16

THE LETTER WAS WRITTEN IN HER SMALL GOTHIC SCRIPT. BY THE TIME I was done, longing had thrown another noose around my wish to escape from love.

Jan. 11, 1958

Dearest Kittredge,

I will not try to tell you how near your letter brought you to me. How deep, how damnable, and how unfair it must all have felt. I see now why my letters, with their small details, have been agreeable to you. Let me try to divert you, then. Here at this Station on a busy day, when two or three things are coming to a boil (or coming apart), one feels in the midst of a Rube Goldberg machine. Right now, on Saturday afternoon, it is quiet—a rare occasion!—a quiet Saturday afternoon in the midst of our January summer. Everyone I know is at one or another of our clay beaches and coffee-colored sea. It’s hot, and I sit in my shorts, still in the same cheap hotel room, believe it or not—I’m one of their three oldest residents by now. Kittredge, I pride myself at how little I need of material things. On the other hand, I virtually percolate with pleasure in enumerating Station activities. I feel as if that is my store, and I’m taking proud inventory.

Here is a good portion of the news. The Bosqueverdes have two awful Washington people from the Soviet Russia Division virtually bivouacked in their quarters. On Tuesday nights, in another part of town, AV/ALANCHE is fighting pitched battles against the left student youth group, MRO. AV/ALANCHE are the sign painters, do you recollect? And there’s still Peones and Libertad, and Chevi Fuertes to bring you up on, plus the Russians, which is to say, our one Russian couple. I am now on good visiting terms with Masarov and his wife. Yes, the greatest single change is that I am, under the most stringent precautions you can imagine, permitted, even encouraged, to cultivate a relationship with Masarov. It has turned the pockets of my inner life inside out.

Before commencing, however, I must tell you, Kittredge, how much I adore you. I am absolutely confounded that anyone in our line of work can doubt for one moment the existence of Alpha and Omega. Well, a good writing teacher I know at Yale said never to use qualifiers like absolutely unless one was hopelessly in love. Absolutely not.

To my good friend Boris Gennadyevitch Masarov and his gypsy wife, Zenia, then. (She told me once that she was one-nineteenth gypsy.)

“One-nineteenth?” I asked her.

“You are brutal as Russian with fascination for facts, figures, numbers,” she responded.

“One-nineteenth?” I inquired again.

“Are good-looking young man. Why ask silly question?”

Having set down this exchange, I see that I have failed to present her quality. She is not shallow. She carries herself as if nothing has transpired in Russia of any moment since Dostoyevsky was saved from the firing squad by the czar’s reprieve. I suppose I am saying that she elicits a chord in one’s historical appreciation. I now know how an aristocratic woman of the provinces might appear to us in the middle of the nineteenth century. The best of Russian literature comes alive for me when I am around Zenia. So many of Turgenev’s dissatisfied women come to mind, and Chekhov’s incomparable glimpses of the Russian provinces.

Zenia is all of them for me, and more. Yet, she is also a woman who has lived under the horrors of Stalin. Kittredge, you can feel the depredations of Soviet history through the sense one receives of her much-battered soul. While she looks over forty, the Russians show their age in ways we do not. Do you know, I believe they take a certain grim satisfaction in wearing their souls on the wrinkled surface of their face. We Americans would, of course, go squeak before we’d ever let anyone have the satisfaction of thinking he was looking into our spiritual depths, but that may be exactly what the Russians have to offer. “I have passed through cataclysmic days, and permitted state horrors to be visited on friends, but I have never lied to my soul.” That is what her face says to me. (She has the most extraordinary deep dark eyes—operative definition of “Otchi Chorniya.”) Yet she has to have been around frightful events. She is KGB, after all. Or at least her husband is. Then she tells me that she is thirty-three. Yes, history has cut its lines into Russian faces.

Well, here I am, rushing new people on to you without the courtesy of a little development, but then this friendship with the Masarovs is the most interesting relation I have at present with anyone in Uruguay, even if it has been put together like an arranged marriage with brokers on both sides.

It began because here in Montevideo we are sometimes a working part of the State Department. “Our cover folds us into the crust” has become one of Hunt’s sayings. Of course, he doesn’t exactly hate the idea of pretending to be First Secretary to the American Ambassador. As you may recall, that worthy, Jefferson Patterson, Eisenhower’s appointee, is a genteel man with a hopeless stammer in English and it gets worse when he attempts Spanish. So, Patterson continues to avoid functions. His deputy, the Counselor, is all right, but his wife, a lush, has been known to take off her shoes at Embassy dances and embark on impromptu high kicks—“Grands jetés,” she announces. Needless to say, they took her off the circuit. Which leaves the field open to the Hunts, and, on occasion, the Porringers, and myself.

Combine this with the State Department’s estimate that Khrushchev’s constant appeals lately for armament reductions, while clearly not to be trusted, must be met, nonetheless, with compensatory American moves. We-cannot-lose-another-contest-for-world-opinion is the present State Department stance. Word has even come to us from Western Hemisphere Division: Carefully monitored fraternizing with the Soviets is a viable option. Theoretically, we’re always prepared to get friendly with any Soviet who throws us a side glance, but as a practical matter, whenever small conversations commence around the canapé tables, we comport ourselves as if we are offering Christmas politesse to lepers. You don’t put a career on the line by fraternizing for too little.

Well, the directive has come in. And we have certainly heated up the GOGOL outpost (which is how we refer to the Bosqueverdes) now that the Russian garden parties are going again. The Sourballs thought enough of this opportunity to send down two of their operators. Nearly all of Soviet Russia Div’s people are anti–Soviet Russians, or Poles, or Finns, intensely fluent in Russian. They do make an odd breed. Paranoid and insular to an extraordinary degree, they give off about as much warmth as a barnacle. Yet they sport what could be Irish names if not for the odd spelling. Monikers like Heulihaen (pronounced Hoolihan) and Flarrety (pronounced Flaherty). Heulihaen and Flarrety have been installed on separate eight-hour stints at GOGOL outpost for the last month, and have been photographing the very hell out of the lawn parties in the Soviet Embassy garden.

Hunt calls them our Finnish Micks. Left to themselves, the Finnish Micks would pass over to us about as much information as you could get from a Mickey Finn, but Hunt knows how to play the web back at Cockroach Alley. Result: The Finnish Micks grudgingly provide us with bits of poop and scam.

The largest discovery (accomplished by way of filming the Russians and their guests in the garden, then studying these home movies around the clock) is that a bit of infidelity is going on behind Soviet Embassy walls. There seems a likely connection between the new Soviet KGB chief, the Resident, named Varkhov, Georgi Varkhov, who looks exactly as he should, built like a tank, shaved head like a bullet, and—are you wholly prepared?—our own soulful Zenia.

Now, I was apprised of this item after I became friendly, all proportions kept, with the Masarovs. I still think Zenia is soulful, although her taste for Varkhov, if true, puts me off. The Finnish Micks, however, seem pretty certain of their ground. The working logic for such conclusions, as I piece it out, comes to this: In social life, we are always surrounded by hints of infidelity at every party. We see smiles, whispers, glances—all that movie-business sign language. Yet our perceptions are transitory. Hints of behavior are everywhere, but we usually cannot confirm what we have seen. On film, however, if we expend the patience to reexamine each move of our actors, the indeterminate can crystallize into the concrete. By such methods are we provided with a 75-percent certainty that Zenia Masarov and Georgi Varkhov are having a liaison, and Boris Gennadyevitch Masarov is aware of the situation.

I hate to terminate at just this place but an urgent phone call involving my work has just come in. Since I have to go by the Embassy, I will post this letter and do my best to carry it up to date tomorrow. Hopefully, I can send a full account then. Forgive such a brusque ending.

Love,
Herrick