Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  And then it was over, the look was gone. Joe would get up, pay both of their bills, and then, with another little shake of his head, walk out into the night—for a very brief moment a carefree man—leaving Alden to mull over, and make what sense he could of the stumbling confessions that had tumbled from Joe’s mouth, like a man in a dream.

  IT WAS NOT ALWAYS like that, though. In a different mood, Joe would talk cogently about the time he’d spent in New York working underground. Brag, almost, about how different things had been back then.

  That had been real spy work, he said. Now everything was just politics—too easy. Before, all communications between Moscow and New York depended on microfilm and invisible ink. Codes had to be smuggled in. By Germans, for example, working on the Hamburg-American line—slid beneath the glass of Woolworth’s pocket mirrors, or the backs of dental plates. Even once they had safely arrived, it was no easy process to decode them. They’d be triple-typed and in need of a bath of potassium permanganate before, at last, the red-brown ink of the Russian text suddenly appeared between the lines. How easy the Soviet spy had it now! Joe said. If he had even a few of his wits about him. How simple it was for him! To make “a clean sweep of just about anything he wanted, and, to boot, a whole lot he didn’t.”

  He’d become agitated just thinking about it. Even angry. Which was odd, when you considered the situation. How he, too, would have found himself suddenly in a very bad position (as soon enough he did) if it turned out not to be quite so simple anymore.

  The problem, Joe complained, was not too little information—but too much. There were too many factions and divisions, he said—and all of them working at cross-purposes. But there was one thing they all had in common, Joe said. They were all glutted with opportunists— those whose “investigative” efforts so far had only served to make them greedy and soft. They just enjoyed it all a little too much. Shopping at Woolworth’s, eating American food—even making American babies (whose citizenship served as a security device for them, just in case the revolution failed). And their “spy” work? Joe said. It consisted of nothing more rigorous than the research of a graduate student! In Russia, American spies had trouble getting their hands on a phone book! In America—everything was open and for the taking. At first they couldn’t even believe their luck. They bought up patents by the truckload, Joe said. Ordered technical manuals for aircrafts and explosives. Bought endless amounts of sample powders directly from the explosive manufacturers—who sent them out indiscriminately, eager for business. It was with sheer amazement that the newcomers settled into their new lives. America. Where everything, including spy work, came easy!

  He recalled, for example, Vladimir Burtinsky—whose orientation was one of his first underground tasks—gloating over his drink (of which he was overly fond, and which would soon prove his undoing) that the country was in fact built for spies. (Less than a year later Burtinsky was killed as he exited a bar. He had been last seen flashing a roll of bills recently won at a game of craps—in sheer delight at the incredible role of chance in his affairs! Shortly after, he was mugged, and left to die in the street.)

  It was discovered only later that Burtinsky had, some time before, been taken in by a con man: code-named Crumb. For a price, Crumb supplied Burtinsky with false transcripts of recorded conversations between foreign ambassadors, the authenticity of which Burtinsky did not doubt, and the sensational quality and content of which he was particularly proud. For months—until just shortly before his death, when at last he became suspicious—Burtinsky passed these false documents on to Moscow. Finally, though, he had no choice but to cable Moscow, admitting his error: “We now must assume that there is no Vernon,” he wrote, referring to a previous wire. “That he and others were fictitious creations by Crumb, which served his own purposes and sizably increased his remuneration.”

  There was a growing awareness of what this meant around that time—due mostly to people like Joe Hodge who had returned from assignments in Russia as rattled and pale as he, and recounted, in the stunned monotonous rhythm of sleepwalkers or the criminally insane, what they had seen. Many returning spies, they reported, were simply being shot. This was, if uncomfortable, at least relatively easy to imagine. More difficult were the accounts of the gulags, and not least because it was nearly impossible to get anyone to talk with any sort of certainty about what they’d witnessed there if they’d been. They would rub their eyes and shake their heads as if they no longer trusted themselves or their memories—which seemed to them now more like nightmares than anything they’d actually seen.

  It is an open question, if Burtinsky had not met his own end in the way that he did due to the pleasure he took in his newfound freedom to increase or decrease his own remuneration at will (he had, apparently, spent the majority of his money and time in America gambling and drinking—often appearing at party meetings either still drunk from the night before or fighting such a terrible case of alcoholinduced vertigo that it was necessary for him to lie down prostrate on the floor during meetings, insisting from time to time, with his eyes closed, “I’m still listening”), whether or not he might have met the same fate as so many other spies who, after some similar gaffe, toward which so many of the spies who made their way into the country were prone, would be recalled to the Soviet Union only in order to swiftly disappear.

  BY 1934, AMERICANS, TOO, began to be “recalled” to Moscow—only then to disappear. Most of these disappearances were so cloaked in mystery, or obscured by conflicting information if any could indeed be gathered, that they were hardly worth speculating about—and, at first, the majority of American party members remained largely unconcerned. If you weren’t careful, or didn’t play by party rules, it was little wonder— they told themselves, and one another—there were some “accidents” along the way.

  Alden, like nearly everyone else at that time with connections to the party, thought of these incidents in more or less the same way they had thought of Burtinsky’s penchant for gambling. If one was foolhardy enough to play with chance, sooner or later one was bound to lose. It was the most basic American principle, which they continued to take on faith: people, for the most part, asked for, and therefore deserved, what they got.

  But right after the creation of the first New Deal projects, there was a rash of prominent party defectors and, as more and more of them began to speak out, an increased sense that—when it came to Moscow—not much was ever left to chance. One of these defectors was Elizabeth Gregory, an acquaintance of Joe’s from his Pioneer days.

  Alden was introduced to Elizabeth one night shortly before she disappeared. She had been visiting the capital “on business,” and, for company, had taken along her disarmingly beautiful cousin, Bits—whose one intelligence (Elizabeth said on her behalf) was that she kept well out of political affairs.

  As far as Joe and Alden could later recall, Bits herself never uttered a single word of her own the entire night. She wore her blond hair in tight curls like a china doll, and once Alden caught a glimpse of her teeth—each one small and pointed like a fox’s, in perfect rows—when she cut the evening short with an exaggerated yawn. Except for that one—final—occasion, though, she kept her mouth shut tightly in a painted line.

  Elizabeth was the opposite of Bits in every way. She was a big, soft-looking brunette. The sort of girl who made you want to just go up to her and squeeze. Not attractive, exactly, but not unattractive, either. She had big lips, which she painted sloppily with bright red lipstick, and her mouth hung, just a little, so you almost didn’t notice, to the side. Joe said that was on account of some early childhood paralysis, but if you didn’t know that you would just assume that she had developed the habit of talking out of the side of her mouth.

  And she talked. Nearly incessantly. But it was the sort of talk—just like Alden’s old friend Jack Nancy’s—that you hardly noticed. It was more like listening to yourself think. One thing just slid, naturally, into the next. That was why it was such a surprise when Bi
ts suddenly opened her mouth and cut the evening short—flashing those perfect little teeth. Everyone got up in a hurry after that and went home—made shy, suddenly, even after the six or seven drinks they’d tossed down and the relative obscurity of the darkened corner of the bar in which they had taken cover. The ordinary boundaries (which had seemed, for a very short while, gloriously, to have been expunged) had been, in that moment, suddenly, disastrously, reimposed.

  But before that happened, they had felt—all of them—the way that one only can when one is young and has drunk a little too much in the company of strangers. And years later, Alden had to admit (though he was not then, and never had been, a religious man) that there existed in him a hope—an expectation, even—that at the end, regardless of when and how it came, he would be granted at least some semblance of the feeling that coursed through his veins that night, as he drank steadily with Joe Hodge and Elizabeth and little foxlike Bits, when they were all still, more or less, who they said they were and believed themselves to be, and no one had yet fled, or gone thoroughly underground, or fallen ten stories to their death, or otherwise disappeared. When, to the contrary, they were all very much alive, and even Joe, with his heavy head and his stiff shoulders, seemed to be part of an unstoppable buzz inside Alden’s brain, and everything was lit from the inside by a single glow.

  Maybe he was in love with Elizabeth, or Bits, or even with Joe himself that night—it was that sort of a glow. Even though all night Elizabeth talked only of her work with the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, of its—her eyes had flashed—absolute corruption, and though she even intimated at times that she feared, if not that she foresaw, in its entirety, what was to come, as she flashed her dark eyes again, and her slightly off-kilter smile hardened at the edges—an expression that Alden would read only later, against the grain of time, as a kind of desperate plea—he felt it. For the first time, he was in love. But was it not, perhaps, after all, with that possibility itself, that he was in love? The possibility that it was already too late for anything—even, or especially, love? Did he not feel a distinct thrill, that night, of their proximity to everything going, as it very soon afterward did, so terribly wrong?

  But still, there was no way of knowing then, despite how that not knowing might have thrilled them, what would become of Elizabeth—or of themselves. It was that very night, you see, that Elizabeth made up her mind to quit the party. She announced her decision definitively— just before the fox’s yawn interrupted their little party and they were scattered shyly again, out into the street.

  ONLY THREE MONTHS LATER, Elizabeth Gregory disappeared. Suddenly, and without any explanation. No trace of her was ever found. And, although at one point, early in the war, it was suggested that several dozen American “former employees of the Soviet Union” were being held in Russian prison camps, by then there was a real war, and Russia was an ally, and the rumor died out after having made only the slightest ripple.

  Joe was the one to tell Alden—one afternoon after work. He drank more, and more rapidly than usual, as he spoke, but it was as if each drink, rather than making him drunk, made him more and more sober, until he seemed to become absolutely frozen and Alden had to steer him from the room like that. He very nearly had to lift Joe’s legs for him in order to get him into a cab, and then try not to worry about what would happen on the other end—if he would recognize his own house when he got there, and be able to make it inside. Or if instead he might, over the course of the short ride, solidify into a final, unmoving effigy of himself, and this final loss. A loss that was, indeed, perhaps the last blow for Joe, because it was by then only a few short months before he, too, would disappear, leaving only slightly more of a trace.

  Alden knew he should have gone with Joe that night, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He couldn’t bring himself to look at him one moment longer, in fact, and packed him off more perfunctorily than he should have, or than the situation warranted. He turned quickly, before the cab had even rolled out of sight, anticipating the relief he would feel once he was released from his company—which had become, in the past weeks, even before Elizabeth’s disappearance, increasingly oppressive. But, instead, he was greeted only by a familiar emptiness, then a sudden sweeping sensation of his own loss. One that stretched into the furthest and most unreachable corners of his heart, which until that moment he hadn’t known had existed at all.

  LATER, ALDEN WOULD RECALL the way Elizabeth had, in support of her sensational announcement, listed off the things that had, she said, pushed her over the top.

  One, she said, counting the point out on one hand, was the famine— which, “as Hodge here can attest,” had been anything but a fantasy. Two: the lengths the party had now gone in order to recruit new members. Dressing up like Ku Klux Klan members, for one example, she said. Had they heard that one? In order to scare up the black vote. Three: the absolute lack of concern for the security of party members doing underground work. She herself had already seen half a dozen friends disappear “underground” forever (Alden could not help but feel a chill run down his spine at this—had this already happened to him? he wondered. How would he know it if and when he himself, finally, “disappeared”?). And then, of course, there was the issue of those “invited” to Russia, for training or to sort out a delicate “misunderstanding.” The list went on.

  In fact, Alden didn’t realize until long after that night—until he had folded Joe’s stiff limbs into the cab and it had driven away—that, despite the chill that had inadvertently run down his spine at Elizabeth’s words, he had failed to properly listen. In part this was because of the disarming beauty of Bits, who had been seated across from him, and in part it was because of the (not unrelated) growing warmth that had all that time been spreading through him. It was nice to have company. To be buoyed by the flirtatious vitality of Elizabeth’s steady stream of conversation— an interruption to the monotony of his days—and he remembered thinking that he would need to find more women to spend time with after that. That they really did provide the necessary release from the strain of the working day. That without women, one might become—like Joe (though even he had a wife)—on the whole, really quite dull. By the time all of Elizabeth’s fingers had been counted out flat, Alden found that he had missed more than half.

  Sooner or later, Elizabeth had said then, everyone who once supported the party (and here her eyes flashed at Joe, causing Alden to wonder suddenly if there was anything, or had been anything before, of a romantic nature between them, if such a thing was possible) would be grossly disappointed.

  But Alden was himself not terribly troubled by the warning. And as she continued to speak, he was still hardly listening, instead thinking primarily now of the possibility that Joe had indeed had relations with Elizabeth, and if so, what kind. Wondering if Elizabeth was as freethinking in her sexual practices and policies as she was in other areas, and if perhaps tonight was not a night that would end triumphantly for them all.

  THINKING ABOUT THIS MONTHS later as, after disposing of Joe, he walked home alone, made him feel about ready to burst with longing. It was a strange, inside-out feeling—almost as though he had burst already, and so wanted now only to be able to put everything back together again. He hadn’t felt that way since he’d read the news about the Indian on the front page of the Washington Post . Everything in little pieces inside him—even his blood coursing through his veins suddenly in pieces, like little bits of glass, so that as he walked he actually began to itch all over in this crazy way. He had to stop in the middle of the street, even, in order to scratch at his skin, and the way that his fingernails felt on his arms—their absolute impotence on the surface of his skin, as they failed utterly to disrupt whatever it was that was at that moment coursing through his veins—was so enraging to him that he simply sat down on the road and cried.

  He hoped, as he cried, that he did so mostly for poor Elizabeth Gregory, who had so recently disappeared, but it was more probable—and he recognized
it, as he continued to weep—that he did so for Joe, and for himself. And perhaps a little for the Indian—though he had been dead by then nearly two years. Or (but here he began to tremble) for Arthur. Whose name he could hardly bear to pronounce inside his mind.

  It was almost as if even the rough idea of the man he had betrayed— in so vast a way, and so irredeemably, that he could not even understand exactly how, or in what form—touched too close to … whatever it was … that knot at the core of himself, which he could not undo. On account of it, whenever his mind drifted even close to Arthur, or Douglas, or the events of the twenty-eighth of July, 1932, he flinched in almost physical pain. He thought of what the Indian had said (it was, he realized only then, very nearly the last thing he’d said), about Arthur—how he had lived out at least a part of his life in the body of another man, and he wondered if perhaps such a thing, without his noticing it, had happened to him. That somehow it was Arthur’s life and not his own that—having inadvertently stumbled into it somehow—he was obliged to carry on with now. It would explain the physical pain he felt, increasingly perhaps, at the memory of him—when he could not, by his usual means, keep it at bay—as well as why Arthur himself, so far as he knew, had all but disappeared—