by Peter Golden
“Besides your bad taste, why not?”
Because, I replied, my listeners were accustomed to doo-wop and early rockers, and I wanted to stick with that, shoehorning in some new tunes I liked: the Beatles, of course, but also Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” and “She’s Not There” by the Zombies, to name just two.
“Govnyuk!” he said.
Emma had used that word; it meant shithead. According to my grandmother, it was rumored that Vladimir Lenin used the same word to describe anyone who disagreed with him.
Dmitry was relentless and even pulled a switcheroo on me, spinning “If I Fell” when I’d written “Silhouettes” by the Rays on the playlist. I let it go. Dmitry did bear more than a passing resemblance to Ringo—small and thin with a prominent nose and a hangdog expression that was oddly paired with a perpetual zany smile—but I doubted this explained his obsession. Taft had mentioned that Dmitry had been in West Germany for only three months, and I wondered how a Soviet kid had become so fixated on a British group. Curious, and hoping to end the playlist war, I invited him to have dinner with me.
* * *
The desk clerk at my hotel recommended the Hofbräuhaus, and when Dmitry and I arrived, an oompah band was going at it—a tuba, trombone, and clarinet slugging it out with an accordion while patrons swayed drunkenly on the benches and drank from their Masskrüge, the dimpled glass steins that held over a quart of beer.
“Too loud,” I said.
Dodging three waitresses in colorful bodices and skirts, all of them miraculously carrying ten steins of lager, we went out to a walled garden. It was so quiet in the garden, I could hear water gurgling in the fountain with a granite lion crouched on top. A stringy waitress, her silver-blue hair in tiny pigtails, brought us menus. She was older than the ones inside—old enough to remember the war—because when Dmitry ordered roast chicken in Russian, she looked at me as if she’d fallen in a pool and couldn’t swim. I repeated Dmitry’s request in my phrase-book German and said that I’d have the same.
“You enjoy scaring people?” I asked after the waitress had gone.
“I only speak Russian, and the language scares Germans. Not that I care. My father lost his legs fighting Fritzes.”
I recalled my father saying that the Russians referred to the war as Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna—the Great Patriotic War. But I didn’t hear about it in school until eleventh grade, when my world history teacher mentioned that the Red Army had lost over eight million soldiers, and that Stalin had been indifferent to the suffering of his people. I asked Emma about it, and she replied, “Stalin was no sweetheart. Now go study for your test.” But we had no tests about Stalin or his army. Movies like The Young Lions and The Longest Day, along with the TV show Combat! and Sgt. Rock comic books, taught me everything I was expected to know about World War II—America had done civilization a favor and kicked Hitler’s ass. With the Cold War in full poisonous flower, I understood why nobody wanted to trumpet Soviet achievements or bring up our former alliance. Yet after seeing the waitress’s response to Dmitry, I started thinking about those omissions and the Germans who wanted the war-crimes trials to stop, and it struck me that everyone gets to write their own past—winners and losers and liars alike.
Dmitry asked, “Was your father in the army?”
“He tried to enlist, but his eyesight was terrible.”
Dmitry chuckled, but it was off-key, as if he were holding his outrage at bay. “My father jokes that Comrade Stalin and General Zhukov lost so many soldiers they sent the blind to fight.”
“Is your father still alive?”
“Oh, yes. He has much to live for. Every May he puts on his uniform and medals and goes to Red Square with his old comrades to celebrate Victory Day—the anniversary of our triumph over Germany. He is a real magician, my father.”
“A magician? Like he pulls rabbits out of hats?”
“Like he makes vodka disappear.”
Without glancing at either of us, the waitress brought our beers and took off.
Dmitry raised his glass. “To your health.”
I returned his toast and sipped my beer. Dmitry was also an accomplished magician, and he made over a pint of lager disappear before setting his stein on the table.
“So how did you learn about the Beatles in Russia?”
“In my business. Rok na kostyakh.”
“Rock on bones?”
Dmitry reached into a pocket of his suit coat, then gave me a disk the size and shape of a 45 record, only thinner and with a much smaller hole in the center. The disk had a shadowy picture of a rib cage on it.
“Is this an X-ray?”
“Was. Now it is the Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There.’ Rock on bones, understand?”
I nodded. “What I don’t understand is how you copied the songs.”
“My friends built machines. A gramophone with an extra stylus connected to another gramophone to cut a groove. You cannot get vinyl in Russia, so we use X-rays. My mother is a doctor at Kremlin Hospital; I was an orderly there and removed X-rays from trash cans. Then I cut them into circles and burned in holes with cigarettes. One of my friends had a brother who was a sailor and could get albums from England. We copied the songs, and I sold them to university students. I earned six times my salary as an orderly.”
I handed him the disk, and Dmitry, his face glum, slid it into his pocket. “I carry it to remember home and my mother.”
“Why did you leave?”
A logical question, but by asking it, I got a peek at the paranoia that was the hallmark of the Soviet image—from Khrushchev grousing to American reporters about the nefarious forces that prevented him from visiting Disneyland to the antics of Boris and Natasha, the kooky spies on Rocky and His Friends.
Glancing over his shoulder, as if the couple getting up from the table behind us were eavesdropping, Dmitry didn’t speak until they had gone. “The police started arresting people for making and selling rock on bones.”
“Counterfeiting records is also illegal in America.”
There was a mix of exasperation and contempt on his face. “It is the music that is illegal,” he said, and explained that Soviet leaders considered rock ’n’ roll, and the dances that went with it, a threat to society and ordered the police to crack down on the peddlers by using informers from the Komsomol—the Young Communist League. As he spoke, I recalled the Saturday nights at Don’s Drive-In, every parking slot filled, the charbroiled burgers on the car-window trays scenting the breeze, and radios tuned to WABC with Cousin Brucie spinning Dion, the Shirelles, and the Four Seasons, when my biggest concern was getting Beryl home by curfew.
“I sold a song to one of those Komsomol farts. I would have been arrested except Kremlin Hospital is for Communist Party nomenklatura, and my mother is a surgeon for these big shots. She removed the police chief’s gallbladder, and one day he tells her my name is on a list and it would be wise for me to leave Moscow. My mother has an aunt working in the Soviet embassy in Warsaw and she got me a visa for Poland.”
Dmitry drank, then wiped his lips with his coat sleeve. “On my shortwave at home I used to listen to your broadcasts from WSOV. And I wanted to put rock in the air instead of on bones. I told my great-aunt I wished to tour East Germany, and she made arrangements. In Moscow, we knew about a farmer north of Berlin who would drive you across the border for two hundred U.S. dollars. I hitchhiked to Neubrandenburg and walked nine kilometers to his farm. I was happy that he spoke a little Russian. Then he doubles the price—once, he says, because I look desperate and twice because the Red Army had set fire to Neubrandenburg.”
Dmitry clammed up as our waitress delivered our chicken with sides of potato salad. He watched her walk away. “What could I do? I had four hundred eighty U.S. I had bought on the street in Moscow. I paid him. He had a truck with an open cargo area covered with a tarp. I crawled under the tarp, and he shoveled dried cow shit over me. There were holes in the floor so I could breathe, but do you know h
ow heavy that much cow shit is?”
I couldn’t help it: I started laughing, and Dmitry joined in. “I was glad my Moscow friends were not there to make fun of me. But then the truck stopped, and I heard the driver and another man yelling in German. Horns were honking. I was sure we were at the border, and I was scared. If they caught me, it was prison for three years.”
“You risked three years for rock ’n’ roll?”
“For Beatles in particular. You would not risk it?”
“I didn’t have to choose.” I stared at the last of the foam dissolving in my stein, and Dmitry asked if I’d lost my appetite. I shook my head, amazed at what he’d done, and after deciding that I would’ve given up deejaying and listening to music to avoid jail, I felt disappointed in myself.
Dmitry studied my face. “Cheer up, Misha. My story has a happy ending. The farmer got me through to a village. I hitched a ride to Munich and spoke to Taft Mifflin. I was hired, he got me the necessary documents for West Germany, and now you are my friend.”
“I am. And I was thinking we should play more Beatles.”
“Da,” Dmitry said, smiling. “A very good idea.”
14
By my second week, I started doing a Khrushchev send-up.
One morning, I pulled out a 45 of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” from a rack on the studio wall, and Dmitry said, “Khrushchev hates the Twist. He says it causes drunkenness, sexual perversion, murder, and farting on trains.”
“Farting?”
Dmitry flashed one of his grins. “I added that. But he hates dancing. My mother told me she heard stories about how Stalin used to humiliate Khrushchev by forcing him to squat and do the gopak, the Cossack dance, for their comrades.”
“Cool. Then I’ll teach him some new moves.”
I dug out the original recording of “The Twist” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, and Chubby Checker’s cover of it, and Joey Dee and the Starliters’ “Peppermint Twist” and “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Dmitry spun the records while I instructed Khrushchev on how to swing his arms and rotate his hips. “Very good, Comrade. But you have to move your feet.”
Dmitry suggested that Khrushchev’s wife, Nina, should join in, and recruited Konstantin’s secretary, a giggly brunette who supplied Nina’s voice. “Shake it, Nika,” she said. “Come now! You dance like a duck with rheumatism.”
We taped seven variations of the Twist lesson. Twice I invited Wilma and Fred Flintstone to the dance, informing my audience that they were twisting on a table with the Khrushchevs, and I had the Soviet premier let loose with a maniacal yowl, followed by Fred Flintstone hollering, “Yabba dabba doo!”
They were mildly amusing bits, and I didn’t give them another thought until Friday when Dmitry and I arrived at the studio. Konstantin, holding a teletype page in his hand, threw his arms around me, nearly asphyxiating me with his BO, and exclaimed, “That son-of-a-whore Khrushchev is out! You are the straw that broke his back!”
Releasing me, Konstantin went down the hall, waving the page as if it were a winning ticket in the Irish Sweepstakes.
Dmitry was laughing. “Do you think our boss believes this?”
“Everyone needs reasons,” I said.
* * *
I received some compliments on the parody, though nothing to rival the praise from our program director. Taft had been out of town, so I didn’t hear from him until the next week, when he buzzed the studio and requested that I come to his office.
“Spoke to Julian Rose and your pal Eddie last night,” Taft said. “South Orange cops arrested somebody for a stickup at”—he glanced at a yellow legal pad—“Bruce’s Pharmacy.”
“That’s down the block from our candy store. They’re nice people at Bruce’s. Anyone hurt?”
“No, a detective was filling a prescription and got the drop on the guy. Some crackpot in a Lone Ranger costume: white hat, black mask, pearl-handle pistols. They’ll check if the slugs match.” Taft looked away, retrieving a pack of Luckies from under the manila folders fanned out across the desktop. “Eddie will be in touch about the ballistics. And he had a couple messages for you. One, don’t be scared to use your American Express card, there’s plenty of dough in your account. And you should get yourself a girlfriend.”
I wasn’t opposed to dating, but in my off-hours I wandered the city with my sketch pad and pencils, stopping to draw the elaborate Gothic door carvings or the manicured beauty of the Englischer Garten. I’d never thought about being an artist, though I’d been drawing for as long as I’d been listening to music. In Munich, drawing helped to distract me from wondering why anyone would murder Emma, which often kept me up at night. Before flying to Germany, I’d gone through her filing cabinet in the basement—envelopes of canceled checks, phone bills, electric bills, tax bills, and bills from Sweets—and I hadn’t seen one slip of paper that remotely resembled a clue. I doubted the Lone Ranger nut had shot Emma: robbers steal things and nothing had been taken from Sweets. My best guess was still that the shooting was connected to the bookie operation in the back room, but Eddie had dismissed that theory, and he was the one person in the world that I trusted.
Tapping one end of a Lucky Strike on his desk, Taft said, “Konstantin tells me you and Dmitry are going to the ceremony at Dachau.”
At noon, a convent for Carmelite nuns was being dedicated on the grounds of the concentration camp by the archbishop of Munich. “Konstantin insisted we go. I didn’t peg him as a Catholic.”
“He’s not. But Konstantin likes us to play up Dachau. The East Germans can’t go to the camp, and any ceremony means a lot to some folks in the Soviet Union. The SS executed six thousand prisoners from the Red Army there. Took the POWs straight from the train to the rifle range and used them for target practice.”
It was hard for me to picture six thousand people. I recalled my high school graduation, all of us in the middle of the football field, and that was only six hundred.
Taft lit the Lucky. “You wouldn’t believe how many people show up for these things. Dignitaries and representatives from international survivor associations, but also former camp inmates from all around the world.”
“You’ve been to the camps?”
“I have.” He dragged on the cigarette, deepening the creases around his eyes and mouth, which made him appear less like a chem teacher and more like a soldier with bad memories. “And I need you and Dmitry to do me a favor today—take it easy on Konstantin.”
“Konstantin and I are buddies now.”
Taft smiled or, more accurately, exhibited his rendition of a smile—a grimace with a tenuous upturn of his lips. “So I hear, but if he gets on you two, cut him some slack. His brother was one of the POWs the SS used for a target.”
15
The school bus that ferried the radio-station employees to Dachau passed through a forest straight out of “Hansel and Gretel” and stopped in a parking lot. I hadn’t seen so many cars and buses since the sellout at Shea when Koufax was pitching for the Dodgers. A crowd was inching out of the lot to the dedication site, and people were carrying signs on poles with the names of their cities on them: Brooklyn, Cleveland, Sydney, London, Jerusalem. Konstantin, who had tried and failed to tame the frizzy wings of his hair with pomade, gave Dmitry a pole sign with Four Freedoms Radio printed on it and said, “Follow us!”
Spotting an arrow-shaped ground marker pointing toward a museum, I ambled off in a different direction. Other than a gray-haired woman dozing in a chair, I was alone in the building and inspected the displays of photographs: prisoners in striped pajamas lined up on roll-call square, their heads shaved; SS officers posing at attention, the Nazi emblems of an eagle clutching a swastika in its talons and the spooky skull and crossbones visible above the visors of their hats; American soldiers from the 42nd Infantry (Rainbow) Division filing past a gate bearing the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei; and row upon row of naked emaciated corpses stacked on the ground like towers in the skyline of hell.
Queasy, dazed, I left the museum, heading for an open space bordered by a chain-link fence topped with rusty barbwire. A few yards before the fence was a trench with a grass floor and sides of concrete, and beyond the trench you could see the woods through the fence, spruces, firs, and birches as white as bone against the steel-blue sky—and the leaves were nearly gone from the chestnuts, a yellow fire dying in the wind.
Emma was a student of trees. Sometimes on Sundays when I was young, we’d walk to South Mountain Reservation, and after I fed the deer behind the wire enclosure, she’d tell me the names of the trees in Russian: Sosna is the pine, Mishka. Dub is the oak. I felt better, recalling those afternoons with my grandmother, and I became aware of a murmuring—the echo of my own memory, I thought, because it was the Mourner’s Kaddish, which frequently came to mind when Emma popped into my head.
Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw. . .
Twenty yards away, I noticed an old man in a chesterfield overcoat and black fedora, with one hand on the crook of a cane, rocking back and forth on the edge of the trench, chanting the prayer. By the third line, he was weeping, and by the fourth he had dropped his cane and began to wobble. Afraid that he’d topple into the trench, I hustled over to him. His hat had fallen off, his wisps of white hair wild in the wind, and he was on one knee, sobbing.