The Puttermesser Papers (23 page)

Lidia told this story indifferently. It was one of Zhenya's secrets, the kind she sometimes whispered behind the stove; it belonged to long ago. But Puttermesser stored it away with a pang:
this
was what had befallen her papa's mother! A starving wraith in her eighties, in broken shoes, peddling in the snow. (Her papa, separated by so many decades, by oceans and continents, had known nothing of it. Mourning, he had gone to bed in the middle of the day. The big housefly, looking to escape, slammed against the mirror. It slammed and slammed. There was no way out.)

VI. INTERVIEWS

L
IDIA HAD BROUGHT WITH
her, for emergencies, a Russian-English dictionary. She never consulted it. It appeared she understood everything, and in her peculiar fragmented English she could convey almost anything. She had learned these jigsaw phrases in a night class, but had left after only five weeks—when she was not on the road with her team there were so many better things to do on bitter winter evenings in Moscow. You could go to someone's room and warm yourself with drink. A party, with strangers, for which you paid an entry fee. Or, rather, you could drink if you came with your own bottle of vodka. She had met her boyfriend in such a room, a largish room in a communal flat with high old ceilings stippled with grimy plaster roses; before the Revolution it had been part of a grand house owned by aristocrats. Her boyfriend, Lidia said, was really
after
her; he was always pestering her to get married.

“Are you sure he isn't just looking for a chance to get out of the country?” Puttermesser asked.

Lidia beamed; surprisingly, her teeth were magnificent.

“He want go Australia,” she said, and slid into laughter.

Sometimes the telephone would ring at four in the morning, and then Lidia leaped up from her sofabed to
catch it before it could wake Puttermesser. But Puttermesser always woke, and it was always Volodya.

“Can't he
count
?” Puttermesser said testily. “Doesn't he know what time zone he's in?”

“He afraid I stay in America,” Lidia said. “He afraid I not come back.”

“Well, isn't that exactly the point?”

“Just like Mama!”

Mama, Puttermesser was learning, was preposterous. It was not admirable to be just like Mama.

“Please, now we speak business,” Lidia urged. “I want clean for womans.”

The interviews began. Puttermesser put up a notice in the elevator:

Companionable Russian emigrée, intelligent,

charming, lively, willing to clean house,

babysit, general light chores. Reasonable.

Inquire 3-C from 8 p.m.

Then she blotted out “Russian emigrée”—it was too literary, and smacked of Paris or Berlin in 1920 (she thought of Nabokov)—and wrote instead: “Soviet newcomer.” The neighbors streamed in; Puttermesser was acquainted with few of them. A couple arrived carrying a small girl in pajamas and asked for a pot to warm milk in while they looked the Russian over. The child broke into a steady shriek and Lidia dismissed them with a scolding; she didn't want to deal with
that
, she said. The bachelor journalist from 7-G, who occasionally nodded at Puttermesser in the
lobby, confessed that he already had perfectly satisfactory help; what he was interested in was a chance to hear a grassroots view of Gorbachev.

“Gorbachev!” Lidia scoffed. “Everybody hate Gorbachev, only stupid peoples in America like Gorbachev,” and threw open the substantial valise that occupied her nightly. It was crammed with cosmetics of every kind—eyebrow pencils, rouge, mascara in all colors, a dozen lipsticks, hairnets, brushes, ointments and lacquers in tubes and tubs. Puttermesser could identify few of these emulsions and was helpless before all of them. (But ah, look, so they
did
have such contrivances in the puritanical socialist state!)

The journalist, offended, retorted that Gorbachev was certainly an improvement on, say, Brezhnev; but Lidia went on creaming her pointed little chin.

Puttermesser turned all around, like a cat in a cage. There was no place to sit down in her own living room. A pair of young men from the top floor were reclining on Lidia's sofabed. One of them inquired whether she knew how to use a vacuum cleaner. Lidia laughed her scornful laugh—did they think she was a primitive?—and asked how much they would pay per hour.

It was difficult to tell who was interviewing whom. Lidia had a head for numbers. She was quick, she could mentally convert dollars into rubles in an instant. She was after money, that was the long and the short of it. Day after day, Puttermesser tried to lure her cousin out—to a museum, or to the top of the Empire State Building. That would be a sight! But Lidia lifted an apathetic shoulder: she liked
things
, not pictures. And she had seen the New York skyline in the movies. She was waiting for evening, when the interviews would resume. The doorbell shrilled until midnight. What she wanted was to clean house and get dollars.

She settled finally on the family in 5-D. It was a three-bedroom apartment; there were three children. The husband did something in computers, and four times a week the wife took a bus downtown to Beth Israel Hospital, to work as a volunteer in pediatrics. They were a socially-conscious, anti-violence couple; though easy and unrestrained with their children, they banned toy guns, monitored and rationed television, and encouraged reading and chess. Two of the children had piano lessons, the third was learning the violin. “Call me Barbara,” the wife told Lidia, and embraced her, and said what a privilege it was for her family to be in a position to provide a job for a refugee. She promised that they were going to be friends, and that Lidia would soon feel at home in 5-D—but if she had any anxieties or complaints she should immediately speak up: there was nothing that could not be negotiated or adjudicated. Lidia was impatient with all this effortful goodness and virtuous heat. She had chosen the Blauschilds only because they had offered her more dollars than anyone else.

“Varvara, ha!” Lidia yelped after her first day. “Foolish womans, teacher come for music, children hate!” And another time: “Dirty house! Children room dirty!” She had never in her life seen such disorder: shoes and shirts and toys left in heaps on the floor, every surface sticky, the sink always mountainous with unwashed pans and dishes, papers scattered everywhere. She disapproved of Varvara
altogether—why would anyone run out to work for nothing? And leave behind such a vast flat, so many rooms, and all for one family, they lived like commissars! Only dirty! The chaos, the slovenliness!

“You don't have to
do
this,” Puttermesser said. “You didn't come to America to clean houses, after all. Look, we need to go see the people at the agency. To get you past the visa stage. It's about time we took care of it.”

Lidia's brown eyeballs slid cautiously sideways in their long shells. She lifted her shoulder and dropped it again.

VII. ANOTHER INTERVIEW

P
UTTERMESSER WAS PRIVATELY GLAD
of the four hours Lidia spent upstairs in 5-D every afternoon; it was a relief not to be obliged to visit so incessantly. Sometimes Lidia would talk of God and His angels, sometimes of the splendid old churches the Revolution had destroyed; and now and then she pulled out a certain dream book, which, if read prayerfully and with concentration, could foretell the future. Lidia was a believer in the world of the sublime. She was moved by icons, by Holy Mother Russia. She told how she often wept at Eastertime, and how Jesus had once appeared to her in a dream, looking exactly like a holy painting on an ancient icon. At such moments poor elderly Puttermesser, with all her flying white hair, saw her Muscovite cousin as some errant Chekhovian character misplaced in a New York living room:
“How lovely it is here!
”
said Olga
,
crossing herself at the sight of the church
.

“
But there's another side to all that, isn't there?” Puttermesser said. “What about the Beylis case?”

Lidia had never heard of the Beylis case.

Puttermesser, a reader of history, explained: “The blood libel. Pure medieval insanity. A Jew named Mendel Beylis was accused in a Russian court of killing a Christian child in order to drain his blood. Imagine, a thing like that, and in
modern times, 1913! The clergy never intervened. So much for Holy Mother Russia.”

Lidia sent out her riddling smile, half secretive, half derisive. “Not happen now.”

“And the attack on the Writers' Union? That was just this year!”

Puttermesser knew what Lidia was thinking: just like Mama.

On a rainy night toward the middle of November they took the subway to the Bronx. Puttermesser had set the appointment with the agency for seven o'clock, so as not to interfere with her cousin's hours at the Blauschilds'. Lidia seemed nervous and reluctant. “We pay?” she asked.

“Not at all. It's a service organization. They hire some staff, but they're mostly volunteers.”

“Like Varvara, work for nothing, foolish!”

In the cramped little office Linda sat morosely in a culde-sac of filing cabinets, noiselessly snapping her scarlet fingernails. The woman behind the desk had a doctor's manner: her aim was to make a diagnosis followed by a recommendation. She was, she said, a refugee from the Soviet Union herself. She had arrived five years ago, and had a son in high school: he was currently on the math team at Stuyvesant. Her husband, formerly an engineer, was employed as a salesman in a men's clothing store. The adjustment had been difficult at first, but now they were well settled. They had gone so far as to join a synagogue—in Kiev such a thing was inconceivable.

Lidia looked away; all this was for Puttermesser. It had a seasoned professional ring. Except for a mild brush of
accent, there was nothing foreign about the interviewer. The woman was even stylish, in the way of the boroughs beyond Manhattan—she wore a scarf at her throat, meticulously knotted and draped, held by a silver pin in the shape of a lamb. She drew out several sheets of Cyrillic text and in a rapid cascade of Russian began to question Lidia. Despite a practiced series of nods she was not unkind. Puttermesser observed that her cousin was staring obsessively at the pin on the scarf; she was inattentive, lethargic. In Lidia's darkly unwilling mutter Puttermesser heard the desultory streak of cynicism she had lately come to recognize. She could spot it even in the unaccustomed syllables of Russian.

And then the Muscovite cousin rose up. Her eyes shot out lightnings. Her fine teeth glinted. A roar of Russian galloped out of the cave of her mouth. The little office was all at once a Colosseum, with the smell of blood in the air.

“Good God! What was
that
all about?” Puttermesser demanded; she had restrained herself until they were nearly home. In the subway Lidia had made herself inaccessible. She pinched up her eyebrows. Her mouth narrowed into a tight line, like Zhenya's mouth in the snapshot. “Commissar!” she said.

They climbed the stairs in a stench of urine at the Seventy-seventh Street station, and nearly stumbled over a homeless man asleep on the concrete. The slanting rain wet his motionless face and neck. An empty bottle in a paper bag rolled past a muddy leg. Lidia hesitated; she was instantly cheerful. “Like in Soviet!” she cried, and Puttermesser understood that her cousin loved mockery best of all.

Lidia threw herself on her sofabed and crumpled up the papers the interviewer had given her and tossed them on the carpet.

“That woman only wanted to help,” Puttermesser said.

“Rules. Much rules.”

“Well, they must be worth it.
She
sounds happy enough over here.”

“Such womans!” Lidia said. “My guys on team more smart.”

The living room was now Lidia's domain entirely. Puttermesser almost never went in there. It was strangely scrambled and unfamiliar, a briar patch behind a barrier of hedgerows—Lidia's boxes and bundles and valises and plastic bags with their contents spilling out. The sofabed was always open and unmade, a tumble of blankets and pillows. Empty soda cans straggled across the top of the television. Orange sticks and an emery board lay on the edge of a bookshelf. Half-filled cups of coffee, days old, languished along the baseboards. Was this Blauschild influence? Was chaos spawning chaos,5-D leaching downward into Puttermesser's spare and scholarly 3-C?

But Puttermesser had another theory; the fault was her own. She had been too solicitous of her young cousin, too deferential, too dutifully and unsuitably ceremonious.
Oh, that's all right, you don't need to think about that. Just leave it, I'll take care of it. Don't worry about it, you really shouldn't, it's fine the way it is
. These were the stanzas of Puttermesser's litany. It was incantation, it was “manners”: she had treated Lidia as an honored guest, she had fallen at her feet—because she represented the healing of a
great unholy rupture; because it was right that a rush of tenderheartedness, of blood-feeling, should pour into the wilderness of separation. To be blessed with a new cousin overnight!

The first week Lidia had grimly taken the broom—wasn't this what was expected? as a sort of rent?—and swept up after their meal. “Oh please don't trouble,” Puttermesser said each time. Thereafter Lidia didn't. She left the lids of her cream jars on the bathtub ledge. She left her dirty dishes on the kitchen table. She left her wet towels on the living-room credenza. It soon came to Puttermesser that her cousin, though spurning atheism, was otherwise a perfected Soviet avatar: she did nothing that was not demanded. Released, she went straight to the television and its manifold enchantments: cars, detergents, toothpaste, cheeseburgers, cruises. An exhibit more various and abundant than any to be seen in the great halls of Moscow, and all unnaturally vivid (no green so green, no red so red, etc.) against an alluring background of meadows, hills, rills, fountains, castles, ferris wheels. The soda cans on top of the set multiplied. There was no reciprocity for Puttermesser's mandarin politesse.