And so it was arranged: Puttermesser was to save Zhenya’s child. She believed she understood from what. The old darknesses were creeping out all over a loosened Soviet Union: who could predict what mean-spirited ghosts of antique hatred were yet to be awakened? Certain newspaper accounts began to jump out at Puttermesser. In Kiev, young men passing under a window are flooded by the passionate sounds of a violin; they crash into the musician’s flat and beat him unconscious. In Moscow, brainy students are shut out of the university by a relentless quota. Schoolchildren have their noses bloodied to the taunts of Zhid! Zhid!
And in New York—in the very hour of perestroika, of glasnost!—Puttermesser picks up a joke that is at this moment circulating through Moscow: Because there is a rumor of a delivery of meat, a long queue forms outside a butcher shop. After a four-hour wait, the manager emerges to address the crowd: “The meat hasn’t arrived yet, but there won’t be enough for everyone, so all the Jews must leave.” Another four hours pass, and out comes the manager: “No delivery yet, but there won’t be enough, so all the chronic grumblers against the regime must leave.” Another four hours, and finally the manager announces: “Sorry, comrades, but there will be no meat delivery after all. Everyone go home!” And a great moan rises up: “Wouldn’t you know it? The Jews are always getting favored!”
How that poisonous joke with its bitter truths reverberated! How Puttermesser felt for Zhenya’s child! She set herself, over several months, the task of letter-writing. She wrote to the State Department, she wrote to her Congresswoman, she wrote to her two Senators, she wrote to HIAS and NYANA. She visited offices and consulted bureaucrats and filled out forms. She emptied a closet and bought extra pillows and sheets and pushed aside chairs and hauled bookcases and made room for a new sofabed. She listened in the subway for the consonants of Russian—once she grabbed the arm of a startled passenger and asked for the story of his life; but the fellow turned out to be a Pole. She went everywhere for advice, telephoned strangers, was warned against the obduracy of officialdom and the barriers to emigrés. Every day she schemed for the refugee’s deliverance; and at night, drained, insomniac, it sometimes seemed to Puttermesser that she could switch on, like a light discovering a hidden stage, any scene from the past.
Under this aridly willed ray she saw her papa on a bed, lying there dressed on top of the quilt, with his hands under his head, the elbows jutting outward. He did not speak at all; his pale eyes were open to nothing. He never blinked. It was three o’clock and very bright; a big housefly was in the room, slamming itself against the window, the wall, the high mirror above the dresser. In the middle of the afternoon Puttermesser’s papa had gone to bed to mourn. His mother was dead—Puttermesser’s Moscow grandmother, whom she had never known, except as that dried-out brown photo in the drawer. So many dead: Puttermesser’s papa; her papa’s strangely Tatar mother; his shy and scholarly father, also reduced to a cracked old Russian photo (a sick man’s face, solemn); all the lost aunts and uncles, the Muscovites, the wartime sufferers; Velvl in his school uniform, with large round pale eyes exactly like her papa’s. Distant, oppressed, eclipsed. The scattered graveyards. Puttermesser’s papa and mama in Staten Island; and where were all those others, how to imagine the cemeteries of Moscow?
The refugee arrived at one o’clock in the morning in the middle of October, ten months after Zhenya’s howl of “Rette mein Kind!” There was a night wind with a cold lick in its tail. In the empty street in front of her building Puttermesser stood waiting for the taxi from Kennedy. Wary, she kept fingering the wallet in the pocket of her cardigan.
The driver, without being asked, carried the refugee’s bags—half a dozen of them—into the elevator.
“How much?” Puttermesser said.
“No problem. Fare’s all taken care of.”
“But she hasn’t got any dollars—”
“She gimme this. Beats anything,” the driver said, and pulled out a round plastic object. The face of it showed the head of Lenin against a background of the Kremlin, with two red stars in a silvery sky.
“It’s only a watch? A cheap quartz watch.”
“You kiddin’? It’s outta Mars, where d’you get to see a thing like this?”
Puttermesser was impressed. The driver was right; the watch was a trophy. And the barter system had returned to Manhattan.
III. A SOVIET MARTIAN
HER NAME WAS LIDIA. She had flown on Aeroflot from Moscow to Prague. In Prague she switched to British Airways, which took her to Ireland for a two-hour refueling; after Ireland and before New York she landed in Washington—her ticket was a complication of airports. Her visa was a complication of fibs: she had convinced the American consul in Moscow that she would surely return—she was leaving behind a husband and two children. Sergei was the husband, the children were Yulia and Volodya. But she had no husband; it was all an invention. In reality Volodya was her boyfriend. The consul, she reported, was a nasty man. He looked at her as if she were a nasty worm. He thought everyone who applied for a visa was trying to put something over on him; he suspected that all of Moscow intended, hook or crook, to pour through the sacred gates of America and vanish behind them.
“You told him you had children?” Puttermesser marveled. “You didn’t have to say a thing like that.”
“I want he give visa.”
“When the visa’s up we’ll get you in legally. I’ve been working on it. If we need to, we’ll get an immigration lawyer,” Puttermesser said; the fervor of salvation rose in her. “We’ll ask for asylum.”
Save my child! But it was no longer Zhenya’s voice; it was the voice of Puttermesser’s papa, longing for the remnant of the lost. The pathos of their fate, the Bolshevik upheavals, the German siege of Moscow, the hunger, the Doctors’ Plot, the terror. Rette mein Kind!
“I get job,” the refugee said. “I clean house for womans.”
Puttermesser said doubtfully, “Would Zhenya want you to do something like that?”
“Mama, ha! What Mama want!”
The refugee’s laugh was a conflagration; Puttermesser was alarmed by such an eruption of mockery. There she stood, the Muscovite cousin, in the middle of Puttermesser’s living room, a small space narrowed by the new sofabed and shrunken still more by these heaps of suitcases and bundles and boxes tied with hairy Russian rope. An ironic beauty of thirty-three, trailing clouds of alien air—or, if not air, some nameless extraterrestrial medium. A Martian. She looked all around, fierce and canny; she took things in. Puttermesser felt herself being tested and judged by those sliding satiric eyes the color of Coca-Cola, and by that frail china-thin nose ending in a pair of tiny tremulous nostrils. It was the longish nose of a Mesopotamian princess.
Her full name was Lidia Klavdia Girshengornova. She was an experienced biochemist—eine Sportsdoktorin, Zhenya had said, but after a while Puttermesser understood that this meant something like laboratory technician. She traveled all over the Soviet Union with her team—“my guys,” she called them, big coarse country boys, half-literate and wild. A B-level track team trying to work itself up to international status and meanwhile playing the local competition. Lidia tested their urine daily for forbidden steroids—or else, Puttermesser speculated (she had read how the Soviets pumped up their athletes), it was Lidia’s job to make sure that her guys were properly dosed. She was careful not to drink with them, but she wrestled and joked around, and she liked going to distant cities, Tbilisi, Kharkov, Vladivostok, Samarkand; especially she liked the trip to the Caucasus, where the hotels had a hint of Europe. She was amazingly up-to-date. Her lipstick was very red, and her hair was almost red, short over the ears, looped over one eyebrow. She wore black tights and a long turtleneck sweater that fell to the tops of her thighs. Puttermesser had often seen this costume on Lexington Avenue at lunchtime, near Bloomingdale’s, and privately wondered at how normal her young cousin seemed: hadn’t she been swaddled on a board at birth, like all infants in backward Russia? Only her shoes were unmistakably f
oreign. They smelled of Soviet factory.
IV. THE GREAT EXPOSITION
IN THE MORNING PUTTERMESSER set out her usual breakfast: toast and peanut butter. Lidia, suspicious, spread the yellow-brown stuff and made a horrible face. “What you call thees?”
“You’ve never had peanut butter?”
“Nyet,” said Lidia, so Puttermesser took her out to the supermarket. At a quarter to nine it was mostly deserted.
“Pick out whatever appeals to you,” Puttermesser offered.
But Lidia, oblivious, in trance, was gaping down the long banks of freezers with their tall foggy doors, behind which lay mounds of spinach and broccoli and string beans and peppers and peas in richly bulging plastic bags. Her little nostrils fluttered as she moved past brilliant boxes of cereals and orderly shining rows of bottled olives and pickles and mustards, past gardens of berries and melons. And when Puttermesser put out her hand to pluck up a packet of cheese, Lidia whirred out a furtive whisper. “No! Not to take!”
“What’s the matter? It’s Jarlsberg, you might like it.”
“They will see!”
“For God’s sake, we’re not under surveillance, we’re here to buy, don’t you understand?”
It developed that Lidia Klavdia Girshengornova had supposed they were visiting an exhibition hall. In Moscow, she explained, there were on occasion such dazzling fairs and expositions: a great public cavern set aside for gargantuan demonstrations of abundance, mainly foreign goods, strictly guarded. Hundreds came to gaze and marvel. To steal from a display, Lidia said, even the smallest item, could land you in prison.
The refugee had other misapprehensions. She thought the telephone was bugged; she was certain there was an official “listener” always on duty. She was innocent of polyester, and was astonished that the bed sheets were never ironed. She believed that every transaction had to be accompanied by a “gift.” Her cases and boxes were cornucopias of shawls, scarves, colorful swaths of all sizes; varnished scarlet-and-black ladles and spoons hand-carved out of hardwood, decorated all over with flowers; ugly but clever little plaster ducks and cows; nested hollow dolls shaped like eggs, without arms or legs, each encapsulating a smaller doll, until the last stood alone, a tiny thumbelina. A circle of red spotted each miniature cheek, and each round head wore a painted babushka. Puttermesser was enchanted by these merry wooden faces redolent of old magical tales: dappled northern forests, silvery birdcalls and fragrant haycocks, a baba yaga’s dark whim in an out-of-the-way cottage.
But Lidia gave her bundles an instantly entrepreneurial name: Russian folk art, she called it, with a salesman’s snap in her voice.
Her voice was shrewd and deep, close to mannish. Puttermesser again felt herself being read by this voice; it took her measure with the speed of an abacus. Lidia, watching Puttermesser watching her unpack, held up one of the painted egglike dolls. “You like?” she asked. “You keep,” and handed over the hollow doll with all its interior brood. A businesslike gesture. A payment of some kind.
Business was on Lidia’s mind. “I tell before, I want clean for womans,” she pressed.
“But you can do better than that. Something in a laboratory, something that could get to be permanent—”
“Just like Mama!” Lidia laughed. She drew out a portfolio of photographs, many of them ragged and worn; Zhenya had sent them to show to Puttermesser. And here was Zhenya herself, sorrowing under summer sunlight, a puddle of shade under nose and lower lip. A dowdy plump aging woman in a patterned dress with a big collar. Flat face, eyes with the median Asian lid. Uncomplicated mouth, tightly shut; it made a narrow line. You could not imagine what this mouth thought or desired. Puttermesser’s own cousin Zhenya, her papa’s true niece! But the woman in the snapshot seemed generations removed. She looked old-fashioned. She looked . . . Soviet. The others, Puttermesser’s papa’s brothers and sisters, the abandoned, the longed-for, did not. Puttermesser was inflamed by the others—they were eternal, it was as if she was entering her papa’s mind. Fanya, Sonya, Reyzl, Aaron, Mordecai! And Velvl’s whitish pupils, his school uniform with the metal buttons, the very same picture Puttermesser had known all her life. Sonya’s son, Lidia said, at twenty-one had been on a ship in the Great Patriotic War; a German torpedo sank it. And what had become of Velvl? Run over and killed by a Moscow tramcar in 1951. He left no children, and his widow married a Georgian. There were no happy stories among these photos. So many familiar pale round eyes. The sisters were redheads; Velvl was white-blond.
An ache fell over Puttermesser. It was grief for her papa’s grief.
V. MORE HISTORY
EVERY YEAR IN THE spring, Lidia said, Zhenya made a pilgrimage to the grandmother’s grave. When the Bolsheviks came, the grandmother’s little dry-goods shop was taken away. It was no bigger than a cubicle, confiscated from the class enemy by the Soviet Peoples. There was winter hunger everywhere, so the grandmother took to peddling in torn shoes that had once belonged to her dead husband.
“What was she peddling?” Puttermesser asked.
Lidia shrugged. She knew only that it was illegal to sell anything privately; it was profiteering. The grandmother stood in the street at dusk and rattled the kopecks in her pocket, hoping to attract the day’s last customer. A man in an official-looking black cap with a badge on it approached. He seized her wrist and manacled it to his own, and pulled her behind him over the hardened snow—but on the way she felt in her pocket with her free hand for a hole she had once sewn up, and broke through the threads, and dropped her few kopecks, one by one, through the open slit. They came to a terrifying building, all black stone on the outside, all cracked linoleum on the inside, where a man with a blue-and-gold collar—he seemed to be some sort of soldier—sat on a high bench and glared down at her. “Black marketeer! Capitalist! You sold goods, I saw you!” the man in the cap yelled. The soldier on the high bench demanded that she produce her profits. But her pockets were empty. “You make a fool of me?” the man in the cap yelled; he gave the grandmother a smack and let her go.
Lidia told this story indifferently. It was one of Zhenya’s secrets, the kind she sometimes whispered behind the stove; it belonged to long ago. But Puttermesser stored it away with a pang: this was what had befallen her papa’s mother! A starving wraith in her eighties, in broken shoes, peddling in the snow. (Her papa, separated by so many decades, by oceans and continents, had known nothing of it. Mourning, he had gone to bed in the middle of the day. The big housefly, looking to escape, slammed against the mirror. It slammed and slammed. There was no way out.)
VI. INTERVIEWS
LIDIA HAD BROUGHT WITH her, for emergencies, a Russian-English dictionary. She never consulted it. It appeared she understood everything, and in her peculiar fragmented English she could convey almost anything. She had learned these jigsaw phrases in a night class, but had left after only five weeks—when she was not on the road with her team there were so many better things to do on bitter winter evenings in Moscow. You could go to someone’s room and warm yourself with drink. A party, with strangers, for which you paid an entry fee. Or, rather, you could drink if you came with your own bottle of vodka. She had met her boyfriend in such a room, a largish room in a communal flat with high old ceilings stippled with grimy plaster roses; before the Revolution it had been part of a grand house owned by aristocrats. Her boyfriend, Lidia said, was really after her; he was always pestering her to get married.
“Are you sure he isn’t just looking for a chance to get out of the country?” Puttermesser asked.
Lidia beamed; surprisingly, her teeth were magnificent.
“He want go Australia,” she said, and slid into laughter.
Sometimes the telephone would ring at four in the morning, and then Lidia leaped up from her sofabed to catch it before it could wake Puttermesser. But Puttermesser always woke, and it was always Volodya.
“Can’t he count?” Puttermesser said testily. “Doesn’t he know what time zone he’s in?”
“He afra
id I stay in America,” Lidia said. “He afraid I not come back.”
“Well, isn’t that exactly the point?”
“Just like Mama!”
Mama, Puttermesser was learning, was preposterous. It was not admirable to be just like Mama.
“Please, now we speak business,” Lidia urged. “I want clean for womans.”
The interviews began. Puttermesser put up a notice in the elevator:
Companionable Russian emigrée, intelligent,
charming, lively, willing to clean house,
babysit, general light chores. Reasonable.
Inquire 3-C from 8 p.m.
Then she blotted out “Russian emigrée”—it was too literary, and smacked of Paris or Berlin in 1920 (she thought of Nabokov)—and wrote instead: “Soviet newcomer.” The neighbors streamed in; Puttermesser was acquainted with few of them. A couple arrived carrying a small girl in pajamas and asked for a pot to warm milk in while they looked the Russian over. The child broke into a steady shriek and Lidia dismissed them with a scolding; she didn’t want to deal with that, she said. The bachelor journalist from 7-G, who occasionally nodded at Puttermesser in the lobby, confessed that he already had perfectly satisfactory help; what he was interested in was a chance to hear a grassroots view of Gorbachev.
The Puttermesser Papers Page 17