad leather belts around their waists and long straps hanging from them. One takes hold, and the human funicular sets off. “Funiculì, Funiculà,” sing the mountain men. They might have stepped straight out of Repin’s Volga Boatmen. The travellers exchange a glance. Assistance will not be refused. Gorky is two years the older, exactly forty, and seriously ill with his lungs—or at least this is how he prefers to present matters during an Italian exile not otherwise conspicuous for deprivation. Lenin’s complaint, meanwhile, is already known to us. Tuberculosis is fit to be displayed. Syphilis is not. Consumption comes furnished with intellectual and romantic associations: sensitivity, passion, refinement. By the end of the nineteenth century the hollow cheek, the pallor, the attenuated frame have acquired a certain aesthetic distinction. Better still, the recommended cures—Mediterranean travel and frequent, strenuous sexual activity—give the disease an almost enviable programme. Keats, Poe, Chopin, Gorky explains, his coat slung over his shoulders as he pauses on the black slope of the lava. For emphasis he hawks noisily, spits, or coughs into his sleeve. Chekhov. Kalinnikov. Petrov. Even death by consumption has style. Malaria or a duel may be better, of course: Byron and Pushkin saw to that. Gorky, besides his hereditary weak chest, could also boast of a bullet in the lung. The effect is somewhat spoiled by the fact that he acquired it neither in battle nor in a duel but during an inept attempt at suicide. Naturally he hopes Lenin will be moved by all this and reciprocate. Confession for confession. Lung for lung. But Lenin’s disease is vulgar and humiliating. There is no sanctity in it, no elevated theology of suffering. The indignity lies not merely in being mortally ill, but in having to keep it quiet. He cannot advertise his intimacy with death, and therefore cannot enjoy the intellectual distinction that ought, by rights, to accompany it. A man with a seat already reserved in the next world might reasonably expect some privileges in this one. People still prefer illnesses with moral content. Disease is thought to reveal character much as a sentence reveals the crime. And beside the romantic elegance of consumption, syphilis cuts a poor figure. The consumptive may at least expect to die pale, weightless and transfigured. The syphilitic, on the other hand… And yet what a list he too might produce: Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, Napoleon Bonaparte. The Creator keeps an admirably well-stocked cupboard of punishments. He may rummage about in it at leisure, select what pleases Him, and enjoy the doctors’ efforts.
As He may now enjoy the two men who have at last reached the crater’s edge. Here one breathes the vapours of the underworld. They are not recommended for either man’s particular complaint, but are said to do wonders for gout and conjunctivitis. They peer into the dark, simmering void at their feet and feel the moment to be almost indecently symbolic. Something ought to be done about it. The idea probably comes to both at once, though Lenin later says it was Gorky’s and Gorky says it was the Old Man’s. “Let’s piss into it.” Their flies are already undone. There is, inevitably, a slight pause. Nothing happens. They concentrate. They steal glances sideways. We, meanwhile, are forced into increasingly awkward angles of observation and, finally, into mind-reading. The chronicler is by now no less uncomfortable than the reader. He would happily get the business over with, but certain natural processes dislike being hurried. Indeed, the greater the urgency, the less urgent they become. Lenin is the shorter man and therefore enjoys a better view of the writer’s equipment. A long, crooked muzhik’s prick, of the sort whose dimensions are not greatly altered by erection. Gorky, being built on a more vertical scale, would have to bend considerably to inspect Lenin’s rather smaller apparatus. Fortunately he is too modest. He blushes at nudes in museums; one may search his novels with a magnifying glass for any expression of carnality, let alone obscenity. Besides, leaning forward on the lip of Vesuvius merely to inspect Lenin’s penis would be an undignified way to die. Let us spare him. We know what he wants to know. Two rumours require testing: is Ilyich really syphilitic, and is he really Jewish? Even from the ideal angle he would probably learn very little, whereas we are at liberty to answer without climbing into Gorky’s line of sight. At this stage, after more than a decade of latency, syphilis leaves nothing obvious to inspect. The disease may be busy enough elsewhere, but the penis is no longer its principal theatre of operations. There is nothing to see. Circumcision promises no more enlightenment. If Lenin keeps any account of his maternal great-grandfather, Mozesz Blank of Zhytomyr, he does not boast of him. He was baptised according to Orthodox custom and educated, in every visible respect, as a Russian of his time. It may never have occurred to him that a sufficiently diligent reconstruction of the family tree could bring him a little closer to Marx—or would never have occurred to him, had the Tsarist secret police not recently shown such ingenuity in reminding revolutionaries of their ancestry. For this is the period, after the revolution of 1905, in which The Protocols of the Elders of Zion begins its useful work. The pamphlet, produced in the atmosphere of the Okhrana, connects the leaders of the underground revolution with a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Its circulation is limited by the inconvenient shortage of readers in Russia, but the lesson is plain enough: ancestry is another thing best kept underground. Inside the party, the Bolshevik–Menshevik quarrel is occasionally simplified into the more manageable form of Russian versus Jew, and Lenin sees no urgent need to object. Nor does he protest when Stalin, whom he is at present encouraging—and who is already known in the party as the Old Man’s left leg—writes of the Mensheviks as a “purely Jewish faction” and the Bolsheviks as a “Russian faction”, concluding with the suggestion that perhaps the party itself is in need of a pogrom. The small, yellow-eyed Georgian has, by the end of the sentence, become Russian. One can see the appeal. Stalin’s remark comes in his report on the London Party Congress, whose undeniable star is Trotsky. Trotsky has the additional misfortune not merely of being Jewish but of looking splendidly so; not merely of being a revolutionary but of looking exactly as a revolutionary ought to look. Slender, handsome, mane flying, forehead broad, profile sharp, fashionable spectacles flashing: worse still, he speaks with such force that even his opponents rise to applaud him. How is one to compete with that? Ideology will only take one so far. Sooner or later one reaches for ancestry. The Jewish card lies conveniently to hand. Lenin sees to it that Stalin is invited to every congress.