“Well, what did you expect? The woman invites you to the center of her life and you insult everyone in sight. The way you answered Sky Hartstein. You heard it, those people actually get asked to the White House. SHEKHINA’S getting famouser and famouser.”
“PRAVDA also famous,” Lidia said. “Nobody read. Read to make joke.”
And in that instant, as “PRAVDA” dropped among the oatmeal crumbs in Lidia’s red mouth, Puttermesser understood her dream. All that barbed wire! It was a platitude of a dream. She had transformed her apartment into the gulag—it was that simple, so stupidly transparent that it would make Freud yawn. Sky’s speech had brought it on; or else Volodya had: the eeriness of a call from a former penal colony just as she was bleeding on barbed wire.
“That book you’ve got?” Puttermesser said. “That dream book?” It was asinine to ask for it, but she did: she felt a shudder, a mystical quake, traveling from Sakhalin to herself—something strangely predictive.
She had never seen Lidia more alert. Her thin neck swerved like the neck of a small quick animal—a pony, or a hyena—as she dashed through the hedge of her bundles to fetch the dream book, and it came to Puttermesser that she had finally struck home with her cousin. Until now what had she been for Lidia if not a harassment and a bore? How old and irrelevant she must seem to a lively young woman, a flirt, a foreigner, a beauty!
Lidia returned with the book in her hands as if she were displaying a crown on a cushion. Here was a believer, an adorer; the cynic, the pessimist, had vanished. Her shrewd eyes had shrunk to the size of two narrow brown seeds. “What in dream? I look, I find.”
Puttermesser waved all around. “Barbed wire. All over the place. Across the windows, everywhere. I got cut on it and blood poured out. I mean poured.”
Lidia considered; she put her head down to study what appeared to be a sort of index—dream topics?
“Does it list barbed wire?”
“Nyet.”
“Prison?”
“Prison not in dream. Dream here, in house.” Lidia bent over the pages, turning them so slowly that the ceiling light flashed off each one. “Ah,” she said. “Krov.”
“What’s that?”
An elongated vowel lingered. A ghostly word. “Blooood,” Lidia said. “Where blooood come?”
“No, no,” Puttermesser said crisply. “It isn’t blued. It doesn’t rhyme with food, it rhymes with mud. Out of my leg. My foot. My toes.”
“Khorosho,” Lidia said. “Better from foot. Blooood from head mean you dies.” She stopped to study some more; she was uncommonly serious. “Peoples dream blooood from foot, they make holy future. You holy womans. You”—she struggled to translate—“saint.”
Puttermesser stared: her ironic cousin was altogether drained of irony. The mystical shudder that led to bitter Sakhalin fell away. Her cousin was . . . what was her cousin? —Anything shoddy, anything that broke at a touch, parts that failed, faulty mechanics, the switch on the living-room wall that suddenly gave out, the leak in the kettle, a crack in the plaster, the bus that was late in coming—all these were occasions for Lidia’s satiric call: like in Soviet! Proof of a corrupt and shabby universe. Puttermesser knew what her cousin was: an apparatchik of blemish and smirch, wart and scab, disdain and distrust. Like in Soviet! She was either too suspicious or too credulous. She was a skeptic who put her faith in charlatanism.
“I think,” Puttermesser said darkly, “you would be a lot better off throwing out such a silly book and getting hold of an English grammar instead.”
The little brown seeds of Lidia’s eyes swelled. She slapped the dream book shut. “What for I need English? I go Sakhalin with Volodya! Make big business in Sakhalin!”
“What are you talking about?”
“Volodya say come, get much rubles. Marry maybe.”
A gray blur, as if a piece of sky were getting hosed down with diluted whitewash, had begun to brighten the windows. It was still too early for dawn, but the blackest hours of night were receding, and in that morning light that was not quite light, spun together with the sharp cartoonlike brilliance of the ceiling fixture, Lidia was sending out a phosphorescence of her own.
“You came for asylum! You came to escape! I spent months paving the way before you got here,” Puttermesser said. “I tackled every goddamn bureaucracy, public and private. For God’s sake, Lidia, what do you think this is? A vacation?”
“I come work,” Lidia contradicted.
“You’re here as a refugee.”
“Refugee? What mean refugee?” Her face was a lit stage; every filament of her hair burned red and redder yet.
“Don’t tell me that out of a million words this is the one you don’t get! Listen, where’s that dictionary—dig it out! Unless it’s sold? Via Peter Robinson’s miscellaneous merchandise outlet—”
“Ah, Pyotr,” Lidia said sweetly. “Tall mans, same like Volodya—”
“Go get the goddamn dictionary!”
So for the second time that night Lidia broke through the hedge and heap of her belongings—the spoons, the dolls, the shawls, everything she had brought to peddle in America—and came back with a book: Russian-English, English-Russian.
Puttermesser looked up “refugee” and right next to it found ЭMИΓPaHT.
“Read that,” she commanded.
“Emi-grahnt,” Lidia read.
“That’s what you are. That’s what I’ve been working on. That’s what I understood from Zhenya.”
“Zhenya? Zhenya say this? I am emi-grahnt like you is holy womans,” Lidia blazed, and stretched out her long, long laugh, as elongated as the vowel in blooood, as crucial as inspiration. “What Mama say! What Mama want!”
XI. THE FAREWELL
IN THE END PYOTR wept. Lidia had been gone only a day; she had managed her ticket—New York to Moscow, a direct flight—all on her own.
“This Korean place on First Avenue?” Pyotr said. “She asked me to go over there with her. To try on this coat. That was only the day before yesterday.”
“She did mention that you and her boyfriend are about the same height,” Puttermesser said.
“I mean I knew it was a present, but I didn’t know who for. She said it was for her brother in Moscow. She said she was having it shipped.”
“Lidia doesn’t have a brother.”
“All the time she was planning to leave.”
“But not before clearing a profit,” Puttermesser said.
“Those dolls went like hot cakes. She must’ve made around nine hundred dollars off them, never mind what she got for the rest of the stuff.”
“Russian folk art. The spoons, the shawls.”
“Those Lenin medals? That was just to see how things’d go.”
“To test the market,” Puttermesser offered.
“She walked out of my place with maybe two thousand smackers. Even this weirdo book went—like half English, half Russian? Would you believe it, in a sports store? She picked up ten bucks for it.”
“She didn’t sell that dictionary!” Puttermesser cried.
“It was your idea, wasn’t it? She said you were making her do grammar instead.” Pyotr drank and sobbed. “I liked that funny Russki talk.”
They were sitting in Puttermesser’s living room. It was, in its way, another tea party—but there was booze in the tea cups. Pyotr had brought along a bottle of vodka to celebrate with Lidia; it was a month ago to the day that she had revealed herself in the Albemarle Sports Shop.
But Lidia was far above the round earth, heading for the death of the Soviet Union.
Crumpled plastic bags littered the carpet. The sofabed was just as Lidia had vacated it, an anarchic jumble of cushions and twisted sheets. Ripped pairs of pantyhose sprawled gauzily over a parade of Coke cans. Lidia’s various scents—lotions, nail polish, hair spray—wafted like the wake of an apparition.
“She didn’t even tell me she was going,” Pyotr wailed.
Puttermesser looked into Pyotr’s clean wet Nor
th Dakota eyes. Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy: gulled.
“The Great Experiment,” she said, and emptied what was left of the booze into poor Pyotr’s innocent cup.
XII. LETTERS
December 12
Dear Ms. Puttermesser:
I hope you’ll forgive this somewhat embarrassed intrusion. Barbara Blauschild, your upstairs neighbor and an old pal of mine, kindly gave me your name. I understand you attended our fund-raiser about two weeks ago, in company of that interesting young lady who raised a ruckus—Barbara tells me you’re her relative. Barbara also tells me she released the young lady from her employ on my behalf. (She had hired her for compassionate reasons.) I very much appreciate the depth of Barbara’s friendship, but she’s always been precipitate. (We keep up our friendship despite the fact that her husband hasn’t spoken to me in years. The truth of the matter is that Barbara and I used to be an item 100 years ago, back in California, and Bill’s never gotten over it.)
I admit (again) that I’m a little embarrassed to be asking this. It’s just that when the young lady with the Russian accent stood up in our meeting with all that fire in her face—not that she exactly knew what she was talking about—it struck me that I would like to get to know her. What’s tricky here is that Barbara, having let her go, now declines to approach her. So I thought you might be willing to help. (I am a sucker for red hair.)
Sincerely,
Schuyler Hartstein, M.A.
Editor and Publisher,
SHEKHINA
December 15
Dear Mr. Hartstein:
Thanks for your note. My cousin has returned to the Soviet Union. She did, however, leave behind a number of cosmetic materials on the top of the toilet tank. None of these were unusual or worthy of remark. Yet only recently I found, concealed under her bed, a half-used bottle of hair coloring.
Sincerely,
Ruth Puttermesser, Esq.
From Tel Aviv, in German (in Puttermesser’s unavoidably maladroit translation):
Hotel Royale
23 Juni
Liebe Ruth!
As you can see, because of the pressure of circumstances I have emigrated to das Land, wo die Zitronen blüh’n (Goethe). I have been here only two days. Lidia is now living in Sakhalin. In the summer it is not a hardship to be there. She is six months pregnant, and she and Volodya (he is her boyfriend since last year) will marry very soon. He is very busy setting up a business with other ambitious young men. You probably do not know, because until now it has been kept as secret as possible, that a number of paleolithic mammoth tusks have been dug up by farmers in Sakhalin. Volodya’s plan is to buy the tusks from the locals and resell them in the West. He and his colleagues are in at the start, so the investment will not be great. I am told that these tusks are very beautiful and actually resemble fossilized wood. Lidia is somewhat doubtful about their authenticity, but you know my Lidia—such a skeptic! Nevertheless she is putting all the money she earned in America into the business. Even if the tusks are not authentic, she believes they can easily be passed off as such to potential collectors, since value is as value seems.
I am glad she is safe in Sakhalin, safer than she would be in America. Lidia told me that she was forced to attend an extremely dangerous political meeting in New York, where all the participants had knives and guns. Some of the guns went off. I am sorry you did not spare her this fright. Even before that, she told me, she was made to travel to a distant place at night, where a woman official of some unsavory and possibly secret organization tried to dragoon her into signing certain papers—a scheme of indenture, apparently. I am very dismayed to hear of such things in your country, especially knives and guns at a public meeting in a palatial hall where the people are, as Lidia explained, well-dressed. Some of the women, though not all, as stylish as Raisa Gorbachev!
The night I left Moscow there was a riot on our street. This is because the USSR is falling apart. Some say the death knell has already been sounded. [In the original: das Tautengeläut ist schon geklungen.] The rioters shouted unpleasant slogans and wore unpleasant uniforms and broke many windows, but they did not (at least not obviously) carry knives or guns. I thank God that Lidia, who did not wish to accompany me here, is for the time being in quiet Sakhalin. Who knows where fate will finally place her? She confided to me that the baby is regrettably not Volodya’s, and she was pleased to have me quit the USSR—she feared I would disclose the truth to Volodya. She assures me that you, dearest Ruth, know who the father is, and that he is a nice boy. I, however, have always been afraid that Lidia would get into trouble with one of the athletes on her team. But the team has been disbanded, since there are no more official Soviet teams.
I will write again when I begin to understand this new place. In the meantime, please write auf deutsch to the above address (it is a hotel being utilized as an absorption center for new immigrants) and tell me all you know about the baby’s father. Lidia says he has a typically Russian name and actually sells icons for a living (but they are of course only reproductions). Where in America could she have unearthed such a person?
Your new-found cousin
Zhenya
PUTTERMESSER IN PARADISE
Knit and unravel,
commands the Gavel.
Do and undo,
till nothing’s true.
—A Song of Paradise,
translated from the Akkadian
“VERY DEEP IS THE well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”
It was Thomas Mann: the opening sentences of Joseph and His Brothers. Ruth Puttermesser, sitting under the green lamp in her lonely bedroom one moment before her death, sitting with the weight of that mighty tale of a magus pressing into her ribs, was thinking of Paradise: very deep is the well of Paradise; should we not call it bottomless?
It happens that in the several seconds before we die the well of the ribs opens, and a crystal pebble is thrown in; then there is a distant tiny splash, no more than the chirp of a droplet. This seeming pebble is the earthly equal of what astrophysicists call a Black Hole—a dead sun that has collapsed into itself, shrinking from density to deeper density, until it is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Until it is less than infinitesimal.
Puttermesser heard (she did not feel) the pebble’s electric ping! as it pierced the veil of the sluice that lay at the bottom of the well—or, rather, as it flew through the impalpable membrane that marked the beginning of bottomlessness. And at the bottom of this bottomlessness—in Eden oxymorons are as esteemed as orchids—there was PARDES. PARDES is a Hebrew word, as befits so messianic a thought: it means an orchard, it means a garden, it means Paradise—derived, no doubt, in this intertwining of the vines of civilization, from the Greek PARADEISOS.
Yet as Puttermesser sat alone in her bedroom under the green lamp, with the magisterial Mann pressed against the framework of her skeleton, it was still one whole instant before her death, and she was as far from entering Eden then as she had been at the moment of her birth. The radiator exhaled its familiar little winter sigh, and over bed, books, and desk the green lamp threw out a cavelike velvet halo. Under Puttermesser’s hand and eye Mann was speaking:
There are deeply chamfered trains of thought out of which one does not escape, once in them; associations cut and dried from old time, which fit in each other like rings in a chain, so that he who has said A cannot help saying B or at least thinking it; and like links in a chain they are, too, in that in them the earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked one into the other that one passes willy-nilly, and whether speaking or silent, from one to the other.
Puttermesser’s mind flew into and behind these phrases like a spirit that can pass through walls. Exegetical onomastic Puttermesser!—what was she musing on in the nanosecond of life still allotted to her? She was thinking of Paradise, yes, but (because the earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked one into the other) she was also thinking how names have their destiny, how they drive whoever h
olds or beholds them. For instance: the poet Wordsworth giving exact value for each syllable. Or Mann himself—Man, Mankind, seeking the origins of human character in Israelitish prehistory. Or how one Eliot reins in the other Eliot: “the jew squats on the windowsill”—that’s Tom—rebuked by Deronda’s visionary Zion—that’s George. And James the aristocratic Jacobite, pretender to the throne. Joyce’s Molly rejoicing. Bellow fanning fires; Updike fingering apertures; Oates wildly sowing; Roth wroth. And so on. Puttermesser: no more cutting than a butterknife.
The earthly and the heavenly are so interlocked that one passes willy-nilly, and whether speaking or silent, from one to the other. Without transition? Without interim or hiatus or breath? Without fear?
Puttermesser is about to be murdered and raped—in that order. She was murdered before she was raped. The intruder—the murderer, the rapist, in that order—slid, slipped, crept into her bedroom through the slightly raised window behind Puttermesser’s reading chair. The window was raised because, though it was February, the apartment, like so many apartments in New York, was stifling. The radiator was a fiery accordion, belching out its own equatorial weather.
There was a kind of kick or knock; the intruder was standing on top of the radiator. The rubber on the soles of his sneakers gave out a burning smell.
She saw him then; she saw the knife, a long blade on a spring, as far in its intent from the work of a butterknife as Tom is from George. “Frank,” he said; and how strange it was that he spoke his own name! Or perhaps, whatever the deed to come, it is not within the scope of human aspiration to remain anonymous. “It’s me, Frankie,” he said. And then, in familiar movietone, “Do what I tellya or ya dead.”
So, in those last seconds, she secretly undertook to call him Candide—for his frankness, for his candor. His face she did not see; it was fully hooded in what she supposed was a ski mask. She supposed it was a ski mask not from ever having glimpsed one of these—when had exegetical onomastic urban Puttermesser, now close to the biblical threescore and ten (but she was not to reach it), ever scaled a magic mountain capped with snow? It was all newspaper knowledge: who hasn’t read of muggers in ski masks?
The Puttermesser Papers Page 20