Experiencing conversation with David Schoffman is a geometrical progression of ever widening tangents and digressions. It’s a mind made transparent by the jags of association. A minor mention of a mosquito bite may lead to a lengthy discourse on Elias Canetti’s “The Agony of Flies.” The subject of sports may lead into Robert Musil’s passion for weightlifting. Musil inevitably leads into Bismarck, which always ends up with Henry Kissinger, the bombing of Cambodia and the overthrow of Allende.
Once, at a dinner party at the home of Maurice Vitel, the former French Ambassador to Luxembourg, the conversation veered toward the question of whether it was morally defensible to poison a flock of sparrows if they actively hindered the cultivation of one’s vineyard. A heated exchange ensued between those who militantly defended the rights of animals and those who militantly defended the rights of wine lovers. In a rare moment of détente while the debaters regrouped around aged cognac and Haitian cigars, Schoffman recounted the following anecdote:
“The failed writer, Boris Khrobkov, a distant relative of Isaac Babel, labored his entire life on an unfinished novel on the subject of the Huguenot exile. Living in the Soviet Union severely proscribed his ability to do the proper historical research and so he petitioned the cultural commissar of Vitebsk a well as the president of the writer’s union for permission to travel abroad. Despite his connection to Babel, his permission was granted for a one-week trip to Paris. His wife and two small children were, of course, required to stay behind.
“On his last day in Paris, where incidentally he did much drinking and very little research, he decided, on a whim, to visit the grave of Ingres at Père-Lachaise. It was late fall and sparrows had gathered in clusters around the islands of breadcrumbs left behind by the cemetery workers. Khrobkov, hung over and bitter about his impending return, grabbed a sparrow by the throat and crushed its skull like a walnut.
“Like any good Russian, he followed that arbitrary act of cruelty with an hysterical, inconsolable fit of weeping. At the very height of his shameless bleating, the great Cartier-Bresson walked by with his small field spaniel Molière. Always ready with his 35mm Lieca rangefinder, he snapped the now famous photograph 'Le Poét Pleurant.'
"Khrobkov returned to Moscow where he was accused of treason and was shot by a firing squad."
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