That night—July 2, I was leaving the Soviet Union on the fifth—I experienced massive self-doubt. If I’m a coward why has it taken me so long to discover it? Where does anxiety end and cowardice begin? Feelings get mixed, sure enough, but not all cowards are anxious men and not all anxious men are cowards. Many “sensitive” (Rose’s word), tense, even frightened human beings did in fear what had to be done, the fear calling up effort when it’s time to fight or jump off a rooftop into a river. There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to—if there are no doors or windows—he walks through a wall.
On the other hand, suppose one is courageous in a hopeless cause —you concentrate on courage but not enough on horse sense? To get to the point of the problem endlessly on my mind, how do I finally decide it’s a sensible and worthwhile thing to smuggle out Levitansky’s manuscript, given my reasonable doubts of the ultimate worth of the operation? Granted, as I now grant, he’s trustworthy and his wife is that and more; still, does it pay a man like me to run the risk?
If six thousand Soviet writers can’t do very much to squeeze out another drop of freedom as artists, who am I to fight their battle—H. Harvitz, knight-of-the-freelance from Manhattan? How far do you go, granted all men, including Communists, are created free and equal and justice is for all? How far do you go for art, if you’re for Yeats, Matisse, and Ludwig van Beethoven? Not to mention Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. So far as to get yourself intentionally involved: the HH Ms. Smuggling Service? Will the President and State Department send up three cheers for my contribution to the cause of artistic social justice? And suppose it amounts to no more than a gaffe in the end?—What will I prove if I sneak out Levitansky’s manuscript and all it turns out to be is just another passable book of stories?
That’s how I argued with myself on more than one occasion, but soon I argued myself into solid indecision. What it boils down to, I’d say, is he expects me to help him because I’m an American. That’s quite a nerve.
Two nights later—odd not to have the Fourth of July on July 4 (I was listening for firecrackers)—a quiet light-lemon summer’s evening in Moscow, after two monotonously uneasy days, though I was still writing museum notes, for relief I took myself off to the Bolshoi to hear Tosca. It was sung in Russian by a busty lady and a handsome Slavic tenor, but the Italian plot was unchanged, and in the end Scarpia, who had promised “death” by fake bullets, gave in sneaky exchange a fusillade of hot lead; another artist bit the dust and Floria Tosca learned the hard way that love wasn’t what she had thought.
Next to me sat another full-breasted woman, this one a lovely Russian of maybe thirty in a white dress that fitted a well-formed figure, her blond hair piled in a birdlike mass on her splendid head. Lillian could look like that though not Rose. This woman—sitting alone, it turned out—spoke flawless English in a mezzo-soprano with a slight accent.
During the first intermission she asked in friendly fashion, managing to seem detached but interested: “Are you American? Or perhaps Swedish?”
“Not Swedish. American is correct. How did you happen to guess?”
“I noticed, if it does not bother you that I say it,” she remarked with a charming laugh, “a certain self-satisfaction.”
“You got the wrong party.”
When she opened her purse a fragrance of springtime burst forth —fresh flowers; the warmth of her body rose to my nostrils. I was moved by memories of the hungers of youth—dreams, longing.
During intermission she touched my arm and said in a low voice, “May I ask a favor? Do you depart soon from the Soviet Union?”
“In fact tomorrow.”
“How fortunate for me. Would it offer too much difficulty to mail, wherever you are going, an airmail letter addressed to my husband, who is presently in Paris? Our airmail service takes two weeks to arrive in the West. I shall be grateful.”
I glanced at the envelope addressed half in French, half in Cyrillic, and said I wouldn’t mind. But during the next act sweat grew active on my body, and at the end of the opera, after Tosca’s shriek of death, I handed the letter back to the not wholly surprised lady, saying I was sorry. I had the feeling I had heard her voice before. I hurried back to the hotel, determined not to leave my room for any reason other than breakfast; then out and into the wide blue sky.
I later fell asleep over a book and a bottle of sweetish warm beer a waiter had brought up, pretending to myself I was relaxed though I was concerned with worried thoughts of the departure and flight home; and when I awoke, three minutes on my wristwatch later, it seemed to me I had made the acquaintance of some new nightmares. I was momentarily panicked by the idea that someone had planted a letter on me, and I searched through the pockets of my two suits. Nyet. Then I recalled that in one of my dreams a drawer in a table I was sitting at had slowly come open, and Feliks Levitansky, a dwarf who lived in it along with a few friendly mice, managed to scale the wooden wall on the comb he used as a ladder, and to hop from the drawer ledge to the top of the table. He leered in my face, shook his Lilliputian fist, and shouted in high-pitched but (to me) understandable Russian, “Atombombnik! You massacred innocent Japanese people! Amerikansky bastards!”
“That’s unfair,” I cried out. “I was no more than a kid in college.”
That’s a sad dream, I thought.
Afterwards this occurred to me: Suppose what happened to Levitansky happens to me. Suppose America gets caught up in a war with China in some semi-reluctant stupid way, and to make fast hash of it—despite my frantic loud protestations: mostly I wave my arms and shout obscenities—we spatter them, before they can get going, with a few dozen H-bombs, boiling up a thick atomic soup of about two hundred million Orientals—blood, gristle, marrow, and lots of floating Chinese eyeballs. We win the war because the Soviets hadn’t been able to make up their minds whom to shoot their missiles at first. And suppose after this unheard-of slaughter, about ten million Americans, in selfrevulsion, head for the borders to flee the country. To stop the loss of wealth, the refugees are intercepted by the army in tanks and turned back. Harvitz hides in his room with shades drawn, writing in a fury of protest an epic poem condemning the mass butchery by America. What nation, Asiatic or other, is next? Nobody in the States wants to publish the poem because it might start riots and another flight of refugees to Canada and Mexico; then one day there’s a knock on the door, and it isn’t the FBI but a bearded Levitansky, in better times a Soviet tourist, a modern, not medieval, Communist. He kindly offers to sneak the manuscript of the poem out for publication in the Soviet Union.
Why? Harvitz suspiciously asks.
Why not? To give the book its liberty.
I awoke after a restless night. I had been instructed by Intourist to be in the lobby with my baggage two hours before flight time, at 11 a.m. I was shaved and dressed by six, and at seven had breakfast—I was very hungry—of yogurt, sausage, and scrambled eggs in the twelfth-floor buffet. I went out to hunt for a taxi. They were hard to come by at this hour, but I finally located one near the American Embassy, not far from the hotel. Speaking my usual mixture of primitive German and French, I persuaded the driver by first suggesting, then slipping him an acceptable two rubles, to take me to Levitansky’s house and wait a few minutes till I came out. Going hastily up the stairs, I knocked on his door, apologizing when he opened it, to the half-pajamaed, iron-faced writer, for waking him this early in the day. Without peace of mind or certainty of purpose I asked him whether he still wanted me to smuggle out his manuscript of stories. I got for my trouble the door slammed in my face.
A half hour later I had everything packed and was locking the suitcase. A knock on the door—half a rap, you might call it. For the suitcase, I thought. I was momentarily startled by the sight of a small man in a thick cap wearing a long trench coat. He winked, and against my will I winked back. I had recognized Levitansky’s brother-in-law Dmitri, the taxi driver. He slid in, unbuttoned his coat, and brought forth the wrapped manuscript. Holding a fin
ger to his lips, he handed it to me before I could say I was no longer interested.
“Levitansky changed his mind?”
“Not changed mind,” he whispered. “Was afraid your voice to be heard by Kovalevsky.”
“I’m sorry, I should have thought of that.”
“Levitansky say not write to him,” the brother-in-law said in a low tone. “When is published book, please to send to him copy of Das Kapital. He will understand message.”
I reluctantly agreed.
The brother-in-law, a short shapeless figure with sad eyes, winked again, shook hands with a steamy palm, and slipped out of my room.
I unlocked my suitcase and laid the manuscript on top of my shirts. Then I unpacked half the contents and slipped the manuscript into a folder containing my notes on literary museums and a few letters from Lillian. I then and there decided that if I got back to the States, the next time I saw her I would ask her to marry me. The phone was ringing as I left the room.
On my way to the airport, alone in a taxi—no Intourist girl accompanied me—I felt, on and off, nauseated. If it’s not the sausage and yogurt it must just be ordinary fear. Still, if Levitansky has the courage to send these stories out, the least I can do is give him a hand. When one thinks of it it’s little enough he does for human freedom during the course of his life. At the airport if I can dig up a Bromo or its Russian equivalent I know I’ll feel better.
The driver was observing me in the mirror, a stern man with the head of a scholar, impassively smoking.
“Le jour fait beau,” I said.
He pointed with an upraised finger to a sign in English at one side of the road to the airport:
“Long live peace in the world!”
“Peace with freedom.” I smiled at the thought of somebody, not Howard Harvitz, painting that in red on the Soviet sign.
We drove on, I foreseeing my exit from the Soviet Union. I had made discreet inquiries from time to time and an Intourist girl in Leningrad had told me I had first to show my papers at the passport-control desk, turn in all my rubles—a serious offense to walk off with any—and then check luggage; no inspection, she swore. And that was that. Unless, of course, the official at the passport desk found my name on a list and said I had to go to the customs office for a package. In that case—if nobody said so I wouldn’t remind him—I would go get my books. I figured I wouldn’t open the package, just tear off a bit of the wrapping, if they were wrapped, as though to make sure they were the books I expected, and then saunter away with the package under my arm.
I had heard that a KGB man was stationed at the ramp as one boarded a plane. He asked for your passport, checked the picture, threw you a stare through dark lenses, and, if there was no serious lack of resemblance, tore out your expired visa, pocketed it, and let you embark.
In ten minutes you were aloft, seat belts fastened in three languages, watching the plane banking west. Maybe if I looked hard I might see in the distance Feliks Levitansky on the roof waving his red-white-and-blue socks on a bamboo pole. Then the plane leveled off, and we were above the clouds, flying westward. And that’s what I would be doing for five or six hours unless the pilot received radio instructions to turn back; or maybe land in Czechoslovakia or East Germany, where two big-hatted detectives boarded the plane. By an act of imagination and will I made it some other passenger they were arresting. I got the plane into the air again and we flew on without incident until we touched down in free London.
As the taxi approached the Moscow airport, fingering my ticket and gripping my suitcase handle, I wished for courage equal to Levitansky’s when they discovered he was the author of a book of stories I had managed to get published, and his trial and suffering began.
Levitansky’s first story, translated by his wife, Irina Filipovna, was about an old man, a widower of seventy-eight, who hoped to have matzos for Passover.
Last year he had got his quota. They had been baked in the State bakery and sold in the State stores; but this year the State bakeries were not permitted to bake them. The officials said the machines had broken down but who believed them?
The old man went to the rabbi, an older man with a tormented beard, and asked him where he could get matzos. He feared that he mightn’t have them this year.
“So do I,” confessed the old rabbi. He said he had been told to tell his congregants to buy flour and bake them at home. The State stores would sell them the flour.
“What good is that for me?” asked the widower. He reminded the rabbi that he had no home to speak of, a single small room with a one-burner electric stove. His wife had died two years ago. His only living child, a married daughter, was with her husband in Birobijan. His other relatives—the few who were left after the German invasion—two female cousins his age—lived in Odessa; and he himself, even if he could find an oven, did not know how to bake matzos. And if he couldn’t what should he do?
The rabbi then promised he would try to get the widower a kilo or two of matzos, and the old man, rejoicing, blessed him.
He waited anxiously a month but the rabbi never mentioned the matzos. Maybe he had forgotten. After all he was an old man burdened with worries, and the widower did not want to press him. However, Passover was coming on wings, so he must do something. A week before the Holy Days he hurried to the rabbi’s flat and spoke to him there.
“Rabbi,” he begged, “you promised me a kilo or two of matzos. What happened to them?”
“I know I promised,” said the rabbi, “but I’m no longer sure to whom. It’s easy to promise.” He dabbed at his face with a damp handkerchief. “I was warned I could be arrested on charges of profiteering in the production and sale of matzos. I was told it could happen even if I were to give them away for nothing. It’s a new crime they’ve invented. Still, take them anyway. If they arrest me, I’m an old man, and how long can an old man live in Lubyanka? Not so long, thanks God. Here, I’ll give you a small pack but you must tell no one where you got the matzos.”
“May the Lord eternally bless you, rabbi. As for dying in prison, rather let it happen to our enemies.”
The rabbi went to his closet and got out a small pack of matzos, already wrapped and tied with knotted twine. When the widower offered in a whisper to pay him, at least the cost of the flour, the rabbi wouldn’t hear of it. “God provides,” he said, “although at times with difficulty.” He said there was hardly enough for all who wanted matzos, so he must take what he got and be thankful.
“I will eat less,” said the old man. “I will count mouthfuls. I will save the last matzo to look at and kiss if there isn’t enough to last me. He will understand.”
Overjoyed to have even a few matzos, he rode home on the trolley car and there met another Jew, a man with a withered hand. They conversed in Yiddish in low tones. The stranger had glanced at the almost square package, then at the widower, and had hoarsely whispered, “Matzos?” The widower, tears starting in his eyes, nodded. “With God’s grace.” “Where did you get them?” “God provides.” “So if He provides let Him provide me,” the stranger brooded. “I’m not so lucky. I was hoping for a package from relatives in Cleveland, America. They wrote they would send me a large pack of the finest matzos, but when I inquire of the authorities they say no matzos have arrived. You know when they will get here?” he muttered. “After Passover by a month or two, and what good will they be then?”
The widower nodded sadly. The stranger wiped his eyes with his good hand and after a short while left the trolley amid a number of people getting off. He had not bothered to say goodbye, and neither had the widower, not to remind him of his own good fortune. But when the time came for the old man to leave the trolley he glanced down between his feet where he had placed the package of matzos, and nothing was there. His feet were there. The old man felt harrowed, as though someone had ripped a large nail up his spine. He searched frantically throughout that car, going a long way past his stop, querying every passenger, the woman conductor, the motorman, but th
ey all swore they had not seen his matzos.
Then it occurred to him that the stranger with the withered hand had stolen them.
The widower in his misery asked himself, Would a Jew have robbed another of his precious matzos? It didn’t seem possible, but it was.
As for me I haven’t even a matzo to look at now. If I could steal any, whether from Jew or Russian, I would steal them. He thought he would steal them even from the old rabbi.
The widower went home without his matzos and had none for Passover.
The story called “Tallith” concerned a youth of seventeen, beardless but for some stray hairs on his chin, who had come from Kirov to the steps of the synagogue on Arkhipova Street in Moscow. He had brought with him a capacious prayer shawl, a white garment of luminous beauty, which he offered for sale to a cluster of Jews of various sorts and sizes—curious, apprehensive, greedy at the sight of the shawl—for fifteen rubles. Most of them avoided the youth, particularly the older Jews, despite the fact that some of the more devout among them were worried about their prayer shawls, eroded on their shoulders after years of daily use, which they could not replace. “It’s the informers among us who have put him up to this,” they whispered among themselves, “so they will have someone to inform on.”
Still, in spite of the warnings of their elders, several of the younger men examined the tallith and admired it. “Where did you get such a fine prayer shawl?” the youth was asked. “It was my father’s who recently died,” he said. “It was given to him by a rich Jew he had once befriended.” “Then why don’t you keep it for yourself, you’re a Jew, aren’t you?” “Yes,” said the youth, not the least embarrassed, “but I am going to Bratsk as a komsomol volunteer and I need a few rubles to get married. Besides I’m a confirmed atheist.”
One young man with fat unshaven cheeks, who admired the deeply white shawl, its white glowing in whiteness, with its long silk fringes, whispered to the youth he might consider buying it for five rubles. But he was overheard by the gabbai, the lay leader of the congregation, who raised his cane and shouted at the whisperer, “Hooligan, if you buy that shawl, beware it doesn’t become your shroud.” The Jew with the unshaven cheeks retreated.
The Complete Stories Page 54