“Help me with this, Artie darling, please.” She knelt beside the bookcase where the paperback novels were lined up in order of her preference—the Arthur Haileys, the Ross MacDonalds, the Robert B. Parkers—she was crazy about that detective Spenser with all his recipes and his lovely girlfriend—and she felt along the back until her fingers stumbled on a hidden latch. She pushed it and a panel gave way. She extracted several notebooks, set them aside, and took out a slim photograph album. Birdie put it on the cream-colored leather top of the famous bridge table and opened it.
“Can I smoke?” I said.
“You asked me already. You think that I am senile? No, you cannot. It’s bad for you. For me also, am I wrong?”
Birdie opened the album. Inside the photographs were covered in tissue paper: my mother in a gypsy costume, smiling broadly; my father as a handsome man in his thirties with other handsome men, one in a rakish beret, the other with a cigar: Che Guevara; Fidel. His friends. Idols of my childhood. A third showed him winking at the camera, laughing, his arm around a comrade who was laughing too, both boys standing on the banks of the Moscow River, the way Tolya and I had stood there this morning, these two dashing in bathing suits.
“Diplomatic Beach Number Three,” she said. “I knew they met foreign girls there. I got them condoms. Your grandmother was furious.”
The other boy was Gennadi Ustinov.
There were more: me in my school outfit looking dull and idiotic. Me in my car in New York, a picture I’d sent her when I first arrived. My mother on her wedding day in a stylish suit and a little hat; a cracked formal portrait of Birdie’s parents taken in a studio in Leningrad before they left for America at the end of the last century.
There were pictures of young Comintern workers on bicycles, on picnics, in Red Square, waving breezily, smiling merrily. Saucy girls in summer dresses laughed at the camera. Boys posed at jaunty angles with their bikes. These were Birdie’s comrades.
“All dead now,” Birdie said sharply.
“How is Bela Nikolayovich?” I asked, inquiring after the last of Birdie’s beaux, a courtly Hungarian diplomat who had become a Maoist briefly in the sixties, then given it all up to practice Zen Buddhism in a monastery outside Moscow that stank of cats.
“Dead. Everyone’s dead. His best time was the war when he felt it was virtuous to work for the intelligence service. My eyes can see 180 degrees, Nicky would say. But he’s dead. So is everyone else. Or gaga. You know what I hate, Artyom? Stupid old people.
“It was not for this we came.” She gestured at the patched window, at the deputies on television spewing venom at each other. At the podium, one man swayed. “A drunk. All drunks. We were for order. For discipline. We came to stay.” I knew Birdie was still committed, a true believer.
I had heard the story but it was Birdie’s great story and I settled in to listen. Birdie was unwilling to cast herself among the forlorn, although the little sideshow in which she figured was one of the saddest in the history of this sonofabitch country. Birdie was among the foreigners who, enamored of the great socialist enterprise, went to the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Later on there were the spies—the Philbys and Blakes—who ended up in Moscow, but they were professionals who had run out of road. “We came to stay,” she always said.
Birdie’s generation went to the revolution with their bridge tables, their Singer sewing machines and their books. “We went because we believed,” she said. The equality of man, the dignity of labor, with a kind of ingenuous fervor they believed. Most were urban intellectuals who didn’t know a tractor from a tank; Birdie herself attended tractor driving school in Alexandrov, although she had come via Bremen, with a pocket full of her father’s dollars. For a time, she sewed workers’ clothing in a commune populated by Western true believers.
“The early thirties was a time of no cynics,” said Birdie, launching herself into her favorite tale while I ate more cake and she nodded approval. “The only cynic was Stalin. You want me to tell you who killed whom?”
“You told me,” I said, and she grunted.
Birdie worked as a typist at the Comintern. Lenin’s instrument for world revolution pulled in kids like Birdie who sat in the building next to the Bolshoi Theater in their good American sandals and plotted the overthrow of capitalism. Recruits like Birdie Golden read foreign papers, listened to the BBC World Service. “We took the pulse.” She removed her eyeglasses, voice brisk with the undiminished ring of New York City.
For Birdie, solidarity was sexy, the classless society rang with poetry. Free love was in the air, and folk music. It was an enticing culture. I thought of Lily Hanes and her parents who were believers.
“I knew them all,” Birdie said, recalling the leaders of her youth. Whatever horrors they might have perpetrated, they had been handsome men in exciting times. Birdie used to claim she also once dated Paul Robeson, which always made us laugh. “They were all poets,” she said.
“Chairman Mao was a poet, too.”
“A mouth like your mother, you’ve got.” Birdie winked as if I had passed some test.
Birdie had given away her money to the revolution and her husband, Guram, a Georgian, a Red Army officer and a very handsome man. For Guram and their boy, and for the cause, early on, Birdie, like the others, took Soviet citizenship. When the purges began, these hybrid creatures were doubly vulnerable to Stalin’s obsessive xenophobia. To their own embassies, they were now foreigners. No one cared.
In 1937, Birdie’s husband, who was my mother’s uncle by marriage, was arrested; he had an American wife and was, therefore, labeled an “Enemy of Nations”. He spent eighteen years in the labor camps. In 1939, Birdie, the wife of an “Enemy of Nations”, was also arrested. Stefan, the child, was dumped in an orphanage for the “Children of Enemies of Nations”.
From fear, Stefan quit speaking English. Speaking English meant you were a spy. When he was nineteen, he drowned. My father said it was suicide. My mother told me it was murder. Guram died from it.
“He had a broken heart,” Birdie said as if it were a disease, like cancer. “Everyone I knew went to ground. They stopped speaking English because it could kill you. They forgot who they were. They spoke in whispers.”
Not Birdie. Birdie was Birdie. She got out of the camp. She holed up in a Moscow apartment. The war came and went. Stalin died. Joe McCarthy died. To Birdie they were the same person.
Birdie’s rebellion was to teach English privately to as many kids as wanted to learn; she gave us all real passion for the language, for America, for New York. We were ripe for it. We were little kids when we saw grown-ups weep for the beautiful dead young President, John Kennedy. America was the land of the free, the home of the brave and Elvis. Everyone knew that.
Now, in the apartment where I spent so much time, I remembered it all; I could retell Birdie’s tales like a liturgy. It was who I was.
Birdie took my hand. Hers was as dry as snakeskin.
“What do I believe these days, you are asking yourself, eh? You think I am like these pathetic creatures who first believe all the bullshit then nothing? This woman Doreen, you remember her, the Englishwoman with the beautiful skin? She spent the war in a room without windows or mirrors. For some years she slept. Birdie does not sleep. Birdie is not pathetic.” She spoke softly. “Birdie does not weep for Stalin or Gorbachev who spoke peasant’s Russian or Yeltsin, or herself. Stalin murdered the Soviet way of thinking. Ours was not to reason why. Ours was just to do or die. Now I reason. Birdie Golden will die a reasonable woman. You want more? You like my stories? Soon I will be dead, my stories over.”
“Are there stories about Gennadi Mikhailovich? You never told me stories about Uncle Gennadi.”
“You mean you want to know if he betrayed your father.”
Birdie showed me a photograph of my father and Ustinov in their army uniforms.
“Poor bastards having to do army time, especially back then.” I thought of my own miserable days in the Isra
eli forces.
“They loved it, you idiot,” Birdie snapped. “They could play soldiers. They wanted to be heroes. It was the fifties, it was patriotic. They were officer class, not conscripts. They loved it.”
I made a face.
“What do you think your father was?” Birdie said.
I drank my tea.
“He was KGB. He chose it. He loved it. Both of them, you understand? It was in the blood. You’re just like your mother,” Birdie said. “She was noisy and unrealistic. Did you know she had been a fine journalist? But she balked at doing what you had to do, she could not decline politely while paying lip-service to the possibility of cooperation. She had a mouth on her. I loved her for that. She made a lot of trouble for your father, but he loved her anyway. At least he did that.”
“What?”
“What? You thought he was a saint? He was KGB. So was Gennadi. They did things,” she said.
I didn’t ask, but Birdie didn’t let me off the hook.
“Did Gennadi betray your father? Did he report what your mother said, her jokes, her anger at the system, her efforts to get information to her foreign friends? I don’t know. Gennadi was in love with her, of course.”
I guess I had always known.
“He was in love with her before your father, and Gennadi had a way of talking, you remember? He could charm the birds off the trees. But your mother liked your father better.”
“I see.”
“Oh don’t be a baby: He didn’t betray your father because of that. If he did it, he did it because he believed in the system. He was a handsome man, Gennadi was. And he always came to see me on my birthday, every year.
“He loved you, Artyom. When you would not see him, he was badly hurt. In the end, he knew too much about all this.” Birdie waved her hand—she meant Moscow, Russia, life. “He knew almost as much as Birdie.” She was drifting. “You saw him in New York?”
“I didn’t see him.”
“You got my fudge?”
“I ate it all.”
“I want you to help me, Artyom.”
In my whole life, I never heard Birdie ask for anything. It had been a legend. “If Birdie ever needs something you will have to guess what it is,” my mother said once. “She will never ask. She has pride a foot thick.”
“What do you need? What can I do for you?”
“You’re married, Artyom darling?”
“Don’t be a Jewish mother. I was married. Once.”
“Once? For five minutes when you were eighteen you were married. And what happened? You fooled around and she left you. Schmuck! That Eviva was a little big in the ass, maybe, but for an Israeli, she was not bad.” She fastened the rheum-clotted bird’s eyes on me.
“I was bad.” I grinned. “I was very very young.”
“Marry. You’ll live longer.”
“Tell me what do you need.”
“Tell me who killed Gennadi Mikhailovich.”
I told her about Lev and the hit, and the mafia, and she made a face.
“Not that crap. Who set it up? Who sent the assassin?”
“It was an accident.”
“Don’t be silly.” Like me, she couldn’t bear that his death was random, meaningless.
“I’m tired now.” Birdie closed her eyes. “But you can have a smoke before you go.” She paused to let the drama build. “So. So guess who I saw?”
She had grown old after all. She changed the subject without noticing. She had my hand in hers and held on tight.
“Who, darling?”
“Don’t darling me. Don’t give me that look. But I’ll tell you who I saw,” she taunted.
“Who?”
“Chaim Brodsky,” she said, triumphant. “Suddenly after all these years, Chaim calls up Birdie. When was it? A few months ago. So. He wants to visit. To schmooze, he says. For old times’ sake. Sure, and the Pope is Jewish. I am high-handed: “Excuse me, Chaim Arnoldovich, you are a famous man so I owe you some respect, but I am some years older,, so you will have to come to Birdie. I don’t go out.” “I’ll send a car,” Chaim says. “You’ll come to the Métropole to dine with me.” A car he sends. Some car! He says it’s a Mercedes Benz car. More like a hearse, and German yet.”
“Can I ask you something, Aunt Birdie?”
“Did I ever say no? Did I ever lie to you? You asked me everything. I told you. What?”
“Did you ever sleep with Chaim Brodsky?”
She made a face, then burst out laughing. “Well, I taught you to ask questions, didn’t I? Once. One weekend.”
“You loved him?”
Birdie fussed with her photograph album and blushed.
“What did he want?”
“My notebooks.”
“What notebooks?”
“Notebooks, notebooks. I keep notebooks. Birdie kept notebooks, thirty, maybe forty years. How Chaim knows? Gossip. Rumor. The usual. Everybody knows Birdie writes things down. Only Chaim is smart enough to know this is worth something. Information. Always worth something in this cockamamie country. Chaim knows better than anyone; he’s all over the place, buying stuff, newspapers, TV, those satellites. Oh, he never uses his name; Mr Chaim Brodsky is retired, a diplomat, the Mr Know-it-all about Russia. But I know it all.” She sipped some tea.
“I knew people, I wrote things down. Some years there was nothing much to do. During the war. During purges. So Birdie stays home, keeps quiet and writes in her notebooks. Who notices what an ugly old woman is doing, right?”
“What kind of things?”
“You want more cake? It’s all right? Go on, finish the last little piece.”
“Thank you.” I ate the little piece of cake.
Without my noticing, it had grown dark. Stingy yellow lights flared on in the apartment buildings on the other side of the raw courtyard. I shut the homemade curtains for Birdie and switched on a lamp. In the pool of light I saw how old she was after all. I reached for my bag.
“A little schnapps?”
“Why not.”
I poured some Scotch from the duty-free bottle I’d brought into the teacups.
“What kind of things? All kind. Who I met. Who I saw. What I knew. Politics. Money. Who is sleeping with whom. Andropov’s socks. Did you know he wore silk socks? Paul Robeson. What a voice!”
“Did you give Brodsky the notebooks?”
“You think I’m meshugga? Of course not. I wouldn’t give Chaim Brodsky a Band-Aid if he slid down a fifty-foot razor blade into a pool of iodine, so to speak. The notebooks are for you. I want a promise you will take care of them, when I go.” She smiled like an old cat. “When I go. Which is soon, but not yet.”
“Of course. I promise. Aunt Birdie?”
“This whisky is very nice, darling. What?”
“Did you ever hear of something named red mercury?”
Birdie chuckled. “Oi from the red mercury. Suddenly everybody is after it. This is all I hear from foreigners, people writing books, making movies. So much talk, so much chatter. Of course I heard. It’s for nuclear weapons. But these reporters, you know what I tell them?”
“What?”
“I tell them I got connections. I can get some. Maybe. They even offer me money.” Birdie wept with laughter.
“Can you?”
From the next apartment came the sound of anger. A kid cried. A cat screamed. Birdie rubbed her forehead wearily.
“Why not sell the notebooks to Chaim? He’s frigging loaded, excuse me.”
“It’s all right. I don’t want Chaim’s money. You think Chaim is a great man? OK. But he has been friends with bad men. Men who busted unions. Who stole poor people’s pensions. Men who bombed innocent babies in Cambodia. Vietnam. He was friends with Robert Maxwell, Margaret Thatcher, even with Richard Nixon. He is friends with bad men now. But I’m tired,” she said and I could see it depressed her talking about a man she once loved who had abused the ideals she lived for.
“I’m tired.”
“Should I
take you back to America with me, Aunt Birdie? I could fix it.”
“What would I do in America?” she said sternly. “This is my place. I’m just tired.”
“What else do you need?”
“I need to rest now is all. Come tomorrow.”
“Can I bring someone?”
“A girl?”
“A girl.”
“She’s pretty?”
“Very.”
“Then come with your girl, Artyom. Come Wednesday. I can have my hair done Wednesday.”
When I kissed her, I felt her bones, thin and brittle as cheap chopsticks. I picked up my suitcase.
“How bad are these other friends of Brodsky’s?”
She looked at me. “Bad enough to try to kill me.”
3
From the time I had left Birdie’s until I got to the hotel where Tolya fixed me a deal, someone followed me. Maybe ghosts. Maybe spooks. I sat in a cab in a daze, smelling the fumes from the cars, from Moscow itself, watching the back of the driver’s head. He had long hair.
Was Birdie right? Was Chaim Brodsky a bad man? Had I been so flattered by him I didn’t see it? He had not told me he had seen her in Moscow, but so what?
I didn’t believe Birdie. She was old. She lived in the past. She was angry because a man she once loved had been friends with Richard Nixon and because her world had disappeared.
Who could blame her?
This Moscow was an alien place to me; for Birdie it would have been a living death. There were billboards and neon, ads for Coke and Mars bars, Versace, Chevrolet, Playboy, sex clubs. The street names had been changed. The roads were jammed with cars. I saw Alfas, BMWs, Jeeps, Buicks, Range Rovers. A Mercedes with tinted windows sped up the wrong lane, lights flashing, spewing pebbles, pollution, corruption. I picked up a copy of Izvestia; it had a business section. There were beggars next to the newsstand.
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