Parachutes and Kisses (56 page)

The whole character of the meetings changed. In the halls, on the stairs, on the balconies of that candy palace, poets were now collaring each other and babbling verses. Even the novelists began reciting poetry (since most novelists have written poetry at some time or other), and the journalists and translators began reciting other people's poetry just to join in the fun. The blue wedding-cake room became a great marriage of literary styles and languages. Poetry had aerated the conference. The pale-blue palace had become a Tower of Babel.

 

In mid-July, Kiev is hot and dusty; the spreading chestnut trees are in dark-green leaf and the city is reminiscent of Paris. Down these chestnut-lined boulevards their bus took them—to Babi Yar. On the first anniversary of her split from Josh, Isadora found herself walking gingerly over the bones of the dead at Babi Yar as if she were walking on those same bluish eggs she had seen hatch in Connecticut last spring. Circling slowly with the members of her delegation, she looped around the ravine where so many had been buried—dead or alive. Anyplace where so many souls have given up the ghost is a holy place, and Isadora felt the strong desire to kiss the earth at Babi Yar, but self-consciousness restrained her.

A little child toddled over the green grass—greener than all the other grass of the Ukraine because of the many deaths that fertilized those blades. High above the living child (who walked in the headlong, drunken manner of all toddlers) there loomed another child—a huge bronze baby, taking leave of a huge bronze mother whose monumental hands were tied behind her back. The bronze baby was frozen forever in an attitude of leave-taking; the living baby was running toward its mother's arms. Isadora thought of Voznesensky's line: “Children are the periscopes of the dead.” She thought of Lisa Erdman in
The White Hotel,
who had dreamed this scene, then lived to see it come to life, come to death, come to transfiguration. She thought of the unimaginable slaughter (which had occurred in part because the victims had found it so unimaginable).

“What a splendid monument,” Isadora said to Anatoly Klimov.

“Thank you,” he replied, he always replied.

If Papa had lived here, Isadora thought, looking up at that monumental mother and babe who soar over the bones of the victims of Babi Yar, he would have been the most celebrated of artists, since representational art is still all the rage in Russia. But then she realized that if Papa had lived here he would probably not have survived the Revolution at all. (Most of her known relatives had perished of starvation.) Or even if he
had
survived the Revolution, he would surely never have survived Babi Yar. His paintings, then, would have been quite as lost as they were now. Paper, canvas, flesh, she thought—none of it stays. We are not immortal, nor are our creations. Is that why the human race is having a collective temper tantrum and threatening to blast all life off the face of the earth? Because they have never come to terms with their own deaths? Surely that was the case with the patriarchal elders who serviced the war machine. If
they
couldn't live forever, then nobody else could either. And yet, their representatives could weep for her grandfather poems.

At Babi Yar the air was very pure and the grass the most livid green she had ever seen. So much death makes for the best gardens, the sweetest air. You can't grow roses without shit, the French proverb goes. Omar Khayyám, her grandfather's favorite poet, had said much the same thing:

But not after nuclear war—no, not then. At Babi Yar, where so many had died so unspeakably, the air was the clearest and most aromatic in all Kiev. She thought of her own Amanda running across the greensward, her red-gold hair a banner behind her, triumphing over all these corpses. And then, with a pang of longing, she thought of Bean and imagined fucking like mad on the grassy lip of the ravine where so many nameless corpses lay. Tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes; her cunt moistened. She wanted to throw herself on the ground, to smother it with kisses, to inundate it with tears, to cover it with poems.

Instead, she knelt down and chastely gave the ground one dry kiss.

“It won't help now,” said Clarissa Cornfeld, the unofficial Cas sandra of their delegation.

That night she called Bean in the States. It was early morning in Connecticut and his voice sounded foggy and sleepy.

“I adore you, lady,” he said. And then, unbidden, he added: “I'm true to you because I want to be. There are no random ladies in the hot tub.”

This was more than she expected of him—though she was true to him, too, and true out of desire, not guilt. There were no random gents in her narrow bed in Kiev (though one of the Russians—a tall slender bearded chap with merely one gold tooth—had clearly been assigned to seduce her).

“I'm true to you, too,” she said, thinking how silly this old-fashioned romantic talk sounded, yet how deeply felt it was. “I'll call you from Odessa.”

 

Calling from Odessa proved to be easier said than done, for Kiev and Moscow had phone communications unheard of in the rest of the country. Nor did Isadora realize during the first few halcyon days of the conference that in Kiev they had been accorded a “Golden Spoon treatment” unknown in the rest of the USSR.

The Soviet government had kindly provided each American writer with a translator-guide and tickets to any Russian cities they wished to see, but once they got away from the conference and began traveling the way the Russians themselves traveled, the jollity and courtliness of the wedding-cake conference evaporated and there were only queues, late (or nonexistent) flights, no phone or cable connections, and the usual chaos that marks travel in the Soviet Union when it is merely Soviet citizens who are doing the traveling.

To take her to Odessa, the Writers' Union had assigned a fellow named Vladimir Glotarchuk—a Soviet Mr. Gradgrind whose answer to every question was: “We must ask proper authorities.”

When Isadora was introduced to him in Kiev and realized that she would be marooned with him for god knew how many days, she was desolate.

Glotarchuk was an American Studies expert who had never been to America, and declared that he never wanted to go because he had read everything about the United States and already knew it “by heart.” He thumped his chest as he said this.

“But aren't you even curious to visit?” Isadora asked.

“I have been to Poland and Cuba,” said Glotarchuk, “and I have read all books and newspapers on USA.”

Glotarchuk had a body shaped like a fireplug and curly ash-blond hair that made damp ringlets on his forehead. His eyes were a drab Soviet blue. His little gold-rimmed glasses glittered in a sinister fashion.

“How'd you draw me?” Isadora said. “By lottery?” But Glotarchuk had no funny bone whatsoever: the Soviet state had amputated it. Or bred a whole race without them.

“Draw you?” he asked. “Draw you? On the contrary, I wish to
write
you. I wish to show that your
Candida Confesses
is a bourgeois decadent novel and a danger to the good socialist woman.”

Aha, thought Isadora—so it is the same here as there: the good woman—whether of the socialist or capitalist variety—is equally endangered by my books.

“So you are traveling with me to write a hatchet piece?” she asked.

“A what?” asked Glotarchuk.

“Hatchet—one of those things you chop down trees with. If I were you I wouldn't show my hand so early. Even Sally Quinn romances one a bit before she strikes.”

“Sally who?”

“I guess the
Washington Post
is prohibited here.”

“Not at tall, at tall,” said Glotarchuk. “We may read
everything
what we wish. I know all things about United States. I read
New York Times.
I read also
Wall Street Journal.
And, of course,
Post.”

“Of course you do,” Isadora said mischievously. “But did you know that there are some people in my country who question whether reading the organs of the capitalist establishment necessarily gives one a perfect picture of life in the United States?”

Glotarchuk looked mystified.

“Then what should a scholar read if not
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal?”
He looked like a little boy who has just been told there is no Santa Claus.

“Oh, you
should
read those papers, but you should read everything else, too, and you should certainly visit the U.S. You should also read the
National Review,
say, and
Mother Jones. The Nation, Commentary, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Penthouse, Harpers, Atlantic, The New Yorker
—and of course the more bourgeois decadent novels the merrier—since only novels really give you life in all its perplexity.” (Isadora saw Glotarchuk's eyes light up when she mentioned
Playboy.
Glotarchuk would have
killed
for a copy of
Playboy
—harder to get in Russia than a First Folio of Shakespeare. Only in the U.S.—and possibly Scandinavia—was sex ubiquitous enough for people to grow bored with it. Only in the U.S. had
we enough
promiscuity to realize that promiscuity is no panacea. The Russians still titillated their people with puritanism—the great titillator.)

“But which is One True View of the USA?” asked an astounded and salivating Glotarchuk.

“There are some who say there
is
no one true view of the USA. In my country”—wasn't it
amazing
how in the Soviet Union one found oneself saying things like “in my country”?—“we don't
believe
there is only one true view. In fact, we strenuously believe in
many
true views. That's why our country sometimes seems so chaotic and violent to outsiders. In our chaos is our strength.”

Holy cow—Isadora sure was becoming fueled with patriotic fer vor. The more she talked with Glotarchuk, the more she stayed in the USSR, the more wildly patriotic she became. She had never loved America as ardently. Today she even loved the
IRS:
what a small price to pay for being an American, she thought, her brain softening and her vestigial patriotism rising to the surface.

 

Her passport and tickets home were still with the Writers' Union officials in Moscow and a rigid “cultural programme” for her trip to Odessa had been planned. Now that she knew what motivated her guide, she wanted to cancel the junket, but it could not be done. Without consulting her, the Writers' Union had scheduled her for two weeks in Odessa with Glotarchuk, and after that, a whole rambling odyssey through Russia with him as her guide. The timing was impossible. She was planning to meet Bean in Italy on the first of August and her child was coming home on August fifteenth. Though she had cabled these schedules to the Soviets
months
before her departure for Moscow, they had blithely disregarded them and made their own plans for her. They wanted to keep her in the Soviet Union for the whole month of August, and they saw no reason why they had to consult
her
about it or take either her kid or her travel plans into account.

Elaborate negotiations with officials at the conference (who had to negotiate with other officials in Moscow) ensued. Finally a compromise was reached. She agreed to spend a week in Odessa with Glotarchuk, then return with him to Leningrad to meet her delegation. After that, back to Moscow, then (if she was lucky), Milan.

When she and Glotarchuk left Kiev for Odessa, she still did not have any assurances that she could leave the country on August first.

“When will the tickets be approved?” she asked Glotarchuk.

“When proper authorities deem it advisable,” said Glotarchuk, smiling spitefully.

“Why can't we get an answer about it now?”

“How womanlike and hysterical you are,” replied Glotarchuk. “The Soviet Union is a rational country. It does not recognize female hysteria. When proper authorities are consulted, we shall get tickets. If proper authorities do not agree, we shall not get tickets.”

Instead of throttling him, Isadora took a swig of Kiev pepper vodka (a gift from another boozy, love-struck poet). She was beginning to understand the dimensions of the famed Soviet drinking problem. After a week with Glotarchuk, her liver might never be the same. Not to mention her brain.

The departure for Odessa was about as cheery as deportations described in books about the Second World War. Without the drivers and guides the conference had provided, the airport at Kiev was revealed in all its horror. Squalling children, pasteboard suitcases falling open to reveal somebody's entire life crammed into a box, queues that inched along with no apparent destination, people who shoved and pushed each other as if in line for a reprieve from some sort of Kafkaesque doom. (“There is hope, but not for us,” said Kafka. Never had Isadora really understood that line until she flew Aeroflot.)

Three hours after the announced departure time, they took off over the golden wheatfields of the Ukraine bound for Odessa, home of her ancestors. Although the passengers were deliberately starved, the crew was to be watered and fed. (In a stunning reversal of American airline practices, Aeroflot serves no drinks to the passengers, but only to the crew!) Suddenly there was a hopeful commotion of stewardesses in the back of the plane, which seemed to portend lunch.

“Are we going to get lunch?” Isadora asked hopefully.

“No—that is for the crew,” Glotarchuk said.