The Puttermesser Papers (26 page)

Lidia returned with the book in her hands as if she were displaying a crown on a cushion. Here was a believer, an adorer; the cynic, the pessimist, had vanished. Her shrewd eyes had shrunk to the size of two narrow brown seeds. “What in dream? I look, I find.”

Puttermesser waved all around. “Barbed wire. All over the place. Across the windows, everywhere. I got cut on it and blood poured out. I mean
poured
.”

Lidia considered; she put her head down to study what appeared to be a sort of index—dream topics?

“Does it list barbed wire?”

“
Nyet
.”

“Prison?”

“Prison not in dream. Dream here, in house.” Lidia bent over the pages, turning them so slowly that the ceiling light flashed off each one. “Ah,” she said. “
Krov
.”

“What's that?”

An elongated vowel lingered. A ghostly word. “Blooood,” Lidia said. “Where blooood come?”

“No, no,” Puttermesser said crisply. “It isn't blued. It doesn't rhyme with food, it rhymes with mud. Out of my leg. My foot. My toes.”

“
Khorosho
,” Lidia said. “Better from foot. Blooood from head mean you dies.” She stopped to study some more; she
was uncommonly serious. “Peoples dream blooood from foot, they make holy future. You holy womans. You”—she struggled to translate—“saint.”

Puttermesser stared: her ironic cousin was altogether drained of irony. The mystical shudder that led to bitter Sakhalin fell away. Her cousin was . . . what was her cousin? —Anything shoddy, anything that broke at a touch, parts that failed, faulty mechanics, the switch on the living-room wall that suddenly gave out, the leak in the kettle, a crack in the plaster, the bus that was late in coming—all these were occasions for Lidia's satiric call:
like in Soviet!
Proof of a corrupt and shabby universe. Puttermesser knew what her cousin was: an apparatchik of blemish and smirch, wart and scab, disdain and distrust.
Like in Soviet!
She was either too suspicious or too credulous. She was a skeptic who put her faith in charlatanism.

“I think,” Puttermesser said darkly, “you would be a lot better off throwing out such a silly book and getting hold of an English grammar instead.”

The little brown seeds of Lidia's eyes swelled. She slapped the dream book shut. “What for I need English? I go Sakhalin with Volodya! Make big business in Sakhalin!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Volodya say come, get much rubles. Marry maybe.”

A gray blur, as if a piece of sky were getting hosed down with diluted whitewash, had begun to brighten the windows. It was still too early for dawn, but the blackest hours of night were receding, and in that morning light that was not quite light, spun together with the sharp cartoonlike
brilliance of the ceiling fixture, Lidia was sending out a phosphorescence of her own.

“You came for asylum! You came to escape! I spent months paving the way before you got here,” Puttermesser said. “I tackled every goddamn bureaucracy, public and private. For God's sake, Lidia, what do you think this is? A
vacation
?”

“I come work,” Lidia contradicted.

“You're here as a refugee.”

“Refugee? What mean refugee?” Her face was a lit stage; every filament of her hair burned red and redder yet.

“Don't tell me that out of a million words
this
is the one you don't get! Listen, where's that dictionary—dig it out! Unless it's sold? Via Peter Robinson's miscellaneous merchandise outlet—”

“Ah, Pyotr,” Lidia said sweetly. “Tall mans, same like Volodya—”

“Go get the goddamn dictionary!”

So for the second time that night Lidia broke through the hedge and heap of her belongings—the spoons, the dolls, the shawls, everything she had brought to peddle in America—and came back with a book: Russian-English, English-Russian.

Puttermesser looked up “refugee” and right next to it found
Э
M
ИΓ
PaHT
.

“Read that,” she commanded.

“Emi-
grahnt
,” Lidia read.

“That's what you are. That's what I've been working on. That's what I understood from Zhenya.”

“Zhenya? Zhenya say this? I am emi-
grahnt
like you is holy womans,” Lidia blazed, and stretched out her long, long laugh, as elongated as the vowel in blooood, as crucial as inspiration. “What Mama say! What Mama want!”

XI. THE FAREWELL

I
N THE END
P
YOTR
wept. Lidia had been gone only a day; she had managed her ticket—New York to Moscow, a direct flight—all on her own.

“This Korean place on First Avenue?” Pyotr said. “She asked me to go over there with her. To try on this
coat
. That was only the day before yesterday.”

“She did mention that you and her boyfriend are about the same height,” Puttermesser said.

“I mean I knew it was a present, but I didn't know who
for
. She said it was for her brother in Moscow. She said she was having it shipped.”

“Lidia doesn't have a brother.”

“All the time she was planning to leave.”

“But not before clearing a profit,” Puttermesser said.

“Those dolls went like hot cakes. She must've made around nine hundred dollars off them, never mind what she got for the rest of the stuff.”

“Russian folk art. The spoons, the shawls.”

“Those Lenin medals? That was just to see how things'd go.”

“To test the market,” Puttermesser offered.

“She walked out of my place with maybe two thousand smackers. Even this weirdo book went—like half English,
half Russian? Would you believe it, in a
sports
store? She picked up ten bucks for it.”

“She didn't sell that dictionary!” Puttermesser cried.

“It was your idea, wasn't it? She said you were making her do grammar instead.” Pyotr drank and sobbed. “I
liked
that funny Russki talk.”

They were sitting in Puttermesser's living room. It was, in its way, another tea party—but there was booze in the tea cups. Pyotr had brought along a bottle of vodka to celebrate with Lidia; it was a month ago to the day that she had revealed herself in the Albemarle Sports Shop.

But Lidia was far above the round earth, heading for the death of the Soviet Union.

Crumpled plastic bags littered the carpet. The sofabed was just as Lidia had vacated it, an anarchic jumble of cushions and twisted sheets. Ripped pairs of pantyhose sprawled gauzily over a parade of Coke cans. Lidia's various scents—lotions, nail polish, hair spray—wafted like the wake of an apparition.

“She didn't even tell me she was going,” Pyotr wailed.

Puttermesser looked into Pyotr's clean wet North Dakota eyes. Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy: gulled.

“The Great Experiment,” she said, and emptied what was left of the booze into poor Pyotr's innocent cup.

XII. LETTERS

December 12

Dear Ms. Puttermesser:

I hope you'll forgive this somewhat embarrassed intrusion. Barbara Blauschild, your upstairs neighbor and an old pal of mine, kindly gave me your name. I understand you attended our fund-raiser about two weeks ago, in company of that interesting young lady who raised a ruckus—Barbara tells me you're her relative. Barbara also tells me she released the young lady from her employ on my behalf. (She had hired her for compassionate reasons.) I very much appreciate the depth of Barbara's friendship, but she's always been precipitate. (We keep up our friendship despite the fact that her husband hasn't spoken to me in years. The truth of the matter is that Barbara and I used to be an item 100 years ago, back in California, and Bill's never gotten over it.)

I admit (again) that I'm a little embarrassed to be asking this. It's just that when the young lady with the Russian accent stood up in our meeting with all that fire in her face—not that she exactly knew what she was talking about—it struck me that I would like to get to know her. What's tricky here is that Barbara, having let her go, now declines to approach her. So I thought you might be willing to help. (I am a sucker for red hair.)

December 15

Dear Mr. Hartstein:

Thanks for your note. My cousin has returned to the Soviet Union. She did, however, leave behind a number of cosmetic materials on the top of the toilet tank. None of these were unusual or worthy of remark. Yet only recently I found, concealed under her bed, a half-used bottle of hair coloring.

From Tel Aviv, in German (in Puttermesser's unavoidably maladroit translation):

Hotel Royale

23 Juni

Liebe Ruth!

As you can see, because of the pressure of circumstances I have emigrated to
das Land, wo die Zitronen blüh'n
(Goethe). I have been here only two days. Lidia is now living in Sakhalin. In the summer it is not a hardship to be there. She is six months pregnant, and she and Volodya (he is her boyfriend since last year) will marry very soon. He is very busy setting up a business with other ambitious young men. You probably do not know, because until now it has been kept as secret as
possible, that a number of paleolithic mammoth tusks have been dug up by farmers in Sakhalin. Volodya's plan is to buy the tusks from the locals and resell them in the West. He and his colleagues are in at the start, so the investment will not be great. I am told that these tusks are very beautiful and actually resemble fossilized wood. Lidia is somewhat doubtful about their authenticity, but you know my Lidia—such a skeptic! Nevertheless she is putting all the money she earned in America into the business. Even if the tusks are not authentic, she believes they can easily be passed off as such to potential collectors, since value is as value seems.

I am glad she is safe in Sakhalin, safer than she would be in America. Lidia told me that she was forced to attend an extremely dangerous political meeting in New York, where all the participants had knives and guns. Some of the guns went off. I am sorry you did not spare her this fright. Even before that, she told me, she was made to travel to a distant place at night, where a woman official of some unsavory and possibly secret organization tried to dragoon her into signing certain papers—a scheme of indenture, apparently. I am very dismayed to hear of such things in your country, especially knives and guns at a public meeting in a palatial hall where the people are, as Lidia explained, well-dressed. Some of the women, though not all, as stylish as Raisa Gorbachev!

The night I left Moscow there was a riot on our street. This is because the USSR is falling apart. Some say the death knell has already been sounded. [In the original:
das Tautengeläut ist schon geklungen
.] The rioters shouted unpleasant slogans and wore unpleasant uniforms and broke many windows, but they did not (at least not obviously) carry knives or guns. I
thank God that Lidia, who did not wish to accompany me here, is for the time being in quiet Sakhalin. Who knows where fate will finally place her? She confided to me that the baby is regrettably not Volodya's, and she was pleased to have me quit the USSR—she feared I would disclose the truth to Volodya. She assures me that you, dearest Ruth, know who the father is, and that he is a nice boy. I, however, have always been afraid that Lidia would get into trouble with one of the athletes on her team. But the team has been disbanded, since there are no more official Soviet teams.

I will write again when I begin to understand this new place. In the meantime, please write
auf deutsch
to the above address (it is a hotel being utilized as an absorption center for new immigrants) and tell me all you know about the baby's father. Lidia says he has a typically Russian name and actually sells icons for a living (but they are of course only reproductions). Where in America could she have unearthed such a person?

Your new-found cousin

Zhenya

PUTTERMESSER IN PARADISE

Knit and unravel,

commands the Gavel.

Do and undo,

till nothing's true.

—A Song of Paradise,

translated from the Akkadian

“V
ERY DEEP IS
THE
well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”

It was Thomas Mann: the opening sentences of
Joseph and His Brothers
. Ruth Puttermesser, sitting under the green lamp in her lonely bedroom one moment before her death, sitting with the weight of that mighty tale of a magus pressing into her ribs, was thinking of Paradise: very deep is the well of Paradise; should we not call it bottomless?

It happens that in the several seconds before we die the well of the ribs opens, and a crystal pebble is thrown in; then there is a distant tiny splash, no more than the chirp of a droplet. This seeming pebble is the earthly equal of what astrophysicists call a Black Hole—a dead sun that has collapsed into itself, shrinking from density to deeper density, until it is smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. Until it is less than infinitesimal.

Puttermesser heard (she did not feel) the pebble's electric
ping!
as it pierced the veil of the sluice that lay at the bottom of the well—or, rather, as it flew through the
impalpable membrane that marked the beginning of bottomlessness. And at the bottom of this bottomlessness—in Eden oxymorons are as esteemed as orchids—there was
PARDES
.
PARDES
is a Hebrew word, as befits so messianic a thought: it means an orchard, it means a garden, it means Paradise—derived, no doubt, in this intertwining of the vines of civilization, from the Greek
PARADEISOS
.