Gia is leaving. The moments move like liquid. He patches together a speech telling her she mustn’t leave thinking her father a bad man, he was good to him when things were tough, when he was a kid Saint Max was there for him, suffering the little children. Nobody else was. Except Masha obviously. It hovers between them as subtle as a flying mallet. How big is his cock, Masha? How big was Dad’s in its communist heyday?
“Just leave, Gia.” Masha commands.
“Thank you for the meal. And thank you for your kindness.”
He is gone and the two women are marooned with each other, across a no man’s land of white tablecloth.
“Masha isn’t my real name.” It hung under the high ceiling as a statement of the self as enigma and Lucy wondered how some people found themselves so fucking interesting. “I was a cellist once..” aah, thought Lucy – musician, artist, moody, interesting, deep, different, plugged into secrets of the universe, I am not worthy…
“You know Chekov?” asked Masha obviously expecting a negative.
“Some.”
“The Seagull?”
“Yes. Masha, who dresses in black in mourning for her life?”
Masha was impressed.
“My fellow musicians nicknamed me after her.” She laughs and it blows a spit of self-mockery onto the smooth patina of her eastern chic. “I was such a drama queen. Now I’m a painter. Everything I do is hideous.” She holds up a fist and puts it down gently. “But people pay good money for hideousness. They think it’s profound.” She looked down at the fists, lying between them like rubble. “They can hold a paint brush, but not a musical instrument. Except piano a little. But no cello.”
“But they could at one time?”
“I wasn’t born like this.” The hands smoothed a wrinkle of tablecloth. “I was a child prodigy.”
You would be thought Lucy.
“A little Soviet star. Hauled across Europe from concert hall to concert hall as an emblem of the cultural genius of all the Russias. We didn’t have light bulbs, toilet rolls, but my God we had culture. I was a star turn in Europe. But as soon as the applause died they would shut me away. Just past teenage, young enough to want some fun, to meet an Italian or a Frenchman, paraded for the West then the West shut away. Puritan bastards. So I demanded to be taken off the foreign tour circuit. They would have none of it of course. More lectures on social deviancy, more concerts planned and I thought I’m going to defect. I asked your father to arrange it. He betrayed me.”
“You have evidence?”
She laughed. “Are you acting in his defence?”
“If he betrayed you why did you stay with him?”
“Because he stayed with me.” She ordered a brandy. When Lucy declined there was a flicker of curiosity.
“Perhaps he just couldn’t stand to lose you.”
“Sure. It worked. I was dropped from the European tour and sent round factories in the Soviet as a punishment. So one day after a lunchtime concert for workers in Minsk they were showing us the production lines – as if we were remotely interested – and there was this small power hammer punching metal sheets.”
Lucy’s own hands flew to her chest for protection. She saw fingers bursting over metal and workers stepping back in shock and disgust. Blood on Party officials; a young girl sinking to her knees and the machine hammering on rhythmically above her impervious to the national insult and the pain of an individual pushed by the clash of an unstable nature and political conformity. She thought of a cello, abandoned in a corner somewhere, and then locked up in its case, put away and forgotten.
“I woke in a mental hospital. They fed me drugs that really did make me insane. No one was paying attention anymore.” She made a fluttering movement with a hand that was graceful despite the deformity. “Except your father. Everyone has constancy for something in them somewhere.”
Not for me, thought Lucy. She wanted a cigarette though she didn’t smoke, and looked round for the Cossack who always smoked. All curiosity about her father had suddenly drained away. What little of his background she had picked up slightly repelled her. It seemed so overly dramatic: love triangles, art, broken fingers. She’d got away from the damage in her own past and the passionate and the eccentric in others now bored her.
Silence bumped across their rocky histories and they sat with it for a while under the high classical ceiling. Tall pot plants stood around the room like ancient retainers weary with waiting. Lucy contemplated the brandy glass turning in Masha’s fists, following the fish eye reflection of the dining room over its bell curve. Little spectrums glowed and faded as the liquor smear dissipated on the inside of the glass. More shards of her father’s past drifted across the tablecloth.
“We went to Cuba. Fidel? Aaah… You meet him, he’s all over you, he forgets you. You have to meet him in the middle of the night.
“They had a film festival in Havana years ago – Czechs, Russians and some American radicals who shouldn’t have been there. I think they were Jews. Anyway one day we were sitting near these young Americans, outside a cafe. I caught the way your father looked at them. Eventually he spoke to them. I’ve no idea what he was saying – my English – they shook hands and the Americans ambled off. He was so disappointed.”
“Why.”
“Because he told them who he was and they had never heard of him.”
Peg obviously held a fascination for Masha. Closed down in a non-drip marriage to a man who made his fortune from non-drip paint, Lucy had a whole vaudeville script about her mother, but didn’t want to do it. However, for form she gave Masha a teaser. “When I was drinking, her husband – her current husband – bailed out my money problems. I should be grateful but it just pissed me, you know?”
“Did you ever say no, thank you?”
“No. I know, but..”
Masha shrugged.
“Yes I should be grateful but….”
“So many of your sentences have ‘yes but’ in them.”
“Yes… yes…”
“Like your father ‘yes but’ ‘yes but’. Or just ‘no’.”
“Yeah.” Masha’s riff of complaints about her father left little space for Lucy. She had things to say too. She pressed on. “I can understand what a shock it must have been for him. I put him in an awkward position. Maybe this trip was a piece of vanity.”
“It isn’t your fault your father is an arsehole.”
“Whenever we settled in a new place I went to the library. The newspaper archives, you know, and read about him? Same stuff everywhere: enemy of liberty, betrayed his country, family…”
“Max betrays. It’s his calling.”
“Maybe.”
“No ‘maybe’. Except perhaps me, I suppose. Perhaps that’s why I get so angry with him.”
“Yeah…” Masha was interrupting her flow; Lucy wanted to dip her oar. “Anyway. In the libraries? Weird, you know, like sitting a few feet away from some library assistant with all this stuff about your father? Then handing him back and leaving. As a kid I always felt something when I passed a library, as if they were where my dad lived.”
The pianist finished packing away his music and as he passed, bowed to the two women and said goodnight in Russian. Masha spoke to him in Georgian. He indicated the piano and she rose and crossed and the sensitivity with which she played confirmed her musical past. Lucy had a tin ear but the piece struck a distant bell; a night with a black boyfriend at an art house cinema in the days when she only watched sub-titled films and only hung out with ethnics, lifted up like Proust’s stage set, and rekindled a lost feeling of the future as a cornucopia of waiting glories.
The music drew the Cossack in and settled him against the arch by the pianist. Thin pipes of smoke from his cigarette fluttered towards the ceiling in double helixes.
Masha w
as present only in the music, a component of a higher aspiration, counter-pointing the absence of any such thing in Lucy’s life. The music disembowelled Lucy and her journey to truth and healing felt pathetic; the road to the Oracle, only to find it shut for the season.
As the last chords resonated into the recesses of the dining room Lucy’s robotic applause was cut short by the pianist’s and Cossack’s reverential compliments. Masha replied to them and Lucy sat alone with her unmusical self until the chatter and bonhomie ended with another courteous bow from the pianist as he left, and a smile from the Cossack as he took himself back to wrap his chair in another cloud of cigarette smoke.
“The theme from Solaris?’
“Solaris?”
“The film. Tarkovsky.”
“I don’t watch films. Bach. Prelude ‘Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ’.”
“I’m a child of the Spielberg/Lucas nexus… I don’t suppose you’ve heard of them either... I’m not very sophisticated.”
“You don’t need sophistication. You’re American.” Masha stroked her knuckles gently. “Your father plays that much better than me.”
“How did you meet?
“He came into my dressing room one night. Full of vodka.” She laughed. “He was an important person. Though I couldn’t understand why he would leave America for Moscow.” The fists were raised again. “After this, in the first nuthouse they put me in, a male nurse gave me paper and charcoal for sex, and I started drawing.” her eyes blazed with Georgian melodrama. “A triptych of God taking a shit flanked by the Madonna baring her arse and Christ with an erection. No more charcoal. They weren’t worried about blasphemy; they just needed an excuse. My drawings were ‘degenerate’” She lifted the brandy. “Here’s to degeneracy. In the second hospital they gave me the liquid cosh and…”
“Liquid cosh?”
“Drugs. Like a zombie, sleepwalking for months. Then your father turns up. He’s tracked me down, and he brought a small tin of watercolours. He told them to lay off the drugs and they did. He was quite a man in those days. I started painting: eerie visions of the hospital and its inmates, the way I saw them off my head on Nembutal and Largactyl. Strange. He liked them. They hated them but they weren’t going to argue with Max. Then he brought oils and canvases and it got serious. I painted an old woman Natasha who had spent most of her life in asylums, I painted her bare breasted. Then the hospital as it really was: toilets crawling with filth, patients who had soiled themselves left naked as a punishment. Max would smuggle some of them out. But they caught me. That was going too far. Even Max could do nothing about that. So, more drugs. Materials confiscated. Sleep and nothingness till Max secured my release. That was how it started. The art. Sex and madness.”
The deep drone of a plane coming in through the night grew overhead. They listened as its dark vibrations passed.
“I’ll drive you to the airport tomorrow.”
“Thank you but I can get a cab.”
“I’ll drive you.” Dark hair cascaded down Masha’s face and long brown neck. What was a woman like this doing with her old dad? What had been her problem apart from loneliness and insanity?
“Okay.”
Blue shadow spreads under the leaves where the dog trapped the child.
From her balcony she studies the streetlight casting the wall’s shadow up to the vegetable bed and the shards of light lying on the dark town like broken teeth. Somewhere in the gloomy city her father hides from her.
The phone rings. Someone is at reception for her. Her spirits rise in hope it’s her father with some late olive branch, but it’s a young gentleman who has come to retrieve a music book. Her father’s Schubert sonatas lie on the bed. She knows why Gia has come back, and why he waited till Masha left and it enrages her. But he may have secrets about her father, or even a message. No. The old spy won’t fall to a sudden rush of sentimentality, the stroke will be played to its conclusion; he is gone and she should accept it; kill the hope; it is a cancer to her growth, her peace. But she can feel the lure of an old easy road and is tempted for spite’s sake. AA ruins everything they say: anything below best standard just pricks the reawakened conscience and those who have gone back to the gin bars and low dives talk about how it ruined their drinking too. There is no comfort, anywhere.
“Send him up.”
She instantly regrets it, hides the Schubert in her suitcase, then removes it and puts it back on the bed. Why pretend? Why play victim? Why not give Gia a message for her father? Father I forgive thee. Not. Go fuck yourself. No. Drop it Lucy. No messages either way, the only message Gia has is in his pants. Don’t open the door to him. Don’t give him the music. She re-dials reception.
“Hi. Could you send up a bottle of vodka, please?”
March 1964
The last few weeks before my defection were like a dream in which I floated from terror into periods of normality where I could laugh and go to bed as content as any man and expectant father. What was happening and what was going to happen seemed to be parts of two different lives. One would possess me for a while then the other would take over. By this stage I never knew how I was going to feel ten minutes later. Life was unpredictable, except that I knew it could only get worse.
Peg was moving slowly now with her pregnancy. We were ticking off days to the birth and had spent Saturdays at the Happy Stork baby store picking cots, buggies, and the inexhaustible complex of mysterious things attached to birth and the early days of a small human being. How a bush woman gives birth with nothing more than a length of biltong to bite on is beyond me.
I was prone to some pretty crazy thinking in those days. I thought about handing myself over to the authorities about forty times an hour, or of kidnapping Peg and burying ourselves in some Peruvian mountain village or taking up fish curing in the Shetland Isles under a new name.
I picked up a message from Yura at a safe drop. They were concerned that everything was taking so long and wondered why I couldn’t cooperate? What was the problem was there anything they could do? They appreciated my position was difficult but they could not hold on forever. Perhaps my wife could be persuaded to come with me? She and my child would be well looked after in Russia.
The soul of discretion and understanding, Yura knew I was under no illusions, that assassins stood quietly chatting in the wings. It was a last resort though and a desperate one, so desperate I wondered if they really would have gone that far. The killing of a CIA officer would have upped the ante in the Cold War stakes. It would have been a propaganda bonanza for the Agency and the whole American Patriot machine. Washington would not have disclosed my dubious loyalty, but played the murder for everything it could get: I was worth more to them as a dead hero than an exposed traitor. They may even have awarded Peg a pension, and that’s another option I considered – playing it out to the end of the rope, setting up some set of false clues for my colleagues back in the office so that it wouldn’t be too big an act of hypocrisy to spit in the Russian eye and have me buried at Arlington under the American flag.
I was not entirely powerless, but all I could feel was a rope around my neck getting tighter. A prosecution was being built. It wasn’t a case of if, but when I would be arrested. And it was sooner rather than later.
More reasonably I began to entertain the idea of handing myself in with an offer of information and names in exchange for immunity from prosecution. It would be a long shot. Americans were more reluctant to use this arrangement than our British counterparts, who took the view that since all spies are members of the same class, throwing chaps out of the club and making a fuss should be avoided if at all possible. And lying is second nature to the Brits; it’s bred in them with rusks and mother’s milk.
However, I had one big trading card. Peter. He would have been a gold medal catch. I also had a bag of others whose expulsion would bring out the bunti
ng in Washington and turn a few Kremlin faces as red as their flag. I was a negotiator, probably in a stronger position than anyone. But these realisations came to me from the edge of madness. To me they seemed desperate grasps at straws. Peter knew this of course. We all knew everything, all the moves in the chess game. It was fascinating in a sinister way. These unspeakable negotiations shimmered between us like ghost dancers, unmentioned, un-implied, off limits, but unmistakeably there on our shoulders.
Something else was happening. Although Kennedy was devoutly anti-communist, it was clear he was willing to do business with Khrushchev after the Cuban crisis cleared up. The world was facing a new set of ideas. He was taking America away from the evils of the Klu Klux Klan and McCarthyism and the WASP smugness of the Eisenhower years. A new breeze was blowing across the Plains. It would never change my beliefs but the idea of being beholden to a Kennedy America for my life and freedom, was less repugnant that it would have been five years earlier. If Oswald had missed, I might be selling real estate in Ohio.
So, given the options available – remote though some might have been – why did I go over?
America was my country and yet it was not. Americans were my people and yet they were not. Some subtle, deep difference separated us. Politics was only one of its manifestations. I had no sense of tribalism. No sense of ‘us’. Without that sense, a man can go anywhere.
Early 1999
Max bunkered through the winter in Tbilisi. Masha didn’t call; Gia rang occasionally. He turned to repopulating his world, hedging against the last nine yards of loneliness by trying to rekindle dead friendships. Invitations to the house by the sea were offered to people he hadn’t thought about in a decade and accepted, though everyone knew no one would turn up. Some asked about his daughter but there was nothing to say. Sometimes the best way to handle things is badly.
The UnAmericans Page 7