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M A Y 1 9 9 8
UD Nevins got me and my banjos -- a fine old Gibson
mother-of-pearl-trimmed Mastertone and an S.S. Stewart backup whose thumb
string always sounded a little punky -- into Moscow and put us all to bed in a
spare room of the big apartment that he and his wife and three children
occupied in the cement warehouse where the Russians stashed free-world
diplomatic staff. April Nevins was a long-haired strawberry blonde beginning to
acquire the tight, worried expression that the wives of ministers and
government officials get, from being saddled with their husbands' careers. You
get the pecking-order blues. The bygone summer hadn't done much to refresh her
freckles, and a long white winter lay ahead. This was late September, shirtless
apple-picking time back home. The puff on the bed they put me in smelled
old-fashionedly of flake soap, the way my mother's laundry used to when I
helped her carry the wet wash basket out back to the clothesline.As he put me to bed, Nevins said that something had already come for me in the diplomatic pouch. An envelope lay on my pillow, addressed to me care of the embassy APO number in a scrunched-up hand in black ballpoint. Inside was a long letter from Imogene, recounting her sorrowful feelings after I left and guessing that I was still alive because my death in her neighborhood hadn't been in the papers and she had caught on the radio a plug for an appearance of mine in St. Louis. She recalled some sexual details I had half forgotten and wasn't sure needed to be put down on paper, and promised undying love. I just skimmed the second page. Her words weren't easy to read; the individual letters looked like they wanted to double back on themselves, and I was dog-tired from those thousands of miles I had traveled to reach the dark side of the moon.
Now, I've seen a lot of friendly crowds in the course of my professional life, but I must say I've never seen as many lovable, well-disposed people as I did that month in Russia. They were -- at least the ones that weren't in any gulag -- full of beans, up all night and bouncy the next morning. The young ones didn't have that shadowy look that American children were taking on, as if dragged out from watching television; these young Russians seemed to be looking directly at life. I hated to think it, but they were unspoiled. Grins poured from the students I played for, in one drafty old classroom after another -- they just took the dancers and musicians out and moved the desks in. There were dusty moldings and plaster garlands high along the peeling plaster walls, and velvet czarist drapes rotting around a view of some damp little park where old women in babushkas, so gnarled and hunched our own society would have had them on the junk heap, swept the dirt paths with brooms that were just twigs tied to sticks. Everything was still used here.
I got better at answering that one, as I strummed and picked and rolled through those echoing classrooms. I stopped saying that slavery had been universal not long ago, that the Russians had had their serfs, that several hundred thousand white men from the North had died so that slaves could be free, that a hundred years later civil-rights laws had been passed and lynching had become a rarity. I could tell, as I stood there listening to myself being translated, that I was losing them. What I was saying was too much like what they heard from their own teachers, too much historical inevitability. I simply said yes, it was a problem, a disgraceful problem, but that I honestly believed America was working at it, and music was one of the foremost ways it was working at it. Listening to myself talk, I would sometimes think that the State Department knew what it was doing, bringing a natural patriotic optimist like me over here. Ever since JFK had been shot, my breed had been harder to find. They must have had a pretty fat file on me somewhere: the thought made me uneasy.
I felt best when I played, played as if for a country-fair crowd back home, and those young Russian faces would light up as if I were telling jokes. They had all heard jazz, and even some twist and early rock on tapes that were smuggled through, but rarely anything so jaunty and tinny and jolly, so irrepressible, as banjo music going full steam, when your fingers do the thinking and you listen in amazement yourself. Sometimes they would pair me with a balalaika player, and one little Azerbaijani -- I think he had some Gypsy blood -- tried my instrument, and I his. We made an act of it for a few days, touring the Caucasus, where old men with beards would gather outside the auditorium windows as if sipping moonshine. When they had me advertised ahead for a formal concert, the crowds were so big that the Soviet controller cut down on the schedule.
The translator who traveled with me kept changing, but usually it was Nadia, a lean, thin-lipped lady over forty who had learned her English during the war, in the military. She had lost two brothers and a fiancé to Hitler, and was wed to the Red system with bonds of iron and grief. She looked like a skinny, tall, stunned soldier boy herself, just out of uniform -- no lipstick, a long, white, waxy nose, and a feathery short haircut with gray coming in, not in strands but in patches. Blank-faced, she would listen to my spiel, give a nod when she'd heard all she could hold, and spout out a stream of this language that was, with all its mushy, twisty sounds, pure music to me. The more she and I traveled together, the better she knew what I was going to say, and the longer she could let me go before translating, and the more I could hear individual words go by, and little transparent phrases through which I seemed to see into her as if into a furnace through a mica window. We traveled on trains in the same compartment, so I could look down from the top bunk and see her hands remove her shoes and her mustard-colored stockings, and then her bare feet and hands flitter out of sight. I would listen, but never heard her breathing relax; she confessed to me toward the end of my stay that she could never sleep on trains. The motion and clicking stirred her up.
An inhibiting factor was Bud Nevins's being in the compartment with us -- there were two bunks on two sides -- or, if not Bud, another escort from our embassy, and often a fourth, an underling of Bud's or a second escort from the Soviet side, who spoke Armenian or Kazakh or whatever the language was going to be when we disembarked. Sometimes I had more escorts than would fit into one compartment; I think I often got the best night's sleep, with everybody watching everybody else. Nadia was as loyal a Communist as they made, but seemed to need watching anyway. As I got to know her body language, I could tell when we were being crowded, politically speaking.
After a while I tended to bond with the Communists. When we arrived at one of our hinterland destinations, Nadia and her associates would bundle me into a Zil, and then we would share irritation at being tailed by an embassy watchdog in his imported Chevrolet. When we all went south, Bud came along with that willowy, redheaded wife of his. April had, along with her worried look, a plump, pretty mouth a little too full of teeth. For all their three children, they hadn't been married ten years. Out of wifely love and loyalty she wanted to join in what fun the Soviet Union in its sinister vastness offered.
Somewhere in backwoods Georgia we visited a monastery, a showpiece of religious tolerance. The skeleton crew of monks glided around with us in their grim stone rooms. The place had a depressing, stuffy, holy smell -- old candle wax and chrism and furniture polish -- that I hadn't sniffed for thirty years, and then in the storage closet of a Baptist basement Sunday school. Among the monks with beards down to their bellies was a young one, and I wondered how he had enlisted himself in this ghostly brotherhood. Demented, or a government employee, I decided. He had silky long hair, like a princess captive in a tower, and the sliding onyx eyeballs of a spy. He was one kind of human animal, and I was another, and when we looked at each other, we each repressed a shudder.
UTSIDE, a little crowd of shepherds and sheep, neither group
looking any too clean, had gathered around the automobiles, and when Nadia had
made our identities and curious mission clear, the shepherds invited us to dine
with them, on one of the sheep. I would have settled for some cabbage soup and
blini back at the Tbilisi hotel, but the Nevinses looked stricken, as though
this chance at authentic ethnicity and bridge-building would never come again,
and I suppose it wouldn't have. Their duty was to see that I did my duty, and
my duty was clear: consort with the shepherds, scoring points for the free
world. I looked toward Nadia, and with one of her unsmiling nods she approved,
though this hadn't been on her schedule. Or -- who knows? -- maybe it had been. By
now I saw her as an ally in my mission to subvert the proletariat, no doubt
deluding myself. We climbed for what seemed like a mile and sat down around a kind of campfire, where an ominous big kettle was mulling over some bony chunks of a recently living creature. The shepherds loved April's long ironed hair and the way her round freckled knees peeped out of her skirt as we squatted on our circle of rock perches. After the goatskin of red wine (as stated before, I'm no connoisseur of alcoholic beverages, but this stuff was so rough that flies kept dying in it, and a full swig removed the paint from the roof of your mouth) had been passed a few times, she began to relish their attention, to glow and giggle and switch her long limbs around and come up with her phrases of language-school Russian. Those shepherds -- agricultural workers and livestock supervisors was probably how they thought of themselves -- had a number of unsolved dental problems, as we saw when their whiskers cracked open in a laugh, but a lot of love hovered around that simmering pot, a lot of desire for international peace. Even Bud took off his jacket and unbuttoned his top shirt button, and Nadia began to lounge back in the scree and translate me loosely, with what I heard as her own original material. The lamb when it came, in tin bowls, could have been mulled somewhat longer, and was mixed with what looked like crabgrass, roots and all, and some little green capers that each had a firecracker inside, but as it turned out, only the Nevinses got sick. Next day they had to stay in their hotel room with the shades lowered while the Communists and I motored out to entertain at a Peoples' War veterans home with a view of Mount Elbrus. The way we all cackled in the car at the expense of the Nevinses and their tender capitalist stomachs was the cruelest thing I saw come to pass in my month in the Soviet Union.
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan: you wondered why God ever made so much wasteland in the world, with a gold dome or a blue lake now and then as a sop to the thirsty soul. But here's where the next revolution was coming from, it turned out -- out from under those Islamic turbans. When my banjo flashed mother-of-pearl their way, they made the split-finger sign to ward off the evil eye. They knew a devil's gadget when they saw it.
Whenever I showed up back in Moscow, I was solemnly handed packets of letters in Imogene's cramped black hand, pages and pages and pages of them. I couldn't believe the paper she wasted, and the abuse of taxpayer money involved in using the diplomatic pouch. She had heard me take an eight-bar vocal break on my Decca cut of "Somebody Loves You, Darlin'," on a station out of Charlottesville, and had decided that it was a code to announce that I was leaving my wife for her. "I am altogether open and YOURS, my dearest DEAREST Eddie," she wrote, if I can remember one sentence in all that trash. "I will wait for as LONG as it takes, though KINGDOM COME in the meantime," if I can recall another. Then on and on, with every detail of what she did each day, with some about her internal workings that I would rather not be told, though I was happy she had her period, and all about her unhappiness (that I wasn't there with her) and hopefulness (that I soon would be), and her theory that I was in the air talking to her all the time, broadcasting from every frequency on the dial, including the shortwave that brought in stations from the Caribbean and Western Europe. If she caught Osborne and Martin doing "My Lonely Heart" or "You'll Never Be the Same," she knew that I was their personal friend and had asked them to send her a private message -- never mind that they had recorded it in the early fifties. I couldn't do more than skim a page here and there; the handwriting would get smaller and scrunchier and then blossom out into some declaration of love printed in capitals and triple underlined. Just the envelopes, the bulky white tumble of them, were embarrassing me in front of Bud Nevins and the whole embassy staff, embattled here in the heartland of godless communism. How could I be a cultural ambassador shouldering this ridiculous load of puling, mewing, conceited infatuation?
Imogene was planning where we would live, how she would dress for her seat of honor at my concerts, what she would do for me in the bedroom and the kitchen to keep my love at its present sky-high pitch. Thinking we were in for a lifetime together, she filled me in on her family--her mother, whom she had maligned but who wasn't all bad, and her father, who was scarcely in her life enough to mention, and her brothers and sisters, who sounded like the worst pack of losers and freeloaders on the Delmarva Peninsula. My fear was that her outpourings would not escape the vigilance of the KGB, x-raying the diplomatic pouch. I would lose face with Nadia, that steely exemplar of doing without. The innocent-eyed gymnasium students would sense my contamination. The homely austerity of Soviet life, with that undercurrent of fear left over from Stalin, made the amorous delusions of this childish American woman repulsive to me. As my month approached its end and the capitalist world was putting out feelers to reclaim me, Imogene's crazy stuff got mixed in with businesslike communications from my agent and colorless but friendly letters from my wife with notes and dutiful drawings from my children enclosed. This heightened my disgust and helpless indignation. I would have sent a cable -- CUT IT OUT, or YOU AIN'T NO BLUE-EYED SWEETHEART OF MINE -- but by some canniness of her warped mind she never gave a return address, and when I tried to think of her apartment, all I got was that black-and-white feeling: the way she fed me her breasts one at a time, the very big radio, and the empty street with the Capitol at the end like a white-chocolate candy. I had simply to endure it, this sore humiliation.
HEY had saved Leningrad for me to the last, since it was where the
Communists, still remembering the siege, were the toughest, and I might run
into the most hostility from an audience. But as soon as my Gibson began
talking, the picked strings all rolling like the synchronized wheels, big and
little, of the Wabash Cannonball, the smiles of mutual understanding
would start breaking out. I am not a brave man, but I have faith in my
instrument and in people's decent instincts. St. Petersburg, as we call it
again, is one beautiful city, a Venice where you least expect it, all those big
curved buildings in Italian colors. The students in their gloomy old ballrooms
were worried about Goldwater getting elected, and I told them that the American
people would never elect a warmonger. I was always introduced as a
"progressive" American folk artist, but I had to tell them that there wasn't
much progressive about me -- my folks had been lifelong Democrats, because of a
war fought a hundred years ago, and I wasn't going to be the one to change
parties.Then, just as I was about to get back onto Aeroflot, Khrushchev was pushed out of power, and all the Soviets around me tightened up, wary of what was going to happen next. This whole huge empire was run out of some back rooms by a few beetle-browed men. Nadia -- my voice, my guide, my protector, closer to me for this month than a wife, because I couldn't have done without her -- complimented me by confiding, somewhere out on the Nevsky Prospekt, or in some hallway where no bugs were likely to be placed, "Eddie, it was not civilized. It was not done how a civilized country should do things. We should have said `Thank you very much for ending the terror.' And then `You are excused -- too much adventurism, okay, failures in agricultural production, and et cetera. Okay, so long, but bolshoi thanks.'"
At moments, toward the end of a long public day in, say, Tashkent, her English would deteriorate, out of sheer weariness from drawing on two sets of brain cells, and her eyelids and the tip of her long white nose would get pink. We would say goodnight in the hotel lobby, with its musty-attic smell and lamps whose bases were brass bears, and she would give me in her handshake not the palm and the meat of the thumb but four cool fingers, aligned like a sergeant's stripes. That was the way we began to say good-bye in the airport, until we leaped the gulf between our two great countries and I kissed her on one cheek and then the other and hugged her, in proper Slavic style. Her eyes teared up, but it may have been just the start of a cold.
Bud told me in the airport, so casually that I should have smelled trouble, "We took you off the APO number two days ago, so your mail won't show up here after you leave. It will be forwarded to your home."
"Sounds reasonable," I said, not thinking.
Coming back, on the last leg, out of Paris, I had an experience such as I've never had again in all my miles of flying. We came down on the big arc over Gander and Nova Scotia and from five miles up I could see New York, hundreds of miles away, a little blur of light in the cold plastic oval of the plane window which grew and grew, like a fish I was pulling in. My cheek got cold against the plastic as I pressed to keep the light in view, a spot on the invisible surface of the earth like a nebula, like a dust mouse, only glowing, the fuzzy center of our heavenly liberty. Just it and me, there in the night sky, communing. It was a vision.
After I cleared customs at Kennedy, I phoned home, though it was after ten o'clock. I was so happy to be in the land of the free. My wife answered with something in her voice besides welcome, like a fearful salamander under a big warm rock. "Some letters for you came today and yesterday," she said. "All from one person, it looks like."
How bright this airport was, I thought, compared with the one in Moscow. Every corner and rampway was lit as harshly as a mug shot. The place was packed with advertisements and snack bars, sizzling with electricity. "Did you open them?" I asked, my heart suddenly plunked by a heavy hand.
"Just one," she said. "That was enough, Eddie. Oh, my."
"It wasn't anything," I began, which wasn't a hundred percent true. For though I was very unhappy with Imogene for making what looked to be an ongoing mess, you can't blame a person for thinking you're a god. You have to feel a spark of fondness, remembering the way she held up one breast and then the other, each nipple looking in that black-and-white room like the hole of a gun barrel pointed straight at your mouth. You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women get together.
John Updike is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990), and sixteen other novels. His most recent book is Toward the End of Time (1997).
Illustration by Gary Kelley
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; May 1998; Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War; Volume 281, No. 5; pages 80 - 90.
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