The Wanting (24 page)

And why did he have this apartment? It was part of the family lore and its legacy of impossible accomplishments.

My uncle Maxim was born in the town of Pilnik—well, who in their right mind would call it a town? It consisted of a small market square, a baker who mostly just rented his oven for the use of the village women, a shul, a threadbare Russian Orthodox church, a small Russian grammar school, an even-smaller Jewish school, a post office, a general store, a barbershop with a makeshift tavern in the back, a doctor who was also the veterinarian, and a tailor. Little Pilnik! Once upon a time, you would find it approximately one hundred kilometers southeast of Kharkov, in the part of Ukraine that, on maps, resembles the snout of a pig. It was nothing but a mud hole into which farmers dropped once a week to barter a few vegetables and sell their cheese and honey. Pilnik, however, did have one specialty: the traveling salesman, the wandering tinker, bookseller, ragman, haberdasher. From little Pilnik these pilgrims spread far and wide along the countryside—up as far as Kiev and down all the way to Odessa and to every town, village, and farm in between—to sharpen your knives or mend your plow, sell you the latest dress from Warsaw or the finest shoelaces from Saint Petersburg. Jews and Gentiles, tall and short, swarthy and fair, they all went forth from Pilnik as if their main occupation was to get as
far away from it as possible. Each and every time, they left with the same high hopes, and each and every time returned empty-handed, having sold their goods too cheaply, spent too much along the way, or simply found themselves robbed, pickpocketed, or liberated of their meager profits by the police, whose time-honored custom of levying fines and extorting bribes was simply the price of breathing air. Such a life, such a town, cannot fail to leave its mark upon its children. And thus it was with my uncle, Maxim Guttman. His father was one of the few men who did not march out each season. He was the tailor, whose shop was next to the post office. In fact, for as long as anyone could remember, the tailor was always named Guttman. But, of course, all this was to end.

First came the Great War and, even before that was over, the revolution. Maxim was but seven years old when the Bolsheviks took control. His father, my grandfather, was a socialist, and so the new regime was his cup of tea, though I doubt he guessed what was in store for good Bolsheviks in the coming years. In fact, I’m not sure he ever quite understood. His dying wish was to be buried wearing his medals. In the meantime, though, little Uncle Maxim kept himself busy in the tailor shop. No one was surprised he had learned his craft at such an early age. What was surprising was how quickly he outstripped his father in the quality of his stitching and the beauty of his patterns. This was a good thing, because it did not take long before his father, my grandfather, made himself a heavy vest, a woolen cap, a decent pair of warm trousers, and went off to join the Reds, leaving Maxim in charge of the shop, his mother, and his baby brother, my father.

Ukraine was running with blood, but Pilnik was so far off the beaten track, and had so little to offer—no government building to commandeer, no storehouses to raid, no political activists to either enlist or shoot—that both sides left it in peace. Occasionally, soldiers did pass through for a drink at the barbershop or the hospitality of the three prostitutes who did business in a shack behind the post office; they would also sometimes stop at the tailor and have a sleeve mended or a button reattached. If little Maxim was afraid of them, he didn’t show it, and both sides
delighted in coddling him. “Stay and take care of your mama,” a Cossack once told him. Another time, a young Bolshevik whose elbows needed patching declared, “Soon your poverty will end! And when you are old enough you will join the party.” As soon as they left, everything returned to normal, and Pilnik remained as it had always been.

It was 1920. The leaves had long since turned amber and decayed into mulch, knee-deep on the forest paths. The annual chill had swung down from the northeast, and the quiet of winter descended on Pilnik, as it had every year since Maxim could remember. One morning, however, this repose was broken by the thunder of animals, men, and machines. Into town they roared, pulling up on their horses, beating the mules that lugged the heavy mortars, screaming orders, cursing anything that got in their way. At the end of this terrifying parade, a small armored car with a large red star nailed to its grille and two red flags frozen solid atop each fender rattled down the road and screeched to a halt in front of the shop. A driver, two officers, and a man dressed in the gray quilted jacket of a factory worker got out and lit their cigarettes.

The factory worker was squat, round, piggish, with a stout face and a nose like a turnip. His cap was pushed back high on his forehead, revealing sharp peasant eyes and broad cheeks. Instead of stopping for a drink at the barber’s or taking his turn lecturing the prostitutes (as the Bolsheviks liked to do), he scurried across the ice directly into my uncle’s shop. My uncle Maxim jumped from his perch near the window and rushed over to his table, quickly taking up a piece of old cloth. The truth was, there was not a scrap of material in that shop that hadn’t been stitched and restitched a dozen times before. In fact, in the past year, only one customer had ordered anything at all—a White colonel who, in spite of being chased all over the countryside by Bolsheviks, ordered Maxim to make him a dress coat of white silk with golden epaulets and braided cuffs in the Cossack style, fitted in the waist and ballooning gracefully to just below the knees, with fourteen brass buttons and a green velvet collar. Maxim had managed to find some material—not at all what the colonel had ordered—and
finished the coat in just a few days, which was all the time the colonel had before he was forced to flee again. Maxim was paid in tsarist notes.

Now the door swung open, and the fat little peasant strolled in. He smiled broadly, showing one golden tooth.

“Ah!” he cried. “At last!”

“Hello,” Maxim replied softly, commanding his hands to keep steady.

“Hello! Hello!” bellowed the other. He inspected a pair of dusty trousers hanging in the corner. “So! You are the tailor of Pilnik! Our dear Lenin would be proud to wear these! You see this coat?” he said, holding out his ragged cotton jacket. “It’s finished. It’s done. And,” he confided, “it’s a piece of shit anyway. I froze to death last year.”

The man seemed to be about twenty years old, but he already wore the red armband of a high-ranking political officer.

“You would like a new jacket?” Maxim asked him.

“Would I like a new jacket? Hah! That’s good! And why, young tailor of Pilnik, do you think I’ve come all this way? I’ll tell you why. May I sit? Do you have any tea?”

Maxim made his way to the samovar, which was lit with a few tiny scraps of charcoal.

“But I’ve no sugar,” he said.

“No sugar? Here!” The man reached into his pocket and brought out a large block wrapped in waxed paper. He pulled a massive knife from his belt and sawed off a thick slice of sugar. “This is for you,” he said. “And this,” he cut off a minuscule piece and stuck it between his teeth, “is for me.” He drank a few loud sips of tea and then looked up and smiled, the golden tooth sparkling with moisture.

“So,” he exclaimed. “Where were we? Well, I’ll tell you. I ran into this fellow—he was wearing a coat. It was magnificent. White with green collar, gold braiding. Long. Elegant. You remember it?”

Maxim did not reply.

“This fellow had long mustaches and wore the Order of Saint Catherine on his chest—no? Don’t remember him?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Well, to be honest, I killed him, I shot him in the head—but before I did I asked where he got his coat.”

Maxim went back to his sewing.

“And he said”—the peasant in the quilted coat placed one stubby finger directly on Maxim’s nose—“
you!
”

Maxim did not look up from his sewing. “My father is with Gavrilov,” he remarked in his small voice.

“Ah! A good unit! An excellent unit! I know this unit.” And suddenly he jumped up and down. “But who cares about politics at a time like this? You, my young friend, are not about politics! You are about pants! Jackets! Suits! You are a great talent stuck away in this little corner of the world that barely exists, this town with a name no one knows and no one will ever know. Vasily!” he suddenly called. The door opened a crack, and the driver poked his head in. “Get the package!”

Vasily disappeared and returned with a large bundle braided with twine. He set it upon the sewing table.

“Open it,” the officer said to Maxim.

With great care, the boy tailor untied the knots and unfolded the burlap sack.

“Look at that!” the peasant cried. “Is that not the finest leather? And this—is this not a most beautiful wool? Don’t even ask where it came from! I’ll tell you—from the closet of a decadent capitalist in Kharkov, may he rest in peace! Believe me, he would have dressed himself like a king—if only he had a tailor as talented as you! So!” he concluded. “Can you make me a jacket, a leather jacket, lined … with felt or whatever you think—just plenty warm, all right? And from this, some woolen trousers and a pair of warm gloves? Can you do that for me?”

“I can,” replied Maxim.

The man pinched his cheek. “I’ll be back in a week. Have it done then.”

“But I need to measure you.”

“No time for that!” he cried, and out the door he flew, leaving
the bundle of fabric, the block of sugar, and the half-empty glass of tea.

Now you may laugh. You may say these things do not happen. But they do happen, and everyone in Moscow has such a story. Of course, when these events are actually taking place, they don’t seem so charming. For Maxim, there was no joy in this at all. He saw clearly that everything depended upon this next moment, that if he was not smart enough, that if he erred in the smallest way, that if in any degree he failed to fulfill the wishes of this crazy Russian, he would not survive. So he closed his eyes. He softened his mind into folds that hold the past and present in one pinch of space, and—there it was! The robust little peasant with the potato nose and the golden tooth: the slope of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, the roundness of his chest—all this Maxim had taken in with his swift eyes as soon as the man had stepped into the room. Quickly he called to mind his height, the length of his leg, the measure of his sleeve; he fixed in his imagination the girth of his hips, the shape of his buttocks, and the size of his waist (which he could only estimate, since it was hidden under the old quilted jacket); and then opening his eyes at last, he took out his tailor’s chalk and began to draw. When he was done, little Max slumped back in his chair and began to cry.

The officer did not return that week as he had promised, nor the next. But on the fourth day of the third week, the horses, the men, the cannon, all came roaring back, and the door to the shop swung open again.

“It’s fucking Siberia out there! Where’s my new coat?”

It was hanging behind the sewing table. Maxim reached up for it.

“Cease!” the man ordered. “Let me admire it first!”

And indeed, it was something to admire. The leather glistened in the late-afternoon light. It draped like sheets of molten silver flowing down from the simple wooden hanger. It had a wide,
peaked collar that spread to the very edge of the shoulders, which themselves were square, bold, manly, confident, and the sleeves ended in folded cuffs drawn back with large black buttons that indicated, not style, but substance; authority, not rank. Even to Maxim, the coat seemed out of place in this humble room, like finding an icon of Andrei Rublev in a trash can.

“Now, bring it to me,” commanded the officer.

Maxim slipped it off the hanger and held it out.

“Did you make the trousers and the gloves?”

Maxim presented these as well, and the fat little man put them on right there and then.

“Tailor of Pilnik!” he declared. “What is your name?”

“Maxim Yakovovich Guttman.”

“Maxim Yakovovich Guttman! If I live through this, someday I will send for you! Do not forget me.”

He made for the door, then turned to face his young tailor as if he had forgotten something. “Khrushchev! Nikita Sergeyevich!” he said. “Remember me!”

And then he was gone.

The man was true to his word, and one day, years later, my uncle Maxim was appointed tailor to the Kremlin. It was for that service he was awarded the apartment on Veshnaya, in the KGB building, with the yard no one dared to enter.

I was thinking about these things in my room in Tishinskaya because of the house I had decided to build. Was it a true story? I don’t know, but it was true for me, and it was true for him, and its telling was no different than the recitation of
The Iliad
or
The Lay of Igor
. As usual, I would begin my dreaming long before I fell asleep. The house: the elevations, the layout, the façade, the frame, the entry, the porch, the fence, and even the pictures I would hang on the walls. All these painted themselves in bright colors on the ceiling above me. How like my uncle I was! I perhaps did not
realize it fully until that moment. I was also like my father, of course. And he had the greater vision, hadn’t he? Though without my uncle, he would never have gone to the university, never have become the great scientist, the man of letters. And then, again, for what? Eventually, I did fall asleep, but only after listening for my mother padding down the hall on her final excursion to the toilet.