by Paul Theroux
l Tell her to cut that out!' said Fred. She seemed to be doing it on account of him, pretending it was all his fault. He began to hate the old lady tor making him feel that way. 'All right,' Fred
A REAL RUSSIAN IKON
finally said, 'no deal. The deal's off. I don't want it! Will you tell her to cut it out!'
Fred was now shouting louder than the old lady was crying. It had a chastening effect on her; her sobbing died to a sniffle.
Igor spoke and, as he did, the old lady continued to sniff. 'She wants sell eekone very much.' He winked. 'Two hundred fifty dollars, American.'
'But I thought you said-'
'Wants sell to you,' Igor said. He stood near Nikolai and the taxi driver. Their faces were triumphantly rosy.
'Doesn't she want it for praying?'
Igor translated with evident malice.
The old lady looked at Fred with red eyes full of pleading fear, more fear than she had shown toward the three Russians. Her voice was small, her face puffy with grief, her unusually large arthritic-knuckled hands clenched tightly over her knees.
'She no pray. She say to me, No pray, comradeV
In the men's toilet of the Uyut tearoom Fred coated his hands with slimy Soviet soap and scalded them in the sink while a customer kecked into the commode. At last the customer left. Fred and Igor made the final transaction. Fred passed the traveler's checks wadded in brutally heavy toilet paper to Igor who reached under the gap in the wall of an adjoining water closet.
Outside, at their table, the deal complete, they touched teacups.
'Chin-chin,' said Igor.
'Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute,' said Fred, feeling oddly abandoned and fearful. 'What am I going to tell them at the customs desk at the airport? They're going to ask me where I got this thing.' The bundle lay beside Fred's chair, innocuous-looking in Pravda and old twine. Fred pointed cautiously, then cupped his hands to his mouth and whispered, 'I'll get into trouble. They'll know I changed my money illegally.' Fred looked to Igor for reassurance. 'I don't want any trouble.'
'No trouble,' said Igor.
'What do you mean-'
Igor hushed him; people at other tables had turned to watch the man shouting in English.
'What,' said Fred with pained hoarseness, 'do you mean, no trouble? They're looking for people who've changed their money
SINNING WITH ANNIE
on the black market. I'm an American, for God's sake, an American^. They'll lock me up. I know they will.' Fred was inconsolable. He sighed. 'I knew this whole thing was a mistake.'
Igor chuckled. 'No trouble. Tell police this eekone present.'
'Sure, a present. You're a great help.'
'Present, yes,' Igor said calmly. 'Find young policeman. Young man. Tell him, heh, you fack Russian gorl. She say, heh, yes, very good, thank you. Gorl give you eekone as present for fack. Easy.'
'Oh, my God.'
'Don't whorry.' Igor winked. 'We go.' He took Nikolai by the arm and departed, leaving Fred to pay the bill.
Fred was upset. Walking back to the Metropole he decided to throw the ikon away and forget the whole business. The decision calmed him, but he grew tense when he realized there was nowhere to throw the ikon. The alleys were bare; there was not a scrap of rubbish or even a trash can on any of the streets. The gutters were being scrubbed by old women in shawls with big brushes. The bundle would be noticed as a novelty (no one threw anything away in Moscow) and would attract attention.
It was all the more worrying for Fred when the elevator operator, a sullen, wet-lipped man in a faded braided uniform, gave the bundle cradled in Fred's arm a very queer look. Fred shoved it under his bed, downed three neat vodkas and went to the Bolshoi to see The Tsar's Bride. He had been cheated on the tickets: he sat behind a post in the sixty-kopek heights, in the darkness, shredding his program with anxious hands.
That night he could not sleep. The haggard face of the old lady appeared in his room. She accused him of stealing her valuable ikon. A Russian policeman with a face like raw mutton tore Fred's passport in half and twisted his arm. Igor, in a chair under a bright light, confessed everything. Nikolai wept piteously and pointed an accusing finger at Fred. Toward daw r n Fred lapsed into feverish sleep. 1 Ie awoke with a vow on his lips.
It was not easy for him to find the old lady's house. The banners were some help in figuring the general direction, but it was not until a day and a half after the visit with Igor and Nikolai - one day before he was due to leave for Tokyo thai he found the right street.
He rapped hard at the gray door, so hard he skinned some leather
[46
A REAL RUSSIAN IKON
from his glove knuckles. He soon saw why there was no answer: a heavy padlock clinked in a hasp at the bottom of the door. Turning, Fred was brought up short by a figure on the sidewalk, standing with his hands in his pockets, eyeing him closely.
'Do you speak English?'
'If you zpeak zlowly.'
'Where is the old lady?'
'Not here,' said the man. At that moment a chauffered Zyl drew up to the curb. 'You are friend?'
'In a way. See, a couple of days ago -'
'Come,' said the man darkly.
They drove through narrow streets, then out to the wide Sadov-aya that rings Moscow, and across the canal to more narrow gray streets, in the bare district of black stumps and boarded-up houses near the Church of the Assumption in Gonchary. They passed the church and continued for about half a mile over frost heaves in the empty street.
'Where are we?'
'Gvozdev,' said the man, and he gave the driver a direction.
The car pulled in through a low gate cut in a thick stone wall. At the far end of a scrubby courtyard was a sooty brick building, the shape of Monticello on the back of the nickel, a domed roof but with one difference: this one had a chimney at the rear belching greasy smoke. It was too squat, too plain, too gloomy for a church. Fred pulled the ikon out of the car and followed the man into the building.
The front entrance - there were no doors - opened onto a vast, high-ceilinged room, empty of furniture. The walls were covered with small brown photographs of men and women, framed in silver and set into the cement, not hung. The cold wind whistling through the front entrance blew soot and grit into the faces of people milling about in the center of the room. It was a silent group, apparently workers; Fred saw that their eyes were fixed on three men who sat on a raised platform at the far end.
The three men were dressed in long coats and boots. They all wore gloves. This would not have seemed so strange except that two of the men were holding violins; the third was seated at an organ. They began to play, still gloved, a mournful and aching song.
From a side door two men entered, carrying a coffin which they
SINNING WITH ANNIE
set in front of the musicians' platform. One of the pallbearers placed a small sprig of flowers on the coffin and touched the wood with his fingers.
'Old lady/ said the man next to Fred. 'She die I am not zurprised. It is formidable how she live zo long in this cold.'
The scraping of the violins and the heavy breathing of the organ continued as the coffin descended into the floor, accompanied by the steely clanking of a hidden chain. The coffin bumped down and out of sight. Two trap doors shot up, met and shut with a bang which echoed in the stone room. When the echo died out the musicians stopped playing and at once began tuning their instruments.
'Say.' Fred turned to the man. He cleared his throat. 'Can you direct me to the Novodevichy Convent?' He said nothing about Svetlana. There might have been trouble. On the other hand he felt sure he would get the ikon past customs now.
A Political Romance
To calm his wife after a quarrel, Morris Rosetree always recalled to her how they had met in the National Library in Prague, how he had said, 'Excuse me, miss, could you tell me where the reading room is?' and how she had replied, 'You are excused. It is in this vichinity.'
He had been doing research for his doctoral dissertation on the history of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. But he had lost interest in it. He asked about the reading room because he heard it was well heated: he wanted to sit comfortably and write a letter to his folks. Several days after asking the dark-eyed girl the question he saw her on the library steps and he offered her a lift home. She refused at first, but Morris was insistent and finally he persuaded her. She remained silent, seemed to hold her breath throughout the journey. Morris invited her for coffee the next day, and later to have lunch. He told her he was an American. On Valentine's Day he bought her some fur-lined gloves. She was glad to get them, she said. She was an orphan. When they were married it was noticed by several American newspapers; one paper printed a picture of the bride and groom and titled it A Political Romance, explaining in the text that love was bigger than politics. At that time very little was happening in Czechoslovakia: Morris Rosetree's marriage there to Lepska Kanek was news.
With the help of Lepska, Morris finished his research. A year later, in the States, Morris got his Ph.D., and he told Lepska that if it hadn't been for her he would never have managed it. Some chapters of the dissertation were published in political journals, but no publisher seemed interested in the whole book. What depressed Morris some time after his book had been turned down was a review he saw of a similar book. The review was enthusiastic ('. . . valuable, timely . . .'), but judging from quotations used in the review the book was no better than his own. He knew his own was dull, so he was irritated reading praise of a book equally dull on the same subject. He became so discouraged that he moved
SINNING WITH ANNIE
away from Eastern European affairs and began a fitful study of the ruling parties of certain African countries.
It was at about this time that his quarrels started with Lepska who, once she had arrived at the Massachusetts college, nicknamed herself Lil. Morris had found her accent attractive in the early years of their marriage: 'You could cut that accent with a knife.' She had learned Morris' swearwords ('Kleist!' 'Sanvabeach!'). Morris had been charmed by her way of asking dinner guests innocently, 'There was big - how do you say rayseestonce in English?' (this provoked 'Resistance!' from the guests). But now the accent annoyed Morris. When she said, 'You Americans hev zoch dirty manners,' he corrected her English. If there were friends present he said, 'Sure, Americans have bad manners. Look at this. This is the way your Czechs eat their grub.' He reached across the table, speared a potato on his fork and made noises of chewing and growling as he cut the potato savagely on his plate. The friends laughed. Lil went silent; her face shut. Afterward she cried and said she was going back to Prague with the children. They had two girls: one had been born while Morris was finishing his dissertation; one a year later. Both had Czech names. Lil cried in their room.
'Remember the library?' Morris would say whenever Lil cried. He could do both voices well, his bewildered American question, her stiff mispronounced reply.
One night she rejected the memory and said bitterly, 'I vish I had not met you.'
'Aw, Lil.'
'You make me zo unhappy,' she sniffed. Then she shrieked, 'I do not vant to leave!'
'Christ, I don't want you to either.'
'No, not leave . . . leave!' she insisted, and burst into tears again.
She was, Morris guessed, talking of suicide.
He went easy on her for a while and was careful not to criticize her accent. But something had happened to the marriage: it had become impersonal; he felt they did not know each other very well, and he didn't care to know her any better. Her accent made him impatient and set his teeth on edge: he interrupted her as you do a stutterer. She moped like a hostage. Her hips were huge, her face and hands went florid in the January cold, though her face was still pretty. But she was like so many Czech women he had seen
A POLITICAL ROMANCE
in Prague, like his landlady, like the librarians and the shrews in the ministries who would not allow him to interview officials. Those women who tried to kill his research: they wore brown, belted dresses and heavy shoes; not old in years, they were made elderly by work. Somehow, they were fat.
His daughters were fat, too, and once Morris had said to his office mate O'Hara (the Middle East), 'I think if we gave them American names they'd get skinny again.' O'Hara laughed. Morris was, afterward, ashamed of having revealed his exasperation. Exasperation was the name he gave it, despair was what he felt: because nothing would change for him. He would have no more kids; he would not marry again. He had tenure: this was his job for life. He could hope for promotion, but in thirty years he would be -this hurt him - the same man, if not a paler version. The manuscript of his book, the letters from publishers containing phrases of terse praise and regret and solemn rejection clipped to the flyleaf, would stay in the bottom drawer of his desk. Once he had had momentum and had breathed an atmosphere of expectancy; he had flown across Europe and been afraid. But he had been younger then, and a student, and he had been in love.
The study he planned of ruling parties was getting nowhere. He could not keep up with the revolutions or the new names (the presidents and generals in these countries were so young!). He taught Political Theory and used a textbook that a colleague had written. Morris knew it was not a good one.
Then the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. Morris looked at his newspaper and saw photographs of chaos. He was tempted to throw the paper away and pay no further attention, for he could not separate in his mind the country from that woman in his house (Lil!) urging food into the two fat little girls whose Slavic names, instead of being dimmed by three and four years of utterance, had acquired queer, unfamiliar highlights and were the roots of even sillier diminutives, encouraging ridicule.
Morris fought that impulse, and he did not want the oblique revenge which his indifference to the invasion would have been. So he read the story and looked at the pictures, and he felt exhilaration, anger stoked by a continuous flow of indignant shame, as if he had returned to a deserted neighborhood and realized, standing amid abandoned buildings, that he too had been a deserter. The pictures were of Prague: tanks in formation on a thoroughfare's
SINNING WITH ANNIE
cobbles, their slender cannon snouts sniffing at rumpled citizens; some boys near the tanks with their hands cupped at their mouths, obviously shouting; others, reaching, in the act of pitching stones; people being chased into doorways by soldiers wearing complicated boots and carrying rifles; people laying wreaths; pathetically small crowds wagging signs; two old ladies, with white flowers, weeping. Morris read the news reports and the editorial, and he fumbled with a cigarette, discovering as he puffed that he had put the wrong end in his mouth and lighted the filter tip.
'What's that awful stink?' It was O'Hara. He saw the paper spread out, the headline. He said, 'Incredible, isn't it?'
'I could have predicted it,' said Morris. He was shaking his head from side to side, but he was smiling.
O'Hara invited Morris over for a meal the next night. He said, 'And don't forget to bring the wife! She's the one I want to chew the fat with.'
Remembering Lil, Morris folded the paper and started down the corridor. He was stopped by Charlie Shankland (Latin America). Shankland said, 'I'm sorry about this,' meaning the invasion, and invited the Rosetrees for Saturday.
Lil cried that afternoon. She saw the paper and said, 'Brave, brave people,' and 'My poor country, always trouble.' At the O'Haras' and the Shanklands' Lil was asked about the Russians: how did she feel about them? what would she do if she were in Prague today? who would she support?
'You do not know how . . . messianic . . . are the Russians,' she said. Morris had never heard her use that word before. He was pleased. 'My husband,' she went on, looking at Charlie and lowering her eyes, 'my husband thinks they are okay, like you all do. But we know they are terrible-' She could not finish.
She had said 'sinks' instead of 'thinks.' Morris was angry with himself for having notic
ed that. He wanted her to say more; he was proud and felt warm toward her. He was asked questions. Twice he replied, 'Well, my wife says she thinks,' ending each time 'Isn't that right, Lil?' And each time Lil looked at him and bowed her head sadly in agreement.
Morris dug out his dissertation and read it, and threw half of it away. He made notes for new chapters and began consulting Lil, asking detailed questions and not interrupting her answers. He gave a lecture for the Political Science Club, and he was invited to
A POLITICAL ROMANCE
Chicago to present a paper at a forum on the worsening situation in Czechoslovakia. He started buying an evening paper; he read of more students defying soldiers and scrawling Dubcek's name on the street with chalk. He followed the funeral of the boy who was shot, and he saw the Czechs, whom he often felt were his Czechs, beaten into silence by the Russians. But the silence did not mean assent; even less, approval. It was resistance. He knew them, better than most people knew them. Time had passed, but it was not very long after the first Russian tank appeared in Prague that Morris Rosetree came home from a lecture and whispered to his wife, 'Lepska, I love you.'
Sinning with Annie
Make no mistake about it, I, Arthur Viswalingam, was married in every sense of the word, and seldom during those first years did I have the slightest compunction. Acceptance is an Asiatic disease; you may consider me one of the afflicted many. I was precisely thirteen, still mottled with pimply blotches, pausing as I was on that unhealthy threshold between puberty and adolescence. Annie (Ananda) was a smooth eleven, as cool and unripe as the mango old Mrs Pushpam brings me each morning on a plate when I sit down to my writing. (Is it this green fruit before me now that makes me pause in my jolly memoir to take up this distressing subject, one that for so long has troubled my dreams and made my prayers pitiful with moans of penitential shame?) It was a long time before the eruptions of adolescence showed with any ludicrous certainty (I almost said absurtainty!) on Annie's face. I imagine it was around our third anniversary, the one we celebrated at the home of that oaf Ratnam, my cousin (his mother, another yahoo, unmercifully repeated a jape about our childlessness: 'Perhaps they are not doing it right!'). I cannot be sure exactly when Annie became a woman: she always seemed to be a small girl playing at being grown-up, worrying the cook and sweeper with her pouts, dressing in outlandish styles of sari, crying often and miserably - all of this, while we were married, an irritating interruption of my algebra homework.