Gradually, the sun became a smaller and smaller crescent. The moon’s shadow swallowed nearly the entire sky. The many-colored corona grew brighter and brighter. At first Nina and Leonid took turns looking through their solar telescope. But then they looked into each other’s eyes.
I read the last installment with a sinking feeling. Everything about it rang false: the shaman’s prophecy, Ivan’s explanation, and especially the “happy” ending. Why did Nina have to look into Leonid’s eyes, instead of into the telescope? How did Leonid solve anything? Why did every story have to end with marriage? You expected that from Bleak House, or even from Crime and Punishment. But “Nina in Siberia” had seemed different. Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between language and the world. For the mystery to be tied up so glibly, for everyone to be paired off and extinguished that way, felt like a terrible betrayal.
? ? ?
Caught up in Nina’s story, I missed the beginning of the next class I was shopping: a seminar on the Spanish avant-garde. I found a seat just as the professor was sliding a cassette into the video player. The tape was cued up to a shot of a cloud bisecting the moon, followed, a moment later, by a razor blade bisecting a woman’s eyeball.
The professor stopped the tape and flipped on the lights. Just from looking at his ravaged, lined face, I thought, you could somehow see that he wasn’t American.
“This,” said the professor, “is the problem with Bu?uel. Why exactly does he show us a moon, and then an eye? Two unrelated images. Why does he juxtapose them?” He looked around the table. Nobody said anything.
“Exactly,” he said. “There is no answer, because this is surrealism. We can suggest many interpretations, but we can prove nothing, and we will never have an answer. Let us think for a moment of Freud. I have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and I found it extremely unsatisfying. In this book, for example, Freud interprets a dream. I read his interpretation. I think, Yes, this is possible. Maybe his interpretation is correct. But how can he prove it? He cannot prove it. For this reason, discussion is endless, and it is useless. We encounter this infinite uselessness also in our attempts to interpret Bu?uel.”
I looked around the table. The other students were either nodding or taking notes. Nobody else seemed to find it appalling or shameful that a literature professor should stand up in front of a classroom and say that interpretation was infinitely useless.
“We just saw a shocking scene,” the professor continued. “In this scene, an eyeball is cut open. Of course, when he was filming, Bu?uel didn’t really use a woman’s eye. He used a cow’s eye.”
The boy next to me seemed to undergo some kind of spasm and scribbled something in his notebook. I glanced at the page. In jerky handwriting he had written: Cow’s eye.
“However,” the professor continued, “even if Bu?uel himself didn’t really perform such an act of human violence, film itself was already a new and violent medium. Film is a medium that fragments and dismembers the human body. We see the actor’s head but we don’t see his body. It’s as if he has been decapitated. Yet he does not appear to be dead. He is talking, and moving, like a live person. What a paradox! In Bu?uel’s time, viewers would stand up and look under the screen, trying to find the rest of the body. Never before had people seen a human body fragmented in this way, and this was already a terrible shock for them.”
When he called film a “paradox” I felt a wave of almost physical pain. “What about portraits?” I blurted.
The professor turned in my direction and fixed his ravaged gaze on my face. “Portraits?”
“In a portrait you just see someone’s head, without their body. But people don’t assume that the person in the portrait has been decapitated.”
“Ah—the bust,” he said. “I think that you are referring to Greek and Roman busts, no? For example, a bust of Aphrodite. Yet often what we see in a museum presented to us as a bust is actually the head of a statue that has been broken off from the body, because of some accident. The Greeks and Romans would have been horrified to see a disembodied head in that way.”
I considered this. “What about coins? Didn’t coins just show a ruler’s head, without his body?”
“Naturally,” the professor said wearily, “coins are very old, and we could discuss this if we wanted. My point is that film was a revolutionary medium.”
I was impressed by that rhetorical turn: now I looked like an asshole, because it was like I was saying that film wasn’t a revolutionary medium.
? ? ?
In the end I signed up for a different Spanish film seminar, taught in Spanish, by an adjunct instructor. The adjunct instructor also said stupid things, but they were in Spanish, so you learned more. I was the only person in the class who wasn’t a heritage speaker, so I talked the slowest and had the worst accent. I had studied Spanish in high school because my father, a leftist, said it was important to know the language of the working classes. I liked Spanish—I liked how the donkey had a place in the national literature—and I liked the idea of watching Spanish movies in Spanish, of learning about a different world in the language it had been thought up in.
? ? ?
Ivan didn’t write back to me on the day I had predicted. Again and again I checked my email, and he always hadn’t written. When his name finally appeared in those green letters on the black screen, I felt amazement and fear, partly because I had stopped thinking he would write, and partly because the subject line said, in Turkish: Don’t be ridiculous!
Dear Sonya, Ivan began. I was “domuzuna calismak” in the library on my philosophy paper when I found this dictionary. In Turkish, domuzuna ?al??mak meant working to your pig. It wasn’t anything anyone ever said, or ever would say. Probably he had meant to say “working like a pig.” Nobody would have said that, either. The pig wasn’t much talked about in Turkish culture, and definitely wasn’t known for its hard work; that would have been the donkey. Still, I thought it was wonderful that Ivan had decided to read a Turkish-English dictionary, and that he had brought to it such a unique perspective.
Turkish, he said, was the only language that could express that there was indeed not much difference between a latrine and Ivan’s paternal aunt. It was full of Hungarian words, like for handcuffs and beard: Compared to Turkish, all Western European languages are just “garb.” For weeks, just thinking about that line could make me laugh aloud. Garbi was Turkish for Western, related to garip (alone, stranger, strange). But “garb” was also like “garble” and “garbage,” and it was also just weird clothing, and I thought he was right. All those Western languages were garb.