The Puttermesser Papers

by Cynthia Ozick

  “Gorbachev!” Lidia scoffed. “Everybody hate Gorbachev, only stupid peoples in America like Gorbachev,” and threw open the substantial valise that occupied her nightly. It was crammed with cosmetics of every kind—eyebrow pencils, rouge, mascara in all colors, a dozen lipsticks, hairnets, brushes, ointments and lacquers in tubes and tubs. Puttermesser could identify few of these emulsions and was helpless before all of them. (But ah, look, so they did have such contrivances in the puritanical socialist state!)

  The journalist, offended, retorted that Gorbachev was certainly an improvement on, say, Brezhnev; but Lidia went on creaming her pointed little chin.

  Puttermesser turned all around, like a cat in a cage. There was no place to sit down in her own living room. A pair of young men from the top floor were reclining on Lidia’s sofabed. One of them inquired whether she knew how to use a vacuum cleaner. Lidia laughed her scornful laugh—did they think she was a primitive?—and asked how much they would pay per hour.

  It was difficult to tell who was interviewing whom. Lidia had a head for numbers. She was quick, she could mentally convert dollars into rubles in an instant. She was after money, that was the long and the short of it. Day after day, Puttermesser tried to lure her cousin out—to a museum, or to the top of the Empire State Building. That would be a sight! But Lidia lifted an apathetic shoulder: she liked things, not pictures. And she had seen the New York skyline in the movies. She was waiting for evening, when the interviews would resume. The doorbell shrilled until midnight. What she wanted was to clean house and get dollars.

  She settled finally on the family in 5-D. It was a three-bedroom apartment; there were three children. The husband did something in computers, and four times a week the wife took a bus downtown to Beth Israel Hospital, to work as a volunteer in pediatrics. They were a socially-conscious, anti-violence couple; though easy and unrestrained with their children, they banned toy guns, monitored and rationed television, and encouraged reading and chess. Two of the children had piano lessons, the third was learning the violin. “Call me Barbara,” the wife told Lidia, and embraced her, and said what a privilege it was for her family to be in a position to provide a job for a refugee. She promised that they were going to be friends, and that Lidia would soon feel at home in 5-D—but if she had any anxieties or complaints she should immediately speak up: there was nothing that could not be negotiated or adjudicated. Lidia was impatient with all this effortful goodness and virtuous heat. She had chosen the Blauschilds only because they had offered her more dollars than anyone else.

  “Varvara, ha!” Lidia yelped after her first day. “Foolish womans, teacher come for music, children hate!” And another time: “Dirty house! Children room dirty!” She had never in her life seen such disorder: shoes and shirts and toys left in heaps on the floor, every surface sticky, the sink always mountainous with unwashed pans and dishes, papers scattered everywhere. She disapproved of Varvara altogether—why would anyone run out to work for nothing? And leave behind such a vast flat, so many rooms, and all for one family, they lived like commissars! Only dirty! The chaos, the slovenliness!

  “You don’t have to do this,” Puttermesser said. “You didn’t come to America to clean houses, after all. Look, we need to go see the people at the agency. To get you past the visa stage. It’s about time we took care of it.”

  Lidia’s brown eyeballs slid cautiously sideways in their long shells. She lifted her shoulder and dropped it again.

  VII. ANOTHER INTERVIEW

  PUTTERMESSER WAS PRIVATELY GLAD of the four hours Lidia spent upstairs in 5-D every afternoon; it was a relief not to be obliged to visit so incessantly. Sometimes Lidia would talk of God and His angels, sometimes of the splendid old churches the Revolution had destroyed; and now and then she pulled out a certain dream book, which, if read prayerfully and with concentration, could foretell the future. Lidia was a believer in the world of the sublime. She was moved by icons, by Holy Mother Russia. She told how she often wept at Eastertime, and how Jesus had once appeared to her in a dream, looking exactly like a holy painting on an ancient icon. At such moments poor elderly Puttermesser, with all her flying white hair, saw her Muscovite cousin as some errant Chekhovian character misplaced in a New York living room: “How lovely it is here!” said Olga, crossing herself at the sight of the church.

  “But there’s another side to all that, isn’t there?” Puttermesser said. “What about the Beylis case?”

  Lidia had never heard of the Beylis case.

  Puttermesser, a reader of history, explained: “The blood libel. Pure medieval insanity. A Jew named Mendel Beylis was accused in a Russian court of killing a Christian child in order to drain his blood. Imagine, a thing like that, and in modern times, 1913! The clergy never intervened. So much for Holy Mother Russia.”

  Lidia sent out her riddling smile, half secretive, half derisive. “Not happen now.”

  “And the attack on the Writers’ Union? That was just this year!”

  Puttermesser knew what Lidia was thinking: just like Mama.

  On a rainy night toward the middle of November they took the subway to the Bronx. Puttermesser had set the appointment with the agency for seven o’clock, so as not to interfere with her cousin’s hours at the Blauschilds’. Lidia seemed nervous and reluctant. “We pay?” she asked.

  “Not at all. It’s a service organization. They hire some staff, but they’re mostly volunteers.”

  “Like Varvara, work for nothing, foolish!”

  In the cramped little office Linda sat morosely in a culde-sac of filing cabinets, noiselessly snapping her scarlet fingernails. The woman behind the desk had a doctor’s manner: her aim was to make a diagnosis followed by a recommendation. She was, she said, a refugee from the Soviet Union herself. She had arrived five years ago, and had a son in high school: he was currently on the math team at Stuyvesant. Her husband, formerly an engineer, was employed as a salesman in a men’s clothing store. The adjustment had been difficult at first, but now they were well settled. They had gone so far as to join a synagogue—in Kiev such a thing was inconceivable.

  Lidia looked away; all this was for Puttermesser. It had a seasoned professional ring. Except for a mild brush of accent, there was nothing foreign about the interviewer. The woman was even stylish, in the way of the boroughs beyond Manhattan—she wore a scarf at her throat, meticulously knotted and draped, held by a silver pin in the shape of a lamb. She drew out several sheets of Cyrillic text and in a rapid cascade of Russian began to question Lidia. Despite a practiced series of nods she was not unkind. Puttermesser observed that her cousin was staring obsessively at the pin on the scarf; she was inattentive, lethargic. In Lidia’s darkly unwilling mutter Puttermesser heard the desultory streak of cynicism she had lately come to recognize. She could spot it even in the unaccustomed syllables of Russian.

  And then the Muscovite cousin rose up. Her eyes shot out lightnings. Her fine teeth glinted. A roar of Russian galloped out of the cave of her mouth. The little office was all at once a Colosseum, with the smell of blood in the air.

  “Good God! What was that all about?” Puttermesser demanded; she had restrained herself until they were nearly home. In the subway Lidia had made herself inaccessible. She pinched up her eyebrows. Her mouth narrowed into a tight line, like Zhenya’s mouth in the snapshot. “Commissar!” she said.

  They climbed the stairs in a stench of urine at the Seventy-seventh Street station, and nearly stumbled over a homeless man asleep on the concrete. The slanting rain wet his motionless face and neck. An empty bottle in a paper bag rolled past a muddy leg. Lidia hesitated; she was instantly cheerful. “Like in Soviet!” she cried, and Puttermesser understood that her cousin loved mockery best of all.

  Lidia threw herself on her sofabed and crumpled up the papers the interviewer had given her and tossed them on the carpet.

  “That woman only wanted to help,” Puttermesser said.

  “Rules. Much rules.”

  “Well, they must be wo
rth it. She sounds happy enough over here.”

  “Such womans!” Lidia said. “My guys on team more smart.”

  The living room was now Lidia’s domain entirely. Puttermesser almost never went in there. It was strangely scrambled and unfamiliar, a briar patch behind a barrier of hedgerows—Lidia’s boxes and bundles and valises and plastic bags with their contents spilling out. The sofabed was always open and unmade, a tumble of blankets and pillows. Empty soda cans straggled across the top of the television. Orange sticks and an emery board lay on the edge of a bookshelf. Half-filled cups of coffee, days old, languished along the baseboards. Was this Blauschild influence? Was chaos spawning chaos,5-D leaching downward into Puttermesser’s spare and scholarly 3-C?

  But Puttermesser had another theory; the fault was her own. She had been too solicitous of her young cousin, too deferential, too dutifully and unsuitably ceremonious. Oh, that’s all right, you don’t need to think about that. Just leave it, I’ll take care of it. Don’t worry about it, you really shouldn’t, it’s fine the way it is. These were the stanzas of Puttermesser’s litany. It was incantation, it was “manners”: she had treated Lidia as an honored guest, she had fallen at her feet—because she represented the healing of a great unholy rupture; because it was right that a rush of tenderheartedness, of blood-feeling, should pour into the wilderness of separation. To be blessed with a new cousin overnight!

  The first week Lidia had grimly taken the broom—wasn’t this what was expected? as a sort of rent?—and swept up after their meal. “Oh please don’t trouble,” Puttermesser said each time. Thereafter Lidia didn’t. She left the lids of her cream jars on the bathtub ledge. She left her dirty dishes on the kitchen table. She left her wet towels on the living-room credenza. It soon came to Puttermesser that her cousin, though spurning atheism, was otherwise a perfected Soviet avatar: she did nothing that was not demanded. Released, she went straight to the television and its manifold enchantments: cars, detergents, toothpaste, cheeseburgers, cruises. An exhibit more various and abundant than any to be seen in the great halls of Moscow, and all unnaturally vivid (no green so green, no red so red, etc.) against an alluring background of meadows, hills, rills, fountains, castles, ferris wheels. The soda cans on top of the set multiplied. There was no reciprocity for Puttermesser’s mandarin politesse.

  “What did that woman at the agency say,” Puttermesser pursued, “that made you explode like that?”

  “She say make Lenin go in trash.”

  “Lenin? You weren’t discussing Soviet history, for God’s sake, were you?”

  “Medals. I bring much medals.”

  Lidia spilled them out then: a whole rattling green plastic bag of little tin effigies of a small boy. The bag had a word printed on it: ФOTOГpaФИЯ.

  “Lenin when child, you see? Komsomol prize for children. Junk! Nobody want! I buy hundred for kopeck.” The mocking laugh. “Woman say not allowed do business, big law for tax. Commissar!”

  VIII. ENTREPRENEURS

  EVERY MORNING LIDIA ATE black bread and sour cream—she had chosen these herself from the neighborhood exhibition—followed by strong tea with plenty of sugar. Then she disappeared. She was always back in time to go up to 5-D to clean for Varvara. She confessed that she had grown to hate Varvara’s children. They were selfish, wild, indulged; they knew too much, and still they were common—this is what people used to say about Khrushchev.

  Puttermesser made no inquiries about Lidia’s absences. The scene at the agency had shown what questions could lead to. But she noticed that Lidia never went out without carrying one or two of her many bundles.

  At eleven o’clock, when Lidia was gone, Varvara came down to see Puttermesser.

  She glanced into the living room: “Mess! Looks like my digs! And you don’t even have kids.”

  “Is there a problem?” Puttermesser said. “You don’t have to be embarrassed, I mean if things aren’t working out with my cousin—”

  “Oh, Lidia’s a jewel! I wouldn’t dream of losing her. She’s enriched our lives,” Varvara said. “She just fascinates the kids. She tells them Russian fairy stories—they’re pretty grisly, the wolf always gets to eat somebody, but the kids love it. And Bill and I don’t mind. It’s not really mayhem like the stuff they feed them on TV. It’s just imagination, it’s harmless.”

  And Puttermesser, in the bloody theater of her own imagination, saw her cousin dissecting the limbs of Varvara’s children via the surrogacy of wolverine fangs.

  Varvara peered past the kitchen. “Is Lidia home?”

  “She’s out for a while.”

  “Taking in the Big Apple? That’s nice. Hey,” Varvara said, “I just want to get the two of you to come to a very special party. A private fund-raiser for SHEKHINA. You know SHEKHINA?”

  “It’s that magazine. The one that advertises itself as having nothing in common with MOTHERWIT,” Puttermesser said.

  “I told Sky about your cousin, and he said she’d be a terrific draw. Sky’s a good friend of mine. We worked on the Neighborhood Visionary Project together years ago, when we all lived out in California. And before that we were both on the board of the All-University Free Expression Process, but that was before I met Bill. And before Sky had that nasty second divorce—basically she kicked him out. Bill hates Free Expression, he thinks it starts you on the road to violence. Bill’s a real pacifist.”

  Puttermesser recalled the Free Expression Process, a fad of two decades ago: it had flourished in the age of streaking, when a naked student—a rosy blur of frontal flesh—would fly down the aisle of a lecture hall and dash across the stage. The Process specialized in “demonstrations” in which a forbidden word was chanted without pause for exactly two hours (fuck and asshole were the natural favorites); this was known as “neutering,” and the goal of the Process People, as the press termed them, was to neuter all the naughty words.

  Varvara said, “I guess you were never a Process Person. Wrong generation, after your time, right?”

  But Puttermesser didn’t believe in generations; such a notion was not in her philosophy. She supposed that what distinguished human beings, whatever their age, was temperament, proclivity, character. Until someone reminded her of it, she often forgot she was old. “I remember their slogan,” she said. “‘Everything Comes Up Crystal.’”

  “Right! Wasn’t that beautiful? And the other one, the one on the T-shirts? ‘Dirt Busters.’ Cute! Once we did a double-Process on turd. Four hours of it. Turd, turd, turd, turd. Well, all that’s long ago—B.K., before kids! We take baths with the kids, though. The whole family, two by two, cross-gender.”

  Varvara looked to be in her forties. Her face was both large and small. Her cheeks and forehead were very wide, her chin was broad and long, but bunched in the middle of all that unused space were the crowded-together eyes, round little nose, round little mouth. A family of features snug in a big tub. You could not tell from such a visage—it was, in fact, a “visage,” a bit Dickensian, a touch archaic—that it belonged to an idealist.

  Schuyler Hartstein, by contrast—Varvara’s old friend—had exactly the sort of head one would expect of a social visionary. Puttermesser had happened on it now and again on television panel shows, a long-skulled baldish rectangle dangling a blond ponytail from its rear and (actually) a curly-ribboned monocle from its front. On such panels—they were not infrequent—Schuyler Hartstein always took the idealist position. He was called Sky not as an abbreviation but as a metaphoric allusion: the cloudlessly vivid cerulean of his poet’s orbs. (Not at all the color of Puttermesser’s papa’s eyes, a wan blue diluted by the sad gray wash of memory and remorse.) In Schuyler Hartstein there were no hesitations, reservations, qualifications, impediments. He had a sunny blond face and all the social thinker’s certainties. Around his neck hung a gold chain, at the end of which swung the Hebrew letters that spelled “life.” He was well-known for piety, and on Sabbath mornings could be seen in a white velvet skullcap, jammed down by means of a bobby pin
over the upper hump of his ponytail.

  Though a loyal socialist, Sky Hartstein was a ferocious entrepreneur. The periodical he had founded was by now almost two years old. Its name, familiar to Blake, Milton, the Swedenborgians and the theosophists, originated in Jewish mysticism: it referred to the radiance of the Divine Presence, and, kabbalistically, to its female aspect. It worked for the cutting-edge feminists; the Catholics liked it (it reminded them of Mary), the Buddhists had no quarrel with it, and the Hare Krishnas were enthralled. Shekhina! You could even find it in the dictionary. Still, the magazine was more celebrated for the manner of its launching than for its contents, a mixture of global utopianism and strenuous self-gratulation (they seemed to be the same thing). Sky Hartstein published his own poetry in his own pages. The famous advertising campaign at the start of SHEKHINA had been devised by Hartstein himself: its headline was POLITICS AGAINST MOTHERWIT—MOTHERWIT being a sober old periodical devoted to rationalist traditions, cautious liberalism, and an impatience with ponytails. But the war between SHEKHINA and MOTHERWIT was one-sided: MOTHERWIT remained aloof. It was only a story that MOTHERWIT had consistently rejected Sky Hartstein’s poetry; MOTHERWIT published no verse at all. The vengefulness of Sky and his SHEKHINA was rooted in something worldlier, and more urgent, than the neglect of contemporary poetry. Sky Hartstein believed that, politically speaking, there were no enemies anywhere, except in one’s own bosom. ENMITY IS ILLUSION, emblazoned on a dove’s wing, appeared on the masthead. ONLY PLOWSHARES! cried out from the subscription blank.