18

January 27, 1958

Dearest Kittredge,

I was hoping for a letter, but perhaps you are waiting to hear more about the Masarovs. In any event, I feel like writing. You see, I’m obliged to report these days on each step taken with Boris and Zenia. Then the Groogs and Sourballs masticate my cables down to the molecules.

As one example of the present work mode, the Groogs and Sours decide in concert with Hunt (for he refuses to be bypassed on any decision, minor or major) that Nancy should not accompany me to the Masarov home. Their reasoning is that a continuing presentation of Miss Waterston and myself as prospective bride and groom might put our histrionic abilities to too great a test—Nancy’s, anyway, Hunt allows. I suspect that Hunt messed up in the first place by putting an Administrative Officer like Nancy into such a slot.

At any rate, Miss Waterston was sufficiently disappointed to show chagrin. “Oh, fudge,” she said, “oh, fudge and yee-God crackers,” so help me, Kittredge, is what she said. Then, with a sigh and a formal, professional smile—Lord, she is professional—she went back to auditing one more of Gordy Morewood’s Byzantine accounts. Poor Nancy—she is so weathered by disappointment.

Meanwhile, I get ready to visit the Masarovs. I call, and, via Hunt’s specific instructions, make the date for Nancy and myself. The idea is to keep Zenia at home with Boris. If she knows Nancy is not accompanying me, she may absent herself, and Howard is trying to forestall that. It’s deemed more rewarding to get a take on husband and wife together. If the Masarovs are near to a breakup, there may be indications which of the two could be more likely to defect. On the off chance that they present themselves as a strong, well-knit couple, maybe they’ll fly the coop together. Such is our advance reasoning.

The day arrives. I trot over for tea and make my apologies about Nancy’s indisposition. They seem disappointed. I cannot help thinking that Hunt was right. If Zenia had been told in advance, she might not have been there.

Given the limited supply of desirable real estate in Montevideo, my friendly Russian couple is living in a high-rise apartment house just two blocks further down the Rambla from the similar high-rise in which is located our safe house. The Masarovs are on the tenth floor, and also have a view through their picture window of Pocitos Beach and the sea. There, all resemblances end. They have truly furnished their place. I do not know if it is to my taste, but their belongings do fill the living room. There are heavy velvet drapes looped around the picture window, several fat armchairs and a plump sofa with lace antimacassars, a small oriental carpet on top of a large one, two samovars—one in brass, the other in silver—a number of standing lamps with beaded shades, a large piece of mahogany furniture with open glass cases for the display of their plates and dishes, small casts of heavy nineteenth-century sculpture on every table, a bronze maiden, for example, with a filmy bronze gown clinging to her half-exposed breasts, then Apollo, standing on the ball of one foot, and gold-framed prints of paintings wherever there is space: Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, plus a couple of Russian painters I do not recognize who portray czars flanked by Russian Orthodox high priests, and nobles dressed half like pirates—must be boyars. In the corner of one painting, a defeated boyar is bleeding to death from a wound in his neck. The agony on his mouth is expressive. Quite a picture to look at every day.

There are also oriental carpets put up as wall hangings, and I count four chess sets, two of which look to be of value. One of the boards is made of inlaid wood.

I can’t help contrasting this old-fashioned, middle-class opulence with Sherman Porringer’s child-scuffed, dog-chewed, blonde-wood furniture and bookshelves on bricks. The Masarovs, possessing not all that much space (now that they’ve filled it), have converted the hallway that ties their three and a half rooms together into a long, very narrow library. It is a squeeze for two people to walk side by side, yet both walls are lined with dark-stained oak bookcases. Later I get to look at Boris’ collection of tomes, and will tell you that he reads French, German, English, Spanish, Italian, and several Soviet languages whose names I would not know how to spell. That is a lot for him to have learned, but, then, he says he is thirty-seven. While this conflicts with the Sourball dossier, which pegs him at thirty-two, I must say it adds up. He speaks of the Second World War, where he rose to the rank of captain, and countless framed photographs on a collection of end tables are certainly there to verify his military career. I do take mental note of the shoulder-board epaulets in these photographs so the Sours can check it out. Of course, I am not able to swear these are World War II snapshots, but they do have the feel of those times, and on one photograph you can witness for background an incredibly littered city of rubble and jagged artifacts. “Berlin,” he told me, “in the last days. That is why we are smiling.”

“Yes, you must have been happy the war was coming to an end.”

He shrugged. Suddenly, he was gloomy. “Half happy,” he replied gnomically, but then, as if it were not congenial to speak in such fashion to a guest, he added, “There is always question. Does one deserve life? Better men have perished.”

“Still, you laugh in photograph,” remarked Zenia.

“I am happy,” he said, contradicting himself.

“We were meeting two days before,” said Zenia. “Brishka and myself. First time.”

“You, too, happened to be in Berlin?” I asked.

“Entertain troops.”

“Zenia is a poet,” said Masarov.

“Was,” said Zenia.

“She has not written a poem in two years.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Close to goofy,” said Zenia. “Moi.”

“Well,” I said. (Kittredge, I swear, we have to be as bad as the English when it comes to receiving sudden confession.) “Well, it must be difficult to sit in these well-furnished rooms when one’s pen is dry.” (To myself, I sounded like the Earl of Phumpherdom.)

The Russians have one virtue, however. They are so abrupt that no deadening remark can keep a half-life of more than three seconds. “Well-furnished?” asked Zenia. “Aggregate. Is but aggregate.”

I heard “aggravate” at first, so was, of course, confused, until her next speech brought clarification. “His family, my family. Aggregate of Moscow apartment—his father; Leningrad apartment—my mother. Remnants of families now complete.”

“None of it yours?”

“All mine. All belongs to Boris. Aussi. Also.”

“Yes,” I said, “and your government shipped it over here for you?”

“Of course,” she said, “why not?”

“But your apartment in Moscow must be empty.”

She shrugged. “People in it.”

We sat down at this point before the second-best chess set and Boris handed me the white pawn. “You are my guest,” he said.

Kittredge, you know I am not at all in Hugh’s class as a player, but I’m not bad—once I won a low-level tournament of patzers, as modest players are referred to, and in a simultaneous exhibition with a ranked master who was taking on twenty Yale students at twenty boards, I happened to be one of three who came away with a draw. The other seventeen all lost. All the same, I am, when it comes to real levels of chess, essentially talentless.

I could sense, however, as soon as we commenced, that the game meant much to him. As if a first whiff of the great international contest for the soul of man had finally entered our mood, I was aware of his tension, and then, reciprocally, of mine. “When in doubt, open with a king’s pawn,” I said cheerfully to him, and did just that. He nodded curtly, but then was rude enough for the first time—since his manners, as I hope I’ve indicated, are the best of that whole Russian gang on Bulevar España—to sit in his chair and study me openly for a minute. He did not look at the board, rather at my face, my posture, my uncertain smile, my—in short—my emanations. He made me feel as if I were back in the gym at St. Matthew’s, and was going to wrestle with the determined-looking fellow at the other end of the mat in just twenty seconds.

“I think,” he said at last, “Sicilian Defense is appropriate reply,” and he advanced a queen’s bishop’s pawn to the fourth rank. Kittredge, I remember clearly that you spoke once of giving chess up at the age of twelve because you could think of nothing else. I would not wish to stir any half-buried cerebration, but I have to tell you this much: The black reply that always puts my king’s-pawn opening into trouble is the Sicilian Defense. It seems to take a different turn every time, and I never get to play my game. I’m white, but I’m reacting all the while to what black is up to. It was uncanny of Boris to look me over so carefully, then pick the Sicilian.

Well, that’s all you need to know. By the sixth move I was uncomfortable, by the eighth I was beginning to glimpse future defeat, and by the tenth move he had gotten up from his chair in impatience at how long it was taking me—we employed no clock—and came back with a book, and was impolite enough, or superior enough, or maybe it is elegant enough, to sit there reading while I cogitated over my next move. Then, as soon as I had come to a decision, he would look up, pull his upper teeth over his lower lip with the gentlest sound of tasteful appreciation, reach forward, make his move, which always took immediate account of whatever small positional scheme I was hoping to advance, and then without a by-your-leave, go back to his book, which happened to be—do you believe this?—the Modern Library Giant of Moby-Dick. He was, incidentally, well into it.

Masarov took a knight on the fourteenth move, and I gave up on the fifteenth. He had all the position by then and his rooks were ready to go. I never succeeded in castling. He kept me too busy.

Now Zenia brings out the tea. There is, in the wake left by the game, nothing to talk about. I comment that she does not use the samovars, but a teapot. “English tea,” she replies. I ask for her patronymic. “My father’s name—Arkady. I am Zenia Arkadyova.”

“The sounds are beautiful,” I say. “Zenia Arkadyova.”

We make a little game of getting the accent right. “Many sounds in Russian,” she tells me, “woods, earth, small animals in forest, rivers. English different. Derives from roads, hills, beaches. Surf of sea.”

The largest generalizations are always begging to be adopted by me, but this is too basic.

“I’m sure you are right,” I say.

She stares at me. It is disconcerting. She seems to be searching for some person in hiding just behind myself. “May I look at your library?” I ask Boris.

He pulls himself out of the deep depression in which he has sat since the end of the game. He passes with a wave of his hand over the three quarters of his books that are in Cyrillic, and brings me to his American section. In English, text is all of Hemingway and most of Faulkner. Also Mary McCarthy, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, William Inge, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, all of O’Neill, Clifford Odets, and T. S. Eliot—The Cocktail Party.

“Do you have ambitions to be a playwright?” I asked.

He grunted. “A playwright?” he replied. “I would not know how to talk to actors.”

“Nonsense,” said Zenia.

He shrugged. “Hemingway I like,” he said. “’Tis the essence of pre–World War Two America, would you agree?” (“’Tis!”) We had taken another step along the bookcase and were passing the works of Henry James. “Much studied by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky,” said Masarov, tapping the binding of The Golden Bowl.

“Is that really true?” I asked. I was overcome by such news.

“No,” said Zenia. “Brishka makes jokes.”

“Not at all. Golden Bowl. Perfect symbol for capitalism. Of course Dzerzhinsky would read such work.”

“Boris, ridiculous. Is insult to our guest.”

He shrugged. “I apologize,” he said, and looked me in the eye. “Who do you like? Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?”

“Dostoyevsky,” I said.

“Good. Dostoyevsky writes semi-atrocious Russian, but is, in fact, my preference. So we have possibility for friendship.”

“First, I must improve my chess.”

“Cannot be done,” he said. His candor caught me by surprise, and I began to laugh. He soon joined me. He’s got this heavy body and prematurely graying hair, much-lined face, one tough guy, but there’s an odd youth lurking in the corners of his expression, as if he hasn’t figured everything out yet.

“Zakuski,” said Zenia. “Have zakuski with more tea. Or vodka.”

I declined. She protested. Despite an atrocious accent, her voice is deep and suggestive. At public functions, she seems like a mysterious and sensuous woman, exotic, occult, as removed from both of us as an oracle; this afternoon, she is middle-aged, fussy, maternal, the mistress of a small and very bourgeois establishment. I am finding it hard to piece together any sense of these two people as KGB, whether together or apart. Yet he has gone out of his way to mention Dzerzhinsky—that is obliged to be some sort of signal.

We sit down and chat about cultural matters American. He is interested in Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, in Thelonius Monk, in Sonny Rollins, whom I have never heard of. He has a record of Sonny Rollins and plays it for me and beams when I say that I have never heard a better tenor saxophone.

Abruptly, he opens a new direction.

“Zenia was telling untruth,” he says. “Zenia Arkadyova was lying?” I ask.

He smiles at my use of the patronymic. “She has, actually, written one poem in last two years.”

“No, is awful. Do not show,” says Zenia.

“In English,” says Masarov. “This year, in Russian tongue, Zenia cannot express herself. Not this year. Is total block. So, in your language, she has essayed .  .  . attempted .  .  .”

“Zakuski. Little poem. Appetizer,” says Zenia. She is wholly flushed now, and her ample bosom is, I could swear, surging. “Nugatory,” she says. “Trivial.” (Sounds like tree-vee-owl.)

“Let him read it,” says Brishka.

They argue in Russian. She yields. She goes to the bedroom and comes back with a sheet of cheap notebook paper. On it, in a somewhat unwieldy hand, she has put this head: “Vertigo Is Joy.”

You can believe that after encountering such a title, I picked up her offering with no happiness, but .  .  . let me write it out for you. Lord knows, I’ve not only got a copy, but can recite it by heart after the workout it got from the Sourballs.

VERTIGO IS JOY

Our bird passed away in my hand, its feathers a shroud.

I knew the moment.

Its last heartbeat

spoke to my palm.

Comrade, said bird,

do not wait in line

to mourn for me.

I fall into depths

that are great heights.

“Better if in Russian,” said Zenia, “but cannot find les mots justes. Not for Russian. Words speak from English. Boris gives correct grammar? Correct punctuation? Is correct?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is good? Good poem?”

“I think so.”

“Zenia is recognized in Russia,” said Boris, “although perhaps not recognized enough.”

“Is good for printing in America?” asked Zenia.

“Probably,” I said. “Let me take it. I have two friends who edit literary magazines.”

“Yes,” she said, “yours,” and folded it into my hand, and looked at me with embarrassing intimacy considering that we were standing there in front of her husband. “Print with pseudonym for me,” she said.

“No,” said Boris. “Present as work of a Soviet poet.”

“Madness,” she muttered.

“I think you might change the title,” I said. “It’s a little too direct for English.”

She would not change her title. She loved the sound. “Am adamant for vertigo,” she said. In her pronunciation, it rhymes with tuxedo. Ver-tee-go.

I left after some discussion of when we would visit again. Masarov proposed a picnic with Nancy and me. I agreed. But, by the time that day arrived, Nancy was not on board, and Zenia had decamped for the day. Boris and I went on the picnic together.

I am beginning to rush, however, and would rather wait for a day or two and finish this off with another letter.

Yours,
Harry