Manhattan 62 (14 page)

PART TWO

CHAPTER ONE

October 19, '62

Moscow. June 2

In one week I leave for New York. From now, I will speak only English, read it, write it, dream, in English. Can you control the language of your dreams?

I worry that they will keep me from going. Even with Stalin gone, in our country things can turn 180 degrees in a second. This journey can be stopped. My fellowship can be cancelled. I will never see New York City. Strange, but it is my Uncle Fyodor Grigoryevich who reassures me. The General everyone calls him, even my father his own brother addresses him so.

But I call him by his name and kiss him on his birthday. The General's wife died when my cousin Sasha was born, and I blame his bitterness on it. Sasha, my best friend, says, “Don't be an ass, Max. He's bitter because Stalin is dead. This was the love of his life.”

My uncle speaks of the United States' desire to sabotage socialism, of its imperialist ambitions. But he admired them as fighters in the Great Patriotic War. He met President Roosevelt at Yalta, when he was still a young man. Only to me does he say these things.

Last week, when I say goodbye, he presents me with a fine Parker pen he received during the war from an American general he helped at Yalta. He says he will miss me. Nobody has ever heard him say such things.

One week. What will it be like, the United States? New York? Sasha has this idea I will drink rum cocktails in a penthouse and listen to live jazz music by Mr Duke Ellington in Harlem, and sit under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel as did Holden Caulfield. Sasha is nuts. I will miss him.

That Friday night, when I broke into Max Ostalsky's room, I set in motion something I couldn't stop. It was the worst thing I ever did. I went looking for something to hang on him, something more I could use to nail him. I already had the silver charm. Nancy had given it to him. He had dropped it on the pier when he killed the Cuban. He would be picked up for murder, or sent home. Somewhere, I had a faint sense I wasn't thinking straight. I didn't care. In a way, Nancy had made it easy for me.

At the drugstore downstairs in the building where Ostalsky lived, I drank a cup of coffee and got friendly with the counterman; in his white apron, he was a garrulous type of guy, though behind the cheerful fat red face, he was no dope.

Lucky for me, the article from the
Village Voice
with the photo of Ostalsky had been framed and hung on the wall behind the counter, next to a pile of pineapple Danish.

“Maxie, sure, that's him,” he said squinting out of his little blue eyes, sunken in the heavy flesh of his face. “Sure, I know him, he always comes in for tuna on rye, a black and white soda. Didn't see him now, what, three, four days? Nice fellow. Uses my phone. Heard him talking to that girl the other day, pleading, like, you know, a young fellow does, but he's OK. Lives with the Millers in 8D. I just seen them leaving for the country. Always get quart of butter pecan to take with them,” said the counterman. “Fill you up?”

“What about Max Ostalsky?”

“Yeah, I saw Max leave, too, bag in his hand.” It was what the building super had told me the day before.

“Were they going together?”

“Nah, no, I think he said Long Island.”

I drank more coffee and ate a frosted cruller.

When did he hear Max pleading with his girl? Monday. Probably Monday. No, Tuesday morning. Nancy had said Max left her at the Village Gate on Monday.

To keep the guy sweet, I ordered a Coke, smoked a cigarette and told him I was a cop, checking out reports of a burglary earlier in the month. Yeah, he said, good to know you're on the case, and let me into the building through a door between the lobby and the drugstore. I walked up the back stairs. By the time I got to the eighth floor, I was winded, panting and coughing hard.

It only took me sixty seconds to pick the lock on Max's door. Sixty seconds, and I was in. That was it.

I was in Max's room, what he called his rabbit hole.

What I did was illegal. Worse. When I thought about it later, the way I broke into his room, the reason for it, made me sick. Over and over, I told myself he was a suspect, a possible killer and this was why I did it. He was a Commie, and if he was a brutal killer, he deserved anything I could serve up, and more. Deep down I knew I did it out of jealousy. It was like a worm that had burrowed deep inside, and was eating me alive. The way things went after that the whole business took on a life of its own.

The room was chilly. One window was open a few inches, odd if Max had been going out of town. I looked out before I shut it. A young man in a gray crew-neck was in the alley beneath the window, smashing a pink rubber Spalding ball against the wall; hitting it hard, as if he was bored, or angry. Weird, though while I watched I realized he wasn't looking at the wall. He was looking up at the window where I stood. A cheap alarm clock ticked loudly from the bedside table.

I checked the door to the Millers' apartment was locked. I knew how to toss a room fast and leave it looking like nobody had been there.

The room was too tidy, as if it had been evacuated quickly, no time to take much. The books, the records, were in place. In the closet were Ostalsky's new American clothes. On his desk, an essay on Melville he had started writing.

The desk drawers contained only pencils and blank yellow pads, but no notebook. He had often carried that damn notebook in his pocket, writing down everything he saw, words he heard. I had a hunch there was other stuff.

Where the hell was it?

In the bathroom, I flushed away my cigarette, and sat on the edge of the tub, elbows on my knees, staring at the wall, head pounding.

What made me think the damn notebook would tell me anything at all? I lit up again. I was smoking three packs a day, and my mouth was like an ashtray.

Then I noticed a part of the radiator cover was askew. A noise from outside stopped me dead. Not the handball player. I thought: I should get the hell out of here before it's too late. I didn't. Somebody rattled the doorknob. A vacuum cleaner chugged into life. I hoped to hell it was the super.

On my hands and knees, cigarette still in my mouth, I yanked at the radiator cover; it came off, leaving paint like flaking skin on the bathroom floor. Nothing. I hauled myself to my feet. Then, I saw something, a light blue tile where the grout seemed new. I got out my pocket-knife. The tile came away. Behind it the wall had been gouged out. I stuck my hand in. I found a small package, two notebooks, held together with a rubber band, wrapped in a small blue towel. I felt as if I'd found a cache of forbidden books, like the fireman in
Fahrenheit 451.

A photograph of Nancy slipped out and I flicked it away, and began to read at random. Who was this man? Was he a killer? Was he going to take Nancy away from me? I sat down on the floor, my back against the tub.

In the first notebook the entries were chronological, more or less, beginning in June before Ostalsky left Moscow.

Moscow. June 7

Out the window of our little flat, I watch my wife leave me. She walks away, growing smaller in her pretty yellow blouse and blue skirt with white flowers. She looks older now, heavier, than when we got married three years ago, as if there is no more joy to be had. Then she turns the corner and disappears. She says she will stay with her parents while I am in the United States. She leaves. I still smell her cigarettes.

She saw, though I said nothing, how happy I am for the chance to go to the United States, to serve our country, but also, I think: New York City! I feel my head will split with excitement. In front of my superiors I pretend I am only glad because of the opportunity to serve.

I run up onto the roof like a ten-year-old boy and lie on my back, look up at Sputnik in the night sky. Sputnik 11. What a country that put up eleven of them! Going to New York, this is my chance to fly. Two more days, my heart is thumping like a crazy person. I think: I am not going into space, but much much further. I am a cosmonaut cut loose. Thoughts whizz in my head, like pieces from an asteroid that will collide. I have never been on a plane.

Max Ostalsky had written it all down: movies, places, record albums, radio stations, clothes, book lists for his classes— Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Fitzgerald, Saul Bellow, every American author I had ever heard of, and plenty I had only a vague idea about, but Ostalsky was a scholar, wasn't he? Isn't that what Nancy had said?

Sometimes he simply jotted words—beatnik, peacenik—or book titles; he commented on color television, which he had never seen, and girls attired in blue jeans; how he loved his “Privacy”, and could lie in a bath full of hot water as long as he wanted, drinking a can of cold Rheingold beer, listening to Ella Fitzgerald, all by himself.

So many bad habits to change before I can go home, too much chocolate cake, beer, hamburgers, I have become a decadent man. I think too much about N.R.

Nancy, he meant Nancy.

The next entry was the draft of a letter to his grandmother. I remembered. The first day I met him, he had told me about his grandma, the woman he called Sunny because she did not like the idea of being an old lady grandmother in a headscarf.

New York City. June 20

Darling Sunny, You would say to me: Write everything down. If you write in English, tell jokes and dream in English, you will be intimate with the language. Keep a private diary. Savor everything, but keep your thoughts to yourself. It is never safe to talk, but for your soul, never acceptable to forget what you see, hear, think, feel. So I have begun my writing things down, even before I leave. And now I am on the plane in the sky, my seatmate is asleep. He snores like a chained-up dancing bear.

His name is Bounine, he is perhaps thirty-five years old, and he is a doctor on his way to Columbia University on a research fellowship. “Such good fortune we are seated together,” he says, this very tall fellow who folds himself in three, it seems, to get into the seat. He has a yellow mop for hair, and thick spectacles, and a satchel so full of books it has burst its lock. I do not think he sat beside me by chance.

I introduce myself. Sunny, I am not born yesterday, as the American saying goes. I know this type of fellow, so charming, so casual, too forthcoming, the kind who may accept to keep an eye on his comrades. Do you say, “keep an eye on?”

But I am glad for company. We talk. His father, like my own, is a doctor, and a hero of the Great Patriotic War.

I have only my Belomorkanals but he offers me Winston cigarettes and his gold lighter. He says, his father travels frequently and gives him these cigarettes. “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should,” he says and tells me this is the slogan the capitalists use to sell them, he has seen it in
Life
magazine. As soon as he falls asleep I write down the conversation—write everything you told me, Sunny.

“You get
Life?”

“You would be surprised,” Bounine says, smiling. “Maxim Stepanovich, I need some help. You see, my name I think will be a problem, I am Vyacheslav and what American can say this? You will be Max, of course.”

I ask his patronymic. “Mikhailovich,” he says, and I say, OK, you will be Mike. “So I am Mike Bounine,” he says triumphantly. “We are Max and Mike. We will be good friends.”

At Idlewild Airport, we part ways, and then I am on the bus. The bridge, the sight of the skyline, my heart seems to stop. New York shimmers in the bright light of a June afternoon, the buildings piled up on top of each other like an Aztec dream, the city surrounded by water. So brilliant is it, I shut my eyes for a minute not to be blinded. The bus stops. I have arrived.

At first, I stare at everything, like a country bumpkin, so to say, a redneck peasant villager who has arrived in the big city. The buildings: the Empire State; the Chrysler Building, and the others, and so forth, all gilded and silvered at the top; and private mansions, apartment buildings like castles, people emerging onto the street in evening clothes, is like entering a film.

Darling Sunny, those first few nights I never sleep, but I walk and I ride the Staten Island Ferry. When I see the city floating on water, I feel myself astonished by this city that is an archipelago, a place made of water, so different from Moscow five hundred miles from the sea.

New York is like a country to itself, the five boroughs floating on water, connected by bridges, tunnels, with the rivers and beaches. One evening I walked right up to Harlem, where I see the poverty and divisions between rich and poor, but also see people with little shops, people quite proud of themselves, the ladies and men dressed up and wearing hats. “People striving for something better,” somebody says to me.

There was a club, and outside, men in very nifty suits, two-tone shoes, one very tall man in a purple suit, and a Cadillac car, and all the children dancing around him. I think he resembles a great African idol. He is a genius at basketball. They call him Wilt the Stilt.

I have a room in an apartment in Greenwich Village, which is like a small town, perhaps Moscow as you describe it in your childhood, with low buildings, some shabby, some of red brick, which is very elegant, along Washington Square Park where young people play guitars or declare poetry or Negroes blow jazz. Old men play chess. Students lie with their books on the grass. Everything is very bright: the girls in pink, yellow, red blouses; the boys in plaid trousers. My classes will begin next week. Mr and Mrs Miller whose apartment I live in are very kind, but Mrs Miller provides more food than I have ever seen, and I think of the scarcity and starvation during the Great Patriotic War, but I am greedy. I will soon be fat. Mrs Miller tells me that the fridge—what she calls the refrigerator—is always full, and that I must raid it—raid it, I like that—any time I might feel hungry.