Manhattan 62 (15 page)

Late at night, when the Millers are asleep, I open the door of this fridge, stare at the interior where there is an entire pink ham, a tray of yellow and white cheeses, a compartment for cold meats, roast beef, salami, there are peaches, melons, lemons, cherries, as much as you want, and chocolate cake, large bottles of milk, orange juice, Coca-Cola. There is a special section for frozen items, and always ice cream in chocolate, vanilla, strawberry. Help yourself, Max, Mrs Miller instructs me.

Sunny, I can only tell you this, but the awful thing is the first time I see her, she reminds me of Mrs Ethel Rosenberg, the little bow-shaped lips, the tight dark hair, and I feel ashamed, thinking of such a martyr as a plump housewife. She is so kind. I have a bad tooth and she escorts me to her dentist, and he gives me nice drugs, I feel nothing, but he says my teeth are not so hot. You can say that, not so hot. Muriel offers to pay for repairs. I cannot allow it.

In Washington Square Park, about four days ago, I met my first American friend. His name is Pat Wynne. He helps me to buy a hot dog. He is a police detective but quite educated, though working class—I should not say this about the workers, but it is true—and of the Roman Catholic faith.

I am not sure how to understand this man, who is so kind to me. He sees terrible things in his work. He is a homicide detective. There is melancholy. Surprised I have never seen a church. Shows me St Joseph's.

We visit the Cedar Tavern, a place for artists, and for the first time I drink whisky and I like it very much. He asks many questions about socialism and the Soviet Union. He allows me to ask him anything. People discuss nuclear war and build private fallout shelters.

I am a bit like a character in a comic film, they say a fish out of water. I think they are surprised that we Soviets—Commies, as they call us—smile, and love American literature, and enjoy music, and even do magic tricks, as I did for some little children in the park on my way to New York University. They called me Max the Magician.

Sunny, I can never admit it to the Americans—it would be unpatriotic to say—but after Moscow's gray deprivations, here it is as if somebody switched on the lights, and the world is all in bright colors.

If only I could know that you would read this, but you are no longer with us. It is nine years, 1953, since they sent you far away because you helped a friend, where you died in the cold, alone and sick. But I have never accepted this. I do not have to believe it. I pretend you are alive, and I write to you. I tell friends of this wonderful grandmother.

This man Ostalsky had been writing letters to his dead grandmother. I recalled suddenly that in the Cedar back in June, I had asked if his grandparents were alive. His grandfather was dead, he had told me. He had never answered my question about the woman he called Sunny. He had been writing to a dead woman.

I turned the pages of the notebook, tossed my cigarette butt into the toilet, and lit a fresh one. Some of the pages were filled with vocabulary and plenty of slang—Flipped out. Faked out. Get with it. On the make. Dope. Balling a chick. Jugs? Surfin'? Malarkey, Kvetch. Schlemiel. Gavone. Street names, notes for essays, food prices, magazines— he liked
Life, Look, Esquire
—flavors of ice cream, he liked toasted almond, and sandwiches, roast beef on a Kaiser roll with mayo. He had written down street names, and drawn little maps, cartoons really, of the area around his building, complete with stick figures.

Some of the entries were dated, but not all. His handwriting was very small, every line filled to the margins, as if he had been taught to save paper.

He had a knack for description, and he loved adjectives. The people he met were congenial, grumpy, humorous, wry, vain, pushy, arrogant, sometimes more than one, and no detail was too small, not even a girl with one brown eye and one blue, or one named Cherry with a big bust who wore a Woman's Strike for Peace button and invited him for square dancing at Judson Memorial Church. He had written:

Dose doe, nice dancing, sympathetic people, but I cannot help thinking of Comrade Khrushchev and his wife so dancing.

June

My FBI tail is very young. I see him as soon as I land at the airport, he comes to Washington Square Park, waits near the building where I live. Pretends to hide behind newspaper. No evasion skills. He sticks out like, what do they say, a sore thumb. I pretend not to notice. Privately, I call him Ed. For J. Edgar Hoover. I have an urge to wave. This would no doubt confuse Ed.

Long ago I put away my desire to tell jokes, do tricks, play pranks—except with the close family—for they said when I was little, Ostalsky has no discipline. Here it returns. Pranks, jokes, magic tricks. Perhaps if I make them laugh, they will not believe that it is better to be dead than Red.

Here everyone cares for fun, or excitement, happiness, of course. Killing time is considered OK. Everyone here is a kid, bud, buddy, kiddo, son, boy, they call me this though I am a grown man of almost thirty. I hope this will help me in learning the culture and language to make me able to contribute more to the future of my country.

What I was reading was an alternative version of Ostalsky's time in New York. His version. Restless, I hurried through more pages in the little book; I wanted something, some sign, something I could use on Max Ostalsky. Where was it?

June 23

Is rock and roll pornographic?

June 25

It is very hot. New clothes. Mrs Muriel Miller helps. My friend Pat Wynne always looks, as they say, sharp. Fine cotton chino trousers that are made in China and so are called chino, I think. Soft shirts with short sleeves for summer heat, blue, yellow, button-down collars. I shall become addicted to these clothes, though my mother thinks I am already vain. Window shopping is a pastime enjoyed by all New Yorkers.

I feel good, and like somebody else. In my new clothes, do I look like a clown? Like a man in a costume on a stage? My nice landlady, Mrs Muriel Miller, takes me shopping, and says I must call her Muriel. She feeds her Cocker Spaniel before we leave. His name is Cugi. “I just had to name the dog for him, I'm mad for Xavier Cugat, do they have the Cha Cha Cha in Russia, Max?

How colorful Muriel Miller's New York looks, so prosperous, shiny, like a book for children. We ride the Fifth Avenue double deck bus, and from the top, I look down at people going to work, women in summer dresses, men in suits.

The crowds on Fifth Avenue coming in and out of office buildings, department stores, tea rooms. In Moscow, we do without so many things, but I keep this to myself. Of course, we fought hard, and withstood the terrible sieges. Americans do not understand this or that we want justice and peace as much as material goods.

Mrs Miller chatters, she is quite interested in politics, and says she feels quite liberal, having voted for JFK. Confesses as a Jew, it did worry her a little that a Catholic President might take orders from the Pope. Still respects Ike who won the war, though Mamie, his wife, was rumored to drink.

She asks many questions, about my family, my work, my hobbies, what I like to read. Sometimes in the evening I find sweets in my room. Mrs Miller leaves them for me. This is so she can examine my things, I imagine. These chocolate chip cookies she provides, the chocolates, like cheese in a mousetrap. I am the mouse.

Mr Stan Miller, her husband, is an advertising man on Madison Avenue, and asks if I would like to be a test subject. This means you go in a room with other people and say what you feel about a certain cigarette, or breakfast cereal or Old Spice, a deodorant product you put under your arms to conceal the odor of sweat. I think I must use this. American men smell of this, like ladies with a certain perfume. For this effort at the ad agency, you receive money. I spend it all on record albums, including
Kind of Blue
by Miles Davis.

Stan Miller seems a kind man. He inquires if I would care to drive his beloved Oldsmobile. He shows it to me, white, with a fold-down top—a convertible—and the interior in red leather. I say I can't drive. He looks at me as if he now believes in my country transportation is only by donkey cart.

The American President wears no hat, he is young, slim and handsome, he speaks to people directly; he jokes with reporters; he seems entirely alive when he plays with his little children; his young wife is beautiful and speaks in her whispery seductive voice, and is very cultured. Everybody refers to him as JFK. They have charm. I watch them on TV. The English word is mesmerized. Enthralled, charmed, as if by a charm, a magic trick. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev is a fine leader, but his wife looks a peasant woman with shoes that seem to hurt her feet. Many Russians were embarrassed the day NK bangs his shoe on the table at the United Nations, or when he speaks of squeezing JFK's balls over Berlin, as if he is telling dirty jokes in some village hall. NK is a good man, though. He has done wonderful things for our country. Without his desire for peace, I would not be in New York. Our men may not smell of perfume, but they are brave, and NK has been courageous, and I think of Yuri Gagarin, and how he just goes like a stroll in the park. When I am down in the dump—this means sad—I say to myself: “Poyekhali!!!”

This was the kind of stuff he had written in his first weeks in New York, first true things about America or JFK, then this idiotic automatic political speak, the kind of thing we assumed of Reds, Russkis, Bolsheviks, of these brainwashed people who had been fed propaganda with their cereal.

Gradually, the robotic Commie-speak began to disappear, and I had a faint sense of a man gradually leaving his country behind, as if he had boarded a boat and, not quite sure how it happened, had now sailed beyond the three-mile limit.

July 4

Independence Day. Coney Island for swimming on the beach, corn on the cob, pink cotton candy.

Rides. The Cyclone was a blast. Bounine accompanies me. I expected him, sooner or later. He remarks on certain young men with beautiful clothing. He has a taste for expensive things.

July 9

Pat Wynne, my friend who I see at university, or after a class, has been named as the detective by the news-papers in a terrible case of a young girl, last week, July, Independence Day, tortured and killed on the High Line, the freight railway near the Hudson River.

I ask about the case. He says little. We go to Minetta Tavern. I meet Nancy Rudnick. Miss Rudnick. Nancy. I want to look at her, and I know this is improper. I am a married man. She has short hair like Shirley MacLaine, my favorite American actress. She has blue eyes. Fine skin.

The next day she waits for me at the library, she says there is a party in Brooklyn Heights, gives me the address. I meet her there that night.

Son of a bitch. Her, too. She gets me to drive her to Brooklyn, doesn't want me at the party because she says I'll hate the music, and invites him. Ostalsky. All the time I spent with him. Christ.

Young people picket Woolworth store to protest for Civil Rights of Negroes who are not allowed to eat in their restaurants down south. Nancy invites me, but I only watch. They call out:

“Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go. But Mary had another lamb whose fleece was very black, and everywhere that Mary went her lamb was turned right back.

One, two, three, four, don't go into Woolworth's Store.”

These young people are wonderful. I must learn some of their names.

July 29

Saul Rudnick and Nancy invite me for dinner for the second time. They are generous. Mr Rudnick—I must call him Saul—is ill, but a proud man, and he likes to hear my stories of my parents and grandparents, of the great days of the revolution, and the many characters involved. Pat has been there that afternoon. I know, but I keep it to myself. I saw Pat watching me from the coffee shop on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Charlton Street.

He knew. He saw everything. What was he?

I must try to find books for my uncle. He admires certain American military men such as General Patton and General Curtis LeMay, General MacArthur, men he admires, for he says they are, in their country, patriots.

August 5

The
Village Voice
prints an interview about me. People congratulate me on the article. I worry that this may attract too much attention to me from Moscow.

Even Mr Pugliese who cuts my hair on Sullivan Street hangs the picture on the wall. Next to Frank Sinatra, the Pope, JFK, Jesus. I am up there with Jesus. What would my superiors think? Mr Pugliese tells me his wife is an Italian socialist, and was a firebrand in her girlhood, sticking up for Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927. He says there is always a room for me at their place, over the barber shop, that I must eat Beatrice's veal one night.

Bounine visits me in the Village often in July, in August, too. He says we are real pals. I am not so sure of this. He knows many things about my family. He pretends he knew nothing of me before the flight. I know he has an obligation to watch me. He is a physicist. But I am sure he is also an agent. Bounine invites me to visit Columbia University. We meet at the statue of Alexander Hamilton. “The father of American capitalism,” Bounine says. “Do you think he is pointing to the future?” In Bounine's room, I see he has very expensive tastes. His new phonograph, his record albums, his new suit, shoes, sweaters. Where does a medical researcher find so much money?

He tells me he finds my stories of Pat Wynne intriguing and would like to meet him.

We discuss Cuba. We discuss American jokes. Bounine questions me about my taste in films, and he pretends this is simply casual conversation, but I know. I know this is a cross-examination.

I tell him I will always prefer our films, which are serious and important, or certain American films with a correct social purpose, such as
To Kill a Mockingbird,
or perhaps an older film I saw,
Twelve Angry Men.
I tell him I read my Theodore Dreiser and Tom Paine in my classes, when I prefer F.Scott Fitzgerald.