- The Human Condition, and: The Queen of Spades
The Human Condition
"They made a mess," says our guide Tatiana as she shows us the room in Ekaterinburg where Czar Nicholas and his wife and children were murdered by drunk, maladroit softies,men who'd been workers just days before, who'd had no firearms training and couldn't shoot straight; driven more by ideology than bloodlust, they vomited and wept as theychased the Grand Duchesses around the cellar, the screaming
girls slipping in their parents' blood. "And then," says Tatiana, "they didn't want that mess," and I thought, Tell me about it. Who wants a mess? Let's have a show of hands!See? I didn't think so. Yet messes are everywhere we look. Engels said that free wills are constantly obstructing one another so that, inevitably, what emerges is somethingthat no one willed. You hit the nail on the head with
that one, Friedrich! For example, when a man decides it's a good idea to stick the full ten inches of his penis into a woman or the full four inches of his penis intoa woman who also thinks it a good idea or at least thinks so for a while and then changes her mind or becomes pregnant or both and decides that it is, in fact, a bad idea,and there you have it: a mess. After the Romanovs were
shot and stabbed and their bodies hacked to pieces and burned and dissolved in sulfuric acid and tossed down an abandoned mine shaft, the Orthodox Churchquickly canonized them, which makes sense, because, one, they were murdered by godless Bolsheviks and, two, they were all extremely good-looking.Have you noticed? All martyrs—Catherine of Alexandria, [End Page 178]
Saint Sebastian, Joan of Arc—are extremely good-looking. No point in having a hunchback for a martyr, I guess. Anyway, the Romanovs, and especially the four dishydaughters, were all good-looking and are now dead. No sex for those beautiful girls. Now in the case of pregnancy, it's not nice to call the littleArmstrong or Penelope who emerges from your own no doubt
comely body "a mess," but there you have it. Kids are a mess. Adorable messes. Put the putter down, Armstrong! See, you broke the coffee table. Brushyour own hair, Penelope, and now the doggy's. Gently, though—gently! Oh, oh! See what you've done; you've hit the dog with the hairbrush and now heis hiding under the bed and doesn't love you anymore,
though I do. Men, let's behave ourselves. And you women—well, who am I to tell you women what to do! When Tatiana tells Barbara her husbandthinks she's too passionate, Barbara says, "Doesn't he like it when you're passionate about him?" Tatiana looks at Barbara as though she's crazy. Time for lunch!All over Russia, people are going to lunch—all over the world, really. [End Page 179]
The Queen of Spades
The old lady dies of fright! But it's okay, since she dies on stage: I'm watching Tchaikovsky's opera at the beautiful Mikhailovsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, where the audience is
as fidgety as a roomful of third graders on a warm spring afternoon. Coins fall from pockets and clatter across the wooden floors, umbrellas topple like saplings in
a Siberian gulag, and in the boxes, the pop songs that Russians use as ringtones compete with the orchestra as phones go off and their owners charge into the vestibule,
slamming doors behind them. The character named Hermann wants to learn the secret to the old lady's success at gambling, but when he threatens her with his pistol, her heart
stops. Speaking of firearms, suddenly a red dot begins to play across the seat backs like a laser sight on a sniper rifle. The old lady appears to Hermann in a dream and tells
him which cards to play: three, seven, ace. He tries it once: it works. Tries it a second time: it works again. The third time, though, the cards come up...