33

July 1, 1958

Dear Kittredge,

Zenia and Georgi turned out to be having a passionate affair. I’m amazed at how much I am feeling for Brishka, and, believe me, she now speaks of him often. One is almost inclined to say, “Poor Varkhov!” for he has to hear constantly about the husband whose wife he is presumably despoiling—Zenia is voluble concerning her sense of shame. Naturally, Porringer will make a point of saying, “No woman ever got injured by a good fuck,” a bracing piece of information, and wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?

Meanwhile, I have been given the monitor’s role in AV/ RATHOLE, which is the unbemused name Hunt has bestowed on our eavesdropping operation. I don’t know if I’m dealing with a comedy or a monstrosity. Can humans be held accountable for what they say in the midst of the act?

The mechanics often prove droll. While the audio promises to be the best yet devised for this kind of tap, and we are able to receive conversations from the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, and the bedroom, there are gaps when Zenia or Georgi rattles a plate, or, worse, the bedsprings take over. The Finnish Micks go over after every visit to pick up the tapes from a bedroom we’ve rented on the floor above, and come back to their desk in our office to spend hours translating. Then, I try to put it into better English without losing any hard intelligence. Since the Sourballs also receive the raw Russian transcripts a day later in Washington and can decide for themselves what is truly of value, I begin to wonder if I am needed. I take this thought to Hunt who assures me that my little unhappiness is but a cavil. “Just keep up your output,” he tells me. I have a hunch he is sending copies of my stuff to a couple of his primes in Western Division.

The worst of it is that the boil-down is minimal. Varkhov goes to his love-nest to forget about his office, and Zenia meets him because she is “captive of exotic alien obsession.” We hear a great deal about that. Varkhov comes through in the tapes as even cruder human stuff than anticipated—apparently, he is descended from a long line of serfs, and his father rose to be a railroad engineer, that is, a locomotive driver, while he, Georgi, distinguished himself as a young if all but uneducated platoon Commissar, survived Stalingrad, and was some sort of hit man or executioner for the GRU during the Red Army’s advance to Berlin. He’s a butcher boy according to Zenia’s wrought description—he deals in “flesh, bones, and now you deal with me.” She speaks mournfully and often about her inability to be in control of herself. “I read books concerning collapse of virtue in women, but books do not warn sufficiently. Not Flaubert. Not even Tolstoy. Chekhov maybe. A little. Not enough. Dostoyevsky, the worst. No good for understanding sufferings of spoiled women mired in worship of devil’s flesh.”

“Who is a devil?” Georgi protests. “I am one man under impossible circumstances. I worship your husband for his wisdom.”

“Not so much as you worship center of me, my pussy hair. Liking what your nose finds? Brishka adores such. You no. Too scared. Strong man scared. Center of sin in pussy hair.”

I’m sorry, Kittredge, but after the Finnish Micks do their literal translation, I am hard put to get it back into enough English to give an idea of what Zenia and Georgi sound like. That last in raw translation came to me as “turpitude in crotch hairs, stinking crotch hairs.” Don’t look to Russians for the delicate touch.

She upbraids Varkhov for quite a time as “nyet kulturny.” I am generally familiar with the expression via Masarov, but Gohogon, another of the Finnish Micks, assures me that this is a forceful insult among Russians—either you are a cultured person, or you are without culture. Zenia Arkadyova feels degraded exactly because she is full of passion for this nyet kulturny, Varkhov. “I had five aunts, all ladies, all dead. Would faint with one look at you.”

His replies to such remarks usually have to be inserted in the transcript as: VARKHOV: .  .  . (grunts).

I become sufficiently curious to get Gohogon to let me listen to the raw tape. Another element reveals itself. Zenia’s words may be brutal, but her voice is soft, melodious, welcoming. His responding grunt is one of pure happiness, something like a hippo snorting in muck. Khorosho, he replies, which comes out much like a grunt itself when uttered in a hoarse voice. “Horror-show,” is the nearest aural equivalent. In fact, khorosho means okay, pure and simple okay.

“I disgrace my family,” says Zenia.

“Khorosho.”

“You are a dog.”

“Khorosho.”

“You are a pig.”

“Khorosho.”

“Specimen of greed.”

“Khorosho, khorosho.”

I begin to think of Peones. Is there a principle here? Do brutes look to be whipped? Is there a scale of inner justice?

“Tell me more,” he says. “Am here to listen.”

“Are unworthy.”

“Okay.”

“Unworthy of my husband.”

“Understood.”

“You revolt me.”

“I don’t,” said Varkhov.

“No, you don’t. Come here. I need you.”

Groans, heavy breathing, bedsprings. Maniacal cries at the end. (Yes, I do listen to the raw tape.) You cannot always tell which voice is which. “Fuck me, fuck me out of my heart. You are my liberty, my shit,” cries Zenia Arkadyova, yes, it is her voice, and even on the tape I can feel her reaching from the hole in the center of herself to that place in the universe where perhaps there is something other than a hole. I don’t know whether to be moved or appalled. Listening to the tape, I can feel the sweet nausea of her desire and wonder if I have pinched some unnatural nerve in myself.

Hunt visits my desk from time to time with exhortations to extract the nitty-gritty. “Restrict it to the gamy stuff. I want to spear Boris in the pits. None of that fraudulent muck about ‘how wonderful my husband is.’ Hell, Harry, human perversity being what it is, a man can forgive a wife who keeps talking about him while she’s with the other guy. So, just look for the give-it-to-me-you-goddamn-great-fucker stuff. The good passages. We’ll squash the heart right out of Brishka, that poor, misunderstood KGB mass-murdering bastard.”

So I commence editing. A fearsome product results. Another example, be it said, of the validity of K. Gardiner Montague’s thesis on A and O. If I allowed myself, I’d be in a whirl of disturbed feelings about what I’m doing, but Alpha has taken over, Alpha appears to thrive on the excitement of bringing off a good job with obdurate, even repellent, material. Not that this is entirely repellent. Kittredge, in honesty, I am not unmoved by the depth of Zenia’s voice. Can you imagine me ever admitting this to anyone but you? Yet our good Reverend Hubbard has to confess that even Varkhov’s grunts, listened to long enough, do strike human chords: tenderness in the midst of animal greed, sorrow in the heart of all his harsh curses. He comes—all right, I will tell all—shouting, “Whore, mother-of-pigs, filth I fuck,” incredible, awful stuff which evokes an aria of responsive ecstasies from her. If I allowed myself, I could feel diminished by the power of their carnality. But I have my Alpha, good, determined work-soldier, and he runs the operation. It even becomes tedious piecing through the transcripts for “good passages.” With the aid of Gohogon, I find the equivalent bits on the tape and splice them. Then I listen as if it were music. Of course, the cuts don’t always work. Whereupon I have to play the raw tapes and try to find other moments of Russian sound that could bridge the transition. Since I don’t know the language, my choices often make no great sense word for word, but miss by miss and bit by bit, I do patch together a workable, even overwhelming, actualization on edited tape of what Hunt was looking for. If he’s been complaining every day at how long it takes, he is generous enough, old clam-lipped Howard, to express his praise finally at my good job. And I am pleased. Deep inside of Omega, hopelessly incarcerated, a subparticle of my soul is mourning for Brishka, but Alpha has carried the day. Indeed, the week. I feel like a sound editor and/or radio director. I have created an interesting vocal work. I swear, before the power of a tough job well done, moral qualms have no more force than blades of grass before a lawnmower. Or, so it seems while working.

Now, of course, the question arises of what to do with the finished product. Hunt, predictably, is all for blasting Boris Masarov out of his socks. Send him the tape, and then no matter what happens we can count on a sizable profit. At the least, if he decides to swallow it, he and Varkhov will have to work together. More likely, Masarov will attempt to have Varkhov sent back to Moscow, or will apply for return himself. That will be time-consuming for the Soviet team.

Of course, there is always the larger possibility that Varkhov can be blackmailed into working for us. Ditto Masarov. Could this tape so demoralize him about the value of his present life that he would consider defection?

Hunt argues sensibly that Boris is likely to look upon us as even more of an enemy than before. Hjalmar Omaley, who has flown in from Soviet Russia Division again, is, of course, all on the side of working for a defection. The Sourballs are geared for that. Arguments go on between Omaley and Hunt that must reflect the scene at Headquarters between Western Hemisphere Division cum Groogs on one side, Soviet Russia Division on the other. I won’t consume pages of this letter by listing any more of the debates, scenarios, lacunae, and, via Omaley, paranoid accusations. Hjalmar is seeing Nancy Waterston every night, and Hunt no longer knows whether to trust her. Un tour de drôle.

In the middle of all this, arrives the following cable. Decoded, it reads:

TO: AV/HACENDADO

FROM: KU/GHOUL-1

CONGRATULATIONS ON RATHOLE. SPLENDID DEMOPO. FELICITATIONS.

Demopo, Kittredge, stands for Demolition Options, that is, wreaking havoc on your opposition.

Hunt was in heaven. “This is the first recognition from your guy since he invited me to dinner two years ago.” He hawked his throat. “On second thought, Harry, you know how to read the man. What is Harlot up to? Does he want to come in on this?”

“He would never approach you directly if he wanted to take it over,” I venture. It’s amazing, Kittredge, how one becomes an expert. I, who have never understood Hugh for one moment, am now explaining him to others.

“Well, what is he saying?” asked Hunt.

“He’s offering genuine felicitations, I believe. After all, it is a nice operation.”

“Hell and soda water if it isn’t,” Hunt exclaims. He can’t quite trust me when it comes to Hugh Montague, but on the other hand, I am saying what he wants to hear. So he tends to believe me. Then shakes his head. “There’s got to be more to this cable.”

“Why,” I asked, “don’t you give him a ring?”

He sighed. I think he was a little reluctant. “This one calls for the red phone,” he said at last.

I left Howard’s office. In fifteen minutes, I was summoned back. He was in a glow. “Montague’s not all that bad when he chooses to be forthcoming. Wants to speak to you now. Wants to congratulate you, too.”

When I got on the secure phone, however, count on it, Howard was still hovering in his office. So I did not dare to close the door. Your own dear mate greeted me by saying in that oft-familiar tunnel voice, “Declare loudly how glad you are that I like it.”

“Yessir,” I said, “I’m awfully glad that you like it.”

“All right,” said Hugh, “enough of that. The cable was merely preamble to get you on the secure phone. I’m not keening in on RATHOLE. Its promise is small. Masarov and Varkhov are made of the hard stuff. They will never defect. In any event, it’s not my playground. I’m calling with a query for you. How would you like to be transferred to Israel?”

“You don’t mean it? Isn’t that a plum?”

“Take it more slowly. It’s very much Angleton’s show over there. As my representative, you’d be working uphill. However, I do hold a couple of slots. Not every last soul in the Mossad is enamored of Mother. A couple of top-shelf Israelis are more inclined to work with me.”

“I guess I had better think about this.”

“You had better. On the positive side, the Mossad are the diamonds in the intelligence game.”

“Yessir.”

“You will come out a master, or broken.”

“Broken?”

“Crushed.” He paused. When I did not reply, he went on. “No question. It’s Angleton’s fief. You will be the enemy as far as Jesus is concerned.” He pronounced Jesus as Hey-sooz, James Jesus Angleton.

“Why are you proposing I go, then?” Unfortunately, I had to whisper this for fear Howard would hear me.

“Because you may survive. Jesus does not hold all the cards. I’ve marked a few for myself.”

“Can I think about it?”

“Do. You’re at a fork. Brood.”

“How do we pick this up again?”

“Call Rosen. He’s now my slave Friday. Telephone him at TSS-Tertiary on one of your open lines. Chat away. Harmless buddy-buddy stuff. If you’ve decided that Israel is go, you need merely remark, ‘How I miss Maine now that I’m in Montevideo.’ I’ll take care of the rest.”

“And if one decides in the negative?”

“Then, boy, don’t use the code. Rosen will have nothing to report to me.”

“Yessir.”

“Two days to determine your mind.” He hung up before I could ask about you, Kittredge. Not that he would have told me.

I will not try to describe the next forty-eight hours. I felt exalted; I dwelt in terror. Angleton’s reputation is easily as fearsome as your husband’s, but then it is to Hugh’s and Angleton’s honor that Agency people speak of them as legends without ever quite knowing what they do.

I was able to learn two things about myself in the next two days. Dear Married Lady: I entered the abyss of my cowardice and smelled the noxious fumes therein; I climbed the highest peaks of my hitherto unglimpsed high ambition. I even thought of the moment I got back into the polo game. I ended by telephoning Arnie Rosen at TSS on an open Station phone, resolved to speak of my longing for Maine.

So soon as I approached that, however, he cut me off. “Forget all about a vacation,” he said. “Your request for leave is canceled.”

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Oh, oh, oh,” he said.

“I can’t bear this,” I told him. “Give me some notion.”

“It’s your mother. Your mother prevents your trip to Maine.”

“My mother? Jessica?”

“Yes.”

“She can’t.”

“Well, she’s the reason, although she’s not the executor of the decision.”

“Who is the executor?”

“Let’s say it’s your father.” A pause. “Yes. Paradigmatically speaking.” Another pause. “And your host sends deep regrets at being unable to send the plane fare.”

I thought I could glimpse a picture, then wondered if I could. “Arnie, hit me once more.” We could have been trading favors for futures.

He was so good at this game. “Well,” he said, and he did say well as if he were opening a door, “I, for one, would never be allowed to go to those woods.”

“Why not?”

“They’re too anti-Semitic in Maine.”

That offered enough. There was reason to feel the answer was going to make its way to me.

“Yes, and how is Kittredge?” I asked. “Have you and she made up?”

“Well, I’d love to, but she is far away.”

“How far away?”

“Think of Australia and you’ll be wrong. Ditto Poland. I wish I could tell you where.” He hung up.

A box of Churchills arrived via embassy pouch two days later. Inside was a card in Harlot’s immaculately small handwriting: “Your errant godfather.” I had solved the question by then. Even as Hugh is Harlot to some, so Angleton is Mother to many. But he is not my mother, Jessica Silverfield Hubbard. Rosen, doubtless, was reminding me that I was one-eighth Jewish. As for my father? Paradigmatically speaking! That had to refer to Company policy. Of course. The Company would not send a Jewish case officer to Israel. Conflict of interest. I had no idea if this originated as an Agency determination, or came by request of the Mossad, or had been agreed upon by both. In any event, Kittredge, your own peerless Harlot had forgotten that a little part of me was Jewish until Personnel, bless them, probably reminded him. For a few days, Kittredge, I must say it was curious to think of myself as Hebraic.

On the other hand, even though I have been up to my neck with RATHOLE, I now have difficulty believing that I am wholly in Uruguay. I must confess to you that I have a private teleology. I still believe I was born for a purpose and will strive to reach a certain end, even if I can neither see the end nor name it. Forty-eight hours in the scenario-factory of my mind had been spent coming to the conclusion that I must accept a dubious, and conceivably career-smashing, job because I was fated to go to Israel. Then, abruptly, I discovered I wasn’t destined at all. Knocked out on a technicality. It has left me awfully detached about RATHOLE. And don’t you know, Kittredge, that may be just as well. RATHOLE seems in danger of decomposing even as we deal with it.

The Sourballs, you see, won the battle. Their decision prevailed: We have to try to get a defector out of this, and the consensus settled on Varkhov. Masarov, the old hand, it was agreed, would simply prove too difficult, too outraged. So Station discussed approaches to Georgi. Porringer is for tailing Varkhov’s chauffeured car with one of the cabs from AV/EMARIA. Sooner or later, Varkhov will stop at a café for lunch, and then Omaley and Gohogon, bulked up by Porringer or myself, can be summoned by radio via AV/EMARIA to move in on Varkhov, hand him the tape and a phone number, and tell him to play it for himself alone. We-can-all-be-friends will serve as the theme of this pageant. Hjalmar, however, hates such an outright approach, and SR Division is behind him. Meetings, they argue, must be kept to a minimum. We could, of course, just mail it to Varkhov directly at the Russian Embassy, but how would we know he received it?

I suggest we use one of our villa keys to leave the tape in Varkhov’s love nest. If the locks have been changed by him, we can hire a locksmith. Disadvantage: The locksmith could attract the notice of the neighbors. If that happens, the operation is blown.

Of course, once we leave a tape, the love nest goes into terminal, anyway. I propose that we send AV/ALANCHE-1 (leader of the sign-painters and a most trustworthy kid) over with our keys. We can do this at a time when we know, via GOGOL, that Varkhov’s car is parked on the street back at the Russian Embassy. AV/ALANCHE-1 need merely try the lock. Whether the keys work or not, he must depart immediately. At least we will know then whether we can open the door.

First rate. My idea is implemented on a Friday afternoon, and we learn that the lock has not been changed. After the weekend, then, we will make our move. We’ve discovered by now that no matter how many times a week our villa on Calle Feliciano Rodríguez is used by Varkhov, he always has a tryst on his Monday break for lunch (because, as we learn from the tape, he has spent the weekend with his wife and is heartily sick of her!). We decide, therefore, to leave the spool with a tape recorder sitting next to it right on the table in his entrance foyer. An accompanying note will suggest a place and time of meeting. All he has to do for assent is to substitute a blank piece of paper, also provided, in place of the note. All stated in immaculate Russian, thanks to Hjalmar. There is a concept behind this. The House of Love on Feliciano Rodríguez Street (as we now with a curious mixture of superiority and embarrassment term the theater of operations for this sticky caper) is always approached and entered by Georgi a half hour before Zenia. To prevent his chauffeur from getting a glimpse of her, the limousine is always dispatched right back to the Embassy. Then Zenia arrives by cab and stops a block away. Walks to the door. Georgi, given his advance half hour, is out of his clothes and hungry as a Russian bear. But she delays him. Sometimes, she makes him put his clothes on again. “We must start as equals,” she tells him. Fascinating, but the point is that we do have a predictable half hour at the commencement when he is alone.

Come Monday morning, therefore, our Company gift is deposited on the foyer table, and Gatsby, who is the least likely to be familiar on sight to either of our Russians, is waiting in a surveillance cab half a block away. Fifteen minutes later, Georgi, right on time, enters the House of Love. Ten minutes later he comes out. He is perspiring visibly. He starts to pace the street. These perambulations become progressively longer to and fro until they take him right past Gatsby, who is still sitting in the parked taxi. Oh, my God, Georgi recognizes Jay. He stops on the sidewalk, salutes him, sticks his thumb to his nose, waggles his fingers, raises a mallet-like fist, smashes it down on the hood of the taxi hard enough to bestow a sizable dent in the metal, and then, seeing Zenia, strides off to meet her, whereupon they enter the house again. Gatsby, in a perfect perspiration of his own, waits in the taxi and has to haggle with his driver over what it will cost to repair the damaged hood. A half hour later, Zenia, distraught, leaves with Georgi, and they hail a cab. When Gatsby attempts to follow at the book-approved distance, Georgi, at a red light, has his own vehicle back itself up a full hundred yards, all the way to Gatsby’s car, gets out, leaves a second dent on the other side of the hood, and jumps back into his cab. Realizing, I think, that discretion is somewhat pointless by now, Varkhov even drops Zenia on the Rambla one building away from her high-rise, and returns to the Embassy where he pays off the driver and shakes his fist at Jay Gatsby even as the latter drives off.

There’s always the chance Varkhov will notify the police that his apartment was entered, but that will take time. So soon as Jay calls in, I’m sent over quickly with Gohogon to see what has been done to Don Bosco’s property. It’s a nightmare. First of all, Georgi has broken off his key in the front door so we can’t get in. Fortunately, there’s a rear entrance he has overlooked in his rage, and we also have the key to that. He has done a job. The four-poster bed is smashed, the tape recorder is smashed, the tape, unspooled, is in and out of the toilet bowl and all over the bathroom floor like a slither-pit of tapeworms, the living-room furniture has hordes of stuffing ripped out, a couple of the walls show dented plaster (from those mallet-like fists)—no need to go on. I feel the fires of the Russian heart burning through the icy Russian winter. I jest, but then I don’t. It gives me a glimpse of the terror Europeans hold of the barbaric passions waiting out in the East for them.

Naturally, all hope for a defection is now lost. Hunt, backed by Western Hemisphere Division and the Groogs, is arguing that a defection was never in the cards, and the alternative is to use our demopos. “Speed is of the essential,” he cables to Washington and in return is given the go-ahead. There is very little to lose. Duplicate tapes are mailed to Masarov at the Embassy, and delivered to the doorman in his high-rise apartment. At a party given by the Swedish Embassy, a third duplicate is left in Masarov’s overcoat pocket. Given Ambassador Woodward’s injunction that State Department presence at embassy functions be unsullied, none of us have been invited, but Porringer does know the Uruguayan hatcheck girl employed by the Swedes well enough to induce her, by way of half a week’s wages, to plant the tape. All of this is at a desperately low level of tradecraft, but, of course, it no longer matters. Saturation is the only way we can be certain Boris receives the goods. No note, of course, is sent. No need for that now. Let Masarov and Varkhov battle it out.

We sit back and wait. Days go by. No apparent results. The Russians then notify us of a reception for Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a young and apparently outspoken new Russian poet. Enclosed is the information that Yevtushenko gives readings in Moscow and Leningrad to stadium crowds of as many as twenty thousand people. While not a singer, his popularity is comparable to the American Elvis Presley’s. All personnel at the American Embassy, states the invitation, are specifically invited. So Woodward feels obliged to bring along Hunt, Porringer, Kearns, Gatsby, Hubbard, and Waterston in addition to his own stodgy crew. Since it’s the heart of winter now, the party is given inside and is formal enough to remind you of czarist receptions.

Varkhov and Masarov head up the receiving line. Zenia and Mrs. Varkhov, a fat lady, are between them. They are all a tad nervous, but then, so are we. Varkhov makes a point of clicking his heels when Jay Gatsby goes by with wife, Theodora. I could swear that Masarov winks at me, or was it an involuntary twitch? Zenia, flushed, and looking most vulnerable, as if she is about to weep or to laugh, but can provide no warning, even for herself, of which it will be, is nonetheless looking more beautiful than I have ever seen her. Forgive the crudity of this next thought but it did occur to me that shame bestows a rich light on a woman’s flesh. Exposed, she is also, despite herself, oddly triumphant. Wherever you are, Kittredge, do not become too furious at this.

At the height of the evening, Yevtushenko is asked to read from his work. Easily as tall as me, he is not bad-looking. Has the sinewy build of a ski instructor. Loudly, he reads his poetry like a young baritone doing a full-voiced récitatif. His Russian seems to be full of onomatopoetic effects. It’s hammy acting, but Zenia’s eyes gleam like gems. “New spirit of Russian people,” she confides to me, as if I were not one of the agents of her attempted downfall. Later, the Belgian Ambassador was to whisper to Hunt that Zenia and Yevtushenko are having an affair.

I wonder. Yevgeny Yevtushenko is quite a fellow. Speaks a harsh English, but practices it assiduously. Draws me aside and wants to know how far I can swim.

“Oh, two miles, anyway,” I tell him.

“Can swim ten. In ice-cold water.” His eyes are wild and blue and stare at you with peremptory force, as if he can bend you to his will inasmuch as his will is pure and only wants your friendship. I have no idea whether he’s up to something. “Are interested in wedding customs?” he asks of me.

I shrug.

“Siberian wedding custom fascinating,” he says. “Siberian groom pisses glass until full of urine. Bride drinks urine. Barbaric, yes?”

“Sounds a bit nyet kulturny.”

My use of Russian does not reach him. “Barbaric, yes, but wisdom, yes. Yes, also! Because! What is marriage for poor people? Babies, wet diapers, ca-ca. Stinks. Small stinks. Good wife must live with such. Hence, Siberian custom. Good beginning for marriage.”

“It’s unfair,” I said. “The bridegroom doesn’t drink the piss.”

“Agree. I agree. Unfair to women. You show sense of justice for era of tomorrow. Let me shake your hand. I salute you.”

He shook my hand, his eyes stared wildly into mine. I had no idea if he was a talented poet, Zenia’s new lover, a KGB joy-boy, or, first of all, entirely mad. I did not even know how much he knew of what we had been up to. But he made me feel cheap, that son of a bitch—I don’t even know how.

Kittredge, I miss you so much I could cry in my beer, at least, if I were the demonstrative sort, like Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Love,
Harry