The UnAmericans Read online

  Peter had fought Nazism, had seen the bony bodies and the charred ovens, the monuments to hate, and then sensed a kindred spirit flickering around the Great Democracy. His was a considered conversion, reached after a long debate with himself. I am an ‘idealist’, a ‘walk-in’, a person of passion, cause for suspicion; young leftists often become old fascists. Later I will learn Peter has his doubts, even there by the poolside as he was guiding me, fundamental questions nagged him, and over the years in Moscow I will follow the fading of his commitment. By the Prague Spring he will have long dropped out of the landscape. These things happen, Alexei will say with a shrug. A few years before Glasnost he will die in Palm Springs, the great historical concerns of the twentieth century lost to the last great obsession of his golf handicap.

  “You have to go over.” The fountain pen is put back in a pocket. My fear seeps out and twists a question mark into the enemy night. I ask in a mouse’s voice if I can take Peg with me. He reminds me I’m not asking her to change her shopping from Macy’s to Gimbels, sheathes his papers into his briefcase and turns towards the hotel, “Don’t be long.”

  Postcard, September 1998

  Dear Mom,

  This is Tverskaya Street, Moscow’s Park Avenue. If you half close your eyes you could be in Cleveland except everybody’s thinner. To think millions died in the Gulag for Paradise on Earth and got Pizza Hut. Heading south for Tbilisi in Georgia – not Willie Nelson’s Georgia, the other one – but I’ll probably be back before you get this. If you get it.

  Regards to Arnold.

  Lucy xxx

  Under crimson balconies, fretwork shutters, peeling paint and pillars warped by centuries of scalding summers, she was conscious of nothing but her own ridiculousness. Dark eyed women and children hanging over balustrades scrutinised her with the incomprehension of primitives eyeing a disc jockey. Her blonde head had a radiance that was an asset on a Californian beach but in a shabby Tbilisi courtyard stamped her as a foreigner.

  In a basic Russian, twanging with Valley Girl inflections she asked for the apartment of Mr Max Agnew. The question galvanised nothing but more stillness among the women, then a language she did not understand, full of aspirates and glottal stops, flickered between the balustrades.

  “He’s not here” was returned with uninflected finality.

  Everyone protected her from her father. No questions were ever answered by her mother, her uncle, or the American nation; he was left an unmentionable enigma, but his neighbours probably had good reason to vet strangers.

  “I’m his daughter. Lucy. From America.”

  “His daughter?”

  “From America?”

  Their shock hissed through the courtyard in Georgian. They knew nothing of an American daughter.

  “Your name is Lucy?”

  “Yes.”

  Her name was all her father had left her.

  “Lucy?”

  “Lucy Agnew.”

  Faces blanked, heads shook imperceptibly, a child’s face peeped at her between scarlet banisters, then a tall mother unfolded from the group and etched her concern up at an apartment leaning into space and beckoned. Someone called “Lucy”, and they were off, floating her up wooden steps through sudden mixes of perfumes and clouds of mustiness from flower baskets and rugs airing on the balustrades, whipping her through a portal in time. Distant hills shimmered in the heat haze, traffic noise skimmed across the River Mtkvari way below; she seemed to be walking in the sky. The old apartment building canted over a park sloping down to the brown river by which the first settlers had paused six thousand years before.

  Then the women halted, sunlight burned a door, bounced off small windows, and everyone had fallen back. Answered prayers sometime materialise as nightmare. This was the door, the one to which she had beaten a long and winding path and now she had reached it, it mesmerised her. Arteries beat in strange parts of her body. The women saw the last drops of her resource drain away and began to sense she was real. Her father’s name burst huskily around her. It was the first time she had heard it outside the walls of her home. She panicked about how to introduce herself when he appeared at the door.

  But it was true. He was not there. There was a house on the Black Sea, they said; he comes he goes. The ordinariness pricked the apocalyptic shock. I told you so, they would say back home and shake their heads, you should have rung him.

  This journey to her father had begun in her child’s head and become a Holy Grail that sustained itself into adulthood, but when she sorted out certain problems in her life and the great day to make the arrangements arrived, her courage deserted her. Even the banal parts of the trip – the flights, the hotel booking for the stopover and change in Moscow – had her moving as if adrift in a monstrous dream. The vital call to her father announcing who she was and asking his permission to come and visit, was simply beyond her. When her boy fiend Timmy enquired if she had called him he had his face chewed for his concern. She preferred the path of spiritual fatalism: “If my Higher Power wants me to meet my father, I will. If not, then so be it. What ever happens is meant to happen.” and this elevated approach calmed her. She would go with faith that he would be there and agree to see her, but as her plane banked above LAX and started its long haul east, the notion that she was a fraud taking her cowardice on a round the world trip nagged her. More vigorous prayers to the Higher Power were made, asking, handing over, promising to accept his will for her, but standing before her father’s unanswered door all she could wonder was why, just for once, her Higher Power couldn’t sign the shit shovel over to someone else.

  The women ushered her to the window, every movement and gesture formal, polite, graceful and gracious. Face pressed to the pane, her eyes adjusting to the light, the first artefacts of the mystery that was her father began forming in the dimness. Small kilims, books and soft furniture materialised in shadow, lines of light slowly edged a baby grand piano. She had never known he was musical, but the women confirmed he was very musical, that he had taught a couple of kids in the apartment block, that he was practically a concert pianist. She was astonished.

  The building was buckled by age and shabby, the courtyard cracked, the roof short of tiles, paint flaked everywhere, and within this architectural entropy her father’s undistinguished apartment provoked her first sense of disappointment.

  An old neighbour swung up, saw Max in her and was shocked. Back home the family dynamic was amnesia and suggestions of resemblance were cut dead. Dad was not to be mentioned; Dad did not exist. The same dynamic obviously prevailed behind her father’s door, but with Lucy as the non-person – she had obviously not merited a mention.

  Questions came like humming birds. She had no memory of him; she was three weeks old when he left. There were more slow nods, more understanding, the picture was forming and in the mix of conversation it became clear her father was a popular neighbour, but could be tricky and reclusive about the world beyond his gates. The women glossed over the fact that she had arrived without any previous arrangement with her father. They took her American address and promised to tell him when he returned. “He may not be interested”, said Lucy. The old woman replied that he was always interested in a pretty girl and cued a gallery of knowing smiles. A Brit from the embassy in Moscow had claimed he “drank like a Georgian”. So he was a drunk who liked women. She’d been avoiding those assholes since she got sober.

  The city was all hills. When she got back to the hotel, her buttocks smarted and her cleavage was glossy with sweat. The agoraphobia of Moscow, that had her clinging to the Amex and Citicorp neon among the Cyrillic, or hanging out in the hotel lobby for American voices, was now replaced by a bubbling excitement. Lucy had to take difficult things in small bites; she had got to his door, declared herself in his courtyard and to her that was no small triumph.

  She showered, fought the hotel h
air drier for a while, and put on a fresh summer dress that hugged her curves. In Moscow her Californian looks attracted men like flies and she was warned by the hotel receptionist that the Georgians were worse. But as an American blonde who had served time in the sewage runs of LA she had good sleazeball radar and an armoury of feints and put-downs.

  On her knees by the bed her Higher Power was thanked for bringing her to her father’s door, for keeping her sober so far that day, and asked to keep her sober for the rest of the day. A humble request for knowledge of His will for her and the power to carry that out was added. Her AA sponsor had been promised regular phone calls, but the time difference between Georgia and California defeated her.

  Downstairs the manageress with the beehive hairdo who looked at all guests as if they were something brought in on the sole of a shoe gave her the time difference and the codes for a direct call to California as if Lucy had never used a phone before. A brief desire to spit on her retro winged glasses was suppressed for a “Spasebo” with Valley Girl inflections. Then a bright ‘Hi!” cut through the cigarette smoke shrouding the old Cossack doorman as she breezed out onto steep, ex-Bolshevik streets to tighten her butt and discover the city her father had made his home.

  The long swim out to the raft was almost beyond him now. Flat on his back, sucking air, he waited for the freshening of the pain in his lungs, and the narcotic of muscles detumescing. Under the pulse squeezing through his good ear, trees that feathered the shore and headland rocks like green clouds a kilometre away whispered to him. Distant sand, blood red cannonades of bougainvillea, pale houses, and tiny Georgians and Germans baring their breasts to a tourist sun, rotated into view on the bellying sea.

  He would miss the raft when the swim finally defeated him. Life was intrusive, inconvenient and noisy. Max had never moved easily among others; his great conversations were always with himself. The rest of humanity triggered a reflex to contradict, to bounce opposing views at any opinion, like a man searching for a belief in nothing and the safety of loneliness.

  He had flown to the raft from Masha. His intention to thaw the chill between them had disintegrated under a Tourette’s hail of jibes about her religious faith. Once released, the words could never stop until the target was driven off, even when that was the last thing he wanted. When he suggested that when she died she would finally get to the pearly gates only to find no one was in, he saw the hurt and felt the stab of triumph and then the immediate regret. But this game played him without asking and she turned and left him cradling his loneliness.

  His life, by the standards of most others, had been one of adventure and high office, but left him with the sense of being stuck somewhere, snapping, like a yappy dog at any passing ankle. Some buried connection spontaneously sparked cruelty in him to any one close, then sluiced up tsunamis of regret and sympathy to salve the hurt. But Masha was finished with being batted from one side of his nature to the other. She had read, marked, learned, inwardly digested, and finally dropped him and his flinty atheism, marooning him in the suspicion that a Kafkaesque Heaven’s gate awaited him where his call would be answered but the hatch slammed against him. He would turn away. He always turned away. Things happened. Nothing happened. He never happened. It never happened. So he swam, drank occasionally, disappeared into boltholes in the head. Distance was his harmony, the raft, a kilometre from land and mankind his hermit’s cell, the sky, with its great silence and indifference, his strip of peace.

  The Party gave him the little house in the 70s, and barring hangovers and official business, he would swim to the raft most summer days to get away and reflect. But from a mountain of reflection there seemed barely a molehill of conclusion. He had been brought up to believe in the common things, and rejected them, but replaced them with nothing, just more rejection. And as the world surrounded him with corruption, bigotry and greed, his position had no need to change. His was a spirit constantly in flight, feeding upon the latest abominations on the wing. Occasionally he was shot down and doubt came in little painful moments like wounds.

  He lay watching a silver dot stretch a silk thread of vapour across the cobalt sky. The thread hung, sagged, broke, and then slowly dissolved to nothing.

  The swim back was murderous. When he hit the beach it had emptied. Only two Muscovite girls remained, Mercedes Eurotrash wearing little but the vacant expression of the habitual drug-user. Topless women on the beach were still a rarity in Georgia and flirted dangerously with the old permissive attitudes towards rape that still hung on in the last breaths of the century. They were both face down, their backs glowing with the day’s sun.

  The smaller, vulgar one had lavished some of the euro-roubles flooding Moscow on a set of new breasts to match the new Russian robustness. As she rolled onto her back the bosoms followed the rotation of her body like jet nose cones. They were so grotesquely inflated that he imagined them exploding in moments of high excitement. It was also a reasonable assumption that she had been a flat chested kid who watched her developed friends gather the boys, while she remained ignored. There was about her the exhibitionism of the nouveau attractive as well as the nouveau riche, that celebration of trashy, expensive jewellery and the over-priced car with the gold trim. And the breasts, that bounced out of a dead communist past like new chicks.

  Her tall, dark friend was thin as a stick, and as he walked past, pretending his eyes weren’t slanted sideways to take in the huge tits, he caught the contempt in her eyes. For that contempt he had respect. For the prole flaunting the monuments to social mobility vulcanised on her chest, he had only his own withered derision, alongside an urge to discharge himself all over them.

  He picked up his towel and sank down among the wild flower on the edge of the beach to let his pulse calm, his chest settle and the stillness recharge him. Something deeper in the ordinary was occasionally touched in these moments, and a sensation of blending into peace lifted him. But when these moments passed he felt drained and depressed and all the problems rushed in to claim their place again.

  Thoughts coalesced round Masha and Gia, the two others in his tiny world: she once a lover, he once a surrogate son, now betraying him together. Women who seek the older man in youth often seek younger men in their maturity, and Max was simply past his use-by date. She was a ‘mature’ woman, much younger than he but still vigorous and beautiful, still in the race. He was out to grass. He let the sand run between his fingers, felt its coolness race down his old skin, and glanced across for the breasts again. It was known both girls spent their nights with Gia. Masha must know, he thought, everyone knew about Gia and his overactive member. She would have her own pain round that, as he had his around her. Hers was a history of sexual generosity anyway, but as Max discovered several times, those who dish it out are often least able to take it when it is dished back to them.

  The sun blushed the sea and hammered copper into the headland treetops. Half way to the horizon the raft melted into twilight. Another summer was ebbing, leaving the morbid thought that it might be the last beached in its quiet, dissolving evenings.

  The lights went on in the village. The Moscow girls sloped into the dusk. He could hear the ‘phone tinkling in his little house and was relieved he was too far away to answer, but it rang persistently. He counselled himself to be calm. He often spoke to himself as if he were a son in need of reassurance; father and child in one, a whole family in him all trying to make their point at the same time. The ‘phone stopped, and the evening settled into peace again.

  Then it rang again, but not for long this time.

  “Sober, you’re welcome. Drinking, no. No way, Max.”

  Insects orbited lamps slung from concrete arches. Cicada tapped syncopations with the sea. Light glowed through bottles of brightly coloured alcohol on the bar: rubies, deep blues, green limonvodka.

  “You know I’ll just go to Shota’s and drink there.”

  “Max, d
on’t drink anywhere.”

  The lamps caught the two Moscow girls from the beach. Bionic Woman’s cantilevered magnificence strained her Tommy Hilfiger top to bursting. Their faces, waxed by the light, stoned him with derision then dipped back to their shisliks. A mosquito bit him as he left.

  Max knew the disapproval bristling Shota’s moustache would give way to the mercantile instinct. A small bottle of vodka was purchased on condition that Max drank away from the tourists in the bar, so he sloped under the huge magnolia to the farthest corner of the patio hanging over the sea. The headland soared above him; light bulbs strung through the magnolia branches formed a sickly cone glowing in the Black Sea night. Perched on the edge of the land above the waves, he released the genie in the bottle.

  One bottle wasn’t enough: an hour – maybe it lasted slightly longer. He didn’t want to rush it, look like he needed it. He always wanted to smoke when he drank, but had given up when someone said it withered the erectile nerves. Half the second bottle had gone before he tried a song. Shota silenced him with a shout from the bar. Max swaggered towards him via several small diversions and inflated his chest. “It’s fucking Schumann!”

  “Behave, Max.”

  He drank to his own sullenness. Among the tourists scattered under the branches, two locals recognised he was back on it and chose a table on the far side of the tree. He watched them avoid his stare.