At the Bureau of Divine Music

At the Bureau of Divine Music

38 At the Bureau of Divine Music The whole day I hung around in the sky over Russia was aWednesday in October. No one looked up with any semblance of regard from the heroic Russian people. I had flown from Paris to visit the faubourgs of Omsk, Irkutsk, Novosibirsk, but they were filled with a smother of blue coal fires, shadows of shadows coughing up tendrils of gray phlegm onto ice floes that passed for boulevards, back alleys, byways that ended in country lanes over the Urals to Ulan Bator and the Mongolian grasslands. What is the object of going but to bring back free toothbrushes, peach-bloom porcelains, and colorful boxes of sandalwood soaps from marble-tiled hotel baths with the only water pressure in Datong orYingxian? Never mind photographs. As my old friend Ray used to say, tapping his forehead, the pictures you take in here are the best ones. I don’t know how we got there, but rather than walk back the way we came, we rambled down the long path from the Temple of Heaven to a park with sad trees and a moat, and across the moat a yellow palisade. Nobody else was around. If unearthly voices fluttered out to us on the swell of wind, we couldn’t hear them. Should the sociopathic cabdriver drive himself to Heaven after taking us home, his cadaver 39 would need to be viewed from behind. The star-shaped mole on his left shoulder blade said nothing to anyone. Only two of us, possibly three, remember the tune he often repeated. ...