OMEGA–12

LOOKING AT THE LONG, LIGHT HOLLOW WHERE SHE HAD LAIN ON THE coverlet, I knew where she had gone. Once Kittredge gave me a great start by confessing she would, on occasion, visit the Vault.

“I detest the place,” I told her.

“No, when I’m alone in the house and begin to wonder if I can’t possibly become any more lonely, I go there,” she said.

“Tell me why.”

“I used to be so afraid of what is in this house. But now I’m not. When I go down to the Vault I feel as if I’ve gotten to the center of my loneliness, as if there’s a bit of land, after all, in the midst of absolutely endless seas. Then, when I come up, Harry, the rest of the house seems less unpeopled.”

“Nothing bothers you down there?”

“Well, I suppose if I allowed myself,” Kittredge said, “I could hear Augustus Farr rattling his chains, but, no, Harry, I feel no vengeance in that place.”

“You really are a lovely girl,” I replied.

Now, I was obliged to remind myself how near I had come this night to carrying her down to the Vault. It gave me a sudden glimpse of myself—one of those rare views returned by the mirror when we are not in any degree loyal to ourselves and so pass cruel and immediate judgment on the apparition in the glass only to realize in the next instant that it is our own face we are condemning. Drunk, miserable, hollow as a gourd, I could hear the silences where unseen judges gather.

The cry of an animal came through the night. It was no ordinary sound. I could not tell from how far away, but the howl came to my ear like the lonely moan of a wolf. There are few wolves in these parts. The cry came again. Now it was as full of suffering and horror as a lacerated bear. There are no bears near. The cry had to have been stirred by my commotion.

Twenty-one years ago, on the dirt road leading from the highway to our back shore, a tramp had been found, partially devoured, in the thicket near Gilley Butler’s house. I am told he lay there with the most frightful expression of fear on what was left of his mouth. Could the shriek of the animal I had just heard be equal to the mutilated silence of the tramp? Who could know? Twenty-one years ago came down to early spring of 1962, a time when some of us were looking to locate a plane to spray poison on Cuban sugar fields. Had there been a year of my working life that had not offered one smothered howl?

Standing in our empty bedroom, my thoughts collided face to face with Damon Butler, the long-dead relative of Gilley Butler—Damon Butler, first mate to Augustus Farr, two and a half centuries dead. This unholy surprise visited me at this moment neither as a ghost nor a voice, but as an image so deep within my mind that for an instant I felt occupied by another presence: I saw what he had seen.

I made prodigious efforts not to see anything at all. I stood in the middle of the bedroom, and made—yes, I call them prodigious efforts although I did not move—made a most fervid attempt to decide that what I now saw in my imagination was neither a gift nor an invasion, but the simple delayed result of an afternoon I had spent ten years ago in the Bar Harbor Library reading Damon Butler’s ship journal, an honored artifact among local library treasures. So, I tried to tell myself that the vision before me now had been put together from no more than the first mate’s papers: bills of lading, shoals negotiated, sloops for sale. The execution of the French commodore that I was witnessing was but the gory essence of Butler’s journal; it was just that I had not allowed it to come back to my thoughts until now. What a formidable incarceration of memory! It all came back. Like a knock on the door before the door flies open.

His ship gone, his men butchered, the French commodore was stripped of his uniform. Naked, arms pinioned, the victim spit, nonetheless, into his captor’s face. In reply, Farr raised his cutlass. The blade was sharp. The commodore’s head flew off like a cabbage. Like the thump of a cabbage striking the deck—so goes Damon’s account. Other crew members were to swear that the corpse, neck spurting, bound limbs straining, sought to rise to its knees until Farr, in a frenzy, kicked it over. There the body lay on the deck, feet twitching. But the head, off to the side, kept moving its mouth. All agreed its mouth was moving. To that, adds Damon Butler, he heard speech issue from those bloody lips. To Farr was said: Si tu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad te.

On that night, years ago, when I followed whatever or whoever was in my dream all the way down to the Vault, I did not think of the speech that came forth from the decapitated head. Now I did. The Latin was clear: “If you do not come to me, I will come to thee.” An intimate curse!

To be out of earshot of Rosen, I took the back stairway. In the cellar, one of the casement windows showed a small pane broken. Through the gap came night air, and its odor was not native to the island. If the nose is a link to memory, then I was sniffing the stale waters of a canal off the Potomac; the muggy fens of the old Georgetown swamps were redolent on the Maine air. I thought of Polly Galen Smith and her attacker; I shuddered. I had just brushed into a cobweb, and its touch, sticky and intimate, remained in my hair. Now I was less certain of what I breathed. Was it the effluvia of the mud flats on the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal? Even as the whoops and cries of a drinking party can travel immaculately through a fog, to be heard a league away on a stranger’s porch, so I wondered if the bay marsh that had witnessed the death of the man who might or might not be Harlot could be dispatching its scent hundreds of miles north to me. In what a malodorous place had the body first washed ashore! The dank smell I used to fear at the bottom of the Keep must have been the first herald of such a horror. Now the wooden steps to the Vault were rotted and loose. It was so long since I had used them that I had forgotten how they could cry out. I might as well have been walking into a ward of men maimed by war. Each step had its own bottomless lament.

There were no lights in the Vault. The bulbs, as I recounted, were long burned out. Only the open door provided a shaft of illumination. My shadow preceding me, I worked my way down, feeling as if I pushed my limbs through palisades of oppression merely to reach the cubicle where Kittredge slept. It was only when I stood in the near-to-complete darkness of the inner room, light from the cellar above much reduced by the right-angle turn off the entrance, that I could dare to recognize it had been years since I ventured here. How decomposed were the bunks when I touched them.

One foam mattress had gone to powder less than the others, and, on it, Kittredge was lying. There was almost no light in the Vault, but by reflection, her pale skin was white. I could see that her eyes were open, and when I approached, she turned her head ever so slightly to indicate that she was aware of me. Neither of us spoke, not at first. I thought again of that moment years ago when the full moon rose over the horizon from the bottom of the notch between two black hills, and the surface of the dark pond on which my canoe floated was alive with a pagan light.

“Harry,” she said, “there’s something for you to know.”

“I expect there is,” I said gently. The anticipation of what she would say reverberated in my head before her words. I experienced that pang one feels so rarely but so precisely in marriage—alarm in advance of the next irremediable step. I did not want her to go on.

“I’ve been unfaithful,” she said.

In every death is a celebration; in every ecstasy, one little death. It was as if the two halves of my soul had just exchanged their places. My guilt for every moment spent with Chloe was, on the instant, relieved of weight; my woe at the new space opened between Kittredge and me rushed in on a flood. The hurricane I had been awaiting in the Tropic of Cerebrum was here. Its first blow to my head came down with the long sullen smash of an ugly swell against an old wooden hull.

“With whom?” I asked. “With whom were you unfaithful?” and the royal observer in myself, untouched by hurricane, earthquake, fire, or storms at sea, had time to notice the rectitude of my grammar—what a peculiar fellow was I!

“There was an afternoon with Harlot,” she said, “but it wasn’t quite an affair, although it was—awful.” She stopped. “Harry, there’s someone else.”

“Is it Dix Butler?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “Dix Butler. I fear I’m in love with him. I hate the very thought of it, but, Harry, I may be in love with that man.”

“No,” I said, “don’t say that. You must not say that.”

“It is,” she said, “a different feeling.”

“He’s a bold man, but not a good one,” I told her, and my voice came out like a verdict rendered from the center of me. No, he was not a good man.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m not a good woman. No more than you are really a good man. It is not what we are,” she said. “I think it is what we inspire. Do you know,” she added gently, “I like to believe that God is present when we make love. It was certainly true with Gobby, and just as true with you. It was just that God was there in the guise of Jehovah. He was over us, and full of judgment. So harsh. But with Dix Butler, I can’t explain why, I feel very close to Christ. Dix is far away from any kind of compassion, but Christ chooses to come close to me then. I have not felt such tenderness since Christopher died. Do you see, I no longer care about myself.” She took my hand. “That was always my dungeon—to live entirely within myself. Now I think of how beautiful it would be if I could give Dix some conception of the compassion I feel. So, you see, it just doesn’t concern me whether Dix, by your lights or anyone else’s, is deserving or not deserving.”

As I stood before her, one awful image came near. It was myself in my car, a livid vision: I had crashed against a tree. My face looked out at me from the back of the head of the man who was smashed. Was it only an illusion that I had driven away from that endlessly long skid?

Then the bottom fell away. I plunged into my true fear. With the force of an infection that bursts an organ wall to race through the body, had the haunting of this Vault broken out?

“No,” I said, “I will not give you up.” As if I were in a trance where one climbs higher and higher into the rigging of one’s soul in order to dare the leap down, I said, “Dix is on his way here, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” she said, “he will be here, and you must leave. I cannot let you be here.” Tears were just visible in this light. She wept silently. “That would be as awful as the day you and I told Hugh that he must give me a divorce.”

“No,” I said again, “I have been afraid of Dix Butler since the day I met him, and that is why I am obliged to remain. I want to face him. For myself.”

“No,” she said. She sat up. “It has all gone wrong, it is all a mess, and Hugh is dead. It is hopeless for you to remain. But if you go away and are not here to be found, then Dix can take care of me. I think he will be able to. Harry, I tell you, there is no way to measure how many ways it will go wrong if you are still here.”

I was no longer certain whether she spoke of love, or of peril, but then she answered the question.

“Harry,” she said, “it will be a disaster. I know what you have been doing for Hugh. I was working with some of that myself.”

“And Dix?”

“Dix knows enough to keep a lot of people in place. That is why you have to leave. Otherwise, I will be pulled down with you. We will both be destroyed.”

I embraced her, I kissed her with that whole mixture of love and desperation that is the only force available to ignite the cold engine of matrimony when passion is lost. “It is all right,” I said. “I will leave if you think it is necessary. But you must leave with me. I know that you do not love Dix. It is just an affair.”

That was when she broke my heart altogether. “No,” she said, “I want to be alone with him.”

We have come to the last moment of this night that I can recount as a witness. I have some recollection of picking up my heavy manuscript of The Game and making my exit by the pantry door to take a silent promenade in the darkness down Long Doane. I passed around one of the guards, and I recall putting the boat back into the channel, but the tide was low and I crossed without difficulty to a neighbor’s camp a quarter of a mile south of where I parked my car. I remember driving to Portland, and emptying our bank account in the morning, per Kittredge’s suggestion, as if, our marriage gone, the umbilical of property still existed. “Harry,” she had said at the end, “take the money that’s in Portland. It’s twenty thousand and more. You’ll need it, and I have the other account.” So I emptied what was there, and flew to New York, and here I do not know if I can go on with even this much summary, for as I learned a day and a half later (in the full seizure that accompanies personal and unendurable news when it comes to you by way of the media) our Keep had burned at dawn and the body of Reed Arnold Rosen had been found. There was no word in any of those reports of Kittredge, Dix, or the guards outside.

That night now exists for me in a darkness equal to the void which comes over a cinema palace when the film is savaged by the claw in the gate and tears, the last image dying with a groan as the sound rolls off the sprocket. A wall arises within my memory as black as our incapacity to know where death will lead us. I see the Keep in flames.

For the next months in New York, I obliged myself to give an account of my last night at the Keep. It was an act, as you may expect, of no ordinary difficulty, and there were days and nights when I could not write a word. I believe that I clung to sanity by an expedition into madness. I found that I kept returning to the moment when my car was turning through its skid and time seemed to divide as neatly as a deck of cards cut in two. I began to have the certainty that if I returned to that hairpin turn where the wheel whipped out of my hands, why then I would not see an empty road, but an automobile smashed against a tree, and behind the windshield would be my shattered person. I saw this mangled presence with such clarity that I was convinced: I had gone over. The idea that I was still alive was an illusion. The rest of that night had taken place in no larger theater than the small part of the mind that survives as a guide over the first roads chosen by the dead. All recollection of myself driving a car, headlights prancing forward like the luminous forelegs of a great steed, was no more than the unwinding of such expectations. I was merely in the first hour of my death. It was part of the balance and the blessing of death that all uncompleted thoughts existing in our mind at a moment of sudden extinction would continue to uncoil. If I had been feeling a touch unreal on my return to Doane, why, that might be the only clue that I was on the pathways of the dead. In the beginning, such roads might hardly diverge from all one knew. If the night had ended with the disappearance of my wife, had it really been my own end that I was mourning? Was Kittredge still waiting for me to return to the Keep on this stormy night? By such means did I keep my sanity through a year in New York. A dead man has less reason to go mad.

IT IS A MEASURE of the life I led in hiding through that year that I did not do anything about the peculiar condition of my passport. Out of the question was any attempt to replace it. Looking like a small layered pastry, this passport was now being held aloft by the Soviet guard in the glass booth, and he had an incredulous look on his face. Was I proposing to enter the U.S.S.R. by way of Sheremetyevo International Airport, Moscow, holding such water-soaked credentials? Worse. He did not yet know that the name of William Holding Libby referred to an imaginary life which would not bear up under serious interrogation.

“Passport,” said the fellow out of his glass cage, “this passport! .  .  . Why?”

His English was going to prove no more useful than my Russian.

“River,” I tried to say in his tongue, helping to suggest that one had fallen into the river with the passport. I was not about to admit I had consigned the document to a laundry room dryer. “River,” I thought I was saying, but later, studying phrases for tourists in my guidebook, I came to recognize that I had used the words for arm and rib and fish (respectively ruka, rebro, and ryba). Doubtless I was telling him that I had stuck my passport up my rib and lost my arm to the fish—God knows it was enough to leave my Sovietsky critically befuddled. Like a good stubborn dog, he kept saying, “Passport—no good. Why?” After which he would draw himself to full height and eyeball me—they were obviously groomed to do that. I was perspiring as profusely as if I were wholly innocent, which in some degree I was. How, I kept asking myself, could I have failed to anticipate the consternation this puffed-up torte of a passport would arouse under examination?

“Not good,” he said. “Expired.”

I could feel the line of passengers waiting behind me.

“No. Not expired. Please,” I said to him, “pozhaluysta!” and reached out my hand. He gave the passport over in great suspicion and I turned with caution the faded crinkled leaves. There! I had found the proper page. My passport had not expired. I pointed out the date and handed it back to him.

The Soviet guard might have been a Minnesota farmboy. He had blue eyes, high cheekbones, and close-cropped blond hair: I don’t think he was twenty-five. “You,” he fixed me with his finger, “you—waiting,” and walked off to come back immediately with an officer, a man of twenty-eight, dark hair, a mustache, the same dull green soldier’s tunic with tight collar and braiding.

“Why?” said the new one, pointing to my passport as if it were a wholly execrable object.

I found the separate words for ice and water. They came into my mind like a pas de deux. “Lyod,” I said, “ bolshoy lyod. Much ice.” I spread my hands as if I were smoothing a tablecloth. Then I gave to the horizontal plane just fashioned in the air one good karate chop. I made a cracking sound. Hopefully, it might sound like an ice-pond breaking up, and I plunged my hand toward my feet. “ Voda. Bolshaya voda—lots of water, isn’t that so?” I waved my hands in desperate strokes. A frozen swimmer.

“Ochen kolodno,” the first guard said.

“Ochen kolodno. Right. Ice-cold, very cold.”

They nodded. They studied the passport back and forth, they looked at my visa which was clean and had the stamps it needed. They fumbled with my name aloud. “William Holding Libby?” It came out: “Veelyam Haul-ding Leeboo?”

“Yes,” I said, “that’s it.”

They studied some names on a hit list. Libby was not on it. They stared at each other. They sighed. They were not dumb. They could feel something was wrong. On the other hand, should they take me off for further questioning, they would have papers to fill out, possibly a lost evening. They must have had plans to go out after work, for the blond guard now stamped my papers. He gave a big kid’s grin. “Pardone,” he said, attempting to give it a friendly Italian-French spin. “Pardone.”

The rest of the way through Arrivals showed me Sheremetyevo, a concrete airport built as a showcase for the 1980 Olympics: Welcome to the U.S.S.R. (Note that our Soviet walls are gray!) My bags went through Customs. The microfilm of Alpha, stowed in my secret compartment, attracted no notice—the suitcase had been designed to take confidential papers through routine inspections. I passed the last gate and encountered multilingual signs that told me to look for the Intourist guide. Instead, a cabdriver approached, a snarling New York–type cabdriver who reminded me of Thomas Wolfe’s dictum that people in the same profession tend to be the same all over the world. My man wanted twenty dollars to take me to the Metropole, a hotel which a travel agent in New York had assured me was a piece of good luck to get into, the Metropole being almost as difficult to snag as the old National. “I can slip you into the new National,” the travel agent had said, “but you don’t want that. It’s all tourist groups.”

“Yes,” I had said, “I don’t want tourist groups.” Had something been obvious about me? Of course, I had popped in on the agent, paid cash, asked for speed in processing my visa (on the assumption he had connections sufficient to rush one through occasionally), and he did, and I tipped him for getting the permissions in a week although it had probably meant putting William Holding Libby on a KGB list which went under some unappetizing category like Individual Tourist, Special. Now, before I was even settled into my cab seat, the driver announced in his black-market English that he wished to buy American dollars from me. His rate, three rubles for a buck, was almost four times better than official exchange.

It could be a trap. I didn’t like him. I certainly didn’t trust him. The authorities could have me jailed for dealing in rubles on the black market.

Indeed, the driver was demanding so much of my attention that I was hardly looking out the window. I was not taking in my first impressions of Russia. Travel in a state of nerves is like passage through a tube. The racket of the car—we were in some kind of Soviet mini-flivver—impinged on me more than the landscape. The driver’s voice, “All right, you tell me, hey, how many dollars you got, come on,” gargled in my ear.

We passed expanses of clean snow, dirty snow, and melted fields about as sprightly as the mud in the Jersey flats. Bits of Moscow began to appear, funky little gingerbread shacks by the side of the road, built in rows but yawning individually, paint peeling. Then came palisades of high-rise housing projects, dirty white for the most part in the dirty white snow. They looked as if the plaster had cracked on the lower floors before they put the trowel to the top ones: What a misery was this land. The March sky was as gray as the concrete walls in the Sheremetyevo Airport. Communism was irritating me personally at this point, equal to the cabdriver, pushy, dirty, depressed, eager for loot, out of date. Of course, the driver might be some outrigger of the KGB. Was I being encountered?

A banner stretched across the superhighway. A legend in Russian. I saw Lenin in the words. Some bouquet, doubtless, of homiletic language. Over how many roads in how many mean and outrageously underequipped Third World countries would you see these banners? Zaire for one. Ditto Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea, Uganda. Who could care? I couldn’t even come out of my tunnel. Moscow streets began to appear, but the side windows of my car were mud-spattered, and sights to the front were only visible through the slip-slop of two overworked wipers that kept drawing striated salt fans on the glass. The driver was as sullen as heavy weather in August.

Now we were on a large boulevard without much traffic. Solemn old buildings—government departments and specialist institutes—perambulated by the side windows. There were few pedestrians. It was Sunday. This was downtown.

We came to a stop in a public square before an old green six-story building. Its sign read . I was at the Metropole. My home away from home.

I gave the cabdriver two dollars for a tip. He wanted ten. He had his own peculiar psychic force. Some weak nerve in me was pinched, for I gave him five. My nerves, we can repeat, were not what once they were.

A stocky, wide-jawed old boy, equal to a retired Mafia soldier of the lowest rank, was the doorman. He had a decoration on the lapel of his gray coat—a hero of the Great War. He would not be about to show cordiality to a stranger.

Nor was he in a rush to help me with the bags. His function was to keep people out. I had to show him the travel-agency voucher in order to get through the door. Inside, the lobby was grim. The palette passed from cigar-butt brown to railroad-coach green. The floor was an aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it. I felt as if I had landed in one of those unhappy hotels on the side streets of Times Square that sit in old cigar smoke, waiting to be demolished.

Was this the famous Metropole where, if my historic recollections proved correct, the Bolsheviks used to gather before and after the Revolution? A huge marble stairway spiraled upward in right-angle turns around an elevator shaft faced in wrought iron.

The woman at the registration desk was wearing a sweater and had a nose cold. She wore eyeglasses, was plain, and pretended not to notice me until I seized her attention. Her English had an unhappy accent reminiscent of such tortures to the spirit as ballet lessons for unpromising girls. The elevator operator, another decorated old war hero, was gruff, and the concierge on the fourth floor was a heavy blonde of about fifty with a beehive hairdo and a big tough Russian face—she looked like a mate for the doorman. She sat behind a little glass-topped desk facing the elevator, kept a rose in a small vase, and scowled at the task of looking for my key, which was large and bronze and as heavy as a pocketful of change.

The route to my room led down one long dark corridor and then turned a right angle to another old shellacked floor. It was parquet with a considerable number of gaps in which squares of plywood had been inserted. A narrow, red carpet, half a football field in length, went down the first corridor, then half a football field down the other to my door. Since the floor buckled every step of the way, I had the sensation—if I may allude to frozen water once more—that I was hopping from one ice floe to the next.

My room was eleven feet by fourteen and had a ceiling twelve feet high. The window looked on a gray court. I had a chest of drawers and a narrow bed with a thin, European mattress laid upon a larger mattress. At the head was a bolster as heavy as a water-soaked log. Plus a TV set!

I turned it on. Electronic snow, pulses of wave-over. Black-and-white. A show for children. I turned it off. I sat on my narrow single bed and put my head in my hands. I got up. I closed the curtains to the courtyard. I sat down again. I was here, and—assuming I had entered without attracting official attention—I could stay here for a week at least, and sort some questions into categories. I had so many questions that I no longer looked for answers. Only for categories.

The rigors of remembering a life that had, in many ways, terminated in the middle of one long night had me proceeding, as you may imagine, through states of peculiar delicacy. A director once told me how, after one of his films was wrapped, he had not stopped living with the camera crew and actors. They had departed, but he would awaken from every sleep with fresh commands. “Bernard, we have to reshoot the market sequence today. Tell Production it’s a hundred extras at least.” He would be out of bed and shaving before he could say to himself: “The movie is over. You have gone mad. You cannot shoot any more.” But he had, as he explained to me, stepped through the looking glass. The film was more real than his life.

Was I equal to that director? For a year, hiding out in a rented room off an airshaft in an apartment house in the Bronx, I had worked to raise a wall between my last memory of Kittredge and myself. Sometimes a month would go by without incident, and I would sleep through the night and work through the day putting one word onto another as if I were spinning a thread to guide me out of the caves.

Then, without warning, love for her would strike. I felt like an epileptic on the edge of grand mal. One misstep and seizures would come. After many months, the Bronx became untenable for me—I had to move.

Besides, they would be looking for me. That was certain. The longer I did not surface, the wider would become their frame of reference. They would have to wonder if I had moved to Moscow. How I laughed—in those paroxysms of silent laughter with which one entertains oneself in the pit—that all the while I was living in the Bronx, they were thinking of me in Moscow.

Yet out of a logic of separate steps that seemed altogether rigorous to me—although I could not specify the steps, I had come to the conclusion that I had to take a trip—for the first time—to the U.S.S.R. I did not know why. I was in profundities of trouble if they ever ran me down in Bronx County, New York, but to be found in Moscow by the KGB? With my extended memoir in microfilm? Why, that would be unforgivable even to myself. What if, despite safe passage through Customs, the Russians knew of my arrival? If Harlot had defected, my present alias might be sitting in Soviet files. That supposition, however, belonged to the world of common sense. I was living in a domain of subterranean logic. Which told me to take along the microfilm of Alpha. Who knows how the boxcars of obsession are shuttled through the freight yards of sleep? I did not feel insane, yet, there was a schedule to madness I seemed to obey. I clung to my writings as if they were body organs. I could never have left Alpha behind. Indeed, the old Jewish lady in whose apartment on the Grand Concourse I had rented a room was aware that I was a man who was writing a book.

“Oh, Mr. Sawyer,” she said when I told her of leaving, “I’m going to miss the sound of your typewriter.”

“Well, I’m going to miss you and Mr. Lowenthal.”

He was an eighty-year-old arthritic; she, a seventy-five-year-old diabetic—we had entertained not much more than passing conversations for most of a year, but I was content with that. Bless them—I knew their lives were bound to be, should I know them better, boring to me. I could feel the worm of condescension stirring when we spoke. It was hard for me to take people seriously who had spent their lives being good thrifty middle-class people. While I expected they would be curious enough about my past, I did not have the heart to regale them at length with the fictitious careers and possible marriages of one Philip Sawyer—a name I employed in order to leave no trail for William Holding Libby, but then there was not much flimflam with the Lowenthals. We made occasional conversation when we met in the hall, and that was it. They were able to supplement their retirement monies with my rent (paid, happily, for both parties, in cash) and I could keep my privacy relatively intact. I stayed in my room except when I grew tired of soup on a hot plate and went out to eat or see a film. I wrote slowly and painfully.

The writing of Omega, however, had gone as well as could be expected, considering how slowly it did go. There were days when I felt neither haunted nor invaded. Nonetheless, I knew I was a boulder on the edge of a cliff. Sooner or later, it would fall. It did. Moscow blinked in my mind like a lit-up billboard. I saw the travel agent, made preparations, tried to study Russian, and said farewell to the Lowenthals. I told them I was going to Seattle. Mrs. Lowenthal said in reply, “Will you have a finished book for your family to read?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I hope they like it.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope so too.”

“Maybe you’ll even get a publisher.”

“Conceivably.”

“If you do, please mail me the volume. I’ll pay for it. I want you to autograph my copy.”

“Oh, Mrs. Lowenthal,” I said, “I’d be delighted to send you a free copy.”

It was exactly the sort of conversation she would never forget. If they ever found this lair in the Bronx, they would learn from her that I had done some typing.

I got off the bed of my room in the Metropole, opened my valise and started to unpack. I took out everything but the envelope containing Alpha. I was hardly ready to begin reading. It was four now, Sunday afternoon, Moscow time, which was eight o’clock in the morning for me. I was sleepy, I was exhausted. I had left at eight in the evening from Kennedy, lost eight hours to the clock, and ten to the flight (with the transit stop at Heathrow) and had landed at 2:00 P.M. Moscow time which was 6:00 A.M. New York time. My nerves, long out of synchronization, were upside down. Since it was 8:00 A.M. now in New York, no wonder I felt full of the false vigor that comes in the morning after a night of false sleep. I had to get out of the room for a while.

I took a walk. My first steps in Moscow. If forty years of American media was enough to bring anyone to the conviction that Communism was evil, I had had my stints of special scholarship. Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex. Perhaps evil was to be comprehended in the grand thesis that Communism was evil.

My first steps, therefore, on Moscow streets were hardly routine to me.

I felt not unlike a prisoner let out of jail after twenty years. Such a man does not know the world he is entering, does not, for example, know how to walk into a store and buy a pair of pants. He has been issued pants for twenty years. Now, I did not know what was allowed me here. I was not certain I could leave the hotel and go out on the street without some proper paper being stamped. I hung about the lobby to observe the comings and goings, but soon felt uneasy. My continued presence might become suspect. So I took a chance, walked to the entrance, stepped out, and was met by a scowl from the doorman—it would take me a while to realize that because he had not placed me yet as a checked-in hotel guest, he was scowling.

At any rate, I was on the street. Cabdrivers, parked at the hotel curb, yelled at me as a prospect, passersby took their glances. I just walked. I made no moves to determine if anyone was following, for I did not wish to show any knowledge of evasive tactics, but, then, for the little it was worth, I did not feel as if I were being followed. I had put on an old jacket and wore a black knit hat pulled over my ears like a merchant seaman. It was all right. I felt like giving a great whoop.

A square away from the hotel would be, I knew, a statue to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, “Sword of the Revolution,” great-grandfather of the KGB. Back of him would be the infamous Lubyanka. From books, photographs, and debriefings, I knew that place better than any American prison—I had listened a hundred times in the imaginary auditorium of my ear to the screams of the tortured in the cellars of the Lubyanka, and I did not know if I wanted to go near it now, but, thus debating, went directly from the Metropole to Dzerzhinsky Square. Before me was an edifice, a late nineteenth-century seven-story morgue of an office, the Lubyanka, once a prerevolutionary business palace for czarist insurance companies. It still had white curtains on the windows, and highly polished brass fittings on the entrance door, but its exterior wall was a soiled khaki-yellow, a dismal, old-fashioned building in and out of which on this late Sunday afternoon came and went a few men wearing officer’s uniforms. The air was as cold as a New England forest in winter, and all the while I heard no screams. This Lubyanka—conceivably my future home—failed to stir adrenaline.

I wandered away through side streets, gray in the light, near to black in the shadows, “the old streets of the merchants”—a phrase from my guidebook. Had these enclaves of gloom ever lifted? It was nearly agreeable to discover depression this palpable, and I had a moment in which I understood the comforts of gloom—was this my first real thought in a week? For even as the acceptance of one’s own poverty might be the first protection against corruption of the soul, so was gloom a fortress in which one could live encapsulated from insanity. Yes, the protective if heavy resonance of gloom would not be hard to find in Moscow, and thinking this, I came out of one more side street onto Red Square, a shock as nice as stepping from a Roman alley into the great plaza of St. Peter’s, except here was no Vatican but a field of cobblestones near to half a mile long and hundreds of feet wide spreading out to the walls of the Kremlin. On the gray horizon were early signs of a lavender twilight, but Russians were still waiting to see the tomb of Lenin and his body, preserved below, in its vault. Two thousand people, two by two, were in that line, and perhaps twenty people entered the tomb each minute, suggesting that the last man in the queue would have to wait one hundred minutes in this cold, a reasonable mortification for a pilgrimage.

I began to pay attention to these Russians on the street. They all looked middle-aged. Even the young had an air of relinquishment that speaks of middle age. All the same, Red Square was a cheerful scene. To my astonishment, it was cheerful on this late Sunday afternoon. There was a shimmer to the air, a conviviality to the faces red with cold. Busloads of tourists—native Russians—were leaving, others were yet arriving. Hundreds of others walking through the Square were showing the simple happiness that comes to hardworking people when they are transported to an important place. These could have been Mormons, or Jehovah’s Witnesses, on a ferry to the Statue of Liberty.

How much like a film it appeared to be. The center of Red Square rose higher than the corners, which left people in the distance only visible above the knee. Their feet had disappeared beneath the cobblestone horizon. Everyone seemed to bounce, therefore, as they walked, even as heads bob when a crowd is perambulating toward a telephoto lens. I did not know the history of Red Square, which is to say, didn’t know what old great events had produced this bouquet of the spirits, but my own were up—I felt delivered from the iron clangor of the Bronx and the walls of Moscow. I was ready, for one irrational instant, to celebrate, I hardly knew what. Maybe it was only the joy of coming to the end of a trip.

I went back to the Metropole, received an increment more of greeting from the doorman, the elevator man, and the dezhurnaya (my floor lady), returned to the room, sat on my bed, sat on the chair next to the bed, took down my valise, looked at the neatly concealed Velcro seam to the false compartment where I kept the microfilm, put the valise up in the closet again, and realized abruptly how tired I was. I was weary from the cold outside, the scrambling of the hours, my whippings-about of mood, the rigors of the walk—everyone in Moscow seemed to stride along at top pace, and I, good American, had stepped it up to stay with them. Now I was tired with the real desolations of my mood. I did not know if I had ever felt so alone on a quiet day.

I went downstairs to eat, but it was not much better. I was seated among strangers at a table for eight with a rumpled tablecloth, not dirty exactly, but no more immaculate than a shirt that has been worn for a few hours. The only dish available was chicken Kiev, a rubber chicken fit for a routine political banquet with a gusher of butter that tasted like lubricating oil mixed with some sour sorrow emanating from the kitchen. The kasha was overcooked, the dark bread was coarse, the fresh vegetable was a thin slice of tomato. Then came one cookie and a cup of tea. The waitress was a heavy, middle-aged woman with weighty personal concerns. She sighed a lot. It took all of the little attention she could give to the world outside herself to keep level with her job.

After I left the table, I realized that I had supped in the equivalent of the hotel’s coffee shop, an eating hall, so to speak, exclusively for guests. The real restaurant, designed for a more prosperous gang, was entered by two glass doors off the lobby. Here black marketeers and bureaucrats, accompanied by their wives, waited on line. Inside, a dance band as full of pep as some of the prom bands that used to work the dances at Yale was hacking away, a weird, bouncy band whose sound reverberated through the glass doors.

I went back to the elevator. I needed to sleep. I hoped I would get to sleep. At the landing, as I got off, my dezhurnaya with the blond beehive gave a real smile when she handed over the key. I understood. Already I gave every evidence of going by her desk many times a day, of being a regular customer. The comings and goings of her keys were her liveliest transactions. True hell. Homage to Sartre.

I locked my door, undressed, washed my face, dried my hands. The sink was cracked, the soap was gritty, the bath towel was small and coarse. So was the toilet paper. This was one of the ten best hotels in Moscow. I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil.

Then I got into bed. Sleep did not come. There was every intimation the High Holies were on their way. I decided to get up again and read Alpha. Will it tell you something of the year I spent in that rented room in the apartment of the Lowenthals that I knew the first pages by heart? But then, I knew much of the material by heart. It had taken me through many a night when I could not work on Omega. Yes, even when Kittredge appeared in these pages, Alpha was endurable. My actual love affair with Kittredge had not begun, after all, during the period I covered in Alpha. Besides, as I projected the microfilm, I would sometimes whisper the words aloud. That held off certain thoughts. Even as we and the Soviets had spent years jamming each other’s radio broadcasts, so would I recite the manuscript of Alpha whenever Kittredge became too alive. Such observances did not always work, but when they did, I could turn the corner. The ghosts of long-gone deeds would not appear, and I could live with Kittredge. Alpha was all I had of her now. I began, therefore, to recite my first sentences aloud, slowly, quietly, intoning the words; the sounds themselves came forward as forces in the unseen war of all those silences in myself that rode to war when I slept.

Alpha commenced. I read by microfilm even as I whispered some of the words aloud. It was half of my past, expressed in what style I could muster after years of ghostwriting, but it was a good half of my past: “A few years ago, in disregard of the discretionary contract I signed in 1955 on entering the CIA .  .  .” That is how the Foreword to Alpha begins. (Of course, a two-thousand-page manuscript is always in need of a foreword.)

So I was back in the book again, reading with my white hotel-room wall for a screen, moving my microfilm manually through my special flashlight equipped with its filmgate and lens, reading about the early career in the CIA of Harry Hubbard, a name that sometimes seemed as separate from myself as the name one repeats on shaking hands with a stranger just introduced in a room full of other strangers whose names one will also repeat. I felt as near and as removed from my original pages as if I were looking at old photographs attaching me imperfectly to the past.