The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 11
Zaitsev used the word defector as if it were a job classification. Pogodin, leaning over Lewinter’s shoulder, translated only part of the monologue—enough to account for the laughter, but not enough to insult. Timoshenko, a thickset, totally bald man with a warm smile, shook hands all around.
One by one, like a teacher calling the roll, Zaitsev introduced his guests. There was Solomon Kaganovich, the renowned Yiddish novelist who had spent fourteen years in a Siberian prison camp and worked nowadays as a handyman in Dom Modeli, Moscow’s central fashion studio. Earlier in the day, Kaganovich had flooded the only toilet in the house, and so Zaitsev, to everyone’s glee, introduced him as “the master plumber”—which was also the name of Kaganovich’s famous unpublished book about Stalin. There was Sergei Yevdokimov, a composer of children’s songs who churned out bawdy ballads for the underground circuit on the side. Zaitsev introduced him as “Russia’s foremost specialist on toilet graffiti.” Zaitsev’s ex-wife, a gone-to-seed woman with a flashing gold tooth and an embarrassingly flat chest, was there with her latest husband, a little-known journalist named Bubnov. Zaitsev purposefully mispronounced his name when he introduced them, and Bubnov was too embarrassed about being there in the first place to correct him. Zaitsev’s current mistress, the Fat Cow—as he privately called her—was next. “Here,” Zaitsev said, molding his palm over her right breast, “meet the goddess of hay fever, who has transformed the common sneeze into an aria. My Katrina.” On cue, she produced a sneeze, and Zaitsev said, “Dear lady, may God bless you.”
In one corner, near the window with the sycamore jutting through it, sat Shliapnikov, a wiry, quiet, dead-drunk carpenter from a nearby village. Yevdokimov, the graffiti specialist, had come across him in a coffee house and brought him along to show how unclass-conscious he was. But as Zaitsev pointed out, it merely showed how class-conscious he really was. Right next to the carpenter sat a grim-faced man in his late thirties, a biochemist named Andrei Antonov-Ovseenko. His father had been an army general destined for great things until Stalin had him executed in the 1936 purge. Antonov-Ovseenko, who had never protested against anything in his life, had recently been coaxed into signing a manifesto demanding that the government reopen the case of one A. Axelrod, an outspoken poet who was thought to be languishing in a mental institution reserved for unharnessed liberals. Just that morning, Antonov-Ovseenko had learned that the manifesto, with his name prominently displayed, had turned up in the New York Times. “Andrei here is an amateur ice skater,” Zaitsev said by way of introduction. Smiling wanly, Antonov-Ovseenko saluted the newcomer. “Right now,” Zaitsev added, “he’s skating on very thin ice.”
“There but for the grace of God go you,” a voice piped up from one corner.
This evoked a general round of laughter.
“What does he mean by that?” Lewinter asked when Pogodin translated.
“I don’t know,” Pogodin said, a puzzled look in his eyes. There were a handful of other people in the room: a couple of Bolshoi musicians, another man whom nobody had ever met before—Zaitsev introduced him as “the unknown guest”—and a junior diplomat whose last name was Krestinsky and whose first name had been irrevocably lost—at least to the host—when he walked through the door. Krestinsky, just back from a tour of duty in Cairo, had brought along a tin of hashish, which some of the guests had tried before dinner. After half a dozen puffs, they laughed nervously and switched back to hard liquor.
“Zaitsev, darling,” the Fat Cow called, her voice still musical in a nasal sort of way, “if you’re finished with the roll call, give us another record.”
“I’ll put one on for the American,” Zaitsev said. Painstakingly, he lowered the diamond needle onto the groove. “Tell him, Yefgeny, tell him it’s to make him feel at home. Atmosphere is everything. I understand it’s a classic of sorts.”
The record Zaitsev put on was an eight-month-old rock hit by an American group called the Sins of Omission. It began:
Ashes to ashes, and yeah
Shit to shit, oh yeah
Everyone’s hung up, oh my good christ yeah
On the mirror bit.
Around the room, Zaitsev’s guests listened in rapt silence to words they didn’t understand. Lewinter had never heard the song before and couldn’t make any sense out of it either, but he nodded appreciatively.
The party had reached a plateau; it could turn deeply serious or uproariously funny—or both.
Absent-mindedly, the Fat Cow dipped into a huge handbag at her feet and pulled out a new French antibiotic throat spray she had bought at an outrageous price from a friend recently back from Paris. She inserted the pressurized capsule in the plastic dispenser, put the whole contraption in her mouth, then pushed and sucked in at the same instant. The spray, which smelled like an insecticide, coated the back of her throat and worked its way up her nasal passages, clearing the congestion that plugged them. Katrina blew her nose, first one nostril and then the other, into a paper dinner napkin. “Ah, I feel better,” she said. “These French drugs really work.”
“You’ve just seen Katrina at her hobby,” Zaitsev explained “Some people accumulate paintings or stamps or money or lovers, but our hay-feverish hypochondriac here collects medicines. And not just any medicines, but Western medicines. You should see the chest upstairs—a veritable pharmacy of American pills and English ointments and French sprays.”
“My prizes are my West German birth control pills and a Swiss laxative—the chocolate tastes divine,” Katrina chimed in.
Pogodin, translating furiously to Lewinter, thought of the hay-fever pills the American had brought with him.
“Zaitsev, old fart,” said Timoshenko, the Novi Mir editor, “are you against collections of medicines—or collections per se? It sounds from your tone as if you’re making a reverse acrobatic leap from the particular to the general.”
“No amount of mental acrobatics could leave you behind, Alex,” said Zaitsev. He plucked the French throat spray from Katrina’s hand and went through a pantomime of spraying his throat, then his nose, then his ears, and finally his behind. Everyone was convulsed in laughter.
“Your friend,” Lewinter whispered to Pogodin, “is quite a clown.”
“I’m against collections of any kind,” Zaitsev began, obviously on the verge of a reasonably long discourse. “They are antithetical to Marxism-Leninism, which is a melange that currently goes by the name of Communism.”
The audience oohed and aahed, egging Zaitsev on. “More precision, Zaitsev,” the Yiddish novelist Kaganovich called.
“You’re right—more precision is needed. I’ll sharpen my tongue. To collect things—to collect anything—is a form of perverse materialism, an admission that in this land of plenty, something could someday be in short supply.” Zaitsev spoke sardonically, and everyone understood it as such—except Katrina.
“But Zaitsev darling,” she chimed, “there are shortages. When’s the last time you found hundred-watt light bulbs?”
“You know what the peasants say?” asked Kaganovich. “The shortage will be divided among the peasants.”
“Exactly,” Katrina said with no logic at all. “And what of a person who collects things of beauty, art objects and the like? That’s not the same as collecting medicines which you may have to use someday.”
“Dear lady, it’s all hoarding, whether art or armpit spray,” Zaitsev answered. “What difference if you hoard objects of beauty against the day when there is no more beauty in the world. Hoarding is hoarding; it’s antisocial and antisocialist, and that’s an end to it.”
“And you, Zaitsev, if you were to hoard, as you put it, what would you collect?” This from Timoshenko, who sat hunched on the edge of an old sofa, his knees wide apart, his hands clasped between them.
Zaitsev rested the bridge of his nose between two fingers and thought a minute. His eyes fell on the delicate strands connecting two leaves of the sycamore. “Cobwebs,” he said. “I’d hoard cobwebs against the day when the spider becomes extinct.”
“But why cobwebs?” Pogodin asked.
“Ah, my dear friend, because they stand as a rebuke to all manmade constructions. The stresses and strains are perfectly calculated. The design is utilitarian. The building materials are cheap and readily available. And one never tires of seeing them, as opposed to those post-neo-Stalin monstrosities they are throwing up in Moscow. Did you hear about the new office buildings on Kutuzovski Prospekt? Kosomol Pravda ran the story. They constructed it so the windows couldn’t open, and then fitted it with undersized air conditioning. The metallurgical combine moved into it in June. For a few weeks they generated so much sweat that the bureaucrats who record such things were convinced that the metallurgical people were working at a fantastic pace and gave them all bonuses. In July the workers refused to come to work, bonuses be damned, and the combine had to move back to its ancient spaces on Gorky Street—so ancient that the windows actually had hinges on them.”
It was a bravura performance, the kind Zaitsev could be counted on to give when any party showed signs of flagging. Some of his quips would be making the rounds for weeks to come. The only thing the audience had to do was listen appreciatively—and spur him on with one-line questions. It was an old indoor sport.
“Is your friend catching any of this, Yefgeny?” Zaitsev asked. “After all, we want him to think well of our party.”
The play on words wasn’t lost on the guests.
Lewinter, who had been getting bits and pieces of the monologue from Pogodin, mumbled something in Pogodin’s ear. “He says,” said Pogodin, “that Katrina’s problem may be in her head, not her nose. He says her compulsion to collect medicines suggests to him that she should see a psychoanalyst.”
It was as good a one-liner as any.
Zaitsev responded with a theatrical roar. “Thank God,” he said, throwing his hands in the air in mock surrender, “for the incompatibility of Marx and Freud. But for that, we’d have those insane hyenas of psychiatry hanging out their shingles in our part of the globe. No, none of it for me. There is a fundamental difference between East and West, Mr. Lewinter. In your world, it isn’t capitalism that’s king, it’s psychiatry. We, on the other hand, live in a world where psychiatry is a defrocked country priest. When you get a cold, it’s because you hate your job or your wife or your life; when we get one, it’s because of germs, pure and simple. Your psychiatrists have created an atmosphere where the ordinary everyday emotions of worry, anxiety, depression, boredom, love and hate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, require medical treatment. Here we simply take another drink. And thank God for that. If you ask me, the basic flaw of psychoanalysts is that they assume it is a good thing to be normal.”
“But isn’t it, Zaitsev darling? Isn’t it good to be normal, I mean?”
“Normality, my dear Katrina,” Zaitsev pontificated, “stifles creativity. What great chess player was ever normal? Have you heard that some of the factories that have gone over to the New Economic Plan are picking plant managers the way they do in the West; giving them psychological tests. Holy mother of hell, there’s not much use testing people to find out if they will make good managers unless you know what it is that makes the good ones good!”
Shliapnikov, the drunken carpenter, had missed most of the conversation. But the mention of “psychological tests” had tripped a wire, and now, from the corner of the room, he blurted out: “Most of our nuts are in the loony asylums. God keep it that way.” He looked around for someone to second the motion.
“There are a lot of people in asylums who aren’t nuts, friend,” Timoshenko said quietly, coldly.
“Like Axelrod,” said Antonov-Ovseenko, happy to have a cause.
“You’re a fool,” Zaitsev exploded, glaring at Antonov-Ovseenko, “a god damn fool. Axelrod is stone dead. Has been for some time.”
There was utter silence in the room; only Timoshenko, who kept abreast of such things, had known Axelrod was dead.
“What did he say just then?” Lewinter asked Pogodin.
“They’re talking about a mutual friend,” Pogodin answered evasively.
“How do you know he’s dead?” Antonov-Ovseenko asked in an almost inaudible voice.
Timoshenko interrupted. “This is a conversation for another time and another place. Please.”
Zaitsev poured himself another bourbon and downed it in one smooth, straight motion. “Another time, another place,” he repeated. “Good title for a book.”
“It’s funny,” Lewinter told Pogodin, “I don’t understand a word, but I can sense the atmosphere has changed.”
But Zaitsev was off and running in a new direction.
“Did you know,” he said, “that Xerxes had myopia? That’s why he sat on a hill over Salamis and watched fifty Greek ships beat his five hundred Persian ships without changing his tactic. He couldn’t see properly.”
“Didn’t his generals tell him what was happening?” asked the unknown guest.
“Xerxes had another disease common to great men,” said Zaitsev. “He didn’t trust the people around him.”
“Lots of great men have suffered from physical defects,” said Pogodin. “It would make an interesting thesis.”
“I hear Brezhnev has hemorrhoids,” Zaitsev said. His ex-wife and the Fat Cow laughed hysterically. “Why are you laughing, dear Katrina? Do you have a pill for that?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” She giggled. “An Italian suppository.”
“Talking of great people, did you ever notice, Zaitsev, that nearly all great writers love cats?” said Yevdokimov, the graffiti expert. “Our own Turgenev, Tolstoi, Pushkin—the list is endless. You have one back in Moscow, don’t you?”
“I do. I call him Chichikov, after the rogue in Gogol’s Dead Souls who roamed the countryside buying the souls of serfs who were thoughtless enough to die, thereby depriving the masters of their property. Cat lovers are a special breed. You can tell a lot about a person by his attitude toward dogs and cats. Napoleon and Mussolini hated cats. Hitler loved dogs. Authoritarians and sadists, as in Germans, and masochists, as in homosexuals, love dogs. Sexy, independent, freedom-loving people love cats.”
“Don’t forget Kublai Khan, Julius Caesar, and Richard Coeur de Lion—they also loved dogs, Zaitsev,” Pogodin said. “There’s a common denomination there.”
“Yefgeny certainly knows his history,” said the Fat Cow. “It runs in his family,” Zaitsev said. He suddenly felt very tired and very bored and very cruel—and his monologue took on a cutting edge. “He is the great-great-grandson of Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin, who pasted together a seven-volume history of Russia and did back flips defending Nicholas I.”
Pogodin gasped in open-mouthed astonishment; he had known Zaitsev since their days at the university together, but he had never traded family trees with him.
“If you’re implying that Mikhail Petrovich was an apologist, I take exception,” said Pogodin.
“Take exception then. Take two. Nicholas was a tyrant and anyone who tried to defend him was as great ..a rogue as Chichikov. Even your great-great-grandfather. On the first day of his reign Nicholas crushed the Decembrists. He spent the rest of his tour of duty, so to speak, shitting on the national minorities, suppressing liberals who dared to criticize him, building up the secret police. Nicholas was a paternalistic fungus on the Russian body politic.”
“You find no redeeming features?” asked Pogodin. He was on the edge of anger; Zaitsev seemed to be putting him down for the exercise.
“Just one—he provided the background tapestry for the golden age of Russian literature; out of Nicholas’ Russia came Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol.”
“Ah, Zaitsev darling, you manage to find redeeming features wherever you look,” said the Fat Cow.
“True enough—even in you.”
There was an embarrassed silence. Tears welled up in Katrina’s eyes. Zaitsev had gone beyond good clean fun. Timoshenko, the Novi Mir editor, came to the rescue. “What do you think, Zaitsev, has the Cyrillic alphabet hurt or helped Russia?”
“In a political or literary sense?”
“Literary.”
“Then of course the answer is that it has hurt us, in the same way that the change of the railway gauge between Russia and the West hurts us; it has slowed movement of intellectual freight across this frontier—and we are the worse for it.”
“I agree,” said Timoshenko, “but I think the West has suffered even more than Russia. Imagine having a literature that has never really absorbed Pushkin or Tolstoi or Dostoevski or Gogol? The idea is absurd.”
“Let’s do a test case,” Kaganovich said. He turned to Lewinter. “Have you read the Russian giants?” Pogodin translated.
“I read Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment in college, but I suppose that’s about it,” Lewinter answered. He hoped they wouldn’t get into a more detailed discussion; he remembered reading the book, but he could recall little beyond the title.
“Zaitsev darling, ask him some penetrating questions about America,” the Fat Cow said. She was her old self again, a half-empty glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Yes, tell us, Mr. Lewinter, is it true that Americans hate black people?” asked Yevdokimov, the graffiti expert.
“How can they allow thirty million people to live in starvation?” asked Bubnov, the journalist.
“How could you allow Kennedy—two Kennedys—to be murdered?” asked the Fat Cow, pointing with her cigarette. “That’s what I want to know. How?”
“My dear, beautiful, simple-minded Katrina, Lewinter here was not personally responsible, was he?” said Zaitsev. “He might just as rationally ask: how could you allow Lenin to be shot in the head by an assassin’s bullet. Come, one question—one reasonable question—at a time.”
Timoshenko began the interrogation of Lewinter. “Can you give us some picture of what life is like in America? Living, as we do, in a fundamentally different society, I’m not sure we have a clear idea.”
With Pogodin translating, Lewinter tried to describe life in the United States. He spoke slowly, haltingly, as if searching for the right words; actually he had anticipated the question and knew very well what he was going to say. “How can I sum up a country that is three thousand miles wide and two hundred million people deep?” he began. “If I had to go to the heart of the matter, I’d say ‘impersonality.’”
