The Complete Stories (59 page)
Read The Complete Stories Online
Authors: Bernard Malamud
“We are members of mankind. If I am drowning you must assist to save me.”
“In unknown waters if I can’t swim?”
“If not, throw to me rope.”
“I’m a visitor here. I’ve told you I may be suspect. For all I know you yourself might be a Soviet agent out to get me, or the room may be bugged, and then where are we? Mr. Levitansky, please, I don’t want to hear or argue anymore. I’ll just plead personal inability and ask you to leave.”
“Bugged?”
“By a listening device planted in this room.”
Levitansky turned gray. He sat a moment in meditation, then rose wearily from the chair.
“I withdraw now request for your assistance. I accept your word that you are not capable. I do not wish to make criticism of you. All I wish to say, Gospodin Garvitz, is it requires more to change a man’s character than to change his name.”
Levitansky left the room, leaving in his wake faint fumes of cognac. He had also passed gas.
“Come back!” I called, not too loudly, but if he heard through the door he didn’t answer. Good riddance, I thought. Not that I don’t sympathize with him but look what he’s done to
my
interior liberty. Who has to come thousands of miles to Russia to get entangled in this kind of mess? It’s a helluva way to spend a vacation.
my
interior liberty. Who has to come thousands of miles to Russia to get entangled in this kind of mess? It’s a helluva way to spend a vacation.
The writer had gone but not his sneaky manuscript. It was lying on my bed.
“That’s his baby, not mine.” Angered, I knotted my tie and slipped on my coat, then via the English-language number called for a cab.
A half hour later I was in the taxi, riding back and forth along Novo Ostapovskaya Street until I spotted the apartment house I thought it might be. It wasn’t, it was another like it. I paid the driver and walked till I thought I had located it. After going up the stairs I was sure I had. When I knocked on Levitansky’s door, the writer, looking older, distant—as if he’d been away on a trip and had just returned; or maybe simply interrupted at his work, his thoughts still in his words on the page, his pen in hand—stared at me. Very blankly.
“Levitansky, my heart breaks for you, I swear, but I am not, at this time of my life, considering my condition and recent experiences, in much of a mood to embark on a dangerous adventure. Please accept deepest regrets.”
I thrust the manuscript into his hand and went down the stairs. Hurrying out of the building, I was, to my horror, unable to avoid Irina Levitansky coming in. Her eyes lit in fright as she recognized me an instant before I hit her full force and sent her sprawling along the walk.
“Oh, my God, what have I done? I beg your pardon!” I helped the dazed, hurt woman to her feet, brushed off her soiled skirt, and futilely, her pink blouse, split and torn on her lacerated arm and shoulder. I stopped dead when I felt myself experiencing erotic sensation.
Irina Filipovna held a handkerchief to her bloody nostril and wept a little. We sat on a stone bench, a girl of ten and her little brother watching us. Irina said something to them in Russian and they moved off.
“I was frightened of you also as you are of us,” she said. “I trust you now because Levitansky does. But I will not urge you to take the manuscript. The responsibility is for you to decide.”
“It’s not a responsibility I want.”
She said as though to herself, “Maybe I will leave Levitansky. He is wretched so much it is no longer a marriage. He drinks. Also he does not earn a living. My brother Dmitri allows him to drive the taxi two, three hours of the day, to my brother’s disadvantage. Except for a ruble
or two from this, I support him. Levitansky does not longer receive translation commissions. Also a neighbor in the house—I am sure Kovalevsky—has denounced him to the police for delinquency and parasitism. There will be a hearing. Levitansky says he will burn his manuscripts.”
or two from this, I support him. Levitansky does not longer receive translation commissions. Also a neighbor in the house—I am sure Kovalevsky—has denounced him to the police for delinquency and parasitism. There will be a hearing. Levitansky says he will burn his manuscripts.”
I said I had just returned the package of stories.
“He will not,” she said. “But even if he burns, he will write more. If they take him away in prison he will write on toilet paper. When he comes out, he will write on newspaper margins. He sits this minute at his table. He is a magnificent writer. I cannot ask him not to write, but now I must decide if this is the condition I wish for myself for the rest of my life.”
Irina sat in silence, an attractive woman with shapely legs and feet, in a soiled skirt and torn blouse. I left her on the stone bench, her handkerchief squeezed in her fist.
That night—July 2, I was leaving the Soviet Union on the fifth—I experienced massive self-doubt. If I’m a coward why has it taken me so long to discover it? Where does anxiety end and cowardice begin? Feelings get mixed, sure enough, but not all cowards are anxious men and not all anxious men are cowards. Many “sensitive” (Rose’s word), tense, even frightened human beings did in fear what had to be done, the fear calling up effort when it’s time to fight or jump off a rooftop into a river. There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to—if there are no doors or windows—he walks through a wall.
On the other hand, suppose one is courageous in a hopeless cause —you concentrate on courage but not enough on horse sense? To get to the point of the problem endlessly on my mind, how do I finally decide it’s a sensible and worthwhile thing to smuggle out Levitansky’s manuscript, given my reasonable doubts of the ultimate worth of the operation? Granted, as I now grant, he’s trustworthy and his wife is that and more; still, does it pay a man like me to run the risk?
If six thousand Soviet writers can’t do very much to squeeze out another drop of freedom as artists, who am I to fight their battle—H. Harvitz, knight-of-the-freelance from Manhattan? How far do you go, granted all men, including Communists, are created free and equal and justice is for all? How far do you go for art, if you’re for Yeats, Matisse, and Ludwig van Beethoven? Not to mention Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. So far as to get yourself intentionally involved: the HH Ms. Smuggling Service? Will the President and State Department send up three cheers for my contribution to the cause of artistic social justice? And suppose it amounts to no more than a gaffe in the end?—What
will I prove if I sneak out Levitansky’s manuscript and all it turns out to be is just another passable book of stories?
will I prove if I sneak out Levitansky’s manuscript and all it turns out to be is just another passable book of stories?
That’s how I argued with myself on more than one occasion, but soon I argued myself into solid indecision. What it boils down to, I’d say, is he expects me to help him because I’m an American. That’s quite a nerve.
Two nights later—odd not to have the Fourth of July on July 4 (I was listening for firecrackers)—a quiet light-lemon summer’s evening in Moscow, after two monotonously uneasy days, though I was still writing museum notes, for relief I took myself off to the Bolshoi to hear
Tosca.
It was sung in Russian by a busty lady and a handsome Slavic tenor, but the Italian plot was unchanged, and in the end Scarpia, who had promised “death” by fake bullets, gave in sneaky exchange a fusillade of hot lead; another artist bit the dust and Floria Tosca learned the hard way that love wasn’t what she had thought.
Tosca.
It was sung in Russian by a busty lady and a handsome Slavic tenor, but the Italian plot was unchanged, and in the end Scarpia, who had promised “death” by fake bullets, gave in sneaky exchange a fusillade of hot lead; another artist bit the dust and Floria Tosca learned the hard way that love wasn’t what she had thought.
Next to me sat another full-breasted woman, this one a lovely Russian of maybe thirty in a white dress that fitted a well-formed figure, her blond hair piled in a birdlike mass on her splendid head. Lillian could look like that though not Rose. This woman—sitting alone, it turned out—spoke flawless English in a mezzo-soprano with a slight accent.
During the first intermission she asked in friendly fashion, managing to seem detached but interested: “Are you American? Or perhaps Swedish?”
“Not Swedish. American is correct. How did you happen to guess?”
“I noticed, if it does not bother you that I say it,” she remarked with a charming laugh, “a certain self-satisfaction.”
“You got the wrong party.”
When she opened her purse a fragrance of springtime burst forth —fresh flowers; the warmth of her body rose to my nostrils. I was moved by memories of the hungers of youth—dreams, longing.
During intermission she touched my arm and said in a low voice, “May I ask a favor? Do you depart soon from the Soviet Union?”
“In fact tomorrow.”
“How fortunate for me. Would it offer too much difficulty to mail, wherever you are going, an airmail letter addressed to my husband, who is presently in Paris? Our airmail service takes two weeks to arrive in the West. I shall be grateful.”
I glanced at the envelope addressed half in French, half in Cyrillic, and said I wouldn’t mind. But during the next act sweat grew active on my body, and at the end of the opera, after Tosca’s shriek of death, I
handed the letter back to the not wholly surprised lady, saying I was sorry. I had the feeling I had heard her voice before. I hurried back to the hotel, determined not to leave my room for any reason other than breakfast; then out and into the wide blue sky.
handed the letter back to the not wholly surprised lady, saying I was sorry. I had the feeling I had heard her voice before. I hurried back to the hotel, determined not to leave my room for any reason other than breakfast; then out and into the wide blue sky.
I later fell asleep over a book and a bottle of sweetish warm beer a waiter had brought up, pretending to myself I was relaxed though I was concerned with worried thoughts of the departure and flight home; and when I awoke, three minutes on my wristwatch later, it seemed to me I had made the acquaintance of some new nightmares. I was momentarily panicked by the idea that someone had planted a letter on me, and I searched through the pockets of my two suits. Nyet. Then I recalled that in one of my dreams a drawer in a table I was sitting at had slowly come open, and Feliks Levitansky, a dwarf who lived in it along with a few friendly mice, managed to scale the wooden wall on the comb he used as a ladder, and to hop from the drawer ledge to the top of the table. He leered in my face, shook his Lilliputian fist, and shouted in high-pitched but (to me) understandable Russian, “Atombombnik! You massacred innocent Japanese people! Amerikansky bastards!”
“That’s unfair,” I cried out. “I was no more than a kid in college.”
That’s a sad dream, I thought.
Afterwards this occurred to me: Suppose what happened to Levitansky happens to me. Suppose America gets caught up in a war with China in some semi-reluctant stupid way, and to make fast hash of it—despite my frantic loud protestations: mostly I wave my arms and shout obscenities—we spatter them, before they can get going, with a few dozen H-bombs, boiling up a thick atomic soup of about two hundred million Orientals—blood, gristle, marrow, and lots of floating Chinese eyeballs. We win the war because the Soviets hadn’t been able to make up their minds whom to shoot their missiles at first. And suppose after this unheard-of slaughter, about ten million Americans, in selfrevulsion, head for the borders to flee the country. To stop the loss of wealth, the refugees are intercepted by the army in tanks and turned back. Harvitz hides in his room with shades drawn, writing in a fury of protest an epic poem condemning the mass butchery by America. What nation, Asiatic or other, is next? Nobody in the States wants to publish the poem because it might start riots and another flight of refugees to Canada and Mexico; then one day there’s a knock on the door, and it isn’t the FBI but a bearded Levitansky, in better times a Soviet tourist, a modern, not medieval, Communist. He kindly offers to sneak the manuscript of the poem out for publication in the Soviet Union.
Why? Harvitz suspiciously asks.
Why not? To give the book its liberty.
I awoke after a restless night. I had been instructed by Intourist to be in the lobby with my baggage two hours before flight time, at 11 a.m. I was shaved and dressed by six, and at seven had breakfast—I was very hungry—of yogurt, sausage, and scrambled eggs in the twelfth-floor buffet. I went out to hunt for a taxi. They were hard to come by at this hour, but I finally located one near the American Embassy, not far from the hotel. Speaking my usual mixture of primitive German and French, I persuaded the driver by first suggesting, then slipping him an acceptable two rubles, to take me to Levitansky’s house and wait a few minutes till I came out. Going hastily up the stairs, I knocked on his door, apologizing when he opened it, to the half-pajamaed, iron-faced writer, for waking him this early in the day. Without peace of mind or certainty of purpose I asked him whether he still wanted me to smuggle out his manuscript of stories. I got for my trouble the door slammed in my face.
A half hour later I had everything packed and was locking the suitcase. A knock on the door—half a rap, you might call it. For the suitcase, I thought. I was momentarily startled by the sight of a small man in a thick cap wearing a long trench coat. He winked, and against my will I winked back. I had recognized Levitansky’s brother-in-law Dmitri, the taxi driver. He slid in, unbuttoned his coat, and brought forth the wrapped manuscript. Holding a finger to his lips, he handed it to me before I could say I was no longer interested.
“Levitansky changed his mind?”
“Not changed mind,” he whispered. “Was afraid your voice to be heard by Kovalevsky.”
“I’m sorry, I should have thought of that.”
“Levitansky say not write to him,” the brother-in-law said in a low tone. “When is published book, please to send to him copy of
Das Kapital.
He will understand message.”
Das Kapital.
He will understand message.”
I reluctantly agreed.
The brother-in-law, a short shapeless figure with sad eyes, winked again, shook hands with a steamy palm, and slipped out of my room.
I unlocked my suitcase and laid the manuscript on top of my shirts. Then I unpacked half the contents and slipped the manuscript into a folder containing my notes on literary museums and a few letters from Lillian. I then and there decided that if I got back to the States, the next time I saw her I would ask her to marry me. The phone was ringing as I left the room.
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