Manhattan 62 (17 page)

I am married. I want somebody to talk to, but you do not talk to other men. Cultured men do not engage in talk of women, not like peasants or workers. But all I think of is her hand in my hair, she says to me, “You know, Max, darling, there are some people who think Communists have horns” and I put my head down, and she strokes it, pretending to look for horns, and after that this is all I want, for her to touch me.

Ditz. Going steady. Films:
Dr No, Lawrence of Arabia.

September 1

Labor Day Party. The Rudnicks. Charlton Street. Nancy's friend, a Cuban, Jorge is there and speaks eloquently about Castro. Nancy's uncle Nathan escorts me into the garden, and he is quite tipsy, and he says to me, “I see the way you look at Nancy. You have no chance. She will eat you alive. You will never belong.” He holds out his arm to include the house, the people, all of it. He says “If you want to understand Nancy, you have to understand all this. This is much more than where she lives. This is who she is.”

Nathan is right in some ways. Wrong about this idea she will eat me alive. Moody, yes. But she has a huge appetite for life, for everything, something I have never seen. Tender with her father and her step-mother, adorable with little cousins. Beautiful.

I am invited to the Rudnicks' summer home on a place called Fire Island for ten days.

Vacation. Swim in the sea, lie on the beach, dig clams with our feet, try out water-skiing. Being in the sea changes me. I feel I can never again live away from it. Nancy in her bikini, Saul, Virginia, we drink wine, eat, talk, argue all night, listen to music. I read and read.

Lolita,
this book keeps me awake for three nights, I gorge on it, I am excited and horrified, I have never read something like this, and I would like to take it home to my mother, but I cannot.
Catch 22
makes me laugh.
Dr Zhivago.
I enjoy this, but why was there so much fuss? I cannot say this; to discuss it with Americans it would be a betrayal of my system.

September

On television, terrible scenes of violence and hatred. James Meredith, a courageous Negro, tries to go to the Univ of Mississippi, they forbid it. Riots afterwards. One French journalist is killed. President Kennedy must send the Army. We would not show such things. Thankful we have nothing like this in our country.

My back is killing me. I get off the bathroom floor and move to a chair in the bedroom, then the desk. I begin to copy out what I will need. Hurry, I think. Hurry. I read as fast as I can. He went to the beach with Nancy. He lay on the beach with her. I was betting he did much more. Did Saul let his girl have boys in her bedroom in his house? Damn Commies. Free Love.

Fall Semester begins. Very good class in the literature of the nineteenth century, though some ideas that shock me, that Huck Finn has what they call a homoerotic strain, an essay by Leslie Fiedler titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!”, I am confused. A classmate, Harry Amos, an Englishman, tries to explain. Is Harry a homosexual? I am perplexed and embarrassed.

I receive my first grade, my first formal paper, on Mark Twain. I have received an A.

All summer, friends are so hospitable, people invite me to concerts, films, dinners.

Hootenanny Carnegie Hall. Nancy's neighbor, Bob Dylan, makes his first big appearance. She says his real name is Robert Zimmerman. He plays a new song. “A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall”. I have never heard anything like this. Haunting. Terrifying. Important.

We hear the Weavers who sing of miners, railroad men, workers. Joyous audience, shining faces raised towards the stage. I sing, too, or hum because I do not know most of the words to these songs: “Midnight Special”. “Rock Island Line”. “Pay Me My Money Down”. Love songs, too, “Greensleeves”, the audience sings and sings “Good Night Irene”.

Pete Seeger, the others, everyone believes peace and good will truly prevail. Many shake my hand and say they know the Soviet Union believes in peace, too.

On the train downtown, Nancy holds my hand. I spend the night at her apartment. I must stop this.

Harry Amos, that exchange fellow from Cambridge University I have a class with sees me in front of NYU. He makes me laugh, but he is the most frivolous man I met ever. English. Pointed shoes. He says: silly things, hipster, flipster, finger popping daddio. He has great wads of cash in his wallet, and happy to treat his fellow students. He invites me to the Peppermint Lounge. This is, what you could call, CRAZY. He instructs me to practice the Twist with a towel. Also asks me if I know another Russian. Name of Mike, he says. I tell him Mike is not a Russian name. I know he means Bounine. Where did they meet?

Then a girl in a beehive—a high hairdo—and a short skirt pulls me onto the floor while the band plays. Joey Dee and the Starliters. Is that Mrs Kennedy? Is it possible?

I imagine my tutor, Comrade Kunityna, who is known to report on unseemly students and I would grab her, and sing, “Come on, Comrade, let's do the Twist, let's twist again, like we did last summer.”

Harry has so many beautiful suits, pairs of slacks, a fine leather jacket, pointy toe boots, and he walks, as if, what did Pat say, light in his loafers? Is Harry homosexual? Not a subject we discuss at home. In class, where we discuss blackmail, our instructor says we must beware of homosexuals. Of all sexual entrapment, but I have been entrapped, if that is the word, by Nancy.

I want things from her that are not proper, not even possible.

At the end of this entry he had scribbled something in Russian. Something he didn't want me to read?

What sort of class did they discuss sexual entrapment in? Wasn't Max an English teacher studying Mark Twain? My heart was beginning to race. I read as fast as I could, smoking, lighting one cigarette with the other.

I put the first notebook down, and picked up the second one. It was labeled October, 1962.

Parched, I got some water from the bathroom sink, and sat down again. Above me, pinned to the wall, was a photograph of a pretty young woman: Max's wife, Nina. I had not looked hard at it before. She was beautiful but sad.

October 1

Another new month. Autumn. I will miss my mother's mushroom soup, or so I say to people, for I do not miss anything, what I want is here. Nancy is here. Every night I sit up late, writing and writing. I feel tired, but I cannot sleep. I am confused. I believe as deeply as ever in my country, and my work. If I were a Roman Catholic like Pat's family, I would confess to a priest. To understand why I question my beliefs, to redeem myself. It is a crime?

Now I understood why Ostalsky wrote in English. He intended for me to find this diary. Instinctively I knew this. He wanted me for his priest. He was isolated, unsure, scared. He had nobody else.

Was it true? My fantasy?

October 2

This comes now, in October, like some whisper, like it is a feather on my skin, like fall blowing away the summer, this sense I have of New York as a wonderful place. But if this is true, they lied to me. They lied to us. They said America is evil, imperialist aggressor, pushing a capitalist propaganda for the rich.

New York is not evil. Americans are not evil. My country lied.

All systems have flaws.

October 3

Bounine is in trouble. He drinks too much.

I ask what's eating him. He asks, can he trust me? I say, sure.

He says he has to tell me something. He tells me he loves America. He loves that he can travel anywhere without permission. Loves jokes about politicians in public. Food. Clothes. Material things. He says, “They lied to us. They lied. The fuckers lied.” He begins to cry. He says our country lied about America. He stinks of whisky and cigarettes, and says he loves our country, but not the lies. He says to me, “Isn't that what you feel? I can see you feel it, too. Don't you? Those fuckers just lied. I can tell you because you are my friend.”

Is Bounine a true friend? Is this an effort to provoke me? I listen, but say nothing.

October 4

Muriel Miller gave me
Ship of Fools,
a popular novel when I arrived, a bestseller about passengers adrift on a great ship. Sometimes I walk near the Hudson River, and I like to walk along the piers and gaze at the great ocean-going liners. I think I am on my own ship, the ship Manhattan, so many people, strange, new, interesting.

I have boarded this ship for a long journey, these passengers are my friends now. Everyone has been kind. I do not want to think about future uses for Mrs Pugliese, or Nancy Rudnick, or Pat Wynne, though, unlike the others, I do not think he can ever be convinced of the value of socialism.

Things upset me more. I cannot tell if somebody has been in my room. Is it just Gladys, the maid. She wants to clean my room, change my sheets. There are things I must put away so she doesn't read them. I keep her waiting. I feel uneasy with servants, this making of the Negro race an underclass, but it is her job.

Do other agents have their plans threatened by laundry? Does it all come down to clean sheets, and buying hot dogs and girls who tempt you? Is there no grander agenda? What am I? Only a naive agent who worries that the maid will find me out, as if my secret job left stains on the sheets?

I re-read the last paragraph. Agents. Secret job? What did he mean? Was Max Ostalsky an agent? Was he KGB? Jesus. Of course he was. He had written about sexual entrapment. He had taken an interest in the names of Nancy's friends on the Woolworth's picket line.

I was sweating. I opened the window. The handball player had gone. I examined the notebook again.

Max Ostalsky was a trained KGB agent. Christ. Sweet Mother of God. He had lied, and lied again, even when I asked him if he was an agent, he said he was too clumsy, too inclined to tell jokes, wasn't that it? Something like that, the night on the High Line?

Before, when I had wondered if he was a spy, it was the kind of idle assumption you just make about a Russian. I had him figured for possibly small potatoes, a casual spy, the kind who passed on a little information; maybe he slipped titbits from US newspapers into his letters home.

This was different. He was a fully fledged agent; he was a spook like the bastards who brainwashed my pals in Korea, and tortured them. He had come to New York to spy on us. He had made me his friend. He made Nancy love him.

I kept reading, my brain working overtime, trying to figure out where he could have gone. Had he fled? Was he already on his way to the Soviet Union? Had they extracted him? Would they give him a medal? Execute him? If Nancy was right, he was already dead, and this, these notebooks, were his last will and testament.

I turned back to some earlier entries at random:

Greenwich Village Peace Center 133 west 3rd, first birthday:

CORE, General Strike for Peace Julian Beck of the Living Theater, so many new friends committed to our way, to world peace.

What shall we teach our children about Race? Wash Sq Methodist Church

Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers says, “we all thought people would be swept away, and say hey this is fun, this hope and peace and love, this cold war ain't no fun,, let's sing instead.”

I began to understand. Some entries were simply notes on what he had done, but others were relevant to this bastard's work. No wonder he went to peace meetings, went to make use of the people who attended them, use them as informants. It suddenly hit me like a blow from a baseball bat, this was exactly the same as the Feds who tried to get information on the same people, find out if they were Commies. God. Jesus wept.

October 12

Harry Amos invites me to a theater, a preview of a play with the title
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
by Edward Albee. Broadway is all neon and lights and the man smoking a Camel cigarette, blowing real smoke. The play, to me, is ugly. People who hate one another. The audience claps and claps.

October 13

Nancy. I left her one hour ago at her apartment. I never felt like this. I am losing control. I think about a life here, as an agent with a cover as correspondent for a Soviet news service; or perhaps as a teacher. Perhaps I would be sent as a sleeper, burrowing into the local life, waiting and waiting to be called, to be awakened for my real job.

I would have a life in Greenwich Village, an apartment with a little garden outside. Entertain friends like Saul, and Pat, if he comes, I will play Marvin Gaye and Little Richard and James Brown. My kids will go to local schools.

The tree in my back yard will grow deep roots. I will name my daughter Sunny.

There are men like that who stay many decades in foreign places, who gradually adapt to the culture, almost changing shape.

For a dime, from a stall on Fourth Avenue, one day I buy a collection by Ray Bradbury including
‘ Dark They Were, and Golden-eyed'.
I have always loved Ray Bradbury. I joined the Bradbury Club at my school in Moscow. I love him for he understands the fear caused by a possible nuclear war. He understands that science is both good and bad. In this tale, he tells of Americans who, stranded by war on another planet, stay so long, they begin to look like locals; their children forget all about America, and earth. But I will not stop being a Soviet man. I will always believe in the socialist way, in the workers, in equality and justice. I will teach my children Russian.

New York. It would be a life.

Stop it. Stop.

I can't stop. I flick the thoughts away, like a malarial mosquito that could suck all my blood. My life isn't my own. I have been trained to serve my country. This year was a gift, a chance to learn about the United States.

Every time I imagine a life here, I am stopped in my tracks, for I cannot imagine Nina in it. She would not be happy, not in America, not with a husband lacking ambition who settled for this little life as a teacher, or a low level correspondent.