Harlot's Ghost

  “No. Not expired. Please,” I said to him, “pozhaluysta!” and reached out my hand. He gave the passport over in great suspicion and I turned with caution the faded crinkled leaves. There! I had found the proper page. My passport had not expired. I pointed out the date and handed it back to him.

  The Soviet guard might have been a Minnesota farmboy. He had blue eyes, high cheekbones, and close-cropped blond hair: I don’t think he was twenty-five. “You,” he fixed me with his finger, “you—waiting,” and walked off to come back immediately with an officer, a man of twenty-eight, dark hair, a mustache, the same dull green soldier’s tunic with tight collar and braiding.

  “Why?” said the new one, pointing to my passport as if it were a wholly execrable object.

  I found the separate words for ice and water. They came into my mind like a pas de deux. “Lyod,” I said, “ bolshoy lyod. Much ice.” I spread my hands as if I were smoothing a tablecloth. Then I gave to the horizontal plane just fashioned in the air one good karate chop. I made a cracking sound. Hopefully, it might sound like an ice-pond breaking up, and I plunged my hand toward my feet. “ Voda. Bolshaya voda—lots of water, isn’t that so?” I waved my hands in desperate strokes. A frozen swimmer.

  “Ochen kolodno,” the first guard said.

  “Ochen kolodno. Right. Ice-cold, very cold.”

  They nodded. They studied the passport back and forth, they looked at my visa which was clean and had the stamps it needed. They fumbled with my name aloud. “William Holding Libby?” It came out: “Veelyam Haul-ding Leeboo?”

  “Yes,” I said, “that’s it.”

  They studied some names on a hit list. Libby was not on it. They stared at each other. They sighed. They were not dumb. They could feel something was wrong. On the other hand, should they take me off for further questioning, they would have papers to fill out, possibly a lost evening. They must have had plans to go out after work, for the blond guard now stamped my papers. He gave a big kid’s grin. “Pardone,” he said, attempting to give it a friendly Italian-French spin. “Pardone.”

  The rest of the way through Arrivals showed me Sheremetyevo, a concrete airport built as a showcase for the 1980 Olympics: Welcome to the U.S.S.R. (Note that our Soviet walls are gray!) My bags went through Customs. The microfilm of Alpha, stowed in my secret compartment, attracted no notice—the suitcase had been designed to take confidential papers through routine inspections. I passed the last gate and encountered multilingual signs that told me to look for the Intourist guide. Instead, a cabdriver approached, a snarling New York–type cabdriver who reminded me of Thomas Wolfe’s dictum that people in the same profession tend to be the same all over the world. My man wanted twenty dollars to take me to the Metropole, a hotel which a travel agent in New York had assured me was a piece of good luck to get into, the Metropole being almost as difficult to snag as the old National. “I can slip you into the new National,” the travel agent had said, “but you don’t want that. It’s all tourist groups.”

  “Yes,” I had said, “I don’t want tourist groups.” Had something been obvious about me? Of course, I had popped in on the agent, paid cash, asked for speed in processing my visa (on the assumption he had connections sufficient to rush one through occasionally), and he did, and I tipped him for getting the permissions in a week although it had probably meant putting William Holding Libby on a KGB list which went under some unappetizing category like Individual Tourist, Special. Now, before I was even settled into my cab seat, the driver announced in his black-market English that he wished to buy American dollars from me. His rate, three rubles for a buck, was almost four times better than official exchange.

  It could be a trap. I didn’t like him. I certainly didn’t trust him. The authorities could have me jailed for dealing in rubles on the black market.

  Indeed, the driver was demanding so much of my attention that I was hardly looking out the window. I was not taking in my first impressions of Russia. Travel in a state of nerves is like passage through a tube. The racket of the car—we were in some kind of Soviet mini-flivver—impinged on me more than the landscape. The driver’s voice, “All right, you tell me, hey, how many dollars you got, come on,” gargled in my ear.

  We passed expanses of clean snow, dirty snow, and melted fields about as sprightly as the mud in the Jersey flats. Bits of Moscow began to appear, funky little gingerbread shacks by the side of the road, built in rows but yawning individually, paint peeling. Then came palisades of high-rise housing projects, dirty white for the most part in the dirty white snow. They looked as if the plaster had cracked on the lower floors before they put the trowel to the top ones: What a misery was this land. The March sky was as gray as the concrete walls in the Sheremetyevo Airport. Communism was irritating me personally at this point, equal to the cabdriver, pushy, dirty, depressed, eager for loot, out of date. Of course, the driver might be some outrigger of the KGB. Was I being encountered?

  A banner stretched across the superhighway. A legend in Russian. I saw Lenin in the words. Some bouquet, doubtless, of homiletic language. Over how many roads in how many mean and outrageously underequipped Third World countries would you see these banners? Zaire for one. Ditto Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea, Uganda. Who could care? I couldn’t even come out of my tunnel. Moscow streets began to appear, but the side windows of my car were mud-spattered, and sights to the front were only visible through the slip-slop of two overworked wipers that kept drawing striated salt fans on the glass. The driver was as sullen as heavy weather in August.

  Now we were on a large boulevard without much traffic. Solemn old buildings—government departments and specialist institutes—perambulated by the side windows. There were few pedestrians. It was Sunday. This was downtown.

  We came to a stop in a public square before an old green six-story building. Its sign read . I was at the Metropole. My home away from home.

  I gave the cabdriver two dollars for a tip. He wanted ten. He had his own peculiar psychic force. Some weak nerve in me was pinched, for I gave him five. My nerves, we can repeat, were not what once they were.

  A stocky, wide-jawed old boy, equal to a retired Mafia soldier of the lowest rank, was the doorman. He had a decoration on the lapel of his gray coat—a hero of the Great War. He would not be about to show cordiality to a stranger.

  Nor was he in a rush to help me with the bags. His function was to keep people out. I had to show him the travel-agency voucher in order to get through the door. Inside, the lobby was grim. The palette passed from cigar-butt brown to railroad-coach green. The floor was an aged parquet that buckled like cheap linoleum when you stepped on it. I felt as if I had landed in one of those unhappy hotels on the side streets of Times Square that sit in old cigar smoke, waiting to be demolished.

  Was this the famous Metropole where, if my historic recollections proved correct, the Bolsheviks used to gather before and after the Revolution? A huge marble stairway spiraled upward in right-angle turns around an elevator shaft faced in wrought iron.

  The woman at the registration desk was wearing a sweater and had a nose cold. She wore eyeglasses, was plain, and pretended not to notice me until I seized her attention. Her English had an unhappy accent reminiscent of such tortures to the spirit as ballet lessons for unpromising girls. The elevator operator, another decorated old war hero, was gruff, and the concierge on the fourth floor was a heavy blonde of about fifty with a beehive hairdo and a big tough Russian face—she looked like a mate for the doorman. She sat behind a little glass-topped desk facing the elevator, kept a rose in a small vase, and scowled at the task of looking for my key, which was large and bronze and as heavy as a pocketful of change.

  The route to my room led down one long dark corridor and then turned a right angle to another old shellacked floor. It was parquet with a considerable number of gaps in which squares of plywood had been inserted. A narrow, red carpet, half a football field in length, went down the first corridor, then half a football field down the other to m
y door. Since the floor buckled every step of the way, I had the sensation—if I may allude to frozen water once more—that I was hopping from one ice floe to the next.

  My room was eleven feet by fourteen and had a ceiling twelve feet high. The window looked on a gray court. I had a chest of drawers and a narrow bed with a thin, European mattress laid upon a larger mattress. At the head was a bolster as heavy as a water-soaked log. Plus a TV set!

  I turned it on. Electronic snow, pulses of wave-over. Black-and-white. A show for children. I turned it off. I sat on my narrow single bed and put my head in my hands. I got up. I closed the curtains to the courtyard. I sat down again. I was here, and—assuming I had entered without attracting official attention—I could stay here for a week at least, and sort some questions into categories. I had so many questions that I no longer looked for answers. Only for categories.

  The rigors of remembering a life that had, in many ways, terminated in the middle of one long night had me proceeding, as you may imagine, through states of peculiar delicacy. A director once told me how, after one of his films was wrapped, he had not stopped living with the camera crew and actors. They had departed, but he would awaken from every sleep with fresh commands. “Bernard, we have to reshoot the market sequence today. Tell Production it’s a hundred extras at least.” He would be out of bed and shaving before he could say to himself: “The movie is over. You have gone mad. You cannot shoot any more.” But he had, as he explained to me, stepped through the looking glass. The film was more real than his life.

  Was I equal to that director? For a year, hiding out in a rented room off an airshaft in an apartment house in the Bronx, I had worked to raise a wall between my last memory of Kittredge and myself. Sometimes a month would go by without incident, and I would sleep through the night and work through the day putting one word onto another as if I were spinning a thread to guide me out of the caves.

  Then, without warning, love for her would strike. I felt like an epileptic on the edge of grand mal. One misstep and seizures would come. After many months, the Bronx became untenable for me—I had to move.

  Besides, they would be looking for me. That was certain. The longer I did not surface, the wider would become their frame of reference. They would have to wonder if I had moved to Moscow. How I laughed—in those paroxysms of silent laughter with which one entertains oneself in the pit—that all the while I was living in the Bronx, they were thinking of me in Moscow.

  Yet out of a logic of separate steps that seemed altogether rigorous to me—although I could not specify the steps, I had come to the conclusion that I had to take a trip—for the first time—to the U.S.S.R. I did not know why. I was in profundities of trouble if they ever ran me down in Bronx County, New York, but to be found in Moscow by the KGB? With my extended memoir in microfilm? Why, that would be unforgivable even to myself. What if, despite safe passage through Customs, the Russians knew of my arrival? If Harlot had defected, my present alias might be sitting in Soviet files. That supposition, however, belonged to the world of common sense. I was living in a domain of subterranean logic. Which told me to take along the microfilm of Alpha. Who knows how the boxcars of obsession are shuttled through the freight yards of sleep? I did not feel insane, yet, there was a schedule to madness I seemed to obey. I clung to my writings as if they were body organs. I could never have left Alpha behind. Indeed, the old Jewish lady in whose apartment on the Grand Concourse I had rented a room was aware that I was a man who was writing a book.

  “Oh, Mr. Sawyer,” she said when I told her of leaving, “I’m going to miss the sound of your typewriter.”

  “Well, I’m going to miss you and Mr. Lowenthal.”

  He was an eighty-year-old arthritic; she, a seventy-five-year-old diabetic—we had entertained not much more than passing conversations for most of a year, but I was content with that. Bless them—I knew their lives were bound to be, should I know them better, boring to me. I could feel the worm of condescension stirring when we spoke. It was hard for me to take people seriously who had spent their lives being good thrifty middle-class people. While I expected they would be curious enough about my past, I did not have the heart to regale them at length with the fictitious careers and possible marriages of one Philip Sawyer—a name I employed in order to leave no trail for William Holding Libby, but then there was not much flimflam with the Lowenthals. We made occasional conversation when we met in the hall, and that was it. They were able to supplement their retirement monies with my rent (paid, happily, for both parties, in cash) and I could keep my privacy relatively intact. I stayed in my room except when I grew tired of soup on a hot plate and went out to eat or see a film. I wrote slowly and painfully.

  The writing of Omega, however, had gone as well as could be expected, considering how slowly it did go. There were days when I felt neither haunted nor invaded. Nonetheless, I knew I was a boulder on the edge of a cliff. Sooner or later, it would fall. It did. Moscow blinked in my mind like a lit-up billboard. I saw the travel agent, made preparations, tried to study Russian, and said farewell to the Lowenthals. I told them I was going to Seattle. Mrs. Lowenthal said in reply, “Will you have a finished book for your family to read?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I hope they like it.”

  “Well,” I said, “I hope so too.”

  “Maybe you’ll even get a publisher.”

  “Conceivably.”

  “If you do, please mail me the volume. I’ll pay for it. I want you to autograph my copy.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Lowenthal,” I said, “I’d be delighted to send you a free copy.”

  It was exactly the sort of conversation she would never forget. If they ever found this lair in the Bronx, they would learn from her that I had done some typing.

  I got off the bed of my room in the Metropole, opened my valise and started to unpack. I took out everything but the envelope containing Alpha. I was hardly ready to begin reading. It was four now, Sunday afternoon, Moscow time, which was eight o’clock in the morning for me. I was sleepy, I was exhausted. I had left at eight in the evening from Kennedy, lost eight hours to the clock, and ten to the flight (with the transit stop at Heathrow) and had landed at 2:00 P.M. Moscow time which was 6:00 A.M. New York time. My nerves, long out of synchronization, were upside down. Since it was 8:00 A.M. now in New York, no wonder I felt full of the false vigor that comes in the morning after a night of false sleep. I had to get out of the room for a while.

  I took a walk. My first steps in Moscow. If forty years of American media was enough to bring anyone to the conviction that Communism was evil, I had had my stints of special scholarship. Communism might well be evil. That is an awesome and terrible thesis, but then the simple can reign over the complex. Perhaps evil was to be comprehended in the grand thesis that Communism was evil.

  My first steps, therefore, on Moscow streets were hardly routine to me.

  I felt not unlike a prisoner let out of jail after twenty years. Such a man does not know the world he is entering, does not, for example, know how to walk into a store and buy a pair of pants. He has been issued pants for twenty years. Now, I did not know what was allowed me here. I was not certain I could leave the hotel and go out on the street without some proper paper being stamped. I hung about the lobby to observe the comings and goings, but soon felt uneasy. My continued presence might become suspect. So I took a chance, walked to the entrance, stepped out, and was met by a scowl from the doorman—it would take me a while to realize that because he had not placed me yet as a checked-in hotel guest, he was scowling.

  At any rate, I was on the street. Cabdrivers, parked at the hotel curb, yelled at me as a prospect, passersby took their glances. I just walked. I made no moves to determine if anyone was following, for I did not wish to show any knowledge of evasive tactics, but, then, for the little it was worth, I did not feel as if I were being followed. I had put on an old jacket and wore a black knit hat pulled over my ears like a merchant seaman. It was all right.
I felt like giving a great whoop.

  A square away from the hotel would be, I knew, a statue to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka, “Sword of the Revolution,” great-grandfather of the KGB. Back of him would be the infamous Lubyanka. From books, photographs, and debriefings, I knew that place better than any American prison—I had listened a hundred times in the imaginary auditorium of my ear to the screams of the tortured in the cellars of the Lubyanka, and I did not know if I wanted to go near it now, but, thus debating, went directly from the Metropole to Dzerzhinsky Square. Before me was an edifice, a late nineteenth-century seven-story morgue of an office, the Lubyanka, once a prerevolutionary business palace for czarist insurance companies. It still had white curtains on the windows, and highly polished brass fittings on the entrance door, but its exterior wall was a soiled khaki-yellow, a dismal, old-fashioned building in and out of which on this late Sunday afternoon came and went a few men wearing officer’s uniforms. The air was as cold as a New England forest in winter, and all the while I heard no screams. This Lubyanka—conceivably my future home—failed to stir adrenaline.

  I wandered away through side streets, gray in the light, near to black in the shadows, “the old streets of the merchants”—a phrase from my guidebook. Had these enclaves of gloom ever lifted? It was nearly agreeable to discover depression this palpable, and I had a moment in which I understood the comforts of gloom—was this my first real thought in a week? For even as the acceptance of one’s own poverty might be the first protection against corruption of the soul, so was gloom a fortress in which one could live encapsulated from insanity. Yes, the protective if heavy resonance of gloom would not be hard to find in Moscow, and thinking this, I came out of one more side street onto Red Square, a shock as nice as stepping from a Roman alley into the great plaza of St. Peter’s, except here was no Vatican but a field of cobblestones near to half a mile long and hundreds of feet wide spreading out to the walls of the Kremlin. On the gray horizon were early signs of a lavender twilight, but Russians were still waiting to see the tomb of Lenin and his body, preserved below, in its vault. Two thousand people, two by two, were in that line, and perhaps twenty people entered the tomb each minute, suggesting that the last man in the queue would have to wait one hundred minutes in this cold, a reasonable mortification for a pilgrimage.