“Does nyet kulturny mean not cultured?”
“Of course. Crystal clear. Not cultured. Gross. That is worst thing you can say of a Russian”—yes, his better English was still with him. “Hordes of my people lived for centuries in huts. Nobody need to wipe his shoes. Floors were dirt. Animals slept with family. Nyet kulturny. Crude. Void of high culture. So, Khrushchev embarrasses many. Will ruin him yet.”
“But he’s a great man, you say?”
“Believe me. Gross, brutal, minion of Stalin. Yet, grows in stature. Immeasurable bravery to repudiate Stalin. You should try explaining to your people. In Moscow now, many high party leaders say to Khrushchev, ‘U.S. has four times more nuclear capacity. We are obliged to catch up.’ Khrushchev says, ‘If U.S. attacks, we answer. Both nations are destroyed. So, will be no war. Our Soviet need is to develop our economy.’ Khrushchev resists huge military pressure. Khrushchev a good man.”
“On our side, we find that a little harder to believe. We think you are responsible for your past, and you don’t shake it so quickly.”
He nodded. “That is because you represent corporate capitalism. Linear. Unilinear people in corporation.” He took a large swallow of his black coffee, which was thick as filtered mud, and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “Americans never understand how Communist Party works. See us as living under total relation to ideology. Grave error. Only corporate capitalism lives in total relation to ideology. We, who you call slave people, more individual.”
“I believe you really think that.”
“Of course. No two Russians alike. All Americans, to me, are same breed.”
“In no way could this be a misapprehension on your part?”
He touched my elbow in amelioration. “Speak of corporate capitalist Americans. Managers. Executive class. They believe American ideology. We believe, but only by half.”
“By half?”
“By half, Harry, you bet.” Again, his heavy hand clapped me on the back.
“And the other half?”
“Our secret half. We brood.”
“Over what?”
“Our soul. I taste my soul. American people speak of free-floating anxiety, yes? Lack of identity, yes? But Russian says: I am losing my soul. Americans used to be like Russians. In nineteenth century. When were individual entrepreneurs. Then, still the baroque spirit. In your hearts. In American architecture. Individual people, eccentric. Now, Americans are corporate capitalists. Brainwashed.”
There was a glint in his eye at the expression on my face. “Khrushchev does not want to lose his soul,” Masarov said, “so, works hard to improve the world.”
“You tell me all this with a straight face?” I confess I was getting angry at his consummate gall.
“Straight face.”
“Tell me about your prison camps.”
His good mood vanished. “The Russian Bear,” he said, “lives with dinosaur’s tail. Tail crawls with infestations. From the past. Eventually, eat the tail. We will absorb horrendous history. But, as of now, immense convulsions. Tragedies. Horrors. Still.”
I could hardly believe he had said this much. He was scowling at his coffee as if it had been a mistake to leave his old comrade-in-arms, vodka, for this new acquaintance. Then he gave a great sigh as if to clean his breath of old memories. “Do you know about beriozhka?” he asked. “Birch trees.”
“Yes. You are all said to love them.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “Zenia wrote beautiful poem in Russian about beriozhka. Translated into English by me. With liberties, however. Zenia would not recognize it. She would leave me.” He looked as if he were about to cry, but instead took out a piece of paper and read aloud to me.
TO THE BIRCHES
pale sentinels
silent arrows
light and moonlight
our silver sun
“Uruguay is not like Russia,” he said. “Are no birches here.”
Then he tore off the unmarked bottom half of the sheet on which the poem was written, scribbled a note upon it for me, and passed it over. The wording, Kittredge, (and you will soon see why) is offered to you from memory.
Caution. Just as one of ours may be, in secret, yours, so one of yours may be ours. Do not trust the people in your Soviet Russia Division. Such remarks can hang me. Silence. Caution. Speak only to your most trusted own.
I had time to read it carefully before he whipped back the note and held it in his hands. I do not know if I was inhabiting his mind at that point, but I did envision him setting this half sheet of paper on fire in the ashtray, which, I swear to you, he proceeded to do just then, as if I had either willed him to do it, or had read his mind before he expressed it.
Kittredge, that was indeed the curious tone on which we left the café and took the drive back to Montevideo in the late summer dusk of February. It is late now, and I am weary, but we are, at last, caught up.
Devotedly,
Harry
20
IT WAS UNDERSTOOD THAT I WOULD CALL HOWARD SO SOON AS I CAME back from the picnic, but I found myself in a peculiar and rebellious state. I did not wish to be debriefed into the late hours of Sunday night. Instead, I chose to write to Kittredge. It was as if my best hope of understanding what had taken place between Masarov and myself would be obtained by setting it down for her. I knew that once my formal report was perused by Hjalmar Omaley, converted to cable traffic, and subjected to the Soviet Russia Division’s questionnaires, the experience would be altered, and I felt some need, no matter how unprofessional, to keep it intact.
I was in a dilemma, however. “Do not trust the people in your Soviet Russia Division,” was a dangerous remark to bring back. Since I now had no evidence of Boris’ note other than my personal description of it, I was bound to be seen as the untrustworthy bearer of a wholly disturbing communication. Maybe the KGB had designed the afternoon to get me to return with a message that would disrupt our Soviet Russia Division. In that case, it might be prudent not to mention the note.
Of course, there was the real possibility that a movie camera had been installed behind a peephole in the café to record the moment when Boris passed his written message over to me and I read it and he then incinerated it in the ashtray, both of us watching solemnly. In such a case, if I did not report the incident to Hunt and Omaley, and there was indeed a KGB mole at Soviet Russia Division in position to see my report on the picnic, then I would be prey to blackmail if I made no mention of Masarov’s message.
I decided to state in my report, therefore, that the note had been passed to me; I would, however, leave out the reference to the Soviet Russia Division. If the intent of the KGB was to increase our suspicion of our own people, then I would be thwarting their purpose. The remaining contents of the note would prove vague. I decided to accept the risk.
Why? As if someone had poked a rude finger into my stomach, the question hit with force. Why, indeed? Why not tell the truth? If it disrupted the Soviet Russia Division, well, they had suffered, no doubt, in such fashion before. Yet I knew I would not change my mind. Not only was living in close quarters with Al Omaley much like cohabiting with a contagious disease, but I did not feel ready to face his meticulous paranoia. I, the messenger, had to be tainted by the message.
All the same, my private motive remained inaccessible to me. Some stubborn depth of instinct was speaking.
It was now ten o’clock on Sunday night, and one could put off calling Howard Hunt no longer. I went down to the street and found a pay phone. On the Avenue of the 18th of July, the night was as quiet as a midnight Tuesday in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
“Where in hell have you been?” was his opening remark.
“Getting drunk with our friend.”
“Until now?”
“A confession, Howard. I got back to the hotel at seven, started to call just to say that I was back and would ring again from downstairs in ten minutes, but, so help me, I fell asleep with the phone in my hand.”
“Oh, no.”
“Did you ever match vodka for vodka with the Russians?”
“Yes. And successfully. Don’t you know enough to drink olive oil before you start?”
“Well, maybe I do now.”
“All right. One question. Was it conclusive?”
“Not wholly affirmative on that.”
“Shit.”
“A fair amount of stuff, all the same.”
“Enough to begin an all-night session right now?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then, I will let it keep till tomorrow. But you get over to the Embassy now. Nancy is waiting to type up the tape.”
“Well, yes.”
“Hang around to help her with garbled transmission.”
“Of course.”
“I know this is open wire, boy, but give a clue. What was our friend up to?”
“Wiser minds than mine will determine that.”
“Any chance of your buddy riding down the river?”
“Twenty-percent possibility.”
“Twenty-percent,” repeated Hunt. I could picture his study at Carrasco; I could all but hear his long fingers tapping on the desk. “That’s a bit of a disappointment,” he said.
“All the same,” I told him, “there are a few new flowers in the nosegay.”
“We’ll be busy tomorrow,” said Hunt. “Get some sleep.”
“I intend to—after the next three hours with Nancy.”
“That’s all right, Harry. You were snoring it off while I was pacing my study worrying over what to say at your grave.”
My relations with Nancy during the hours it took to transcribe the tape proved as formal as the muted aftereffect of our single kiss, a sad void for her, I was certain, but by two in the morning, the transcript was done, and so was my accompanying report. I went back to the hotel, while Nancy, loyal to the code of all the unsung soldiers, was still sending our text on the encoding machine. Our five-letter groups would be deciphered by communications people in Washington before the dawn.
Hjalmar Omaley, whether alerted by Hunt, or paranoically instinctive, came by some twenty minutes in advance of my departure, a precise timing that enabled him to read my report and go through the transcript just as Nancy was finishing the last page. He had the oddest style of perusal. Reminiscent of the way General Gehlen used to mutter over the chessboard, he all but crooned into the contents. “Holy hooligans, Hjalmar, holy hooligans,” he kept saying as he read, but whether this was praise for the operation or astonished disapproval, I had no idea. Just as I was leaving, Nancy, quick as a bird darting into the eaves (for I was not supposed to see it), flashed one tender smile at Hjalmar. It seemed to me then that I would be wiser to worry over the empty space in my own heart rather than the void in others.
By the middle of Monday morning, Howard was in a state of great excitement. The Sourballs had succeeded in closing the discrepancy on Masarov’s age. Their Soviet Personnel Record dossier was now in order. While Hunt would not, or could not, provide me with more detail than to say, “Masarov is not thirty-two but thirty-nine, not, as he claims, thirty-seven. Get set for this: He is higher echelon than we thought. Considerably above Varkhov in rank.”
“I thought the Finnish Micks had concluded Boris was Number Two KGB here.”
“They did, but the Sovs must have been sending contrived signals. It’s a kangaroo pouch.”
While I had never heard the expression before, the metaphor obviously spoke of an operation where the number-one man is concealed.
“What of Zenia and Varkhov?” I asked.
“In for reappraisal. One thing is nailed down, though. Our Masarov here in Uruguay is one of the leading KGB experts on America.”
“Why, then, is he in these parts?”
“That may be the focal enigma, may it not?” said Howard.
If my visit to the home of Boris and Zenia had taken me through heavy cross-examination, the picnic subjected me to an eighteen-hour day with Hjalmar, followed by two more eighteen-hour days responding to questionnaires from Washington. More than once I came close to confessing what I now called (in the last redoubts of the privacy of my mind) “The Abominable Omission,” for the questionnaires certainly kept returning to the contents of Boris’ note. What certainty could I submit that the message, as recollected by me, was complete: 60 percent? 70 percent? 80 percent? 90 percent? 95 percent? 100 percent? I made the mistake of answering 80 percent. As if they were psychically attuned to the topography of culpability, the Sourballs follow-up question stated: In your reconstruction, the note has three full statements plus three one-word exhortations. If recall is 80% complete, what is the possibility that a fourth sentence is missing?
To which I replied: Zero possibility.
Repeat query: 50%? 40%? 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 0%?
Zero possibility.
Boris note lacks concerted impact. How do you account for that?
I was sitting at a typewriter console hooked up to our Encoder-Decoder. An encrypted question would come in from Washington, go through the decoder, activate the keys of my typewriter, and come out in deciphered, five-letter groups on my typewriter page, which I could read, by now, as quickly as plain text. BORIS NOTEL ACKSC ONCER TEDIM PACT didn’t cost me one-tenth of a second more. Then, so soon as I typed out a reply to the comment, my five-letter groups would begin their trip back through the same typewriter and Encoder-Decoder to the Sourballs in Cockroach Alley. I would sit and wait for my typewriter to commence clacking again. After hours of such back and forth, I began to feel as if I were playing chess with an opponent in another room. Over my shoulder, Hjalmar Omaley read the questions and my answers.
On this last comment, Boris note lacks concerted impact, I turned to him.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
He had an irritating smile. His teeth would gleam in concert with the gleam that came off his eyeglasses. “It means,” said Hjalmar, “precisely what it says.”
This annoyed me sufficiently to type for my reply exactly what I had said to him. WHATD OESTH ISMEA N
PRECI SELYW HATIT SAYS came back.
“All right, we have a problem,” I said. “I can’t comment if I don’t know what I’m replying to.”
At Yale, I had always detested the superior sort of graduate student who looked like Hjalmar Omaley. Their heads were invariably held at odd angles. They listened with a half-smile. They appeared to be sniffing the inferior odor of your turds as compared to the integrated concert of their own. They would answer inquiries with questions or with such throwaways as precisely what it says. When, however, they finally took account of the subject, they left you in no doubt of their credentials. “We have under consideration,” said Hjalmar, “a high-echelon member of the KGB, expert in American studies, who dallies with a minor case officer in a country with small to negligible geopolitical impact. Said KGB officer then proceeds to incriminate himself to said minor case officer by dint of extreme remarks, allusions, and unorthodox comparisons of his country and party to a sordid husband and wife. He abuses Marxist tenets. All such product would guarantee, at the least, his recall, and imprisonment if we were to forward transcript obtained to the KGB and they were to believe it. Do you follow me now?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Since he is, however, heading up the KGB cadres here, his own transcript, if he has one, need not be of concern to him. He has obviously been given sanction. There are elements in the KGB who do have sanction to speak freely and, on occasion, act freely. Such post-Neanderthals can be seen as the equivalent of seventeenth-century Jesuits. Are you still capable of following me?”
“Yes.”
“Good. We now encounter the specific implausibility of the entire situation. To summarize what I have just said: A major KGB operative who, so far as we can see, has no intention of defecting, nonetheless engages in major conversational indiscretions with the opposition. If there is an entelechy in his process—and there must be entelechy, or else, why commence?—he su
cceeds in presenting a note which is destroyed almost immediately after it is delivered. That is a dubious business, since the message has no incisive content. It names no person, attacks specifically none of our departments, and in sum, is too general to be disruptive. He has given you a shovel without a handle. What explanation do you offer?”
I was about to reply, but he said, “Wait,” and turned on a tape recorder placed next to the Encoder-Decoder. “Speak your piece into that.”
The position of the microphone placed my back to Omaley, and I could feel his malign presence leaning in full psychic drapery upon my shoulders.
“Repeat your question,” I said.
“What explanation do you offer of your meeting?”
“I think we are dealing with a man rather than a scenario.”
“Expatiate.”
“I’m not as certain as all of you that Masarov has a clear message to pass on. If he is the number-one man, and his wife is indeed in love with Varkhov, who now, it seems, is his assistant, I believe that could prove disorienting to his behavior.”
“Masarov is ruthless, skillful, and highly capable of discharging ultimate functions. It is difficult to believe that his marital troubles, if bona fide, would prove unsettling. In 1941, at the age of twenty-two, as a young officer in the NKVD, he was present in the Katyn Forest during the Soviet massacre of the Polish officers. He is a man, therefore, who has shot others in the back of the head.” Standing behind me, Hjalmar did tap me lightly on the head.
Could I place Boris into this new portrait? My stomach was reacting. “Katyn Forest helps to explain his appraisal of Khrushchev,” I said.
“To employ Masarov’s own terminology—kvatch. An attempt to beguile you, misdirect you, have you, in short, follow the wrong shell in his game.”
“If you know all of it, why do you keep questioning me?”
“‘Boris note lacks concerted impact.’ Try replying to that on the E-D.”
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