The Wanting

by Michael Lavigne

  I entered the office of the chief investigator and handed the duty officer my papers. He commanded me to sit on the bench along the far wall. From my perch I could hear the bright quack of typewriters and a stream of meaningless conversation rising over the partitions. People came and went, some in uniform, some not, some with briefcases, some with tins of cookies, some with armloads of manila files, some with shopping bags. No one so much as glanced at me. I then understood to what extent I did not exist for them. I would exist when they decided it was time for me to exist, and then I would exist for the purposes they intended and nothing else. But there was also a strange, unsettling familiarity about the scene, as if I had been here before. The bench beneath me contained the penned carvings of names and phone numbers—ILYA, VALODYA, KOSTYA—and I had the sense that I knew them—and the wide face and cropped hair of the young duty officer reminded me so much of the boys I had come across in the countryside on my hikes and summer service—and the scent of floor wax was exactly the same as it had been in my grammar school—and the voices beyond the partitions the same as those in my own office: endless complaints dotted with explosions of laughter. I had been here before because every place in Russia was the same as every other place. And also, as always, I had the sense I did not belong in any of them, and that the inch or so of air around my skin was the only thing I truly owned.

  At long last, my name was called—not that there was anyone else waiting—and I was escorted past a series of small offices and secretarial pools to a narrow, cheerful room that contained a large desk outfitted with red bunting, several luxurious leather chairs, a carpet decorated with Soviet emblems entwined with sheaves of wheat and sunflowers, and on the wall, beside the photographs of Andropov and Fedorchuk, what looked to be a real oil painting in the Critical Realist style of the last century, something halfway between The Barge Haulers on the Volga and Tsar Mikhail and His Boyars, clearly done by someone in his or her art-school days, maybe the chief investigator’s wife.

  A hidden door in the rear of the office opened and in came an officer wearing a full-dress jacket with braided epaulets and countless medals and ribbons. His trousers were the color of gathering clouds; they were perfectly pressed with a deep, sharp crease, and I could not help but notice how the fine gabardine fell from his knee in soft, elegant streams. These were no ordinary police trousers. I thought immediately of my uncle Max, and I wondered which Jewish tailor had taken up his needle in hope of moving his family into some present-day Veshnaya. The officer introduced himself as “Vasin, Vasily Nikolayevich,” and asked me if I would like a cup of tea or perhaps a Fanta. A strong and disconcerting aroma of damp wool filled the room when he removed his jacket, and though he hung it carefully in his closet and closed the door, I sensed that, beneath the pressed creases, a more fundamental slovenliness ruled his life. He smiled at me, pressed a button on his desk, and called for the tea. From his shirt pocket, he offered me a cigarette. My hand autonomically reached out. Maybe it thought a cigarette would make me look more confident. But I refused the tea, for there could be nothing more revealing than a teacup rattling in its saucer.

  Vasily Nikolayevich Vasin was a colonel. Of course, there were colonels on every street corner in Moscow. My own cousin Danka was a colonel. No one paid any attention to them. Here, though, in this magnificent office with its three telephones and innumerable intercom buttons, prancing about in his beautiful trousers and polished shoes, this Vasily Vasin seemed quite formidable, the more so for his easygoing and relaxed disposition.

  “Need a light?” he said.

  Vasily Vasin sat down. There was a large file on the desk in front of him. He pushed it aside as if someone had placed it there by mistake.

  “So the matter in question is your friend Collette Chernova,” he began. “I know you are aware of everything, you are a person of intelligence and conscience, so I won’t play games with you. I’ll just come to the point. We don’t need your testimony. The evidence is all there. She could easily get the death penalty. All her meetings with the spy Charles Spaulding. All her dealings with agents of the CIA posing as representatives of the press. All her writings and antics intended to slander and humiliate the Soviet people. We have dates; we have transcripts; we have phone calls. Are you sure you don’t want a Fanta or a Pepsi? Nescafé? So, comrade, we don’t need you. We also have all those letters. She had a huge collection. Piles of them. Seditious letters.”

  “Perhaps they were love letters,” I said.

  “So you know the letters?” he murmured. “But no. My understanding is that they were seditious. In fact, they are the most serious evidence we have against her. That, of course, and the planned hijacking.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” I snapped. “They were just stupid love letters.”

  “Why don’t you tell me your side of it then?”

  “She was in love with a man and she wrote to him. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. If they were just love letters. To whom were they written?”

  “You know all this. Why ask me?”

  “Well, all right. Perhaps the problem is they were written in French. Perhaps we don’t understand them correctly. Who is this fellow”—he perused one of the letters he now extracted from the file—“Pascal? Who is he, anyway?”

  “A friend of her aunt and uncle.”

  “Yes, the aunt and uncle. You know, they were counterrevolutionaries who defected to France.”

  “That’s a lie. They were in France before the revolution. Collette’s grandfather was a great Bolshevik. Read your history.”

  He lazily drew some smoke through his nostrils. “You’re an intellectual,” he said. “I’m sure you have lots of books. You know all about the French, French literature, French culture. What its appeal is, I can’t fathom. Perhaps you can enlighten me? You see, this Pascal—he seems to have a very elaborate surname. I’m guessing he is one of the so-called aristocracy. France! It calls itself a democracy! Perhaps you can explain to me how a democracy can still have these privileged classes, these parasites who inherit their status as if their blood were sweeter than anyone else’s? Oh, well, the arrow will always fall where it is aimed. Each society must advance at its own pace. But why do you suppose all these code words? These so-called refuseniks! They think with all these codes they are fooling us! Do you imagine that by jamming a pencil in a telephone you can stop us from listening to you? If we want to listen, it’s not through the telephone. You can tell your friends that, if you want. These letters of this Pascal, whatever his surname is, here, look, I’ll just read it to you, We delivered the baby clothes and are just waiting to hear if they fit. Baby clothes! Do they think we’re children? That we can’t decipher such a primitive code? Chernova was smuggling a document to the West, some vital information, perhaps from her place of work, or some slanderous material she wanted printed in the New York newspapers. We already know specifically what the information was in this case, so it doesn’t matter. But you see, we understand how you people think. You imagine it is cat and mouse and you are scurrying about under our noses where we can’t see you. It’s very romantic for you. But no one is fooling anyone. We don’t stop you because we don’t want to. Why should we? It’s a free country. It’s only when you go too far, when you break the rules of common decency, when your games become dangerous and treasonous and cause harm to the government and the state, to the organs of the proletariat. And this, unfortunately, is the fate of poor Collette Petrovna.”

  “I don’t know anything about codes,” I said.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just trying to better understand these letters. You are not denying that these are her letters? I can see that you recognize them. This pile she received from France, and these, admittedly few, are the copies she made of the letters she wrote herself and sent through the CIA courier to this Monsieur Pascal and, by the way, to many others as well. Apparently she had a lot of lovers.”

  “What do you want from me?”
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  “I just want you to look at this particular letter. This is her handwriting, isn’t it?”

  “How would I know? It could be a forgery.”

  “Do you think she hasn’t already admitted this is her handwriting?”

  “Again, how would I know?”

  “Don’t you think Collette Petrovna is an honest person?”

  “Of course she is.”

  “I can show you her statement where she admits these are her letters. So what good does it do you to deny it? It will only turn us against you.”

  “I don’t deny anything.”

  “Comrade. I am not here to hurt you. I am only asking you one thing. Look at this letter. This one in particular.”

  The way he held it out to me, the odd tone of urgency in his voice … I snatched it from him and glanced down at it.

  “Now,” he said.

  “I told you,” I stammered, “I … I don’t know.”

  “But you do know.”

  “How could I know?”

  “Because you’ve already read them.”

  “Not this one.”

  “No. Not this one, but clearly you have read the others. It would be unwise to lie about this. Do you think we haven’t double-checked every detail? Do you believe you didn’t leave fingerprints? I can show you the test results if you like. I imagine these are your tears on them as well, because I know it was hard for you. How could that have been easy? Even today, she doesn’t deny her love for this Frenchman. Let’s talk about the times you drove out with the spy Charles Spaulding—you called him Charlie, yes? Did you think because you drove out to the forest we couldn’t trace you? It was illegal in the first place for him to leave the city limits, except on a train to Leningrad or Kiev or on a tour bus. You knew this, yet you abetted his illegal behavior. That alone could land you three years. Normally, quite honestly, you would have nothing to worry about. Because if that was all it was—an American tourist out for a lark—but we know he’s a spy, and you knew he was a spy, and you were with him, and you went into illegal areas to avoid being detected and to speak of illegal things and pass information and receive instructions. All right! All right! Perhaps you were unaware of this. We know they walked alone for the most part. They left you in the car or perhaps you went out to hunt mushrooms! To be honest, I am willing to believe you are the innocent party here, just a victim of the American Zionists. I am even willing to believe Chernova was also a dupe of the Americans. I frankly would be willing to recommend a very light sentence for her, maybe even a parole, or at worst we could just send her to Gorky with the Sakharovs. That’s not so bad, is it? I’m sure they would get along very well. But I can’t do anything for her unless I understand more completely what you were doing in the woods. And you were also present at other meetings, Zionist provocations, public displays, all of it illegal. Suddenly I am worried, because when you add up all these infractions they become very serious, in aggregate very damaging, and though I completely accept that you could be innocent, and I am fairly convinced that you are a loyal citizen—after all, how many times do you have to prove it?—still, this can look very bad to anyone who doesn’t have a firm grasp of your character and where you really stand on the issues. I mean, if you were to be put on trial, it could go very badly for you. It could be even worse for poor Collette Petrovna, because now we must add conspiracy, and that makes it unlikely there can be any clemency at all. So I just ask you to think about it. What would be best for everyone involved? We’re not asking you to tell us anything we don’t already know. Collette Petrovna has already confessed everything. And what really has she done, after all? She is just a misguided young woman. Did she kill anyone? No. Did she hijack an airplane? She never got that far. In any case, how could she have managed it? It was a pipe dream. Did she expose nuclear secrets? Of course not. She didn’t even publish a derisive book in the West. Still, it is a very serious case, or at least many of my colleagues think so. But I am trying my very best to find some shred of evidence that might exonerate her. Well, let’s be honest, she can’t get off scot-free, she broke the law, but if I just had some little kernel to help her. Soviet law requires we investigate every lead. Perhaps you have information that could help her. We just want you to clarify things, and naturally this would also confirm that we are right about you, that you are a loyal citizen. Otherwise, you know … well, it could be painful for you, and especially for your mother. To be left alone at her age. Possibly to lose her apartment. And you. I don’t know what I could do for you. I know it may not seem this way, but, honestly, I have nothing against you. On the contrary, I want to protect you, because the consequences for everyone could be very serious.”

  He paused to take the dead cigarette from my fingers and place it in his crystal ashtray.

  “You see what I mean?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “All right, Roman Leopoldovich, let’s begin again. So I will ask you: you often stayed with her in her apartment?”

  I looked up at Vasily Vasin. There was no enmity in his eyes, no cruelty. They seemed hopeful, even kind. “So, you stayed with her?” he repeated.

  “Yes,” I finally said.

  “And naturally you noticed that she received letters?”

  “Everyone receives letters,” I said.

  “Exactly. And you saw the very letters I’m holding in my hand.”

  I tried not to look at them.

  “You already said as much,” he reminded me.

  “Yes, all right, I guess so.”

  “Well, that’s all you need to say.”

  “I can go?”

  He smiled at me again. “I can understand why you fell in love with her. She is a very beautiful Jewess, very elegant, very striking.…”

  “Yes, she is,” I found myself saying.

  “I wonder, though, did she sew?”

  “Sew?”

  “She wore such beautiful clothes! I admire beautiful clothing. I can see that you noticed my uniform. You have an eye for such things. Where did she get her clothes?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “You see, that’s why I’m asking if she sewed them.”

  “Really, I don’t know.”

  “Did you ever see her sewing?”

  “No. I don’t know.”

  “Very well then, she must have purchased them. But I just have to wonder, where, on her salary, could she purchase such clothes in Moscow?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Perhaps they came from Paris?”

  “Clothes come from Paris only in our dreams,” I said.

  “We don’t dream in this office, Comrade Guttman. Here we are honest with one another. So please, think about your answer.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she inherited them.”

  “That’s possible! Thank you! Because you and I are thinking alike. We’re both thinking that obviously either they were given to her, or she bought them with money someone paid her! But not inherited. After all, she never smelled like mothballs, did she?” He laughed.

  Vasily Vasin poured himself more tea in the English manner, directly from the teapot into the cup. The happy scent of bergamot circled obliviously around us.

  “She received payment, that’s clear,” he continued. “If it were just clothing, we wouldn’t care. It’s a typical Zionist activity. Everyone does it. We’re aware of this. We don’t care about it at all. For instance, the jacket you are wearing. Have you ever seen anyone in Moscow wear corduroy? One of those Jewish groups in New York sent it—if not to you, then to one of your friends, who gave it to you.”

  I said nothing.

  “But you all receive things from abroad. Collette doesn’t deny it. I already asked her.” He took a sip of tea. “You Jews are always complaining about everything; I suppose that entitles you to dress better than the rest of us. But as I said, it’s not of much importance, so don’t worry about it. But in her case—you never saw her actually receive clothes did you?
”

  “No.”

  “So it must have been money.”

  He leaned back in his chair, smiling.

  “Very well, let’s summarize. You acknowledge that you lived with Collette Chernova, and her clothing was extravagant and was undoubtedly purchased with hard currency. You saw the letters that passed back and forth from the capitalist countries in the hands of the CIA agent Charles Spaulding, and you have intimate knowledge of their contents, including all the coded passages and instructions having to do with foreign lovers, seditious documents, fabricated invitations etc. etc. She mentions, in code of course, her intention to hijack a small plane from Tallinn airport and have it flown to Stockholm. By the way, I am assuming that Comrade Chernova was unaware you had read her letters, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Vasin sighed. “Even then, you understood she was not completely trustworthy. It’s too bad.”

  He stood up and strode toward the curtains. “Why don’t we get some light?” He fiddled with the cord, then changed his mind and swung around to face me. “I want to ask you something, man to man. In all this time you were with the Chernova woman, did it not occur to you that she was merely using you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “it occurred to me.”

  “But you didn’t care?”

  “No. I guess I didn’t.”

  “Perhaps, Guttman, your father never taught you the meaning of honor.”

  “Perhaps not, Comrade Investigator,” I answered, “but he did teach me the meaning of love.”

  “Ah,” he said, deciding not to open the curtains after all, “so this is love.”

  In the end, we came to an agreement about my testimony. On the stand, I would be allowed to utter as few words as necessary, but whatever I said was to adhere strictly to a script he and I invented, and no one, except perhaps Collette herself, would be surprised by any of it.