“Thank you. She does not look happy. I count this as a genre scene rather than a portrait, because what we see is the generic situation: what is at stake in the invention of the self.”
The next slide was an etching of a theater from the perspective of the stage, showing the unpainted backs of the scenery, the silhouettes of three actors, and, beyond the footlights, a big black space.
“Artifice,” Gary blurted, like someone having a seizure. “Frames. Who selects what we see?” He started talking about how museums, which we thought of as the gateway to art, were actually the main agents of hiding art from the public. Every museum owned ten, twenty, a hundred times as many paintings as were ever seen on display. The curator was like the superego, burying 99 percent of thoughts in the dark behind a door marked PRIVATE. The curator had the power to make or break the artist—to keep someone sup-pressed or re-pressed for a lifetime. As he spoke, Gary seemed to grow increasingly angry and agitated.
“You have Harvard ID cards. That ID card will open doors for you. Why don’t you use it? Why don’t you go to the museums, to the Fogg Museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the Glass Flowers gallery, and demand to see what they aren’t showing you? They have to show you once you have the card. They have to let you in, you know.”
“Let’s do it!” called Ham.
“You want to? You really want to?” said Gary.
It was time to break for lunch. After we got back, we were going to go to the museums and demand to see the things they weren’t showing us.
? ? ?
I was the only freshman in the class, so I went by myself to the freshman cafeteria. Portraits of old men hung on the dark paneled walls. The ceiling was so high you could barely see it, though with effort you could make out some pale specks, apparently pats of butter that had been flicked up there in the 1920s by high-spirited undergraduates. I thought they sounded like assholes. What light there was came from a few high small windows and several massive chandeliers with antlers on them. Whenever a lightbulb burned out, a handyman had to climb up a two-story ladder and bat at the antlers, ducking to avoid being gouged, until he could reach the right socket.
Exiting the lunch line with a falafel sandwich, I noticed Svetlana from Russian sitting alone near a window, with an open spiral notebook.
“Sonya, hi!” she called. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you. You’re taking linguistics, right?”
“How did you know?” I pulled out the chair across from her.
“I shopped the class last week. I saw you there.”
“I didn’t see you.”
“I got there early. I noticed you when you came in. You’re very remarkable-looking, you know. I mean that literally. Of course you’re very tall, but it’s not just your height.” I was in fact the tallest living member of my family, male or female. My cousins said it was because I had grown up eating rich American foods and leading a life of leisure. “Your face is very unusual. You know that I, too, was flirting with the idea of linguistics. How is it?”
“It’s okay,” I said. I told her about the fire pits that the Turkic people dug, about how vowels changed over time and geography.
“That’s interesting.” She placed an almost voracious emphasis on the word “interesting.” “I’m sure it’s much more interesting than Psych 101, but you see it’s inevitable really that I should take psychology, since my father is an analyst. A Jungian, a real big shot. He founded the only serious journal of psychoanalysis in Serbia. Then two of his patients became opposition leaders and the party started harassing my dad. To get the transcripts. Of course, they had it in for him anyway.”
I thought this over, while trying to make the falafel stay in the sandwich. “Did they get the transcripts?”
“Nope—there weren’t any. My father has a photographic memory, he never writes anything down. I’m just the opposite, a real graphomaniac. It’s pretty sad, really. I mean, look at all the notes I’ve taken, and it’s only the second week of school.” Svetlana flipped through her notebook, displaying many pages covered on both sides in tiny, curly handwriting. She picked up her fork and judiciously composed a forkful of salad.
“Soldiers searched our apartment,” she said, “looking for the imaginary transcripts. They came in uniforms with guns at eleven at night and trashed the place—even my room and my sisters’ and brother’s rooms. They took all our toys out of the box and threw them on the floor. I had a new doll, and the doll broke.”
“That’s terrible,” I said.
“It was supposed to say ‘Mama’ when you pulled a string,” she said. “When they threw it on the floor it kept saying ‘Mama’ until they kicked it. In my father’s office they ripped the pages out of books, scattered every single sheet of paper, tore up the wall. In the bathroom they pried out all the tiles. In the kitchen they dumped all the flour and sugar and tea from the cans, looking for tapes. My little brother bit one of them and they hit him in the mouth. They took every single cassette. They took all my U2 albums. I cried and cried. And my mother was so angry at my father.” Svetlana sighed. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “This is the first real conversation we’re having and already I’m burdening you with my emotional baggage. Enough—tell me about yourself. Are you going to major in linguistics?”
“I haven’t decided yet. I might do art.”
“Oh, you’re an artist? My mother is an artist. Well, she used to be. Then she was an architect, and then a designer, and now she’s crazy and basically unemployed. But here I go again with my family. Are you taking any art classes now?”
I told her about Constructed Worlds, about how museums hid things from people, and how the class seemed to be planning some kind of heist.
“I would never have the nerve to take a class like that,” she said. “I’m very traditional, academically—another legacy from my father. Basically when I was five he told me all the books to read, and I’ve been reading them ever since. You must think I’m so boring.”
“Do you want to become an analyst, too?”
“No, I want to study Joseph Brodsky. That’s why I’m taking Russian. I have some bad news, by the way—we’re not going to be in the same class anymore. I had to transfer into another section because of my psych lab.”