The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 13
A formal garden had been added to the estate in the mid-nineteenth century by one of the count’s descendants who had come across a painting of Versailles. Smack in the middle of the garden stood the four-foot-thick roof of a steel-and-cement air raid shelter, a relic from what the Russians called the Great Patriotic War. There was a story to the shelter. The Germans had used the estate as a divisional command post during their drive on Moscow in 1941. At the high-water mark of the campaign, the German general staff had ordered all divisional commanders to construct massive shelters in case Hitler decided to visit the front line. He never did. Later, during the Cold War, the shelter was provided with modern air conditioning and communications equipment in case Stalin decided to visit the estate. That visit never materialized either. Avksentiev had only recently turned the bunker into a storage cellar for wine and potatoes.
Pogodin’s car swung past the shelter and drew to a stop on the gravel driveway next to the front door. A very old man, whom Pogodin took for a servant, stood on the steps. The man was well over six feet tall and very thin. He wore loose fitting trousers and a rough, collarless peasant shirt buttoned to the neck. His eyeglasses were thick as magnifying lenses. Walking with a slight shuffle, his backbone curved like a bow, the old man led the way into the house. He kept his eyes on the ground, following—or so it seemed to Pogodin—some invisible path marked out on the tiles.
The trail led through the proscenium hall lined with gilt-framed oil paintings and marble statues. There were six huge columns in the room that looked like reddish-brown porphyry but were actually made of balsa wood so they could be easily rearranged for different plays. At the far corner, near a large wooden contraption that had been used to re-create the sound of wind and thunder for the count’s theater, two small girls sat cross-legged on the floor playing pick-up sticks. Both of them looked up at Pogodin and smiled and went back to their game. The old man opened a small door—so small that Pogodin had to duck under the lintel—and motioned Pogodin through. The door closed behind him, and Pogodin found himself alone on the top of a steel ladder that spiraled down into darkness. The air was filled with the faint odor of sulphur. At the bottom step, Pogodin paused, the way one does when entering a movie theater, to wait for his vision to adjust. The only light came from a half-dozen slit windows high in the walls. Slowly, the blacks and grays started to fall into place and Pogodin began to make out his surroundings. The room was directly beneath the proscenium hall and about the same size. At one end, yellow beads of electric light frow another room seeped under a curtain. Odd pieces of theatrical equipment—mock trees, a row boat with saddles in it, a large straw basket full of armor, a fake well—were lined up against the far wall beneath the windows. Hanging from the ceiling from pieces of string of various lengths were dozens of cutouts made of paper and straw and colored wool. Some looked like birds in flight, some like houses or castles, some like floral designs, some like nothing Pogodin had ever seen before.
“They’re called pajaqi; Polish peasants decorate their homes with them. Have you seen the floor yet?” The voice, speaking a precise, almost classical Russian, came from beyond the curtain with the light seeping under it. It belonged, unmistakably, to Avksentiev.
“It’s too dim to make out, Comrade Minister.”
“Ah, yes, of course. Try scraping your shoes against the floor then.”
Pogodin rubbed his right foot back and forth and heard and felt sand. He crouched very low and looked more closely; the floor was covered with a sand drawing, an intricately etched geometric pattern of circles and squares and triangles that spiraled out from the center of the room like ripples in a pond.
Again the voice of Avksentiev. “It’s quite unique, I’m told. There probably aren’t a dozen men alive that can still do that sort of thing. Come, join me in here, Yefgeny Mikhailovich.”
When Pogodin made no move to go, Avksentiev added: “Don’t worry about disturbing the floor. Come ahead. The first step is the hardest.” And Avksentiev laughed good-humoredly at the psychology that invariably kept his visitors rooted to the floor.
“It’s like walking on a great painting, Comrade Minister,” Pogodin said, and he tiptoed across the room toward the beads of light, trying hard to put his toes inside the patterns and keep his heels off the ground.
The glare from a naked electric bulb struck Pogodin’s eyes as he pushed aside the curtain. Now the odor of sulphur was overpowering. He stood inside the room, blinking, uncertain, waiting again for his vision to return.
“You haven’t changed a bit, Yefgeny, not one bit,” Avksentiev said. “You still look so American it makes me nervous to talk to you. I haven’t seen you since … where was it?”
“Czechoslovakia.”
“Quite right, I should have remembered. Czechoslovakia.”
Pogodin could make out Avksentiev now. He was sitting, stark naked, on a wooden bench, covered from head to toe with a thin coat of dried mud.
“Will you join me, Yefgeny? I have it flown in specially from the Black Sea. The mud there is extremely rich in sulphur. Excellent for arthritis. But then, I don’t expect you have arthritis, do you? Join me anyhow. There are probably other ingredients in it that will do you good.”
“Thank you, Comrade Minister, but I think of mud as something one wipes off, not on.”
“You always did have an orthodox mind. Well, Yefgeny Mikhailovich, it is pleasant to see you after all these years. You look well, tired perhaps, but well. Sit down, help yourself to a drink. I’ll wash off the mud and we’ll talk.” Avksentiev moved to a tiled comer and turned on a shower nozzle full blast. The caked mud began to dissolve into rivulets and run down the drain.
Boris Avksentiev was one of the rising stars in the Soviet Communist Party hierarchy. At fifty-one, he was already a candidate member of the ruling Politburo, the deputy minister in charge of overall implementation of economic reforms and secretary of the supersecret committee that supervised the country’s external security organs. During his Komsomol days, he had been a champion wrestler; at one point there had been some talk of sending him to the Olympics, but the idea had been shelved when Avksentiev expressed an interest in going into security work—which he did for some time. The people who think about such things didn’t want him to become too conspicuous too soon. As Avksentiev hosed down, Pogodin could still see the wrestler in him; sturdy shoulders tapering to a narrow waist and muscular thighs. If Avksentiev’s body had a defect, it was that his legs were, proportionately, short for his torso; people who saw Avksentiev sitting down invariably came away with the impression that he was much taller than he actually was.
Avksentiev wrapped himself in a white terry-cloth robe and, patting his body dry, took a seat opposite Pogodin. “How do you like the house? It’s quite a rarity, really. The theater, I mean. Did you see the wooden contraption upstairs? If you turn the crank, it produces the sound effects of a storm.”
“I was wondering what it was,” Pogodin said. He understood that there would be some ice-breaking small talk.
“This level has the prop room; some of the original scenery is still here. Way in the back there is a trap door to the stage. It’s really charming—a genuine piece of Russian history.”
“I thought you lived in Moscow—I was surprised when the car headed out of the city,” Pogodin said. He edged his chair around to face Avksentiev. The legs squeaked across the floor and sent a chill up his spine.
“I have an apartment in Moscow, but when I can get away, I prefer to come here. I like to commune, though with what or whom I’m not quite sure.” Pogodin laughed politely, nervously.
“Who does the sand drawing? It really is a masterpiece.”
“Ah, that’s a long story. But I’ll tell it to you. Did you take notice of the old man who met you at the door? He does it. He makes the pajaqi too. He learned the art in Poland; he’s Polish peasant on his mother’s side, and was raised there until the family moved to Odessa in nineteen oh seven. He was sixteen, I believe, at the time.”
Absently, Avksentiev poured himself a glass of mineral water. “In the morning, long before anyone else is up, the old man sweeps the sand on the floor into a bucket. He rolls a sheet of newspaper into a funnel, pinches off the end and fills the funnel with sand. Then, bending at the waist, he begins his new design. He always works from the center out in expanding circles, and ends up at the foot of the spiral staircase. Every day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, there is a different design on the floor; he never does the same one twice. He’s going blind doing it, but he keeps at it.”
“It probably takes him back to his youth,” Pogodin offered. But Avksentiev went right on as if he hadn’t spoken. “It may surprise you to learn that the old man is my father. Ah, I see you are surprised. He has an interesting story, my father. He grew to manhood in Odessa. One of his boyhood friends was a seminary student named Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whom we of course know as Stalin. When Stalin joined the Communist Party, my father tagged along with him. In the early days before the Revolution, the two of them robbed banks in Odessa together. During the Civil War, Stalin stayed in Moscow but my father took on a job nobody else wanted: executing deserters. He traveled from front to front, putting his pistol to the heads of quaking men and puffing the trigger. He had read somewhere that condemned men were entitled to a choice, so he always carried two pistols—a large smooth-bore revolver and a small caliber pistol—and he let them pick which one he was to use. When Stalin consolidated his power in the late twenties, he decided to reward his old comrades. One bright day he rang my father up on the telephone and gave him this estate. In the thirties, Stalin purged all his cronies, all his bank-robbing friends, the Odessa Party people, everyone—everyone except my father. He used to sit on the stage, his feet dangling, waiting for them to come. I remember that every night he used to embrace me and say ‘good-bye,’ not ‘good night.’ After a while he began clutching at the paraphernalia of his youth, things which took him back to the days in Poland when he didn’t have the thought of an irrational death hanging over his head. That’s when he began with the pajaqi and the sand drawings. He doesn’t speak much these days. He’s not really insane; he’s just living in another, simpler world.”
Pogodin listened in silence, torn between embarrassment and curiosity. Curiosity won out.
“And did you ever learn why your father was spared?”
“Ah, no, some years ago I made discreet inquiries, but nobody knew. Perhaps his name was simply overlooked. Perhaps Stalin remembered some favor my father had done him and spared him for it. Perhaps they set out to arrest him and couldn’t find the road. Who can say?”
Pogodin had heard many stories about the days of Stalin’s terror—one from his own father, who had been summoned home from an overseas assignment to what he thought would be prison or execution, only to find he was being promoted. But the story of Avksentiev’s father was particularly moving. “There’s something very melancholy about using sand to create art. It’s so … well, transient. There will be nobody to continue the tradition when your father is gone.”
“Ah, but there will be,” Avksentiev said. “You see, I’ve taken up the art. The actual drawing is not that difficult, something like putting frosting on a cake. It’s developing your own patterns and maintaining the concentric symmetry that’s hard. I can do a fairly simple thing of linked circles, and I’m trying to develop the complexities.”
“How fascinating,” Pogodin said. “I envy you your commitment to tradition.”
“My commitment, Yefgeny Mikhailovich, is to the status quo, whatever that status quo may be.” Avksentiev said the words coldly, like an instructor who had finally arrived at the theorem. And Pogodin understood the story of the sand drawings was not small talk—but metaphor.
“I owe you an apology, Comrade Minister,” Pogodin said. “I didn’t realize we were engrossed in a serious discussion.”
“If you are up to your old standards, Yefgeny, the point will not have been lost on you.”
“You are telling me the answer is no.”
“Precisely. On the merits, anyone would think that we were foolish not to act on the information that the American defector has offered us. But you must understand that I and my colleagues are committed to the status quo—out of instinct, out of habit, out of inclination. It really doesn’t matter very much what that status quo happens to be. Our country has been through decades of turmoil and terror. Now at long last we’ve come to a period of peace and stability and consolidation. When we do move off center, as we are now with economic reforms in some industrial enterprises, we move slowly, deliberately, hesitantly—and only after long and meticulous study. If we accept the defector’s information at face value, we must move off center quickly. It would bring on an enormous amount of dislocation, involving money, priorities, reputations, areas of influence within the government and, more important, within the party. You can appreciate, can’t you, that it would be no easy matter.”
Now Pogodin understood why he had been summoned for this private meeting with Avksentiev. He was being told to lay off. Avksentiev and those members of the ruling circles for whom he spoke felt more comfortable doing nothing.
“Yefgeny, you have shown yourself to be a resourceful and tactful intelligence officer. Now it would seem that you’ve jeopardized your impartiality. You’ve become a partisan—and that puts you on dangerous ground. You have a bright future ahead of you. Only bear with us. Some of us, quite genuinely, don’t trust this American defector. Our fears about abandoning the status quo are reinforced by our instinctive doubts about a man who walks in off the street, uninvited, and offers us one of America’s most closely guarded secrets. We are inclined to mistrust him. We are sitting on the fence now. Perhaps the Americans will push us one way or another. Do you know who is handling this on their end?”
“I haven’t been in touch with that side of the operation, Comrade Minister.”
“An old friend of ours, the one who ran the Cernú operation in Czechoslovakia when we were there—Leo Diamond. Odd, isn’t it?”
“Is that what makes you think Lewinter is an operation?”
“Partly. Diamond has an operational mind. It’s precisely the kind of thing he would think up.”
“So we write Lewinter off, then. That is your conclusion.”
“Not quite, no. We will harvest some propaganda from him. After all, we have on our hands a man who has defected from America because he can no longer tolerate life there. The very least we can do is let him speak out on the subject. As for the rest, we will wait and see.”
15
“OF COURSE, if it’s too much trouble …” Lewinter said, and left the sentence hanging unfinished in the air.
It was an awkward moment. The waitress, a matronly woman who hovered over Lewinter like a bird about to pounce on a worm, waited for someone to tell her what to do. Boris Miliutin, the Propaganda Ministry Chief of Section who had been called in to handle the press conference, held his breath, his fork and knife poised over the 250-gram portion of beefsteak on his plate.
“I don’t understand,” Avksentiev said when Pogodin translated. “If what is too much trouble?”
“It’s the meat, Comrade Minister,” Pogodin explained quietly. “I believe it is too rare for him. He would like it put back on the fire.”
Avksentiev snapped his fingers, pointed at Lewinter’s plate, and said a few words in Russian. The waitress leaned over Lewinter’s shoulder and snatched it away. Miliutin, a thin, imperturbable functionary with a beak nose and eyeglasses that rested a third of the way down on it, tucked his fork and knife under the overhang of his plate and lit a cigarette. He pinched it between the thumb and forefinger, with the burning end pointing up, and had to twist his wrist completely around to smoke.
“You were giving us your impressions of Moscow?” Avksentiev said. Out of politeness, Avksentiev, Pogodin, and Miliutin ignored the food in front of them. Lewinter never thought to invite them to eat.
“Well, Mr. Av-sen-tev, I hope I will not be stepping on anyone’s toes if I say that my first impression of Moscow is that it is a singularly dreary city.”
“What does that mean, ‘stepping on toes’?” Avksentiev asked when Pogodin translated word for word.
Miliutin, who had never traveled outside of the Soviet Union but spoke textbook English, explained. “Excuse me, Comrade Minister, but it is an expression that means ‘to annoy.’ I step on toes, I annoy, that is the logic behind it.”
His khaki eyes narrowing competitively, Pogodin threaded his fingers through his kinky hair. “He’s using it in the sense of ‘offend.’ Annoy will do, but offend is more precise.
“I can never understand translations,” Lewinter said. “Everytime I say something, you have a discussion. Hey, don’t translate that, I’m not complaining, it’s just interesting.”
“What does he say?” asked Avksentiev.
“He says everytime he says a word, we have a discussion,” Pogodin said.
“Then let him learn Russian,” snapped Avksentiev. He was hungry and the food in front of him was getting cold.
“What did he say?” asked Lewinter.
“Comrade Minister Avksentiev asks if you’ve had any luck with Russian,” Pogodin said. “We must find you a tutor soon.”
“Yes, by all means. I would like to try my hand at it. If I’m going to live here, I’d better. When in Rome …”
