It was 1982. Brezhnev died. Ready also died, after eating rat poison. Olya started her senior year at the Institute and bought herself a violin made by the German master Schneider for 1,600 rubles, telling her poor parents that a girlfriend who’d dropped out of school and married a Georgian had given it to her. She continued to meet Burmistrov at the same apartment. She was so used to Horse Soup’s screaming that she no longer paid any attention to it, focusing only on the food in front of her.
Que se sepa que en Chile nos estarán robando los ojos mas no la VOZ!
The citizen body has always been the target of state violence, but, in keeping with these visual times, the police targeted the optic organ itself, rendering their violence spectacular. The target was no longer the body but the eye of the citizen. They aimed to leave eyes open and awake forever, perpetually shot upward, blank.
So, with my back leaning against the door, I mumbled: Do this, do that. What an algorithm! Let’s recap . . . Defend the citadel. Don’t hide. Don’t be afraid of your anger. Know when to indulge yourself. In other words, be a heretic in order to be more devout than the faithful. Follow the intuition of the ancestral bacteria in your stomach in order to keep track of the metaphors of the soul. But did I really understand?
Sometimes, I wonder if there is a spell at work when we write, one that causes what is said to be said without us. And indeed, that is perhaps what writing is, isn’t it: what is said there is said without us. If I could stop writing, I think maybe I would.
What’s that you’re saying now? Oh, it was your grandmother who didn’t know how to read, and you’ve been in the school system from preschool to college? I see, so you really don’t get what’s going on when people talk to you. Your grandmother, your sister, you, it’s all the same. Don’t you get it? You believe in assimilation, you only wore a headscarf for a couple of years when you were a teenager — that’s fine. But, I mean, we can’t just let go and leave what is French in your hands.
The house in Raipur that we moved into later has verandas that are more like rooms. It’s hard to say why they aren’t rooms, or what makes them verandas. One of them is called the old veranda. The house was built slowly and all at once.
He says: “We at Amazon think every day is a first day. Remember that. This is a good opportunity to make a note of that and get in on the ground floor and move up. Jobs are still being filled, the company’s still on the up, but between you and me, everyone knows nothing can grow forever.”
