Jerzy

by Jerome Charyn

  And now we had a third party in our romance: Nikolai’s Nose. We did not have to put it in a box. It sat with us, palpable in our own minds.

  “Jurek, take us somewhere. The Nose is sick and tired of the Nassau Inn.”

  “But where would you like to go, lapushka?”

  “When I was a little girl locked inside the Kremlin, I would listen to people talk of Atlantic City, with its boardwalks and Al Capone—it was the secret capital of the world.”

  “Lana, Capone ruled Chicago, not Atlantic City. It’s a dump, a ruin that still stands. But if you blow on it hard enough, all of Atlantic City will come tumbling down.”

  “Good. We will blow on Atlantic City, and see what happens—how much will it cost for the three of us to take a cab?”

  I should have been suspicious of his jackal’s smile. If I wanted Atlantic City, he said, I would have to protect myself against the ocean breeze. So I returned to the Nassau Inn wearing my winter cape, but there was no Kosinski, not his hide nor his hair. And then a blue Buick, the kind that Brezhnev would have driven, honked at me. A chauffeur stepped out of the car in a gray uniform with burgundy-colored boots and a cap that hid his eyes.

  I was furious. “You mock me, my dear. I’m not your toy poodle.”

  “No,” he said, “you’re the tsarevna. And you have to ride to Atlantic City with all the pomp and circumstance of your position.”

  “Like Cinderella in her pumpkin coach. And don’t forget—her chauffeur was a rat.”

  “Indulge me, Lana. Get in . . . with Nikolai.”

  “Stop playing games. There is no Nikolai. I do not wish to travel with a phantom nose on my seat.”

  But I could not dethrone my chauffeur. He turned his fist into a marionetka and pretended to speak through the little hole he had made with his fingers.

  “Svetlana Alliluyeva, Nikolai’s Nose at your service. I knew your father well. I was his favorite character. Do you remember how he would recite my journeys across Petersburg to you before you went to sleep?”

  “It’s a lie,” I said. “Papa never . . .”

  And then I started to laugh. “You win, you win.” And I plunged into Brezhnev’s Buick with Nikolai’s Nose in my arms.

  IT WAS A MONSTROUS TOWN, with buildings that reminded me of the “white layer cakes” that rose across Moscow in the ’30s, thanks to my father and his team of architects. Molotov, who did not have a drop of imagination, must have designed those white layer cakes, which were like stupid pieces in a proletarian fairy tale. Atlantic City wasn’t a proletarian garden, I know, but it had the same monumental monotony. Some of its layer cakes were white, and some were redbrick, but they held the whole skyline hostage to their bewildering presence. Nothing else seemed to live or move. The men and women I saw on South Indiana Street could have been mechanical ants.

  Jurek didn’t even have to park his car. He gave his keys to the concierge at the Claridge. And the two of us made quite a stir. Grande dames didn’t walk under the Claridge’s canopy with their chauffeurs, who were supposed to wait in the garage or have a bite to eat in one of the Claridge’s back rooms.

  I was Russian, after all, even if I modeled myself on Lana Turner. And I didn’t trust any of the matrons with my babushka or winter cape—matrons in Moscow were known to steal and covet capes and scarves for themselves. We went through the lobby arm in arm. People might not have recognized me—my nose is too short and I do not have a spectacular profile—but they whispered and pointed at us with a rudeness that would have earned them a slap in the face in my old country.

  “Chauffeur, you must tell them not to stare. It’s impolite.”

  “Lana, they worship you. They have never seen a Russian princess before.”

  “But their mamushkas should teach them manners,” I said.

  “Their mamushkas would stare at you in the same way.”

  “Then perhaps we should dine at another hotel.”

  He ignored my last remark, and one of the Claridge’s lackeys escorted us into a dining room that was as large as a Soviet football field. I expected the Dynamos to arrive in their winter jerseys and make us shiver with their mastery over the ball. But there were no footballers at the Claridge—just an army of waiters and busboys to serve a wild and noisy scattering of dinner guests. The men smoked cigarettes, the women wore mascara masks, and they could not believe their eyes when they saw a chauffeur in burgundy-colored boots escort me to one of the oak tables, move his chair next to mine, summon the waiters, and demand a bottle of the Claridge’s best champagne.

  These barbarians gawked at us through the entire meal. I loved every moment of it. Brothers and sisters, I was having the time of my life. Jurek spoke to the waiters in French, bolted into the kitchen to confer with the chef, and had the busboys prepare a place setting for Nikolai.

  “Jurek dear, it’s better than a name-day party. You are the sweetest, kindest boy, and also a devil—you know in your heart what can entertain me and quicken my blood.”

  The men buried their noses in the wine list, but the mascaraed women were much bolder and asked me to sign their menus.

  “Your Highness,” one of them said, “I think it’s the height of culture to have dinner with your chauffeur at the Claridge. What’s his name?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t bother with names. I give them numbers. This is Chauffeur Number Five.”

  I was feeling giddy and perverse—now I knew what it was to be inside Jurisha’s head, swarming with crazy contradictions.

  A second or third woman asked about Nikolai’s place setting. I couldn’t confess that we had a personage from one of Gogol’s stories at our table. She might have gotten suspicious about a wandering nose, and I wouldn’t divulge my love of Russian literature to a restaurant full of barbarians.

  “A tragedy,” I said, patting my eyes with an enormous napkin. “Our dead son—Nikolai. He drowned at my lake near Carlsbad. We always leave a setting for him wherever we go.”

  They were astonished. Their mascara began to melt into their eyes—that’s how much I had heated them up with my tale.

  “Your Highness, you had a child with Chauffeur Number Five?”

  They swarmed to our table, bringing their own chairs and beckoning their husbands after a while. We finished nine magnums of Veuve Clicquot. They were all in love with Chauffeur Number Five. But the cleverest of them, a woman whose mascara did not run, pressed her flute of champagne against her cheek, looked into my drowsy, drunken eyes, and said, “Say, aren’t you Svetlana what-yer-call-it? The dead dictator’s daughter?”

  It was Jurek’s training as a liar that rescued me.

  “Her Highness likes to pose as Lana. It makes it easier for us to travel.”

  All my giddiness was gone. It was not so amusing after all to trick our fellow diners at the Claridge. Perhaps we were the barbarians, Jurisha and I. And I was no longer amused by Nikolai’s Nose.

  Jurek could sense my displeasure. He stood up and bowed.

  “Her Highness is tired,” he said. “She’s still in mourning. She misses our son.”

  The others left our table. It was cluttered with debris.

  “Jurisha, I would like to go now.”

  He snapped his fingers at a waiter and took out a credit card. I covered the card with my own freckled hand.

  “Darling,” I said with a bittersweet smile, darker than the darkest Russian chocolate. “What will the Claridge think? We can’t have my chauffeur pay the bill.”

  It meant nothing, two thousand dollari. I was an author, no? With royalties that my bankers piled into six accounts. I could have asked for a telephone, the way Lana Turner would have done, and bought Jurek another Buick without leaving my chair. I was now a kapitalistka, not so much a princess.

  I got up from the table without Nikolai’s Nose. I left him there. I didn’t want to play with invisible marionettes. My father always had Gogol at his bedside ever since I could remember. Gogol understood Russia’s madness, our mania for titles, our fe
ar of bureaucrats, so that a nose could acquire a title of its own and become another fearsome bureaucrat. But I had to rid myself of my father’s ghost, or I myself would become a phantom without the semblance of a home.

  — 17 —

  Bozhe moy, I HAD GOGOL IN MY BLOOD. I couldn’t break away from Nikolai’s Nose. If I shut my eyes, I could see it run on Palmer Square. But the nose wasn’t always Nikolai’s. Sometimes it was my father’s nose, with its wide nostrils and thick black nostril hair. At other times it was unrecognizable, except for the reddish braids that surrounded it, like an obscene sandwich. The braids were mine.

  I would get up like a bolt in the middle of the night and grasp my face, needing some certainty that my nose was secure. This was Princeton, not Saint Petersburg, and I hadn’t landed inside one of Gogol’s stories—not yet. But it’s hard to explain why I couldn’t stop crying. I’d had such epic battles with my father, where hate and anger would build for months and months like a bitter, hardening wound, that I hadn’t really mourned him—he’d died like a dog in his own dacha, covered in sweat and piss, and my first impulse upon seeing the rage and fear in his wolf’s yellow eyes had been to make a fist. I wanted to beat him until his eyes shrank inside his skull and his face was swollen and blue.

  He’d had a mistress during the last eighteen years of his life, a “housekeeper” named Valechka, who traveled with him wherever he went. She was a kind, stupid girl with a pug nose and a child’s melodious voice. But Valechka, who had catered to his every whim, wasn’t allowed to care for Papa while he lay dying. She was discarded by the Politburo like a rag doll. I had been jealous and petulant about her closeness to my father, though I did like her gentle ways with him, her soft seduction. She was illiterate—and I always imagined that my father read Gogol to Valechka, especially “The Nose.”

  More than once I’d catch her in a sort of pantomime, where she would “unscrew” my father’s nose and run with it in the fields behind his dacha at Kuntsevo. How happy she was to be the possessor of my father’s nose. He had often told me that books were his only life, that he had become the Soviet tsar by default, a wolf who didn’t want to be eaten by other wolfs.

  “Housekeeper,” he’d say—he liked to think of me as his housekeeper when I was his one and only obedient little girl—“Housekeeper, I read and learn every day of my life. My own comrades do not want to lend me their books. I had my spies get to the bottom of their grumbling. They say Stalin cannot return a book without grease stains on every other page. But doesn’t that grease prove that Stalin devours a book, and aren’t his thumbprints a sign of his seriousness?”

  I hadn’t been “Setanka” the housekeeper in a long, long time. He always had his little joke when I was a child. He would turn me into Setanka, the little tsar of Moscow, and Papa would play the tsar’s most obedient servant, Secretary Number One. He would grovel in front of me and his minions.

  “Setanka, your wish is my command.”

  And I would fill up with pretended rage. “Setanka says that Secretary Number One hasn’t shined his shoes. His mustache is filled with crumbs. His fingernails are filthy. All of Setanka’s secretaries should be ashamed of themselves.”

  Papa would shiver and laugh and shine his shoes—he always seemed to have such a good time with his Setanka. No one else would have dared scold the Boss or criticize him. And how clever I was as a little girl! Brothers and sisters, I was not drunk with power. I could always tell by the color of his wolf’s eyes whether he wanted to play with his Setanka or not. If the wolf’s eyes went from bright yellow to a dull brown, the little tsar of Moscow would suddenly grow meek as a mouse.

  But there was always a price to pay. Setanka had become an addiction. The games ended with the beginning of the war. He would scribble letters to me in his green pencil and sign them, Josef the Peasant, or Your Loving Papa, Secretary Number One. But I couldn’t rage in front of his minions anymore. I couldn’t command him, order him about, or even comment on the crumbs in his mustache. I hardly ever saw him, and when I did, that familiar bright yellow had fled from his eyes.

  I never grew out of my addiction—not completely. I am still Setanka, Josef Stalin’s ungrown daughter, who was eager to play, play, play. And it was my misfortune in America that Jurek revived this addiction and made it worse. I was drawn to him and his maddening games. He was my own particular devil, wearing the guise of a secret brother. I had to repeat again and again the story of Setanka. He would listen in ecstasy, his ears sprouting devilish points.

  “Lana, don’t lie. Did your father really shiver in his shoes?”

  “Boots,” I said. “The Boss wore boots most of the time.”

  A peculiar look crept into Jurek’s eyes. He was the novelist now, taking notes with the green pencil inside his head, and I worried that I might become a personage in his next novel. But I couldn’t help myself. I was addicted to him. And I was drawn deeper into his games.

  We fed each other’s paranoia, and we both felt like lambs being led to the slaughterhouse. We were at the mercy of some secret service—call it the KGB. The dacha on Stanworth hadn’t been rented in my name. But it was clear to most townspeople who the hermit in the head scarf was. Tellers at the bank touched my hand. Princeton professors stopped me in the street. Yet Moscow swore I was a demented witch who was locked up in an insane asylum. And my devil with his curly hair reasoned that it would not have been difficult for the KGB to kidnap Setanka and lock her up in a real asylum. So we had to be careful.

  Jurek now wore disguises at the Nassau Inn—a mustache and beard that made him look like a sinister Buffalo Bill, or else his chauffeur’s cap and boots.

  “Darling, it’s ridiculous. You cannot pretend to be a stranger—everybody knows you at the Yankee Doodle.”

  But he wouldn’t listen; he said it was no longer safe to meet at the Nassau Inn. I panicked—where else did I have to go? I had an ice-cream parlor on Nassau Street, a bank on Palmer Square, and a dark corner in a taproom as the three vital points of my existence, except for my library and an occasional picnic with my American friends. But Jurek insisted that we meet in Manhattan from now on.

  “It’s imperative,” he said. “It’s vital . . . and you must not tell a living soul, Lana, or you will compromise our mission.”

  And so I took the dinky that waited at Princeton’s little depot like a private car, maneuvered in my babushka and dark glasses, and ended in Manhattan—Moscow had a much bigger crush of people, but the crowds at Pennsylvania Station frightened me because I could not follow the logic of their movements; they milled around like cattle in the midst of a mindless stampede, and I was sucked into their flow. I could not find Kosinski. I clutched my handbag and ended up on an escalator that spat me out into the street.

  Like a child, I called out for Secretary Number One, but my poor papushka didn’t come. I marched under a mountain of walls that could have swallowed up Moscow’s white layer cakes. I couldn’t stand to look up into the teeth of such high crevices. Moscow was round and overripe, with her winding streetcars, her embankments, her population of domes that could have been born in the dream of a drunken tsar. But Manhattan had no such roundness—I saw the jagged lines and steep pockets of an endless ziggurat. Angels would have grown dizzy here and toppled off the roofs.

  Chorti, I whispered to myself. I had come to a devils’ paradise.

  One of these Manhattan devils stood behind me. He was in a military uniform with silver braids and medals and a forage cap. Bozhe moy, I did not recognize him until he removed the cap and revealed his curly hair.

  “Congratulations, govnyuk. You would scare away the Cheka with such a disguise. Are you a general from some lost Arabian legion? I have never seen so many different colors and ribbons on a single uniform. Did you just step off Noah’s ark? Why didn’t you meet me at Pennsylvania Station?”

  “Lana, I haven’t left your side. I was on the dinky with you.”

  “Impossible,” I said. “I would . . .”
r />   But that devil could have been sitting beside me. I struck him in the chest with my handbag.

  “Rainbow Room,” I said. “It is in Rockefeller’s Center. You will take me there, please.”

  I had puzzled the devil, mystified him. “And what will you find at your little tourist mecca?”

  “Tourists,” I said. “Khrushchev visited Rockefeller’s Center with President Eisenhower. He told me, ‘Svetochka, you must visit Rainbow Room. It is the only place in Manhattan that doesn’t make me homesick. You sit in the sky with the angels, and it’s almost Moscow.’”

  “Lana, I’m not a magician. You have to book the Rainbow Room a month in advance.”

  “But you’re a general, Jurek. You’ll tell them that the dictator’s daughter is following Uncle Nikita’s footsteps and wishes to shake hands with an angel in the tourist mecca.”

  IT WAS MOSCOW IN MANHATTAN, even if Rockefeller’s Center didn’t have the warmth and savage wonder of a Russian nightclub, where the worst enemies could cry in one another’s arms, where someone’s wife could dance with a hundred men and her husband would see this as an honor to himself, where politicians could scheme in the open with oil tycoons, where bundles of dollari would pass from hand to hand, where gamblers gambled and generals brought their mistresses to be ogled by anyone in a clean shirt. Nightclubs were holy places, “cathedrals” where no one could be punished or harmed.

  The Rainbow Room didn’t have such a burden. It wasn’t where a whole society mingled. It was never raucous. Women did not clutch their husbands’ noses out of anger, love, or spite; men didn’t roam from table to table, looking for other men’s wives. There was a calm that must have captivated Khrushchev; a kind of soft musical hum that could have been the whisper of angels—did that sound come from the chandeliers or the diners themselves?

  It was like sitting in an enormous eagle’s nest with silvered walls and all of Manhattan below us; the city wasn’t a ziggurat with jagged lines from our eagle’s nest; the tallest buildings, with their own slight sway, had a silent hum—I did not see any angels nesting there. But I felt their presence, and it’s this that must have excited Uncle Nikita.