The Complete Stories (56 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: The Complete Stories
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After breakfast the next morning, she, or somebody who sounded like her—I was aware of the contralto quality—called again.
“If you understand English,” I said, “or maybe a little German or French—even Yiddish if you happen to know it—we’d get along fine. But not in Russian, I’m sorry to say. Nyet Russki. I’d be glad to meet you for lunch or whatever you like; so if you get the drift of my remarks why don’t you say da? Then dial the English interpreter on extension 37. She could explain to me what’s what and we can meet at your convenience.”
I had the impression she was listening with both ears, but after a while the phone hung silent in my hand. I wondered where she had got my name, and was someone testing me to find out whether I did or didn’t speak Russian. I honestly did not.
Afterwards I wrote a short letter to Lillian, telling her I would be leaving for Moscow via Aeroflot, tomorrow at 4 p.m., and I intended to stay there for two weeks, with a break of maybe three or four days in Leningrad, at the Astoria Hotel. I wrote down the exact dates and later airmailed the letter in a street box some distance from the hotel, whatever good that did. I hoped Lillian would get it in time to reach me by return mail before I left the Soviet Union. To tell the truth I was uneasy all day.
But by the next morning my mood had shifted, and as I was standing at the railing in a park above the Dnieper, looking at the buildings going up across the river in what had once been steppeland, I experienced a curious sense of relief. The vast construction I beheld—it was as though two or three scattered small cities were rising out of the earth—astonished me. This sort of thing was going on all over Russia —halfway around the world—and when I considered what it meant in terms of sheer labor, capital goods, plain morale, I was then and there convinced that the Soviet Union would never willingly provoke a war, nuclear or otherwise, with the United States. Neither would America, in its right mind, with the Soviet Union.
For the first time since I had come to Russia I felt secure and safe, and I enjoyed there, at the breezy railing above the Dnieper, a rare few minutes of euphoria.
 
 
Why is it that the most interesting architecture is from czarist times? I asked myself, and if I’m not mistaken Levitansky quivered, no doubt coincidental. Unless I had spoken aloud to myself, which I sometimes
do; I decided I hadn’t. We were on our way to the museum, hitting a fast eighty kilometers, because traffic was sparse.
“What do you think of my country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?” the driver inquired, turning his head to see where I was.
“I would appreciate it if you kept your eyes on the road.”
“Don’t be nervous, I drive now for years.”
Then I answered that I was impressed by much I had seen. Obviously it was a great country.
Levitansky’s round face appeared in the mirror smiling pleasantly, his teeth eroded. The smile seemed to have come from within the mouth. Now that he had revealed his half-Jewish antecedents I had the impression he looked more Jewish than Slavic, and more dissatisfied than I had previously thought. That I got from the restless eyes.
“Also our system—Communism?”
I answered carefully, not wanting to give offense. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ve seen some unusual things—even inspiring—but my personal taste is for a lot more individual freedom than people seem to have here. America has its serious faults, God knows, but at least we’re privileged to criticize—if you know what I mean. My father used to say, ‘You can’t beat the Bill of Rights.’ It’s an open society, which means freedom of choice, at least in theory.”
“Communism is altogether better political system,” Levitansky replied candidly, “although it is not in present stage totally realized. In present stage”—he swallowed, reflected, did not finish the thought. Instead he said, “Our Revolution was magnificent and holy event. I love early Soviet history, excitement of Communist idealism, and magnificent victory over bourgeois and imperialist forces. Overnight was lifted up—uplifted—the whole suffering masses. Pasternak called this ‘splendid surgery.’ Evgeny Zamyatin—maybe you know his books?—spoke thus: ‘The Revolution consumes the earth with fire, but then is born a new life.’ Many of our poets said similar things.”
I didn’t argue, each to his own revolution.
“You told before,” said Levitansky, glancing at me again in the mirror, “that you wish to write articles about your visit. Political or not political?”
“What I have in mind is something on the literary museums of Moscow for an American travel magazine. That’s the sort of thing I do. I’m a freelance writer.” I laughed apologetically. It’s strange how stresses shift when you’re in another country.
Levitansky politely joined in the laugh, stopping in midcourse. “I wish to be certain, what is freelance writer?”
I told him. “I also edit a bit. I’ve done anthologies of poetry and essays, both for high school kids.”
“We have here freelance. I am writer also,” Levitansky said solemnly.
“You don’t say? You mean as translator?”
“Translation is my profession but I am also original writer.”
“Then you do three things to earn a living—write, translate, and drive this cab?”
“The taxi is not my true work.”
“Are you translating anything in particular now?”
The driver cleared his throat. “In present time I have no translation project.”
“What sort of thing do you write?”
“I write stories.”
“Is that so? What kind, if I might ask?”
“I will tell you what kind—little ones—short stories, imagined from life.”
“Have you published any?”
He seemed about to turn around to look me in the eye but reached instead into his shirt pocket. I offered my American pack. He shook out a cigarette and lit it, exhaling slowly.
“A few pieces although not recently. To tell the truth”—he sighed—“I write presently for the drawer. You know this expression? Like Isaac Babel, ‘I am master of the genre of silence.’”
“I’ve heard it,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“The mice should read and criticize,” Levitansky said bitterly. “This what they don’t eat and make their drops—droppings—on. It is perfect criticism.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“We arrive now to Chekhov Museum.”
I leaned forward to pay him and made the impulsive mistake of adding a one-ruble tip. His face flared. “I am Soviet citizen.” He forcibly returned the ruble.
“Call it a thoughtless error,” I apologized. “No harm meant.”
“Hiroshima! Nagasaki!” he taunted as the Volga took off in a burst of smoke. “Aggressor against the suffering poor people of Vietnam!”
“That’s none of my doing,” I called after him.
 
 
An hour and a half later, after I had signed the guest book and was leaving the museum, I saw a man standing, smoking, under a linden
tree across the street. Nearby was a parked taxi. We stared at each other—I wasn’t certain at first who it was, but Levitansky nodded amiably to me, calling “Welcome! Welcome!” He waved an arm, smiling openmouthed. He had combed his thick hair and was wearing a loose dark suit coat over a tieless white shirt, and baggy pants. His socks, striped red-white-and-blue, you could see through his sandals.
I am forgiven, I thought. “Welcome to you,” I said, crossing the street.
“How did you enjoy Chekhov Museum?”
“I did indeed. I’ve made a lot of notes. You know what they have there? They have one of his black fedoras, also his pince-nez that you see in pictures of him. Awfully moving.”
Levitansky wiped an eye—to my surprise. He seemed not quite the same man, modified. It’s funny, you hear a few personal facts from a stranger and he changes as he speaks. The taxi driver is now a writer, even if part-time. Anyway, that’s my dominant impression.
“Excuse me my former anger,” Levitansky explained. “Now is not for me the best of times. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’” he said, smiling sadly.
“So long as you pardon my unintentional blunder. Are you perhaps free to drive me to the Metropole, or are you here by coincidence?”
I looked around to see if anyone was coming out of the museum.
“If you wish to engage me I will drive you, but at first I wish to show you something—how do you say?—of interest.”
He reached through the open front window of the taxi and brought forth a flat package wrapped in brown paper tied with red string.
“Stories which I wrote.”
“I don’t read Russian,” I said.
“My wife has translated some of them. She is not by her profession a translator, although her English is advanced and sensitive. She had been for two years in England for Soviet Purchasing Commission. We became acquainted in university. I prefer not to translate my stories because I do not translate so well Russian into English, although I do it beautifully the opposite. Also I will not force myself—it is like selfimitation. Perhaps the stories appear a little awkward in English—also my wife admits this—but you can read and form opinion.”
Though he offered the package hesitantly, he offered it as if it was a bouquet of spring flowers. Can it be some sort of trick? I asked myself. Are they testing me because I signed that damned document in the Kiev airport, five copies no less?
Levitansky seemed to know my thought. “It is purely stories.”
He bit the string in two and, laying the package on the fender of the Volga, unpeeled the wrapping. There were the stories, clipped separately, typed on long sheets of thin blue paper. I took one Levitansky handed me and scanned the top page—it seemed a story—then I flipped through the other pages and handed the manuscript back. “I’m not much a critic of stories.”
“I don’t seek critic. I seek for reader with literary experience and taste. If you have redacted books of poems and also essays, you will be able to judge literary quality of my stories. Please, I request you will read them.”
After a long minute I heard myself say, “Well, I might at that.” I didn’t recognize the voice and wasn’t sure why I had said what I had. You might say I spoke apart from myself, with reluctance that either he wasn’t aware of or chose to ignore.
“If you respect—if you approve my stories, perhaps you will be able to arrange for publication in Paris or either London?” His larynx wobbled.
I stared at the man. “I don’t happen to be going to Paris, and I’ll be in London only between planes to the U.S.A.”
“In this event, perhaps you will show to your publisher, and he will publish my work in America?” Levitansky was now visibly uneasy.
“In America?” I said, raising my voice in disbelief.
For the first time he gazed around before replying.
“If you will be so kind to show them to publisher of your books—he is reliable publisher?—perhaps he will wish to bring out volume of my stories? I will make contract whatever he will like. Money, if I could get, is not an idea.”
“Whatever volume are you talking about?”
He said that from thirty stories he had written he had chosen eighteen, of which these were a sample. “Unfortunately more are not now translated. My wife is biochemist assistant and works long hours in laboratory. I am sure your publisher will enjoy to read these. It will depend on your opinion.”
Either this man has a fantastic imagination, or he’s out of his right mind. “I wouldn’t want to get myself involved in smuggling a Russian manuscript out of Russia.”
“I have informed you that my manuscript is of made-up stories.”
“That may be but it’s still a chancy enterprise. I’d be taking chances I have no desire to take, to be frank.”
“At least if you will read,” he sighed.
I took the stories again and thumbed slowly through each. What I was looking for I couldn’t say: maybe a booby trap? Should I or shouldn’t I? Why should I?
He handed me the wrapping paper and I rolled up the stories in it. The quicker I read them, the quicker I’ve read them. I stepped into the cab.
“As I said, I’m at the Metropole. Come by tonight about nine o’clock and I’ll give you my opinion, for what it’s worth. But I’m afraid I’ll have to limit it to that, Mr. Levitansky, without further obligation or expectations, or it’s no deal. My room number is 538.”
“Tonight?—so soon?” he said, scratching both palms. “You must read with care so you will realize the art.”
“Tomorrow night, then, same time. I’d rather not have them in my room longer than that.”
Levitansky agreed. Whistling through eroded teeth, he drove me carefully to the Metropole.
 
 
That night, sipping vodka from a drinking glass, I read Levitansky’s stories. They were simply and strongly written—I had almost expected it—and not badly translated; in fact the translation read much better than I had been led to think, although there were of course some gaffes—odd constructions, ill-fitting stiff words, some indicated by question marks and taken, I suppose, from a thesaurus. And the stories, short tales dealing—somewhat to my surprise—mostly with Moscow Jews, were good, artistically done, really moving. The situations they revealed weren’t exactly news to me: I’m a careful reader of the
Times
. But the stories weren’t written to complain. What they had to say was achieved as form, no telling the dancer from the dance. I poured myself another glass of the potato potion—I was beginning to feel high, occasionally wondering why I was putting so much away—relaxing, I guess. I then reread the stories with admiration for Levitansky. I had the feeling he was no ordinary man. I felt excited, then depressed, as if I had been let in on a secret I didn’t want to know.

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