It’s cold in Austria. Negative two degrees Celsius to be exact. Why did I come here? I only stopped asking myself that today, two seconds ago. Because now I know. It has something to do with Gogol and the red light district in Amsterdam. Also, the fact that I want to learn Russian after I’m done learning French. One, because I want to be as much like Nabokov as is possible for a midwestern white girl and two, because I want to read Russian literature in its original language. This includes Gogol, who might have lived in Austria during some part of his life. I say this because, while jogging through downtown Vienna yesterday, I saw a bridge with sculptures of abstract noses on all four corners. Permanent installations dedicated to one of Gogol’s most famous works. There is also an opera premiering here now called, Gogol. It’s about the man, himself, his creative decline and madness toward the end of his life, and his death.
Let me back up. I was in Holland before this with my girlfriend. After spending a few days in Leiden where she was giving a talk at the University there, we went to Amsterdam. Nevermind the fact that marijuana and hallucinogenic mushrooms are legal and abundantly available all throughout this very crowded and bustling city with its attending dense, pungent odors. I won’t go into the self-pity I endured over not being able to partake in a pot brownie with my coffee (pesky sobriety). What I will go into is the other thing that’s legal, which is prostitution.
We walked to De Wallen, also known as the red light district, and realized we were penetrating its borders when a string of sex shops appeared. My girlfriend kept stopping every 50 feet or so to take a picture of something. During one of these stops, I waited for her up ahead and noticed a nearly naked woman in a glass doorway halfway below street level. She was looking at my girlfriend, tapping the glass to get her attention. When that didn’t work, Nearly Naked opened the door, stepped up onto the first step, and made a barking noise at my girlfriend. She ducked right back into her doorway again after that and saw me, laughing. She laughed, too, and so did my girlfriend, but we were confused about what’d just happened. Had she been propositioned?
We continued walking, arms locked, tentatively going down a narrow alley lined with glass doors beneath glowing red bulbs. Every door had a practically naked woman in it. She would be wearing a very skimpy bikini, or just the bottoms with some pasties over her nipples. There were all kinds of women, most of them stunningly beautiful, some of them with obnoxiously large and disproportionate breasts, some very pale, some with visible bruises. It was both hard to look and impossible not to. What struck me in those first couple of alleys we traversed were the two consistent things about the women: their exaggerated burlesque posturing and their dead, dead eyes. It was the latter that I noticed first, because I looked to their eyes in search of fear, humor, threat, whatever, but in every case, saw only the spookiest emptiness. It might have been drugs. It might have been the inevitable result of standing in a door that way day in, day out, selling sex to whoever happened to walk by.
The former, the postures, that’s what lingers in my mind. Because there was this insane, surreal quality to it that made walking those alleys dreamlike. The tenor of the dreaminess turned nightmarish when we headed across a street and up alleys on the other side. The streets were darker, I swear — dirtier, more littered, and attended with very seedy and menacing looking men staring down all the passers by. The women were hard looking, too. Scary, even. I saw a customer going into a door. I saw a heavy set woman behind a door flick her tongue snake-like at a very old man walking by. I tried to fathom it. Something smelled awful. We walked faster. I wanted to take a shower.
Skip ahead to when I arrived in Vienna. It was cold and gray from the outset. I took the train to the apartment I’d rented and found myself in a dark, cold, smelly, very depressing studio in the middle of a rat maze concrete jungle. I found some incense to burn. It didn’t help. I tried turning up the heat but it stayed cold. I went out for a run, thinking it would warm me, counting on my rat memory to not get lost. (Remembering my way back through all the twists and turns of foreign city streets is due to what I call my rat memory, for obvious reasons. I seem to have a good one.) People were frowning, bundled up in scarfs and hats and babushkas. It reminds me of Moscow. And then I saw the Gogol posters. The nose sculptures.
I went back to my craphole apartment and wrote feverishly that first night. My writing was tinged with the harshness of this city. It was bent with the surrealism and the grotesque quality of the De Wallen women behind glass doors. But not only — it had its opposite in there, too. Specifically, what leaked in was from a series of photographs I had seen on display in a gallery while I was running. They were badly exposed polaroids, actually, composed of dark light that lands flat on the nude torsos of what looked like children. Light hits the nude torso and immediately falls away, creating soft shadows and nearly translucent shapes. Fleshy and strangely green shapes. The light falling off the body makes the body more beautiful. What’s conveyed in the image is an emotional intimacy and trust — the kind that exists between a parent and child. Those women in De Wallen — the way they were distorted caricatures of sensuality — they were the shadow side of the vulnerable beauty captured in those polaroids.
And how does this relate to Gogol and to Vienna? Maybe it doesn’t, but as I was looking into the possibility of buying myself a ticket to the opera here, I read about Gogol being a primary influence for (no kidding) Nobokov, not to mention Tolstoy and Dosttoyevsky. Not that that’s a big shocker — Gogol must have influenced nearly every writer in the 20th century and beyond. But here I am, writing this way as the result of my environment and the particular string of events that preceded my arrival here. It seems apt, is all.
Maybe I shouldn’t have abandoned that craphole apartment for this new, clean, warm one. Gogol would not approve. Ah well, I was cold. And I’m writing with a wider range, still. In the words of one of my characters: “I am not afraid of death. I’m afraid of not living fully. I believe in expanding my limits. I believe one must do immoral as well as moral acts to expand.”
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