Mother Night (5 page)

Say what you like about me, I have never touched my principal.

During my postwar years as an odd duck and
recluse in Greenwich Village, I lived on about four dollars a day, rent included, and I even had a television set.

My new furnishings were all war surplus, like myself—a narrow steel cot, olive-drab blankets with “U.S.A.” on them, folding canvas chairs, mess kits to cook in and eat out of. Even my library was largely war surplus, coming as it did from recreation kits intended for troops overseas.

And, since phonograph records came in these unused kits, too, I got myself a war-surplus, weather-proofed, portable phonograph, guaranteed to play in any climate from the Bering Straits to the Arafura Sea. By buying the recreation kits, each one a sealed pig-in-a-poke, I came into possession of twenty-six recordings of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.”

My overcoat, my raincoat, my jacket, my socks and my underwear were war surplus, too.

By buying a war-surplus first-aid kit for a dollar, I also came into possession of a quantity of morphine. The buzzards in the war-surplus business were so glutted with carrion as to have overlooked it.

I was tempted to take the morphine, reflecting that, if it made me feel happy, I would, after all, have enough money to support the habit. But then I understood that I was already drugged.

I was feeling no pain.

My narcotic was what had got me through the
war; it was an ability to let my emotions be stirred by only one thing—my love for Helga. This concentration of my emotions on so small an area had begun as a young lover’s happy illusion, had developed into a device to keep me from going insane during the war, and had finally become the permanent axis about which my thoughts revolved.

And so, with my Helga presumed dead, I became a death-worshipper, as content as any narrow-minded religious nut anywhere. Always alone, I drank toasts to her, said good morning to her, said good night to her, played music for her, and didn’t give a damn for one thing else.

And then one day in 1958, after thirteen years of living like that, I bought a war-surplus wood-carving set. It was surplus not from the Second World War but from the Korean war. It cost me three dollars.

When I got it home, I started to carve up my broom handle to no particular purpose. And it suddenly occurred to me to make a chess set.

I speak of suddenness here, because I was startled to find myself with an enthusiasm. I was so enthusiastic that I carved for twelve hours straight, sank sharp tools into the palm of my left hand a dozen times, and still would not stop. I was an elated, gory mess when I was finished. I had a handsome set of chessmen to show for my labors.

And yet another strange impulse came upon me.

I felt compelled to show somebody, somebody still among the living, the marvelous thing I had made.

So, made boisterous by both creativity and drink, I went downstairs and banged on the door of my neighbor, not even knowing who my neighbor was.

My neighbor was a foxy old man named George Kraft. That was only one of his names. The real name of this old man was Colonel Iona Potapov. This antique sonofabitch was a Russian agent, had been operating continuously in America since 1935.

I didn’t know that.

And he didn’t know at first who I was, either.

It was dumb luck that brought us together. No conspiracy was involved at first. It was I who knocked on his door, invaded his privacy. If I hadn’t carved that chess set, we never would have met.

Kraft—and I’ll call him that from now on, because that’s how I think of him—had three or four locks on his front door.

I induced him to unlock them all by asking him if he played chess. There was dumb luck again. Nothing else would have made him open up.

People helping me with my research later, incidentally, tell me that the name of Iona Potapov was a familiar one in European chess tournaments in the early thirties. He actually beat the Grand Master Tartakover in Rotterdam in 1931.

When he opened up, I saw that he was a painter.
There was an easel in the middle of his living room with a fresh canvas on it, and there were stunning paintings by him on every wall.

When I talk about Kraft, alias Potapov, I’m a lot more comfortable than when I talk about Wirtanen, alias God-knows-what. Wirtanen has left no more of a trail than an inchworm crossing a billiard table. Evidences of Kraft are everywhere. At this very moment, I’m told, Kraft’s paintings are bringing as much as ten thousand dollars apiece in New York.

I have at hand a clipping from the New York
Herald Tribune
of March third, about two weeks ago, in which a critic says of Kraft as a painter:

Well—when Kraft opened his door for me, I knew his paintings were good. I didn’t know they were that good. I suspect that the review above was written by a pansy full of brandy Alexanders.

“I didn’t know I had a painter living underneath me,” I said to Kraft.

“Maybe you don’t have one,” he said.

“Marvelous paintings!” I said. “Where do you exhibit?”

“I
never have,” he said.

“You’d make a fortune if you did,” I said.

“You’re nice to say so,” he said, “but I started painting too late.” He then told me what was supposed to be the story of his life, none of it true.

He said he was a widower from Indianapolis. As a young man, he said, he’d wanted to be an artist, but he’d gone into business instead—the paint and wallpaper business.

“My wife died two years ago,” he said, and he managed to look a little moist around the eyes. He had a wife, all right, but not underground in Indianapolis. He had a very live wife named Tanya in Borisoglebsk. He hadn’t seen her for twenty-five years.

“When she died,” he said to me, “I found my spirit wanted to choose between only two things—suicide, or the dreams I’d had in my youth. I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool. I bought myself some canvas and paint, and I came to Greenwich Village.”

“No children?” I said.

“None,” he said sadly. He actually had three children and nine grandchildren. His oldest son, Ilya, is a famous rocket expert.

“The only relative I’ve got in this world is art—” he said, “and I’m the poorest relative art ever had.” He didn’t mean he was impoverished. He meant he was a bad painter. He had plenty of money, he told me. He’d sold his business in Indianapolis, he said, for a very good price.

“Chess—” he said, “you said something about Chess?”

I had the chessmen I’d whittled, in a shoebox. I showed them to him. “I just made these,” I said, “and now I’ve got a terrific yen to play with them.”

“Pride yourself on your game, do you?” he said.

“I haven’t played for a good while,” I said.

Almost all the chess I’d played had been with Werner Noth, my father-in-law, the Chief of Police of Berlin. I used to beat Noth pretty consistently—on Sunday afternoons when my Helga and I went calling on him. The only tournament I ever played in was an intramural
thing in the German Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. I finished eleventh in a field of sixty-five.

In ping-pong I did a good deal better. I was ping-pong champion of the Ministry for four years running, singles and doubles. My doubles partner was Heinz Schildknecht, an expert at propagandizing Australians and New Zealanders. One time Heinz and I took on a doubles team composed of
Reichsleiter
Goebbels and
Oberdienstleiter
Karl Hederich. We sat them down 21-2, 21-1, 21-0.

History often goes hand-in-hand with sports.

Kraft had a chessboard. We set up my men on it, and we began to play.

And the thick, bristly, olive-drab cocoon I had built for myself was frayed a little, was weakened enough to let some pale light in.

I enjoyed the game, was able to come up with enough intuitively interesting moves to give my new friend entertainment while he beat me.

After that, Kraft and I played at least three games a day, every day for a year. And we built up between ourselves a pathetic sort of domesticity that we both felt need of. We began tasting our food again, making little discoveries in grocery stores, bringing them home to share. When strawberries came in season, I remember, Kraft and I whooped it up as though Jesus had returned.

One particularly touching thing between us was the matter of wines. Kraft knew a lot more than I did about wines, and he often brought home cob-webby treasures to go with a meal. But, even though Kraft always had a filled glass before him when we sat down to eat, the wine was all for me. Kraft was an alcoholic. He could not take so much as a sip of wine without starting on a bender that could last a month.

That much of what he told me about himself was true. He was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, had been for sixteen years. While he used A.A. meetings as spy drops, his appetite for what the meetings offered spiritually was real. He once told me, in all sincerity, that the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.

It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he would use an institution he so admired for purposes of espionage.

It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy that he should also be a true friend of mine, and that he should eventually think of a way to use me cruelly in advancing the Russian cause.

F
OR A LITTLE WHILE
I lied to Kraft about who I was and what I’d done. But the friendship deepened so much, so fast, that I soon told him everything.

“It’s so unjust!” he said. “It makes me ashamed to be an American! Why can’t the Government step forward and say, ‘Here! This man you’ve been spitting on is a hero!’” He was indignant, and, for all I know, he was sincere in his indignation.

“Nobody spits on me,” I said. “Nobody even knows I’m alive any more.”

He was eager to see my plays. When I told him I didn’t have copies of any of them, he made me tell him about them, scene by scene—had me performing them for him.

He said he thought they were marvelous. Maybe he was sincere. I don’t know. My plays seemed vapid to me, but it’s possible he liked them.

What excited him, I think, was the idea of art, and not what I’d done with it.

“The arts, the arts, the arts—” he said to me one night. “I don’t know why it took me so long to realize how important they are. As a young man, I actually held them in supreme contempt. Now, whenever I think about them, I want to fall on my knees and weep.”

It was late autumn. Oysters had come back in season, and we were feasting on a dozen apiece. I’d known Kraft about a year then.

“Howard—” he said to me, “future civilizations—better civilizations than this one—are going to judge all men by the extent to which they’ve been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”

“Um,” I said.

“You’ve got to write again,” he said. “Just as daisies bloom as daisies and roses bloom as roses—you must bloom as a writer and I must bloom as a painter. Everything else about us is uninteresting.”

“Dead men don’t usually write very well,” I said.

“You’re not dead!” he said. “You’re full of ideas. You can talk for hours on end.”

“Blather,” I said.

“Not blather!” he said hotly. “All you need in this
world to get writing again, writing better than ever before, is a woman.”

“A what?” I said.

“A woman,” he said.

“Where did you get this peculiar idea—” I said, “from eating oysters? If you’ll get one, I’ll get one,” I said. “How’s that?”

“I’m too old for one to do me any good,” he said, “but you’re not.” Again, trying to separate the real from the fake, I have to declare this conviction of the real. He was really earnest about wanting me to write again, was convinced that a woman could do the trick. “I would almost go through the humiliation of trying to be a man to a woman,” he said, “if you would take a woman, too.”

“I’ve got one,” I said.

“You had one once,” he said. “There’s a world of difference.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“I’m going to talk about it all the same,” he said.

“Then talk away,” I said, getting up from the table. “Be a matchmaker to your heart’s content. I’m going down to see what goodies came in the mail today.”

He’d annoyed me, and I went down the stairs to my mailbox, simply to walk off my annoyance. I wasn’t eager to see the mail. I often went a week or more without seeing if I had any. The only things that were
ever in my mailbox were dividend checks, notices of stockholders’ meetings, trash mail addressed to “Boxholder,” and advertising flyers for books and apparatus said to be useful in the field of education.

How did I happen to receive advertisements for educational materials? One time I applied for a job as a teacher of German in a private school in New York. That was in 1950 or so.

I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either. I applied, I think, simply to demonstrate to myself that there really was such a person as me.