The revolutionist, p.47
The Revolutionist, page 47
Shapiro snorted. "People who set foot in the place are screened. Someone with a drop of Jewish blood in his veins or a circumcised cock would never get past the barriers on the government road."
Nachshon was having trouble keeping his eyes open. He got up and circled the table and stood with his back against a wall to ease the pain in his spine. He still had the hulking look of a linesman who played American football before padding was used. He was built close to the ground; his late wife used to joke that he had a low center of gravity, also a high threshold of pain. When he planted his feet he looked unmovable. When he lowered his head and started forward he looked unstoppable. Now, standing with his back to the wall, he felt suddenly used. It wasn't the traveling that was catching up with him; it was the urgency of the problem he had come to solve. His thoughts drifted to Zander. He would have given his right arm to know if he was still alive. He remembered as if it had happened yesterday the time they had dined on "stuffed" and he had tried to talk him out of going back to Russia. "For me, Palestine, is not the promised land, but Russia could be," Zander had told him all those years ago.
Nachshon had corresponded with him more or less regularly until the mid thirties. With the first of the great public trials under way, Nachshon had stopped writing on the theory that it would be safer for Zander if he didn't correspond with someone abroad. When Zander's
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letters ceased, Nachshon had hoped it was for the same reason. But deep down he doubted it. Knowing Zander, knowing his moral convictions, Nachshon considered it extremely unlikely that he had survived the purges.
"If you want my opinion," Shapiro was saying, "you're dreaming if you think there's a way to get to him." He returned the dossier to the safe and closed the door and spun the combination, and checked the handle to make sure it was locked.
"I am dreaming," Nachshon admitted. He smiled tiredly, a faraway look in his eyes. "But then, Herzl once said that all human activity begins in dreams."
From the window Zander could see Ludmilla hurrying through the snow toward the building. Minutes later he heard her burst through the front door of the communal apartment. It slammed behind her with such force that the framed photographs of her husband and children rattled against the walls. She pounded down the corridor in her furlined galoshes and threw open the door of the living room. "Oh, God, Alexander, I humbly apologize. I really do," she cried. Her nose was beet red from the icy air outside. Tinsels of frost clung to the fringes of hair visible beneath her knitted bonnet. "I won't blame you if you don't baby-sit again for a month. I would have been back on time if I hadn't stopped to queue. They were selling a treasure, Alexander—leather gloves from Czechoslovakia! I bought a pair for everyone except Azalia because they didn't have sizes that small. You are a seven, aren't you.'' That's what I have written in my notebook. 'Alexander's hand—size seven.' Here, try them on. Were the children bloodsuckers.^"
Zander undid the newspaper and pulled out the pair marked with a "7" and started to fit his right hand into one of the gloves. "Vanka finished his homework and went downstairs to play with a friend. Aza got another nosebleed—she's lying on your bed with toilet paper stuffed in her nostrils."
"Personally, I think they come from the altitude—living on the ninth floor like this, the air has to be thinner. Leonid laughs when I talk altitude, but what does he know—he's only a doctor. Do the gloves fit.'*"
"They're perfect. I haven't seen leather like this in years. How much do I owe you.'"'
Ludmilla threw her coat over the back of a chair and began to unsnap her galoshes. "It's a birthday present," she insisted. "Happy fifty-nine."
"I am fifty-eight until the twenty-second of the month. Don't rush me," Zander said moodily.
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"Did you manage to get any work done while I was gone?"
"I translated four or five pages. But there's no hurry. Anytime I hand it in is all right. It's dull academic material. They pay by the page. And badly. Well, at least it gives me something to do."
Ludmilla sighed one of her drawn-out musical sighs that never failed to impress Zander 2i% philosophical. It occurred to him that people in Russia left a great deal unsaid these days, and what was unsaid often came out in the form of a sigh. "I think," Ludmilla said, "it's a crime against humanity when someone like you can't find a regular job."
"If I didn't have the word 'Israelite' on my internal passport, I'd stand a better chance. No one in his right mind is hiring Jews anymore."
"Ha! That reminds me of a story," Ludmilla said. "Have you heard the one about the Jew and Pravda?. It's this way: The Jew reads an article that says the Soviet Union is not only going to catch up to America but will surpass it. 'When we surpass America,' the Jew tells his wife, 'we will get off and live there!'
Zander didn't crack a smile. "I hope to God you don't tell stories Hke that in front of the children. One of them might repeat it and then where would you be.'^"
Ludmilla rolled her eyes. "I may be slightly crazy, but I'm not insane!"
Zander lowered his voice. "These are bad times for Jews."
Ludmilla tossed her shoulders in irritation. "I'm not Jewish," she snapped without thinking what she was saying.
"Your stepfather is Jewish," Zander said harshly. "Your husband is Jewish. Your children are half Jewish."
Ludmilla saw he was hurt. "I didn't mean that," she said quickly. She pulled on a pair of slippers and stretched out on the daybed that her eleven-year-old son, Vanka, slept in at night. Her good spirits had evaporated. Zander noticed for the first time fine lines fanning out from the corners of her eyes, and wrinkles on her forehead. She had put on weight, too, and had begun to look her age, which was
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Zander felt his flesh creep. She was right, of course; it was starting all over again. The arrest of several prominent Yiddish writers the previous week had really shaken him. According to Pravda, they were "Zionist agents of American imperialism." A Jewish literary critic Zander vaguely knew had been fired from his journal. A Jewish writer friend of his who had published seven novels couldn't find anyone willing to publish his eighth. Rumors were circulating about the Jewish doctors attached to the Kremlin medical service; they were being investigated because of alleged ties to international Zionist organizations. More ominous still was the letter signed by several prominent Jews, including a chess champion, a composer, and a popular writer, asking Comrade Stalin to permit the Jews to redeem the great harm they had done Russia with hard labor in some remote region of the motherland. To Zander, it looked as if Stalin was planning to finish what Hitler started.
It was dark out and the temperature had dipped to minus twenty-seven by the time Zander started home. Ludmilla had wanted him to spend the night—Vanka could double up with his sister and Zander could sleep on the daybed in the living room—but he knew Zsuzsa would worry herself sick if he didn't turn up for dinner; she had lost her father and two uncles and her older brother in the purges. So he pulled on his new gloves and turned up his collar and accepted Ludmilla's offer of a second woolen scarf and with a last wave up to her from the sidewalk headed for the trolley station.
The streets were crowded with people hurrying home from work, and once again Zander noticed how, more than seven years after the end of the Great Patriotic War, almost every man managed to wear some scrap of uniform—a khaki scarf, a khaki greatcoat, army boots, sniper's mittens with a special opening for the trigger finger, an aviator's sheepskin jacket with its lambswool collar. It wasn't. Zander understood, so much because people lacked winter clothing; it was more a question of everyone being fiercely proud to have been part of the military machine that crushed Hitlerism. Zander himself was wearing one of the brown woolen shirts under his jacket that had been issued to him the day he reported for duty. Except for a stint digging tank traps as the Wehrmacht approached the outskirts of Moscow, he had spent the war in an office translating into Russian American field manuals that came with Lend Lease equipment. Still, he felt as if he, too, had made a contribution to the triumph of the Soviet Union, and he wore his old army shirts as a badge of pride.
Arriving at the trolley station. Zander discovered that the overhead power line was down. An emergency unit had blocked the street with its truck and was putting up ladders to repair the line. When Zander politely asked the foreman how long it would be before the trolley
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returned to service, he muttered, "We're working as fast as we can," by which Zander understood that it could be hours. He started toward the nearest metro station, which was a good fifteen minutes away on foot. He was halfway down the block when he noticed a communal taxi coming toward him. On the spur of the moment—he seldom took taxis because of the cost—he stepped into the gutter and waved his cane at the cab. The driver pulled up and leaned across the passenger's seat and Zander shouted an address. The driver reached out and opened the door. "Be quick," he called, "so we don't lose our heat."
Zander slid into the seat and hurriedly pulled the door closed. As the taxi started forward he turned to nod politely at the two people already in the backseat.
"Zander!" the woman cried. When he stared at her in puzzlement she said, "Don't you recognize me under all this fur.^ It's me, Masha. And this is my husband, Andrei. Sweet pea, you remember me telling you about the American who came back with Lenin to make the revolution in Russia.^ Here he is in the flesh. Alexander Til."
Zander had seen Masha in several films during the war and several more since, and remembered reading somewhere that she had married a director who had made a name for himself doing "tractor" stories, which was another way of describing films that glorified collective farms. "You absolutely must come up for a drink," Masha said. "I won't take no for an answer."
"I would take it as a favor if you accepted," her husband said. He had an open, decent face, but the bloated, blurred look around the eyes of someone who drank too much, "I would like to talk to you about Ronzha," he added. Andrei tilted his head and squinted at Zander, watching him closely to see how he reacted to the mention of the poet's name. Ronzha was not someone who was talked about openly. People lucky enough to own a volume of his early poetry disguised it in a dust jacket from another book. "You see," Andrei said with a wink, "Masha has told me about you."
Zander was tempted, but Andrei's reference to Ronzha made him uneasy. "My wife is expecting me," he said. "She'll be worried if I don't get back soon."
"So you're married," Masha said. "Who is the lucky woman.'*"
"Her name is Zsuzsa. She's half Yugoslav. I met her during the war," Zander said. "We got married right after it, as soon as we could find a place to live."
Masha asked Zander what kind of work he did these days. Zander replied vaguely that he was between jobs.
"What exactly do you do.-^" Andrei asked.
"Anything."
Andrei studied Zander again and nodded slowly. He reached into
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his breast pocket and pulled out a small white card, which he offered to Zander. "If you like, come by my office tomorrow," he said. "Anytime after nine. I might have something for you."
When Zander got home and told Zsuzsa what had happened in the taxi she turned the calling card in her fingers, as if looking at it from another angle might reveal more about the man whose name was printed on it. "Very fancy," she said skeptically, running a fingertip over the letters. " 'A. S. Bagdanov. Chairman, Motion Picture Collective.' What do you make of it.''"
Zander shrugged. "I don't like being permanently unemployed. I have to take the chance."
Zsuzsa went back to stirring onions in the frying pan. Her mother, an old woman who had been widowed in the thirties and still dressed in black, stuck her head in the door of the communal kitchen. "Smells good, Zsuzsa," she called. "I see Alexander finally got back. I'm not rushing you, but when do you think I'll be able to start cooking my cabbage soup.'"'
"Give me another quarter hour and the kitchen will be all yours," Zsuzsa told the old woman. As soon as her mother had gone, Zsuzsa shook her head. "I don't like the business of him mentioning Ronzha's name in front of a taxi driver. Everyone knows they are all informers. Your chairman of the Motion Picture Collective is either an idiot or a provocateur, if you ask me."
"The driver didn't look as if he would know who Pushkin was," Zander said. "Anyway, Ronzha was a nickname. There are not many of us left who called him by that name."
Zsuzsa was not convinced. She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a moment. "I don't like it," she said finally. She glanced up from her onions. "Don't forget that Masha denounced you once."
Zander, sitting in a kitchen chair, seemed to hunch down into it. "And I denounced Ronzha," he said softly.
"One thing has nothing to do with the other," Zsuzsa said in exasperation. "Ronzha was dead when you denounced him. You were very much alive when that motion picture actress denounced you."
"She didn't have a choice," Zander insisted.
Zander's coming home late had frayed Zsuzsa's nerves. "I must have missed the whole point of Ronzha reading his Stalin poem to a roomful of people," she blurted out. She kept her voice under tight control so her mother and the other couple living at the end of the corridor wouldn't hear her. "I somehow got the impression from you he did it to demonstrate that even in the worst of times a choice is precisely what people did have."
Zander threw an arm over her shoulder. "I'll be careful."
"Have it your way." Zsuzsa turned back to her onions.
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At nine the next morning Zander was scanning the listings in the lobby of a relatively new building opposite the central post office on Gorky Street. He found Motion Picture Collective and rode an elevator up to the seventh floor. Elevators always managed to remind him of Atticus Tuohy and "tunneling up." He hadn't set eyes on Tuohy since the war—he had bumped into him at a metro station which was being used as a bomb shelter during air raids. Atticus had pretended to be delighted to see Zander again and they had talked of getting together and exchanged addresses. But when Zander tried to look him up soon after, he found a pile of rubble where the apartment building had been, and he learned from the block warden that the building had been bombed out before Tuohy had given him the address.
At the Motion Picture Collective, Andrei Bagdanov ushered him into his office. "I am delighted you came," he said immediately, and he looked as if he meant it. Waving Zander to a couch in the corner, he settled into a leather chair facing him. He produced a bottle of Polish slivowitz from a shelf under an end table, poured out two brimming glasses, and passed one to Zander. They clanked glasses and drank.
"Masha told me about the favor you did her—" Andrei began.
Zander interrupted. "I never did Masha any favor."
"She doesn't see it that way," Andrei said. "Neither do I. She felt sick to her stomach when she denounced you. She still loses sleep over turning in the girl. You could have denounced her back but you didn't. Frankly, I'd like to do something to make it up to you."
Zander said, "I have no experience with making films."
"Masha told me you used to do subtitles for American pictures during your vacations."
Zander nodded cautiously.
Andrei poured out two more measures of slivowitz. "The Motion Picture Collective over which I preside," he began to explain, "is really a distribution agency. We have hundreds of films and we deal directly with the movie theaters. We have a sideline too. During the last great Wehrmacht offensive against the allies, what the Americans call the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans overran some American army bases and captured a packet of Hollywood films. They were taken back to Berlin and made available to high German officials who were nostalgic for the Gish sisters or Garbo or Charlie Chaplin. At the end of the war our boys liberated the films along with Berlin, but we didn't return them to the Americans—we keep them in basement vaults in this building."
Andrei picked up his tumbler and downed the contents in one swallow and set it down on the tabletop so sharply Zander thought the glass would crack.
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Zander said, "You want me to subtitle these films. Is that it?"
"Not exactly," Andrei said. "There are a hundred forty-seven of them in all. Subtitling would be too expensive for our budget. We get requests for these films from some of our senior Party people who are interested in seeing how decadent America is. You still speak fluent American.'' From time to time I could give you work doing a running translation of a film as it's being shown. I could pay you, say, a hundred rubles for a night's work."
Zander watched Andrei pour out another glass of slivowitz for himself. He had a grudging admiration for anyone who could drink alcohol this early in the day; like the sigh, it was another way of expressing the inexpressible. "There's something I ought to tell you," he said. Andrei looked up. Zander hesitated. Then: "I don't want you to get into trouble because of me."
Andrei waved a hand. "You're a Jew. Masha already told me. So what.'' If you agree to take on the work, it comes more or less under a freelance directive, which means I pay you out of a special fund and don't have to file a formal notification of employment."
