“Because of what you photographed,” answered the officer patiently.
“I photographed this field,” Levanter said, “the fence that crosses it, and an old man who walked past.”
“What else?”
“What else is there, Comrade?” said Levanter. “There is nothing else. Here, take my camera. Whatever you see through the viewer is what I saw.” He held out his camera, but the officer pushed it back to him.
“You are here, on one of the coldest days of the year, in the middle of a storm, just to take pictures of an empty field, a broken fence, and some old man passing by.”
“I am!”
“That’s a lie!” said the officer.
“It’s the truth!” said Levanter.
“Tell the truth, or I’ll arrest you!”
Levanter tried to sound patient. “I took a picture of an old man against the fence and the fence against the field. That’s all.”
The officer became very angry. “I won’t listen to such crap anymore,” he said. “I know you photographed this field.” He paused. “But we both know that such a field, any field, could serve as a landing site —” He paused again, this time apparently for effect. “A landing site for, let’s say, invading paratroopers. Is that what you photographed? Would a Soviet judge believe that you did not? Now, no more trickery. Take out the film!”
Levanter obeyed. Sheltering his camera from the snow with his coat, he opened it, pulling the entire roll off its spool and exposing it to the light. The corkscrew of film dangled from his hand. He let it go; in an instant it was carried off by the wind and disappeared in the snow.
Levanter returned to the field the following day. It was gray and cold. A man dragged himself along the fence, clutching his coat and, every few steps, tugging his hat lower. Seen through the viewfinder, the man’s figure, the fence, and the field already appeared as a finished photo. Levanter took the picture.
As a student, shortly before he left Moscow for America, Levanter had gone to a private screening of two prewar Soviet films starring a lovely young actress. She was so beautiful that Levanter went to considerable trouble to find her. He eventually learned that the actress and her much older husband had escaped during the German occupation of Russia. Now, in New York, he was finally able to trace her through a Russian cultural foundation.
As soon as he located the number, Levanter telephoned and told the actress how impressed he had been by her films. He implored her to see him and was thrilled when she agreed.
They met several times for lunch or drinks or a stroll in the park. She was in her forties; over two decades had passed since he had seen her films, but he still found her breathtaking. Levanter was so inhibited by her grace and sexual appeal that he was unable to steer their relationship in any direction; he merely listened as she spoke her perfectly enunciated Russian. She recounted the episodes of her life, told him about her movie career and how it was abruptly curtailed by the war. She explained that she had never made another film and, ever since she had been in exile, first in France and then in America, she had worked as a model, often for low pay, to try to support her husband, whose deteriorating health had made him unemployable and now kept him housebound.
Walking beside her, Levanter fantasized their being together in his apartment. He is crouching before her. Slowly, he is lifting her skirt, gently separating her legs, and then licking her flesh through her underwear until she squirms. He starts to pull down her panties and, with his mouth upon her flesh, guides her toward the bed. Suddenly, in his fantasy, he hears the actress murmuring, “Tell me, what shall I do for you?”
But here his passion ran into an obstacle: the Russian language. Could Onegin possibly tell Tatyana that he wanted to eat her? Would Vronsky say to Anna Karenina, “I want you to suck me”? Could Levanter speak such thoughts in the language of Turgenev and Pasternak to this dignified, educated woman? He could not. In Russian, the language of his childhood and adolescence, he regressed to memories of parents and schoolteachers, to early emotions of shame, fear, and guilt. Only in English could he name the nature of his desires; his new language was the idiom of his manhood.
“You don’t mind speaking Russian with me?” asked the actress as they walked through the park.
“Not at all,” Levanter answered, glancing at the outlines of her thighs. “You speak it so melodiously.” He raised his eyes to her breasts.
“My English is so crude, so imprecise,” she said apologetically.
They walked in silence. Then, in a burst of courage that startled even him, Levanter invited her to his apartment.
“What for?”
Levanter caught his breath. “I have a collection of photographs I took in Russia,” he said. “They’re all mounted — too big and heavy to carry around. But I am certain you would appreciate them.”
At the apartment, the actress sat on the narrow convertible sofa. He perched on a chair facing her. On the floor between them lay the stack of photographs. Levanter handed them to her, one at a time. The actress studied each picture, occasionally asking him when and where it was taken, and then placed it on the cushion beside her, the growing pile diminishing Levanter’s chances of casually sliding next to her.
He grew tense and uneasy, aware of every move he made. He couldn’t figure out what to do. The convertible sofa was the only bed in his small apartment. Should he go over and take the pile of photographs away? Could he then ask the actress to stand up so he could remove the cushion she sat on, pull the handle to unfold the mattress, take out the pillows and blankets from under the backrest — and all for the purpose of performing an act that thus far had not even been named?
Levanter imagined himself nonchalantly approaching the sofa, leaning against it, just inches from the actress, and saying, “Why don’t you get up for a moment.” She turns to him, an inquiring look on her face. Then she smiles politely and says, “No thank you. I’m quite comfortable here.”
Then what? He knew he could no more say simply, “I want to turn this sofa into a bed; I want to make love to you” than he could tell her what kind of love he wanted from her.
The more he searched for the appropriate Russian words and phrases, the more apprehensive he became. The mother tongue had turned into an uninvited chaperone, guarding his passion from getting out of hand. Yet he almost laughed out loud when he remembered that the word for convertible sofa in his native language was “Atnetykanka” — translation: “American woman.”
They sat quietly, from time to time glancing at each other, the actress snuggled in the corner of the couch, Levanter stiff and pensive on his chair. The actress was barricaded by the stack of photographs which she went through for a second time. She gave the last one a long, attentive look. Then she got up. It was time to go. Levanter helped her with her coat and, inhaling her perfume, escorted her to the door. They exchanged the banalities of a polite good-by. As she walked down the stairs, he caught a glimpse of her hips. In a minute, she was gone. He felt like a schoolboy who had pathetically failed his first blind date.
It was when he was fifteen. Excellence in many cultural and athletic activities of the Youth Movement over two years had earned him a gold medal, an award that entitled him to a full, state-paid summer vacation at a Youth Movement camp.
Located deep in the country on the bank of a river and surrounded by dense forest, the camp gave teen-agers a respite from the cities so recently ravaged by war. As he was boarding the train, Levanter’s suitcase fell onto the tracks and sprang open. Seized by embarrassment and terrified that the train was about to depart, he hesitated about trying to retrieve any of his belongings. Unexpectedly, one of the boys from the YM contingent lowered himself under the train and, picking up the suitcase, threw it and most of its contents to Levanter. The boy barely managed to crawl out and climb back into the carriage before the train jerked and started to move.
During the five-hour journey, Levanter and Oscar, the boy who had rescued his things, became friends. Oscar w
as a year older than Levanter and about four inches taller. If Levanter could have magically changed his appearance, he would have wanted to look exactly like Oscar: sandy hair, pale blue eyes, chiseled features. He was pleased that he was assigned to the same twenty-bed bunkhouse as his new friend.
The YM camp, one of the largest in the country, accommodated over two thousand boys, with several hundred teen-age girls at the adjacent girls’ camp. The two camps shared the river front and often held joint events.
One day Levanter and Oscar strolled past a tall, good-looking girl with blond hair pulled back in a single braid. Oscar remarked that she could be an ideal blind date, and if he encountered her walking alone in the city at night, he would break her eye. Breaking the eye was what he called rape, he explained. Noting Levanter’s surprise, he admitted that he had been raping girls and women for three or four years, and by now had raped several dozen. Twice within the past year he had been picked up by police as a rape suspect but was released both times because the victims could not identify him positively. He had worked out a fail-safe way to break the eye, he said, and credited himself with inventing a hold to keep the victim at his mercy: the twist, he dubbed it. Thanks to the twist, not one of his victims had ever managed to see his face — that was why he called them blind dates.
Along with these bits of terminology, Oscar had developed a whole sex vocabulary. A female’s head was a melon, her mouth a lock, hands were grabbers, the back a sun deck, breasts points, nipples contacts, and her belly a plate; her legs were sticks, the groin the cut, and her buttocks pillows, divided by the narrows.
First he would grip her hair from behind, so she couldn’t turn around, and trip her. Then, with his fingers, he would squeeze and turn the contacts and pull on them; when she seemed unable to withstand the pain anymore, he would release the contacts but almost simultaneously enter her cut. At this point, she would usually submit without further resistance.
Oscar had also worked out a certain philosophy: sex was a spring that nature kept permanently wound, and man’s obligation to himself was to unwind it as often as possible. Rape was a mere short cut to the unwinding; it was also a sport that required expertise. Since the sex act required physical arousal of the male, and not of the female, nature had arranged for males to break the eye of females.
Levanter asked Oscar to show him some of his eye-breaking tricks when they were alone in their bunkhouse. Oscar told him to cross the room. Levanter got up from his bed and started walking. Suddenly a strong hand gripped the back of his hair, immobilizing his head; a knee pressed into his back. In an instant, he was tripped onto the floor, face down; in another instant, Oscar wedged himself between Levanter’s legs. A flattened frog, unable to move, Levanter was helpless.
“That’s the twist,” Oscar announced with pride.
Oscar showed Levanter a diary he had kept of his past blind dates. For each encounter, he had noted the victim’s characteristics, the place where he had first seen her, where he had attacked her, whether she was a virgin, and where he had finally left her. And he kept a list of prospective blind dates, two or three likely candidates, whose schedules and whereabouts he had already established. He was also an expert on the natural environment: he knew the best places to accost a female, where to drag her, where to play with her, and how to get away after he was finished with her. He talked about rape with the ease of a barber describing how to give a good haircut.
Often, Oscar said, he could assess the nature of a blind date by the way she carried herself on the street — he could guess whether she was timid and fearful, hysterical and resistant, strong-willed or submissive, and he would restrain her accordingly.
If he had to stifle her screams, he explained, he would hold her lock until she lost her breath; if he needed to immobilize her, he would penetrate the narrows instead of the cut and keep her pinned down; when he required a longer time for his arousal and climax, or if she seemed too powerful or too resistant, he would tie her grabbers behind her back, bind her sticks, and stuff a handkerchief in her lock.
Oscar admitted that there was one disadvantage to his method: he took all his blind dates from behind. As he was unwilling to risk being identified, he had never kissed one on the lock and could enjoy their faces only when stalking them, only from afar. Even if he succeeded in blindfolding one, he said, he would still be afraid to kiss her on the lock for fear of being bitten on the lip or cheek and, thus branded, being recognizable to the police. Furthermore, in one of his recurring dreams, he confessed, he was giving a blind date a deep kiss, his tongue flicking back and forth inside her lock, when she suddenly clamped her teeth down and, like an epileptic having a fit, bit off his tongue, spitting the spongy scrap straight into his face. Blood gushed from his mouth and he could see the severed tongue tumbling down his chest. Thanks to this dream, he said, he had perfected the twist.
To notice a blind date, to follow her unseen, nurturing his thoughts of what he would do with her, teasing his desire as if it were a dog about to be unleashed, then, in one spontaneous moment, to break her eye — this was for Oscar the essence of his blind dating. And blind dating — along with other occasional acts of daring, like crawling under a train seconds before it started moving — was all that interested him in life.
At coeducational events, Oscar would point out a girl he found attractive. The girl, responding to what she took for a sign of his interest, would smile at him and he would smile back at her as if he were simply too shy to approach her. In a low voice, he pondered the girl’s reaction when, in the woods or on a street, behind a bench in the park or in a niche in a basement, he would trap her and command her to obey him. He described in great detail what he would do to her when he had ripped her clothes off and subdued her again and again, until he was exhausted.
At first Levanter had listened to Oscar with mixed fear and curiosity, eager to know more about his friend’s adventures. But after a while, when Oscar went into his erotic speculations, Levanter grew sexually aroused, always thinking of the blond girl with the long braid.
As Levanter and Oscar were seen together more and more often, one of the counselors who knew Levanter from the city and was particularly fond of him warned him about Oscar. Oscar’s YM membership had been suspended twice for misconduct, the counselor said; he had been in trouble with the law, and he was known to be emotionally unstable. Levanter listened attentively, agreed to be less dependent on his friend, but immediately put the whole conversation out of his mind, and went right back to Oscar and their imagined blind dating.
Oscar told Levanter that he had found a short cut through the forest to the girls’ camp and that it was an ideal place for blind dating. The forest was dark, the foliage above would mute any screams, and the mosses underfoot offered nice soft padding. He could stalk his blind date even before twilight, safely break her eye, and return to camp unnoticed in time for supper.
Once the two boys bicycled along the short cut. Oscar stopped midway and they dragged their bikes out of view and hid in the underbrush. From behind the dense bushes, they watched an occasional camper go by. When they saw a girl, Oscar started to outline how he would reach for her hair, shove her into the woods, and force her to kneel. He would tear off her clothes, then grasp her pillows, and for a moment hold her, all tense, with his groin pressed hard against her until she began to writhe and thrash under him, and then he would spread her apart even more and pump into her with all his force, one hand over her lock, smothering her scream, the other holding her sun deck as she bucked back and forth, in pain and fear.
Levanter was captivated. What his friend envisaged was to him an adventure, a thrilling game of hide-and-seek. The girl would be hurt, but Levanter tended to agree with Oscar, considering the bruises and scratches of the forced entry as the only sources of her pain. He rationalized that a virgin making love for the first time, even willingly, had to suffer some pain. Defloration was an act of violence. Thus, he reasoned, it approximated rape. He argued with himself
that, in the manner of an ordinary virgin being deflowered, the blind date would not be visibly crippled or mutilated and might even become aroused.
The distance between talking about a rape and actually performing one still seemed enormous to Levanter. He argued with Oscar that, unlike a city, a vacation camp could not assure one of anonymity. But Oscar dismissed his caution as naive. Fear is the same everywhere, he said, and everyone is blinded with panic when jumped from behind, no matter where, no matter when.
Oscar stopped taking Levanter to the path. Levanter began to suspect that Oscar was annoyed by his apprehension and didn’t want him around anymore.
One morning, browsing in the sports shop that serviced the two camps, Levanter saw the blond girl with the long braid. He was too shy to approach her, even to attempt to strike up a conversation; all the chats he had rehearsed in his mind became useless the moment he was near her. Carefully Levanter edged to the counter. He heard a salesman tell her to return at five o’clock to collect the table-tennis nets that she had brought in for repair. The girl left the shop. Levanter followed her discreetly until she entered the forest short cut. Suddenly, he knew what he was going to do.
After lunch, Levanter feigned a headache and was sent to his bunk. He remained there, under the covers, eyes closed, until the last of the boys had come in to change for the afternoon swim. Then he slipped out through the rear exit and picked up a bike left there by a counselor who had gone to town and was not expected to return until the next day. Levanter pedaled around the camp and soon was in the forest.
Halfway through the short cut, he veered into the bushes and stopped. He hid the bike near the place Oscar had evaluated as the best spot for a blind date and sat behind the large bush, waiting. He checked his watch: four-thirty.
It was quiet in the forest. The sun had barely begun to set. It still brightened the highest trees, keeping the birds away, but below, where Levanter waited, twilight descended.