But Ivanov said ah, love, and Ansky, in his fashion, also said ah, love. So over the next few days he set out in tireless search of Nadja Yurenieva, and at last he found her, wearing her long leather jacket, sitting in one of the lecture halls at the University of Moscow, looking like an orphan, a self-designated orphan, listening to the rousing remarks or poems or rhymed nonsense of some pretentious idiot (or whatever he was!) who recited with his gaze fixed on the audience while in his left hand he held the silly manuscript that every so often he glanced at in a theatrical and unnecessary way, since his memory was clearly sharp.
And Nadja Yurenieva saw Ansky and got up discreetly and left the hall where the bad Soviet Poet (as oblivious and foolish and prissy and gutless and affected as a Mexican lyrical poet, or actually a Latin American lyric poet, that poor stunted and bloated phenomenon) reeled off his lines on the steel industry (possessing the same crass, arrogant ignorance as a Latin American poet speaking about his self, his era, his otherness), and she went out into the streets of Moscow, followed by Ansky, who instead of approaching her remained some fifteen feet behind, a distance that shrank as time passed and they walked farther. Never before had Ansky better understood or delighted more in suprematism, Kazimir Malevich’s invention, nor the first tenet of Malevich’s declaration of independence signed in Vitebsk on November 5, 1920, which proclaims: “The fifth dimension has been established.”
Roberto Bolaño, 2666
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