The Birobidzhan Affair: A Novel

by Marek Halter

  I’d never known Sam string together that many sentences before. Hearing the chink of a glass, I thought I could have done with a drink myself. The bottle I usually kept in my desk drawer was empty. I’d let a lot of things slide over the past few days.

  Sam broke the silence.

  “That said, my notes are worth more than the paper they’re written on. They might be of some use to you. I’ve put them all in the internal mail for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “They’re not quite complete. I didn’t manage to get everything down at the time.”

  “Do you think you could fill in the gaps for me now?”

  “Possibly.”

  After that, he lapsed into silence for several seconds. I was familiar enough with Sam’s ways not to be thrown by his pause. Now I knew why he’d been so keen to get me on the phone. I rummaged in the clutter on my desk for a notebook and pencil. Hearing Sam take another swig, I grunted, “I’m listening … ”

  “During that tour, Stalin was using Mikhoels as a Trojan horse. Uncle Joe is a real pro when it comes to hiding dark forests behind pretty trees.”

  “Go on.”

  “Right at the beginning of the war, when I was working on an article about Japanese-American internment camps around Seattle, I met a guy from the FBI. He was no idiot. We took to each other immediately. Five or six weeks after Mikhoels’s tour, after reading my article, he said to me, ‘Sam, I think it’s time you realized a couple of things about Uncle Joe’s waltzers.’”

  “He really said that? He really called them ‘Uncle Joe’s waltzers’?”

  “It’s a nice image. On the dance floor, you tend to watch the best dancers and don’t notice what the others are doing, the ones who are dancing in the shadows and are hard at work on another job entirely. Mikhoels’s tour was not just about earning dollars and sympathy.”

  “Did he know that?”

  “Probably not, or else he suspected it and put it out of his mind. He had no choice in the matter. Without Stalin’s backing, he couldn’t leave the USSR, and his top priority was to mobilize the Jews in the United States. … ”

  “And what about the other ‘dancers’?”

  “The sympathy that Mikhoels won for the Soviet cause was supposed to lay the groundwork for the recruitment of Jews prepared to do more than just put their hands in their pockets. That was the job of another member of the Jewish Antifascist Committee: Itzik Feffer, a Yiddish poet and NKVD agent. Mikhoels gave talks and sent willing candidates his way. He put them in touch with Soviet agents who took them in hand. Those guys were NKVD pros, vice-consuls in New York with diplomatic passports, Leonid Kvasnikov and Alexandre Feklisov to name a few.”

  I quickly jotted down the names.

  “Did it work?”

  “Better than you’d think. For many, it was the logical conclusion of Mikhoels’s talks. Stalin and the Reds were on the front line against Hitler. The United States, the Brits, and the USSR were allies. If the only weapon capable of stopping the Nazis and the mass slaughter of Jews was the atomic bomb, America shouldn’t be keeping it all to itself. People ought to be helping the Russians acquire the technology. Morally speaking, it was a valid argument.”

  “Were you tempted?”

  Sam gave one of his rare little laughs.

  “It was all a bit confused, wasn’t it? Fortunately, I didn’t have to make that choice. I didn’t have any information for Uncle Joe.”

  I thought back to my own war years. They hadn’t lasted long, three years from 1944 to 1947, in England, then Berlin. I’d done nothing heroic, but it was all good experience. It had taught me a thing or two about confusion.

  “I see.”

  “It’s all a question of knowing how far to take it, Al.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does the name Klaus Fuchs ring any bells with you?”

  I couldn’t help smiling. Everybody was obsessed with the guy.

  “One of these days I’m going to know his life story by heart, Sam. He’s the brain behind Los Alamos, the man who sent the secrets to the bomb to Moscow. The Brits arrested him in January. He confessed in March. The Post even ran an article on him.”

  “One thing you might not be aware of is what he told the Brits when they asked him why he betrayed us. ‘What’s this talk of treason? Without Stalin and the millions of Soviets who died bringing Hitler down, the United States and Britain would have ceased to exist. The real crime would be for you to be the only ones with the atomic bomb. That would have been a crime against science. All the people who helped me to stop that theft are heroes.’”

  “That’s not a bad defense! What held true for some people eight or ten years ago still holds true today. Is that it?”

  “Yes, except that Fuchs was really pushing it. This isn’t 1943, and we’re not fighting against Hitler anymore. Today, the enemy is on the other side of the Pacific, and they’re stealing weapons from us that we ought to be able to use to make them behave.”

  There was a pause. Sam must have been finishing his drink.

  I said, “I know about Fuchs, Sam, and the names he let slip to the Brits and the FBI, not to mention the arrests over the past few weeks. I also know that young Cohn is onto it, just as he’s on Marina Gousseiev’s case.”

  “So you’ll understand what I have to say even better. Things are heating up, Al. Your Russian is hanging over the cauldron. They’ll soon have everything they need to plunge her into it, and they may even be right. They’re busy dismantling these loathsome Soviet networks, piece by piece. And it’s not just a show for Nixon’s and McCarthy’s amusement.”

  “Sam … ”

  “No, you listen to me. Stop playing the wise guy, Al, or you’ll go down with that blasted woman. I’d be sorry to see that happen because I’m fond of you and you’re a good journalist. And if you go down, you’ll take everything we’ve worked for on this damned paper with you, and I can’t allow that to happen.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Sam. What are you driving at?”

  “It’s simple. Go to the hearings, keep your ears open, and take it all down for your articles, but leave it at that. Don’t go pretending to be her guardian angel. You don’t have the wings to pull it off. Do you read me, or do you want me to be more plain?”

  A terrible shiver made me grip the handset more tightly. Had Sam found out about my early morning visit to the Old County Jail? No, I didn’t want him to be more plain. How could he know? And so soon!

  I lit a cigarette to disguise the anxiety in my voice.

  “Can I ask you something, Sam? Are you still in touch with that good friend of yours at the FBI you were telling me about just now?”

  There was a slight cough on the other end of the line. Sam’s voice softened.

  “Yes, he’s part of the family now. He married one of my cousins, but he still likes to get things off his chest from time to time. You can’t imagine how lonely an FBI agent can feel. And some of them are fed up with being used as puppets by guys who can think of nothing but fabricating false evidence. He has been known to point out a rusty old nail sticking out of a floorboard before I step on it on occasion.”

  “Okay, I get the message.”

  “Excellent.”

  “I need the New York office to do me a favor, all aboveboard. There should be some record of the name Michael Apron in the medical school archives or insurance files. If he lived in Brooklyn, someone might remember him. It wasn’t that long ago.”

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  We both hung up, neither of us particularly cheerful. I stubbed out my cigarette. My hand was trembling slightly.

  T. C. had been wrong. He wasn’t the only one who knew about my trip to the jail that morning. It would even be fair to say that word spread fast. I wondered who else knew, apart from the FBI. Had Cohn, Wood, and McCarthy been informed? It was likely.

  In a moment of panic, I dialed T. C.’s number. Ulysses answered the telephon
e. His employer wasn’t there. He was dining out. Did I want to leave a message?

  After giving my name and thanking Ulysses, I lit another cigarette to steady my fingers. Seriously in need of some thinking space and a drink, I left the office. Before I knew it, I was sitting in front of a beer and a shot of bourbon in a bar on Vernon Street. I ordered a sandwich too, but when the waiter put it down in front of me, my stomach gave a dissenting lurch. I was scared.

  One question was going around and around in my head. They knew, but they were letting me carry on. Why?

  Once I had some alcohol inside me, I attempted to get things straight in my muddled brain. It was no use trying to guess how they had found out about my visit to the jail. There were too many possibilities. At least I had had the presence of mind not to leave Shirley’s fake permit behind. I still had it in my pocket.

  It didn’t take me long to work out what I must do. As things stood, that phony permit could only get Shirley into trouble. I made a trip to the restroom. There, I tore the paper bearing the letterhead of Wood’s office into tiny shreds and watched them disappear down the toilet.

  On returning to my seat, I felt much calmer. An idea had popped into my head, or rather popped back into my head. It had flashed through my mind earlier, but I hadn’t paid it any attention. Wood had been a little too ready to insist on my presence at the hearings. No doubt he’d seen it was in his best interest, but he couldn’t have made the decision alone. He must have gotten the other Committee members to agree to it. And suddenly I could see absolutely no good reason why McCarthy and Nixon should have given their consent.

  Holding the hearing behind closed doors was all for show, play-acting. In two or three days maximum, they would cause a sensation when they pulled a rabbit out of their hat. Marina would be guilty; they would produce evidence of that. When that day came, it would be a nice bit of publicity for them to have a witness on the inside, a journalist who could recount how they had conducted the hearing and uncovered the plot. Except that I couldn’t be that witness, and they knew it. They would need somebody pliant, a hack who was under their thumb. There was no shortage of them in Washington, but I wasn’t one of them. In that case, why had they let me in on it?

  Another question followed. Since they knew, why had the little men in gray suits from the FBI not already come for me? Lately, they’d arrested journalists for less than I had done.

  An explanation came to me. There was a real possibility that they’d been manipulating me like a puppet from the beginning.

  If they had no good reasons for letting me sit in on the hearings, they may have bad ones.

  After draining a second glass, I began to have a pretty good idea of how it had happened. McCarthy and Nixon had spotted an opportunity. Nothing would please them more than a blunder on my part. That a journalist with left-leaning tendencies, and a Jew at that, should flout the law to defend a real Soviet spy and a phony Jew would be proof of that great anti-American conspiracy that they were cooking up. It would be a godsend for the forthcoming November elections.

  Sam had been right when he’d said that things were heating up. Things were doing more than just heating up.

  Of course they would need proof, but proof could be fabricated. They only had to leave me to flounder in the mud and I would hand them everything they needed on a plate.

  Or perhaps they actually had hard evidence?

  Were McCarthy and his clique really crafty enough to dream up such an elaborate trap without at least some elements of truth?

  Surely the Jewish and Soviet spy rings that the FBI was uncovering, the theft of the plans for the atomic bomb, and Fuchs couldn’t all be pure invention. Stalin had actually detonated his bomb ten months earlier.

  For the first time, serious doubts crept into my mind. Who was Marina Andreyeva Gousseiev?

  Had the guys arrested by the FBI in recent days mentioned her name, or the name Maria Apron? Did Cohn already have that kind of proof in his bag of tricks? Was he playing at cat and mouse?

  Sam and T. C. had put me on my guard. I was placing too much trust in Marina, too fast and too early. I’d been a sucker for her talent and her beauty, a sentimental Jew through and through. Hadn’t Marina succeeded in passing herself off as something she wasn’t for years? A Jew!

  “And if you go down, you’ll take everything we’ve worked for on this damned paper with you,” Sam had said. He could be right.

  On edge and in a bad mood, I parked my Nash in the parking lot at the capitol. I couldn’t help looking out for the men in gray suits from the FBI, half expecting them to surround the car. But no, there was no welcome committee for me, either there or at the door to the auditorium. There were no surprises. The game went on.

  Nobody even seemed to notice me come in. The congressmen were already in their armchairs. The merry threesome—Wood, Nixon, and McCarthy—were joking among themselves. Mundt was pretending to be engrossed in his work. O’Neal was gone and Cohn hadn’t arrived yet.

  I was relieved to see Shirley nattering with her colleague. Suddenly, the thought of buying her dinner at Chez Georges that evening gave me a warm glow. Not only did she deserve it, but I could also count on her to distract me from this whole sorry saga for a few hours, and that would do me the world of good.

  As I approached the stenotypists’ table, she turned her back on me. Her colleague was drawing stripes of lipstick on the back of her hands so that they could compare colors. Around half a dozen lipsticks were lined up between the blank paper strips for their stenotype machines. The auditorium might have been a beauty parlor. Somewhat nonplussed, I was going to make some kind of witty protest, just to prove to Shirley that I hadn’t forgotten my promise, when she glanced back for just long enough to freeze the words on my lips.

  Shit! What was going on?

  Maybe it was nothing. Perhaps Shirley was just being cautious enough for both of us, and rightly so. There was no point in being caught fraternizing.

  I sank back into my black mood, sat down behind my table, and only just had time to open my notebook before Cohn appeared. Marina was behind him, her face withdrawn, indifferent. After the guards had removed her handcuffs, she repeated that all too familiar little ritual, taking off her white caraco jacket, lifting her fingers to her temples, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear, checking that her chignon was in place, then spreading her hands out flat in front of the microphone and staring down at them as if she were alone in the world.

  Perhaps she was. Or were her friends at the embassy—those ‘others,’ as she had called them that morning—somehow looking out for her one way or another?

  I forced myself to imagine she was a master spy. It was possible. Anything was possible. And if that turned out to be the truth, it was time I steeled my heart. Otherwise I would only be letting myself in for a lot of grief.

  The chatter died away. Cohn glanced in Wood’s direction. The gavel came down and the show began.

  “Mr. Chairman, as I told you yesterday, the FBI conducted a search of Miss Gousseiev’s New York lodgings this morning. The search was concluded toward midday today. The agents responsible for carrying it out have forwarded me an initial report. I can give you a summary of their findings.”

  Cohn laid out some papers in front of him. He had the undivided attention of everyone in the room, except for Marina. She didn’t even seem to be listening.

  “The description of the lodgings matches the witness’s preliminary statement. It’s a one-bed apartment, complete with bathroom, on the second floor of a furnished apartment building at Hester House, thirty-five Hester Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan. Miss Gousseiev has lived there since February seventeenth of last year. The agents report that they found no hidey-holes or particular objects that anyone might have wanted to hide from a search team. In addition to some clothes and the usual everyday items, Miss Gousseiev’s room contained lots of documents related to the theatre. These consisted of flyers and scripts, mostly duplicated using a mimeograph machine
or typed, some with notes in the witness’s handwriting. Of the books, four were in Russian and three were anthologies of verse, one by the famous author Boris Pasternak. The fourth was a work of nonfiction about the theatre of a certain Constantin Stanislavski. In accordance with the usual procedure, the FBI has seized all the documents and books for closer examination. We will have the full results of their analyses in a few days.”

  Cohn paused dramatically. He put down the file he was holding, picked up another, and glanced in Marina’s direction, then back at Wood with an affable smile.

  “Before we continue with the hearing, I’d like to ask the witness a few questions about the documents. … ”

  I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The others had sat up straight in their armchairs. Nixon and McCarthy were looking hard at Marina through narrowed eyes. You could almost see their ears twitching. Marina’s hands still didn’t budge. Anyone might have thought she didn’t understand a word of English.

  Wood’s eyelids were fluttering.

  “You may proceed, Mr. Chief Investigator.”

  “Miss Gousseiev … ”

  Cohn rolled his pen between his fingers. He marked another pause, as if to give Marina time to lift her head.

  “We didn’t find any letters at your lodgings, Miss Gousseiev, no letter of any sort. That’s unusual. Everyone gets mail. Don’t you have any friends?”

  Marina decided to look at him. She looked distant, surprised.

  “No. … No friends.”

  “Nobody, really?”

  “You know where I come from. It’s not easy to make friends as a foreigner, especially not when people realize you’re from Russia.”

  “Some people did help you, though. … ”

  “I know the people I work with. They’re nice, but they’re not friends. … Maybe it’s my fault. In Russia, nobody trusts anyone. You never know what your friends might be capable of. Even in Birobidzhan it was difficult.”

  “Would you describe the writer, Mrs. Dorothy Parker, as your friend?”

  Another silence fell, as dense as rock.