The Puttermesser Papers (25 page)

“
Kakoi teatr!
” Lidia cried; she was leading Pyotr by the hand. He followed docilely, shyly. Puttermesser saw how he was dazzled by the doubly exotic: enigmatic New York, where a Muscovite beauty could suddenly take you over and swoop you into an event more curious than any you might run into in the great Northwest! A spacious carpeted room; rows of folding chairs; sofas pushed against the walls, and long maroon draperies drawn over two sets of windows, like twin curtained prosceniums. A fresh copy of
SHEKHINA
had been placed on each chair.

“Oh look,” Varvara said, opening hers, “here's an article by Kirkwood Plethora!”

Puttermesser asked, “Isn't your husband coming tonight?”

“Bill won't have anything to do with Sky, it goes back years. They just won't reconcile, but I'm not into any of that.”

“Doesn't he mind? I mean if you're still loyal to someone he doesn't—”

“We're separate
people
, for God's sake!”

Pyotr leaned forward timidly. “Who's this Kirkwood Plethora?”

“The
film
maker,” Varvara explained. “She's right over there, in front of the fellow who wrote that big play. The play about the flying bus filled with gays and lesbians? Plethora's the one who went to the Sudan to do a movie about the oppression of the animists . . . ssh! It's starting.”

Applause. The evening's host, a woman in her middle fifties, dressed in jeans, a creased shirt, and several rings and bracelets, materialized out of the lost rear recesses of
the apartment. Puttermesser picked up the magazine she had been sitting on and began to riffle through it, until she came on one of the poems Sky Hartstein liked to sprinkle through each issue:

The unneeded

are needed

for our satisfaction.

We are bloated

with such satisfactions.

Enough!

Let us turn

and satisfy ourselves

with the sublime.

The title was “The Marginalized.” Puttermesser, attentively rereading, was unsure what or who the unneeded and the marginalized
were
: were they the despised of our world whom we abuse by our injustices, or were they our own greedy feelings, of which we should be ashamed? (
SHEKHINA
, she noticed, tended toward the frequent use of “we” and “our,” pinning on its readers, willy-nilly, any sin currently in bad repute.) Or was this poem only another of Sky's wistful advertisements for a new wife?

Pyotr was caressing Lidia's raw little hand, each finger with its blood-red hood. Lidia wore her reddest lipstick and her most detached smile; she was fondling the buttons of her new leather coat. The polished leather shone like black glass, and Puttermesser was all at once put in mind of the boy Dickens in the blacking factory. Child labor! One
of the causes of messianic Marxism. Lidia had bought the leather coat in a shop on First Avenue run by immigrant Koreans—Varvara had told her where to find it—and had paid for it with the profits from her Lenin medals. The label said Made in China: sewn, for all anyone knew, by eight-year-old slaveys chained to their machines. In her gleaming leather coat and black tights, Lidia seemed unimaginably remote from Zhenya: Zhenya with that sun-crossed squint, that loose proletarian dress, flat fearful mouth, imploring scream.

Puttermesser looked all around—who was in this room? Varvara had already spotted the most celebrated: Bert Waldroon, the playwright and activist, and Kirkwood Plethora, grown surprisingly elderly by now, her trademark single earring masking a hearing aid. There was, besides, a young seminarian, the leader of Men for Women, an allmale feminist organization dedicated to the removal from Scripture of every “he” pronoun referring to God; the idea was to substitute phrases such as Profound Essence, Divine Fundament, Illimitable Spirit, Goad of the World, Omni-Gendered Sole Purpose, Soul Engenderer, and so on. There were some of Sky Hartstein's fellow-poets, including the one who accompanied himself on the zither, and another who wrote bilingually, in order to promote Esperanto. There was a tepid novelist whose books sold fairly well despite her estrangement from grammar and spelling; it was said that it took two copy editors to get her through her native tongue. And there were, of course, the politically consecrated—atheists mainly, apparently unoffended by what they called Sky Hartstein's “religious orientation.”
The rest were the unsung and the undistinguished, though not the unmarked: they were immensely recognizable by virtue of the adoration that enflamed them. They were, like the atheists, hot believers in Sky Hartstein's credo. In the pages of
SHEKHINA
it went by the name of Spiritual Polity.

The introducer in jeans was just finishing her money pitch—“Remember, Sky's the limit!”—when, in thickening applause, Sky Hartstein ascended out of his chair. (You couldn't say he got up out of it.) It was, he began, “for me personally,” an amazing week. On Monday he had been invited to the White House to meet with the Vice President, who wanted to learn more about the Spiritual Polity concept. On Tuesday
TIME
and
NEWSWEEK
ran photos of the Vice President and Sky in fraternal embrace, and the
VILLAGE VOICE
published Sky's remarks in full.
SHEKHINA
was making its way! On Wednesday His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, granted Sky an audience, and what do you suppose they talked about? Those little toy cars you operate by remote control, how they are subject to movement by an invisible force . . . only imagine the golden smile of His Holiness, a lover of mechanical and electronic contrivances, an engineer-manqué perhaps, but also, foremost and formidably, a metaphorical metaphysician. The little cars stand for the power, from afar, of divine influence drawing on human will. . . . Sky Hartstein's speech rushed on in flooding sheets, a torrent of sweetness and light (though, Puttermesser secretly thought, the sweetness was Nutra and the light was lite). He swept the Beatles into the Psalms and the prophets into organically grown vegetables. He quoted from Blake and recited the sleep-giving
properties of melatonin. He excoriated greed and selfishness, oh especially these! Greed and selfishness polluted both Republicans and Democrats, those equal sewers of armaments and national arrogance. Let all borders dissolve, let the nations vanish away, let all peoples be bound up in loving kindness! Let us remember our hopes and extol our visionaries! Let glasnost spread its healing tent over the earth, and restore us to origins, to openness of heart, to classlessness, to the end of want—let the poor rise up from their wretchedness according to the verdant primal promise of that genius who once labored long in the British Museum! Karl and Groucho, Lenin and Lennon: Sky ventured this little joke, he didn't care how stale, and anyhow it wasn't a joke at all—the robust and pliant tissue of Spirit joins like to like, and unlike to unlike; ah we happy many!

Everyone knows, he went on, about the excesses of Stalin, the gulag, the terror, the KGB, informers, shadows, spies, interrogators, torturers; and yet in an early time, before the darkness of perversion descended, before the betrayal of the noble scheme of universal aspiration, there was the little holy seed of human redemption. The Great Experiment had failed in its first venue, yes, but if the seed were to be replanted, there ought to be a witness to give testimony to its fertility, to its potential, to its futurity. And the witness was here, in this room, at this moment.

Puttermesser thought: How simple-minded this righteousness is; but what does he want with Lidia?

“Imagine one born into the Experiment,” Sky Hartstein said, “after its best days are done. When the veil of perfidy has fallen over it. After it has attenuated. When it is plain
that what is required for the Experiment's resuscitation is a more favorable environment and another go. Still,” he said, “to one born into the Experiment, no matter how late, there must cling some small amount of the Pristine. The Revolution leaves its residue. Intimations of the Beginning. A trail, a wisp, an aroma of what was
meant
. Tell us,” he said, widening his arms in Lidia's direction, “what you have inherited from the Beginning.”

Lidia snatched her chapped knuckles out of Pyotr's faithful grasp and jumped out of her chair. “You think was in old days clean?” she cried. “Never clean, no! Stupid mans! Stupid womans!”

Bert Waldroon, the playwright, began to hiss. The host in jeans, worrying about the disruption of her party—a table at the back of the room was stacked with oatmeal cookies and a wholesome pyramid of apples—broke in plaintively: “But wasn't Communism once a truly beautiful hope? At the start? In principle? And remember that for serious progressives the goals of socialism are still viable—”

Lidia uncoiled the tight windings of her laugh. “Foolish American peoples!” she yelled. “In Soviet stupid peoples more smart! My guys on team more smart!”

Varvara whispered furiously, “Sit down! You're ruining the meeting!”

“Communism,” Lidia yelled. “What Communism? Naive! Fairy tale always! No Communism, never! Naive!”

There she stood, her pointed little chin in the air, her elbows firm—a Saint Joan of disillusionment, a commissar of mockery: a perfected Soviet flower. She trusted no one,
she trusted nothing. She was no more rooted than a dandelion's head when it has turned into feathers and is ready to fly. For the first time Puttermesser liked her cousin nearly as much as she deplored her.

X. A TEA PARTY

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
the night the telephone rang. Puttermesser found herself catapulted out of a fiercely undulating dream: waves and waves of barbed wire were unrolling before her. Her apartment was ringed round with barbed wire: it crisscrossed the windows, it closed off the kitchen, it followed the baseboards and led right into Lidia's living room and surrounded her sofabed. Thirstily heading for a drink of water, Puttermesser leaped over the wire and caught her shin on one of the twisted barbs. Blood was spilling down her ankle, flowing between her naked toes. . . .

It was Volodya, calling not from Moscow but from Sakhalin. Sakhalin, the Czar's penal colony, where Chekhov had gone to investigate prison conditions. A distant island in the inconceivable Sea of Okhotsk, below the Arctic, its southern tip irritably fingering Japan. Talk about Mars! Puttermesser turned in her bed, drove off the bad dream, and listened to the murmur of Russian. Lidia in Russian was a different Lidia: she flew among the rococo gasps and trills of those brilliant syllables as lightly as on a trapeze. Her laugh, embedded in Russian, was a different laugh: it was free to do its stunts

“
Do svidanya
,” Lidia breathed out—it was a sly
caress—and hung up. “Volodya want do business in Sakhalin,” she explained.

“Don't people get arrested for trying that? Isn't it dangerous? Zhenya's grandmother—” Then Puttermesser remembered that Zhenya's grandmother was her own grandmother too: an old woman in a black babushka dropping kopecks through a hole in her pocket to foil the pitiless. In Puttermesser's mind her papa's mother went skittering across the steel crust of snow again and again, forever, a snatch of movie reel played over and over.

The thirst in her dream had pursued her into the kitchen. She filled the kettle for tea and put out two cups. The windows, cleared of their silver thorns, were black. It was half-past three.

“You don't mean
private
business,” she said. “Isn't that what they call economic crime—”

Lidia released her amiable shrug. “Perestroika,” she said.

“Really? People aren't afraid of breaking the law anymore?”

“Apparatchik rules,” Lidia spat out. “
Volodya
not afraid!”

“But I thought you said he was thinking about leaving the country. Going to Australia.”

“First get much rubles. First Sakhalin.”

“I don't suppose you can buy a leather coat in Sakhalin. Not with such deep pockets anyhow,” Puttermesser said, pouring the water over the leaves and letting it darken to mahogany. She didn't mind that her cousin had converted her away from tea bags.

“I buy coat in America, give Volodya.”

“You're out of a job now,” Puttermesser said mildly.

They sipped their tea. Lidia produced the half-dozen oatmeal cookies she had been slipping into the pocket of her new leather coat—emptying or filling pockets seemed to be in the family line—at the very moment Varvara was firing her.

“Foolish Varvara,” Lidia said. Nibbling her cookie, she looked almost childlike; her nostrils vibrated.

“Well, what did you expect? The woman invites you to the center of her life and you insult everyone in sight. The way you answered Sky Hartstein. You heard it, those people actually get asked to the White House.
SHEKHINA
'
S
getting famouser and famouser.”

“
PRAVDA
also famous,” Lidia said. “Nobody read. Read to make joke.”

And in that instant, as “
PRAVDA
” dropped among the oatmeal crumbs in Lidia's red mouth, Puttermesser understood her dream. All that barbed wire! It was a platitude of a dream. She had transformed her apartment into the gulag—it was that simple, so stupidly transparent that it would make Freud yawn. Sky's speech had brought it on; or else Volodya had: the eeriness of a call from a former penal colony just as she was bleeding on barbed wire.

“That book you've got?” Puttermesser said. “That dream book?” It was asinine to ask for it, but she did: she felt a shudder, a mystical quake, traveling from Sakhalin to herself—something strangely predictive.

She had never seen Lidia more alert. Her thin neck swerved like the neck of a small quick animal—a pony, or a
hyena—as she dashed through the hedge of her bundles to fetch the dream book, and it came to Puttermesser that she had finally struck home with her cousin. Until now what had she been for Lidia if not a harassment and a bore? How old and irrelevant she must seem to a lively young woman, a flirt, a foreigner, a beauty!