Kovacol told me there was no way out for a foreigner who knew the secrets of their coding computers. He asked me what I thought I was accomplishing by quitting and I said I wanted to rectify a serious error. I didn't say my life was full of them. He said the fate of a bourgeois humanist was bound to be narrow. He said I was lucky he didn't shoot me on the spot and then discharged me from the unit without pay. The friend I had come with from Stockholm, the one who had given them my name originally, wouldn't see me again.
For a few weeks they let me alone, then began to tail me to see if I had any contacts. I had one a short while, a man I met one night in a park. At first he didn't trust me but then became sympathetic. When he told me he was a Jew I said you were, William, and told him about my situation here. Arkady Davidovich turned out to be a dissident. For some weeks he and his wife helped me with food parcels they hid in various spots I had been told to look in, but I stopped picking them up when I realized the secret police were tight on my tail. Arkady and his wife have two kids, a boy thirteen and a girl nine, and I didn't want them to get into worse trouble because of me. We don't meet any more but sometimes they manage to slip an envelope with a couple of rubles to me. I walk into a crowd and when I come out usually there are two or three rubles in my pocket. Latelyânow that I am being followed day and nightâthat happens rarely.
I've tried to get into the U.S. Embassy, but the Soviet guards recognize me and won't let me in. If I wait for an American to come out they shove me along with their nightsticks. I don't know how they do it but when I call from a public booth the call is jammed. I hear a buzz and when I talk my voice breaks into noise. It's as though your self had destructed.
I don't know how much longer I can last. I'm on the move and they are generally close behind but not making the arrest, though I've begun to hunger for it. If I'm lucky I'll end up in a strict-regime labor camp in the Gulag. Frankly, it would be a relief. I wouldn't have to scrounge for bread or try to hide where they watch me hiding. I have a croupy cough and almost constant diarrhea. Maybe that's the punishment they've arranged till I collapse.
I'm afraid of my fate. I'm afraid of myself for the fate I've created. Right now I'd give half my life to be free the other half.
I wish I could say there was something you could do for me. Maybe talk to the press? But if you do they might shoot me at once. I've blocked my exits. All my life I've been walking in a tunnel believing I was out in the open. The only really generous thing I ever really did was to stop taking food from a dissident Jew and his family.
Tell Maud I think of her a lot. My mother is my mother, and you are my father, William. Some simple things take a long time to get thought out.
Gerry.
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Dubin mourned D. H. Lawrence.
In a letter to his sister-in-law Else, he said: “It is very lovely, the wind, clouds, the running sea that bursts like a blossom on the island opposite. If only I was well, and had my strength back!
“But I am so weak. And something inside me weeps black tears. I wish it would go away.”
Frieda held his ankle as he lay dying. “I held his ankle from time to time, it felt so full of life, all my days I shall hold his ankle in my hand.”
After Lawrence's death, Middleton Murry, the ex-friend he detested, came to stand at his grave; and soon thereafter Frieda and he became lovers. Murry later wrote in his diary, “With her for the first time in my life, I know what fulfilment in love really meant.”
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Kitty could not sleep. Dubin woke and saw her not sleeping.
“Haven't you slept yet?”
“No. When will we leave for Russia?”
“When the visas come.”
“What will we do when we get there?”
“Cry out his name.”
“Maud hasn't called.”
“I know.”
Kitty slept, snoring lightly. She spoke in her sleep, “Nat, dear Nat.”
Dubin, with sweet pleasure, remembered his mother covering him with a second blanket on a very cold night.
He lay awake, recomposing a letter to Gerry he carried in his head. Then he got out of bed and went upstairs to sleep in the boy's bed.
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A breeze blew up in the late afternoon, making sea sounds in the tops of leafless trees; at night winter dipped its cold hands into the wind. But a half-moon brightened the night-blue sky, lit, softened, as though spring might begin as moonlight, a not bad idea in a cold climate.
Dubin again worked in the barn study. Kitty hadn't asked why he worked when or where he worked. He wrote there mornings and returned after supper till almost midnight, except those nights he left the light on and went early to Fanny's farm. If the phone rang, he had told Kitty, he would not answer, wanted no interruptions.
The biographer, carrying a heavy birch stick, trotted through the woods and up the road to the farm. The snow had melted but at night the dirt road hardened and was ridged. In a few weeks it would be mud season. He had given up his afternoon walks and this was his new route, from house to house by way of his barn, Kitty's Wood, the farm, then back to the barn study to be alone a few minutes before he went home. In bed, awake as Kitty slept her early sleep, he considered fasting a day a week.
Dubin ran, this windy pre-spring night, to Fanny's. Where else? The wind buffeted him and he ducked behind trees to catch his breath. On the road the going was easier with the wind blowing behind him. Fanny's large barn was dark and silent. Her kitchen light was on. Through the window he saw her sitting at the table in her padded jacket and beige wool hat, reading the local paper. Snowdrop yawned at her feet. Her boots were muddy. She looked dismally tired. Dubin, concerned about her, knocked the clapper and entered, using the key she had given him. The sink was full of dirty dishes he quickly washed for her.
The farm, Fanny confessed, had seriously been worrying her. She hadn't wanted to give it this much time and labor. Craig Bosell had fallen off a ladder in his cellar and broken his right hip; he was in the hospital. She could not replace him at the modest salary he accepted. The day after he left, one
of the Toggenburgs was killed in the goat pasture by a dog that had burrowed under the wire fence. He had torn her udder and chewed off an ear. Fanny had chased the hound with an ax as Snowdrop yelped but the bloody doe was dead. Bawling, she dug the goat a grave. Dubin helped bury her.
The goats weren't easy to handle. The pregnant doe, Trudy, a large-eared black-and-white yammering Nubian that Fanny had bought bred, was a neurotic beast. Left alone in the dark she trumpeted in fear until she learned to flip the light switch with her nose after Fanny had left the barn. The barn light burned all night and she had to fence the goat into another stall. Trudy bleated throughout the night. Fanny returned her to her former stall and let her turn the light on when she wanted to. “I was afraid of the dark myself when I was a little girl.” She loved the pregnant goat. “She's about to kid and I almost hate to see it happen she's so satisfied to be a pregnant goat.”
She shoveled the goats' hay into the overhead manger and filled with warmish drinking water their rubber buckets hooked to the wall; she also cleaned their stalls, carried out manure; laid new sawdust, and spent an hour every day brushing their coats. Later she collected the warm newly laid eggs from the hens' nests, sold or bartered them in town; had a dozen other tasks that kept her busy till dark. Although she complained she was dead-tired she seemed always to have energy for sex. “Or what's it all about?” In her bedroom she changed into a sheer nightgown before Dubin came upstairs. In bed she was adventurous, exciting, even wise. Afterward they quietly talked, affectionately, honestly. Then Dubin showered, dressed, and trotted back to his study, sitting there contemplatively ten or fifteen minutes before going home.
“How did it go tonight?” Kitty asked.
He told her fine.
One night in February when the temperature had fallen below zero, Fanny's pipes froze and it cost her seventy-two dollars to repair the one that had burst in the cellar and thaw out the others to get the water running. In a driving storm a week later the roof leaked around the chimney. Patching that cost another fifty. She worried about the rising cost of services; Dubin worried with her. She said she didn't know how she would go on doing all she did, plus milk Trudy twice a day after she had kidded; and that summer take care of the vegetable garden she wanted. “Besides that I would like to plant some flowers to look at when I feel like it.” Dubin said she had to have
help and suggested, to begin with, hiring a high school boy part-time. He offered to pay his hourly wages. “I've lectured twice lately for good fees.”
Fanny said no.
“Why not?”
“I'm not your goddamned wifeâI don't want your money.”
“What can I do for a friend?” he said after a minute.
“I will pay my own bills.”
He sometimes came over in the afternoon to work at whatever he could. Dubin sawed wood for the kitchen stove. Once he replaced a broken window. He fixed an electric light socketâlittle jobs he hadn't done for years. And Roger Foster, Fanny informed him, came on weekend mornings. “He helps me clean my barn.”
Though her hips and bosom seemed fuller, Fanny said she had lost weight. Her face was thinner. One night as she unbraided her hair he found a strand of gray in it; and Dubin noticed that the four or five darkish hairs under her chin had once more sprouted forth. Fanny, hopping out of bed to look in the mirror, was incensed. “I spent over a hundred bucks on electrolysis and injections. I thought I'd got rid of them forever.” She said angrily: “Even if they grow seven feet long I will never cut those hairs again.”
“Lady Bluebeard,” he teased.
“Don't you call me that,” she yelled at him.
He begged her pardon.
“You also call me Kitty, in case you don't know it.”
“Often?”
“Once in a while.”
Dubin said he was sorry.
Crawling back into bed she complained about her life: “Nothing is going the way I hoped. I haven't had any time to myself since Craig broke his hip. I have no time to read. I feel flaked out when I look at a page of print. Sometimes the feeling that my life is not turning out right floods over me.”
“Do you think taking on this farm was a mistake?”
He disliked his question because he feared her answer, but Fanny said after a pause, “Not actually coming here but maybe my idea of having a barnful of tender loving animals welcoming me with yaps of joy in the morning was out of my childhood books. Still this place is right for me, and I love the house and have been fixing it up, little by little, the way I want.”
Dubin said it was tastefully done.
“I wouldn't think of leaving it. My main gripe is I am tied down too much. Everything I do I
have
to.”
“Not everything.”
“You'd be surprised.” Smiling in afterthought she said, “Not everything.”
Fanny said she had been thinking a lot about the future.
“Relative to what?”
“To myselfâthat I still find it hard to zero in on what I want out of my life.”
“You know yourself better than you did, not a long time ago.”
“Yes, but I am still not sure what I want to doâwhat I want to work at. Sometimes I say, the hell with that, I'd rather get married. I want to have a baby before I am too old. I want to get settled. I don't want to be a single woman forever.”
He said she was entitled to these things.
“With you?”
“With or without me.”
Fanny let it slowly go at that, then said, “Other times I think I'd rather stay single and in some career I respect. I honestly think that. I want to work at something worthwhile that I could do well. I want to do something really well, not get lost in the shuffle. I want to like myself up to the hilt sometime in my life.”
He asked her what she had in mind to do.
“I've thought a lot about that, and have even thought of selling antiques in my house,” Fanny said. “My mother did that once, and I have taste but it doesn't take much of a brain. I thought of teaching but don't want to. I don't feel I have the right toâeverybody knows what I know. I've also looked at veterinary-medicine catalogues but there I am fantasizing. What I keep going back to in my mindâever since I worked as a secretary in a law office âis to study law and practice it. But the trouble is I don't think I can handle law school right now, though I think I could get accepted if I applied. They're taking more women nowadays and I have good grades even if it did take me six years to knock off my B.A.”
They had talked before about studying law and talked of it now as they lay in bed. Dubin had told her about his own disappointing experience as a lawyer. “I got little pleasure out of it though perhaps the fault was mine for not being more patient. I could have changed the nature of my practice
if I wasn't so anxious about making a living. I lived on cases involving small finaglers and found myself engaged in pisher dishonesties. I told myself the law is not perfect and neither are men, but I couldn't stand what I was doing. Montaigne wanted to get out of public life so he could stop lying for convenience' sake. I wanted to stop lying, period.”