“You say I know who you are, but do you know who I am?” I asked him. “I’m a plain person, not very imaginative, though I don’t write a bad article. My whole life, for some reason, has been without much real adventure, except I was divorced once and remarried happily to a woman whose death I am still mourning. Now I’m here more or less on a vacation, not to jeopardize myself by taking chances of an unknown sort. What’s more—and this is the main thing I came to tell you—I wouldn’t at all be surprised if I am already under suspicion and would do you more harm than good.”
I told Levitansky about the airport incident in Kiev. “I signed a document I couldn’t even read, which was a foolish thing to do.”
“In Kiev this happened?”
“That’s right.”
He laughed dismally. “It would not happen to you if you entered through Moscow. In the Ukraine—what is your word?—they are rubes, country people.”
“That might be—nevertheless I signed the paper.”
“Do you have copy?”
“Not with me. In my desk drawer in the hotel.”
“I am certain this is receipt for your books which officials will return to you when you depart from Soviet Union.”
“That’s what I’d be afraid of.”
“Why afraid?” he asked. “Are you afraid to receive back umbrella which you have lost?”
“I’d be afraid one thing might lead to another—more questions, other searches. It would be stupid to have your manuscript in my suitcase, in Russian, no less, that I can’t even read. Suppose they accuse me of being some kind of courier transferring stolen documents?”
The thought raised me to my feet. I realized the tension in the room was thick as steam, mostly mine.
Levitansky rose, embittered. “There is no question of spying. I do not think I have presented myself as traitor to my country.”
“I didn’t say anything of the sort. All I’m saying is I don’t want to get into trouble with the Soviet authorities. Nobody can blame me for that. In other words the enterprise isn’t for me.”
“I have made at one time inquirings,” Levitansky insisted. “You will have nothing to fear for tourist who has been a few weeks in U.S.S.R. under guidance of Intourist, and does not speak Russian. They sometimes ask questions to political people, also bourgeois journalists who have made bad impression. I would deliver to you the manuscript in the last instant. It is typed on less than one hundred fifty sheets thin paper and will make small package, weightless. If it should look to you like trouble, you can leave it in dustbin. My name will not be anywhere and if they find it and track—trace to me the stories, I will answer I threw them out myself. They won’t believe this, but what other can I say? It will make no difference anyway. If I stop my writing I may as well be dead. No harm will come to you.”
“I’d rather not, if you don’t mind.”
With what I guess was a curse of despair, Levitansky reached for the portrait on his bookcase and flung it against the wall. Pasternak struck Mayakovsky, splattering him with glass, shattering himself, and both pictures crashed to the floor.
“Freelance writer,” he shouted, “go to hell to America! Tell to Negroes about Bill of Rights! Tell them they are free although you keep them slaves! Talk to sacrificed Vietnamese people that you respect them!”
Irina Filipovna entered the room on the run. “Feliks,” she entreated, “Kovalevsky hears every word!
“Please,” she begged me, “please go away. Leave poor Levitansky alone. I beg you from my miserable heart.”
I left in a hurry. The next day I flew to Leningrad.
Three days later, after a tense visit to Leningrad, I was sitting loosely in a beat-up taxi with a cheerful Intouristka, a half hour after my arrival at the Moscow airport. We were driving to the Ukraine Hotel, where I was assigned for my remaining days in the Soviet Union. I would have preferred the Metropole again because it is so conveniently located and I was used to it, but on second thought, better some place where a certain party wouldn’t know I lived. The Volga we were riding in seemed somehow familiar, but if so it was safely in the hands of a small stranger with a large wool cap, a man wearing sunglasses, who paid me no particular attention.
I had had a rather special several minutes in Leningrad on my first day. On a white summer’s evening, shortly after I had unpacked in my room at the Astoria, I discovered the Winter Palace and Hermitage after a walk along Nevsky Prospekt. Chancing on Palace Square, vast, deserted at the moment, I felt an unexpected intense emotion thinking of the revolutionary events that had occurred on this spot. My God, I thought, why should I feel myself part of Russian history? It’s a contagious business, what happens to men. On the Palace Bridge I gazed at the ice-blue Neva, in the distance the golden steeple of the cathedral built by Peter the Great gleaming under masses of wind-driven clouds in patches of green sky. It’s the Soviet Union but it’s still Russia.
The next day I woke up anxious. In the street I was approached twice by strangers speaking English; I think my suede shoes attracted them. The first, tight-eyed and badly dressed, wanted to sell me blackmarket rubles. “Nyet,” I said, tipping my straw hat and hurrying on. The second, a tall, bearded boy of about nineteen, with a left-sided tuft longer than the right, wearing a home-knitted green pullover, offered to buy jazz records, “youth clothes,” and American cigarettes. “Sorry, nothing for sale.” I escaped him too, except that green sweater followed me for a kilometer along one of the canals. I broke into a run. When I looked back he had disappeared. I slept badly—it stayed light too long past midnight; and in the morning inquired about the possibility of an immediate flight to Helsinki. I was informed I couldn’t book one for a week. I decided to return to Moscow a day before I had planned to, mostly to see what they had in the Dostoevsky Museum.
I had been thinking about Levitansky. How much of a writer was he really? I had read three of the eighteen stories he wanted to publish. Suppose he had showed me the best and the others were mediocre or thereabouts? Was it worth taking a chance for that kind of book? I thought, The best thing for my peace of mind is to forget the guy. Before checking out of the Astoria I received a chatty letter from Lillian, forwarded from Moscow, apparently not in response to my recent one to her but written earlier. Should I marry her? Did I dare? The phone rang piercingly, but when I picked up the receiver no one answered. On the plane to Moscow I had visions of a crash; there must be many nobody ever reads of.
In my room on the twelfth floor of the Ukraine I relaxed in a green plastic-covered armchair. There was also a single low bed and a utilitarian pinewood desk, an apple-green telephone plunked on it for instant use. I’ll be home in a week, I thought. Now I’d better shave and see if anything is left in the way of a concert or opera ticket for tonight. I’m in a mood for music.
The electric plug in the bathroom didn’t work, so I put away my shaver and was lathering up when I jumped to a single explosive knock on the door. I opened it slowly and there stood Levitansky with a brown paper packet in his hand.
Is this son of a bitch out to compromise me?
“How did you happen to find out where I was only twenty minutes after I got back, Mr. Levitansky?”
“How I found you?” The writer shrugged. He seemed deathly tired, the face longer, leaner, resembling a hungry fox on his last unsteady legs, but still in business.
“My brother-in-law was chauffeur for you from the airport. He heard the girl inquire your name. We have spoke of you. Dmitri—this is my wife’s brother—informed me you have registered at the Ukraine. I inquired downstairs your room number and it was granted to me.”
“However it happened,” I said firmly, “I want you to know I haven’t changed my mind. I don’t want to get more involved. I thought it all through while I was in Leningrad and that’s my decision.”
“I may come in?”
“Please, but for obvious reasons I’d appreciate a short visit.”
Levitansky sat, thin knees pressed together
, in the armchair, his parcel awkwardly on his lap. If he was happy he had found me, it did nothing for his expression.
I finished shaving, put on a fresh white shirt, and sat down on the bed. “Sorry I have nothing to offer in the way of an aperitif but I could call downstairs?”
Levitansky twiddled his fingers no. He was dressed without change down to his socks. Did his wife wash out the same pair each night, or were all his socks tricolored?
“To speak frankly,” I said, “I have to protest this constant tension you’ve whipped up in and around me. Nobody in his right mind can expect a complete stranger visiting the Soviet Union to pull his chestnuts out of the fire. It’s your country that’s hindering you as a writer, not me or the United States of America. Since you live here what can you do but live with it?”
“I love my country,” Levitansky said.
“Nobody denies it. That holds for me, though love for country—let’s face it—is a mixed bag. Nationality isn’t soul as I’m sure you agree. But what I’m also saying is there are things about his country one might not like that he has to make his peace with. I’m assuming you’re not thinking of counter-revolution. So if you’re up against a wall you can’t climb, or dig under, or outflank, at least stop banging your head against it, not to mention mine. Do what you can. It’s amazing, for instance, what can be said in a fairy tale.”
“I have written already my fairy tales,” he said moodily. “Now is the time for truth without disguises. I will make my peace to this point where it interferes with my interior liberty; and then I must stop to make my peace. My brother-in-law has also told to me, ‘You must write acceptable stories, others can do it, so why cannot you?’ And I have answered to him, ‘Yes, but must be acceptable to me!’”
“In that case, aren’t you up against the impossible? If you permit me to say it, are those Jews in your stories, if they can’t have their matzos and prayer books, any freer in their religious lives than you are as a writer? What I mean is, one has to face up to the nature of his society.”
“I have faced up. Do you face up to yours?” he asked with a flash of scorn.
“My own problem is not that I can’t express myself but that I don’t. In my own mind Vietnam is a demoralizing mistake, yet I’ve never really opposed it except to sign petitions and vote for congressmen who say they’re against the war. My first wife used to criticize me. She said I wrote the wrong things and was involved in everything but useful action. My second wife knew it but made me think she didn’t. Maybe I’m just waking up to the fact that the U.S. government has for years been mucking up my self-respect.”
Levitansky’s larynx moved up like a flag on a pole, then sank.
He tried again, saying, “The Soviet Union preservates for us the great victories of our Revolution. Because of this I have remained for years at peace with the State. Communism is still to me inspirational ideal although this historical period is spoiled by leaders with impoverished view of humanity. They have pissed on Revolution.”
“Stalin?”
“Him especially, but also others. Even so I have obeyed Party directives, and when I could not longer obey I wrote for drawer. I said to myself, ‘Levitansky, history changes every minute and also Communism will change.’ I believed if the State restricts two, three generations of artists, what is this against development of true socialist society—maybe best society of world history? So what does it mean if some of us are sacrificed to Party purpose? The aesthetic mode is not in necessity greater than politics—than needs of Revolution. Then in fifty years more will be secure the State, and all Soviet artists will say whatever they wish. This is what I tried to think, but do not longer think so. I do not believe more in partiinost, which is guided thought, an expression which is to me ridiculous. I do not think Revolution is fulfilled in country of unpublished novelists, poets, playwriters, who hide in drawers whole libraries of literature that will never be printed or if so, it will be printed after they stink in their graves. I think now the State will never be secure—never! It is not in the nature of politics, or human condition, to be finished with Revolution. Evgeny Zamyatin told: ‘There is no final revolution. Revolutions are infinite!’”
“I guess that’s along my own line of thinking,” I said, hoping for reasons of personal safety to forestall Levitansky’s ultimate confession —which he, with brooding eyes, was already relentlessly making—lest in the end it imprison me in his will and history.
“I have learned from writing my stories,” the writer was saying, “that imagination is enemy of the State. I have learned from my writing that I am not free man. I ask for your help, not to harm my country, which still has magnificent socialistic possibilities, but in order to help me escape its worst errors. I do not wish to defame Russia. My purpose in my work is to show its true heart. So have done our writers from Pushkin to Pasternak and also, in his own way, Solzhenitsyn. If you believe in democratic humanism you must help artist to be free. Is not true?”
I got up, I think to shake myself out of his question. “What exactly is my responsibility to you, Levitansky?” I tried to contain the exasperation I felt.
“We are members of mankind. If I am drowning you must assist to save me.”
“In unknown waters if I can’t swim?”
“If not, throw to me rope.”
“I’m a visitor here. I’ve told you I may be suspect. For all I know you yourself might be a Soviet agent out to get me, or the room may be bugged, and then where are we? Mr. Levitansky, please, I don’t want to hear or argue anymore. I’ll just plead personal inability and ask you to leave.”
“Bugged?”
“By a listening device planted in this room.”
Levitansky turned gray. He sat a moment in meditation, then rose wearily from the chair.
“I withdraw now request for your assistance. I accept your word that you are not capable. I do not wish to make criticism of you. All I wish to say, Gospodin Garvitz, is it requires more to change a man’s character than to change his name.”
Levitansky left the room, leaving in his wake faint fumes of cognac. He had also passed gas.
“Come back!” I called, not too loudly, but if he heard through the door he didn’t answer. Good riddance, I thought. Not that I don’t sympathize with him but look what he’s done to my interior liberty. Who has to come thousands of miles to Russia to get entangled in this kind of mess? It’s a helluva way to spend a vacation.
The writer had gone but not his sneaky manuscript. It was lying on my bed.
“That’s his baby, not mine.” Angered, I knotted my tie and slipped on my coat, then via the English-language number called for a cab.
A half hour later I was in the taxi, riding back and forth along Novo Ostapovskaya Street until I spotted the apartment house I thought it might be. It wasn’t, it was another like it. I paid the driver and walked till I thought I had located it. After going up the stairs I was sure I had. When I knocked on Levitansky’s door, the writer, looking older, distant—as if he’d been away on a trip and had just returned; or maybe simply interrupted at his work, his thoughts still in his words on the page, his pen in hand—stared at me. Very blankly.
“Levitansky, my heart breaks for you, I swear, but I am not, at this time of my life, considering my condition and recent experiences, in much of a mood to embark on a dangerous adventure. Please accept deepest regrets.”
I thrust the manuscript into his hand and went down the stairs. Hurrying out of the building, I was, to my horror, unable to avoid Irina Levitansky coming in. Her eyes lit in fright as she recognized me an instant before I hit her full force and sent her sprawling along the walk.
“Oh, my God, what have I done? I beg your pardon!” I helped the dazed, hurt woman to her feet, brushed off her soiled skirt, and futilely, her pink blouse, split and torn on her lacerated arm and shoulder. I stopped dead when I felt myself experiencing erotic sensation.
Irina Filipovna held a handkerchief to her bloody nostril and we
pt a little. We sat on a stone bench, a girl of ten and her little brother watching us. Irina said something to them in Russian and they moved off.
“I was frightened of you also as you are of us,” she said. “I trust you now because Levitansky does. But I will not urge you to take the manuscript. The responsibility is for you to decide.”
“It’s not a responsibility I want.”
She said as though to herself, “Maybe I will leave Levitansky. He is wretched so much it is no longer a marriage. He drinks. Also he does not earn a living. My brother Dmitri allows him to drive the taxi two, three hours of the day, to my brother’s disadvantage. Except for a ruble or two from this, I support him. Levitansky does not longer receive translation commissions. Also a neighbor in the house—I am sure Kovalevsky—has denounced him to the police for delinquency and parasitism. There will be a hearing. Levitansky says he will burn his manuscripts.”
I said I had just returned the package of stories.
“He will not,” she said. “But even if he burns, he will write more. If they take him away in prison he will write on toilet paper. When he comes out, he will write on newspaper margins. He sits this minute at his table. He is a magnificent writer. I cannot ask him not to write, but now I must decide if this is the condition I wish for myself for the rest of my life.”
Irina sat in silence, an attractive woman with shapely legs and feet, in a soiled skirt and torn blouse. I left her on the stone bench, her handkerchief squeezed in her fist.
The Complete Stories Page 53