Music Under the Generals

by NICOLAS NABOKOV

1

MR. NABICALF, Mr. Nabicalf, hurry up, we’re late,” came Blintz’s voice from below. “Es ist schon nach halb vier.” “Damn that German and his creaky voice,” I grumbled, and ran down the staircase.

Blintz, a placid GI of Hamburger origin, stood at the bottom of the stairs and shook his head. “Always late, always late,” he mumbled as we walked to the garden gate.

“Oh stop nagging, Blintz.”

Looking sulky he slipped into the driver’s seat of the worn Ford sedan, our so-called “staff car.”“It is not I who is going to the opera,” he began sulking again, as we drove towards the Kbnigin Luisen Strasse, “und you know how long it takes to get to the Russian sector.”

We drove to the gray arcades of the ruined central Radio Station and turned into the main artery leading from the west straight into the Russian heart of Berlin. I looked at my watch. It was 4.05. The opera began at 4.30. There was time enough, I thought, but Blintz grumbled on. “You know how it is mit die Russen, ” he said; “dey don’t know how to handle traffic. And today all de generals will be dere: from us, from de British, from de French. We will never get trough.”

As soon as we turned left on the Friedrichstrasse we got into a fierce traffic jam. Blintz was right. The narrow passageway in the center of the street (a winding river bed between high banks of rubble) was filled with cars. All of them, in an endless file, were stalled, honking, their drivers cursing in four different tongues. When we finally got to the Wintergarten (the old Berlin Music Hall that housed the Prussian State Opera Company) the courtyard was nearly empty. Only a few latecomers were jumping out of cars and hurrying towards the entrance. At the door two officers in long gray coats with blue bands on their caps (the colors of the M.V.D. Security Troops) asked for the invitation. I produced the large engraved card with its golden hammer and sickle and its uneuphonious text. Then I crossed through the empty lobby and as I climbed the plush and gilt staircase two adolescent soldiers in dark green parade uniforms saluted me. The hall was dark. The curtain was up. The music had begun. “My God,” I said to myself, recognizing the oily tunes of Madame Butterfly, “not that old thing!”

The stage, a labyrinth of bedragoned screens and bamboo shades, was lit from the back by the indigo blue of the Nagasaki harbor. On the left of the stage, in rocking chairs, sat Lieutenant Pinkerton, U.S.N. (tenor), and the American Consul, Mr. Sharpless (baritone). Between them a small wicker table field two glasses, a water pitcher, and a Vat 69 bottle in a bucket of ice. In high-pitched German (the lingua franca of Berlin) Lieutenant Pinkerton invited Mr. Sharpless to “Milch, punch, oder whisky?“ and then resumed his loud bravado about “Yankee Freuden” (pleasures) and “Yankee Reisen” (travels).

Stepping on boots and shoes, I made my way to a seat in the center of the eighth row. Oddly lit by the interior of Lieutenant Pinkerton’s Nagasaki dwelling, the hall was a strange and perplexing spectacle. Hundreds of rows of oversized eggs, with noses, mouths, and eyebrows painted on them, rested on top of glimmering epaulets, colored lapels, beribboned and bemedaled chests, and vertical rows of golden buttons. All was motionless. From every direction and level of the enormous dark hall the eggs were staring at the stage.

“Hy’-you, Nick. I’m sure glad you’re here,” said a voice on my left in a loud whisper and a perceptible Southern drawl, I turned around and saw the bald anteater’s profile of General X. “You know Colonel W, don’t you?" and he introduced me to his neighbor. “Nick here,” whispered the General to the Colonel, “works for Bob McClure in Information Control. He’s hep on music and shows the Krauts how to go about it. He’ll tell us what this g.d. thing is all about.”

Trying to be as quiet as possible, in order not to interfere with Lieutenant Pinkerton’s enumeration of the advantages of a Japanese marriage (“Es kann monatlich anulie-ert werden — It can be annulled each month”), I began explaining that this was Madame Butterfly, an Italian opera with music by Puccini, adapted by two Italians from a story by Long and Be —

“I don’t care who wrote the damn thing,” interrupted the General. “What I want to know is who are those guys up there, and what’s this German doing,” and he pointed at Lieutenant Pinkerton, “in an American uniform?”

“Silence, s’il vous plaît,” whispered an angry uniform in front of us. “Ah, ces Américains!”

“Go on, never mind the Frenchie,” said the General and turned his ear closer to my mouth.

I started explaining the story of Madame Butterfly, and as I went on, his face began to change. From cheerful, it turned earnest, from earnest, grave, from grave, angry, from angry, outraged. “Why it’s an insult!" he burst out in a loud whisper. “You mean to say that an American officer knocks up this Jap girl" — and he pointed to ChoCho-San — “and then goes back home and marries somebody else? It’s outrageous! Don’t they know that an American officer, if he did such a thing, would get court-martialed?”

“ Wollen Sie bitte schweigen,” said another uniform, in a broad Russian accent.

“Oh, damn it,”mumbled the General. He turned away from the stage and stopped looking at it. We sat through the rest of the act in awkward, frozen silence. Only towards the end, when after a great deal of slobbery singing and perfunctory necking, Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San were about to withdraw to their so-called “marriage chamber,”did the General look at the stage again. “YMiy the g.d. s.o.b.’s,” he grunted as the curtain went down and several thousand pairs of uniformed arms began to flail about producing a drone of applause.

“Say, Nick,” said General X in an irritated tone, “did you know about this g.d. thing,” and he pointed in the direction of the stage, “before you came here tonight?” I replied that I had known but had forgotten about it. “How could you forget about it?” he asked. “You knew that they were going to permit the Krauts to put on American uniforms and go through that . . . insulting . . . that slanderous rigmarole! And you didn’t do anything about it! You didn’t protest?”

I explained that I believed there was nothing to protest. “After all, General,” I said in as soothing a tone as I could muster, “Madame Butterfly is performed in New York at the Met and all over the United States. It’s a famous opera . . . it’s a classic . . . its music is known to —”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted, “I’ve heard that g.d. music played by our band in Fort Worth, and better than those Germans, too. I don’t mean the music. I mean the play. I mean that these stinking bastards did it on purpose. It’s a calculated insult to America and its armed forces. We must protest. Don’t you think so. Bill?” and he turned to the Colonel. The Wrigley-trained jaws of the Colonel moved acquicscingly.

“If you let these Russifies get away with it,” continued the General, “you’ll soon have them . . . they’ll soon be , . . they’ll soon have us by the . . And not finding the proper words he turned on me in a rage and started shaking his finger: “I’m going to call Bob McClure and tell him to lodge a protest tomorrow and demand ail apology.” lie put on his cap, buttoned his coat, and started towards the stairs. “And if Bob McClure won t do anything about it,”he barked, “I’m going to see Lucius Clay.”

2

MUSICAL life in Berlin was indeed complicated in the winter of 1945-1946. When I arrived there in August, 1945, the Allies had divided their musical Germans among themselves and were controlling their activities with various degrees of severity and encouragement. The three big music-making organizations, the State Opera, the Berlin Municipal Opera, and the Philharmonic Orchestra, went respectively to the Russians, the British, and the Americans. The French, having come too late for the prize-awarding ceremony, got nothing. They had to be content with occasional gifts from the other Allies, in the form either of concerts by the Philharmonic Orchestra in their part of the sprawling Berlin ruin, or of the loan of the Municipal or the State Opera House for performances of the Comédie Française or the Conservatoire orchestra.

The control of German music by the American generals was, on the surface, reasonable enough. It was based on the principle so well expressed by the late King of Saxony, who, having abdicated, turned to the delegates of the Constitutional Assembly and said, “Now you can make your dirt all by yourself. ”

Officially we were supposed to be concerned only with the following: —

1. To eject the Nazis from German musical life and license those German musicians whom we believed to be “clean” Germans.

2. To control the programs of German concerts and see to it that they would not turn into nationalist manifestations.

3. To guard and protect the “monuments” and “treasures” of Germany’s culture which had by virtue of conquest fallen into our hands.

Unofficially we had to find halls and houses for the orchestras, operas, and conservatories, coal to heat them, roofing and bricks to patch up the leaks and holes, bulbs to light them, instruments for the orchestras, calories for the musicians (questions raised at staff meetings included such ticklish problems as whether a trombonist is justified in getting more calories than a string player — that is, whether more calories are needed to blow the trombone than to bow the double bass). The bombed-out orchestra libraries needed parts and scores; composers needed music paper and ink; opera houses needed performers and costumes; and everybody needed shelter, food, and fuel. Fortunately “our” general was a very good general. He backed up the work of his officers and fought with his superiors about the shortsightedness of our policy.

The Russian policy differed from ours. The problem of “clean hands” in regard to Nazis and collaborators did not worry them. In the beginning, they put thousands of Nazis in M.V.D. camps, raped and murdered a number of others while putting Berlin and other German cities through a monstrous medieval sack, but once all this was over they began to use the Nazi conductors, performers, and singers whenever and wherever they found it useful. They agreed with us perfunctorily on the need for denazification but, as in most other cases involving “quadripartite agreements,” they disregarded the agreements completely whenever they found them to be obstacles to their independent policy in regard to Germany. Overtly, towards the Germans, they began from the very outset to play the role of patrons of German art, German music, and German culture; and as a corollary to this propagandistic Kulturträgertum (carrying the banner of culture) they began at first secretly, then openly, to castigate the Americans and the British as suppressors of German culture, pointing at our “hands-off policy” with an accusing finger. While we kept aloof, the Russians pushed the Germans around, told them what to do and how to do it, ordered them to resume opera and ballet performances on incredibly short notice, told them what to play and what not to play, made them join the Socialist Unity or the Communist Party under the threat of losing their jobs or the inducement of getting better rations, and presented to them, as supreme examples of the Great Soviet culture, Russian choruses, troupes of dancers, singers, and virtuosi, brought to entertain Soviet occupation troops and the officials of their military government.

3

THESE “closed” concerts for the Soviet military, by imported Russian artists, were curious affairs, reflecting average Russian tastes and hence fascinating to see. I would occasionally go when invited by my “opposite numbers” of the Soviet military government. Once after a concert these gentlemen took me to a kind of Junior Officers’ Club in Karlshorst, the northeastern part of Berlin, where the Soviet Military Administration had its headquarters. There were other Soviet citizens in the party — Russian artists and actors, both male and female, military and civilian.

The concert had been long and dreary. It had begun with the famous Russian tenor Kozlovsky, who sang the two famous arias from Eugene Onegin, the Song of India from Sadko, and lieder by Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Arensky, and Rachmaninov. The voice was small but lovely. Like many Russian tenors it had a warm lyrical quality. He switched from his full tone to a soft falsetto with ease and grace. His breath was controlled and completely inaudible. His dynamics were smooth and his intonation perfect; but . . . but . . . his interpretation! The awful provincial taste in delivery, its greasy outmoded sentimentality reminiscent of the worst habits of the American radio crooner. After each of his numbers the audience clapped and cheered furiously. Their faces got red and their eyes wet. The stocky pomaded little colonels and their round middle-class wives dressed in prewar evening gowns, a plump brooch keeping the V-shaped neckline from bursting out under the heavy milk-farm equipment, jumped to their feet and bellowed the names of famous Russian songs they wanted to hear and yelled: “Bi-is . . . Bi-is . . . Bi-is.” He sang innumerable encores, each time interspersed with the same kind of bellowing and clapping, until finally, after he had made a gesture of vocal exhaustion, they let him go.

During the next two numbers on the program, the Second String Quartet by Borodin and the oozy Andante Cantabile by Tchaikovsky, played by the famous Moscow Beethoven String Quartet, the audience sat in respectful though fidgety silence. They looked just a touch bored and restive. The next attraction was a cubical lady pianist who played the Twelfth Hungarian Rhapsody of Liszt, two hackneyed nocturnes of Chopin, and the painfully boring Polichinelle by Rachmaninov.

Then a troupe of Ukrainian singers and dancers in national costume and headgear appeared and did what Ukrainian singers and dancers are supposed to do and have been doing whenever and wherever they are on the stage of a theater, a concert hall, or a cabaret. The male dancers kicked about on the floor in crouched positions, surrounded by a flock of bouncing girls who zigzagged between them waving colored kerchiefs. The chorus, in a semicircle behind them, bellowed and clapped to the strumming of three pandura players. The last and longest entertainment on the program was the singing of the famous and superlative Red Army Chorus. The army boys started off with Russian sentimentalia (akin in spirit, period, and quality to the American barbershopiana), then branched into three or four old patriotic songs of the time of the late Emperors Alexander III and Nicolas II. They concluded with the three celebrated patriotic Soviet songs of the Second World War: Broad Is My Fatherland, The Song of the Red Pioneers, and the unavoidable Red Cavalry Song with the thumping of horses as background. With the exception of the Red Army songs, there was not a single piece of music that had not been composed long before the Revolution of 1917, nor the name of a single famous Soviet composer on the program.

Now, I thought, as I entered the officers’ club after the concert, I may have the opportunity of asking a few questions of my Russian hosts and for once getting straight answers. I sat down at an oblong table, covered with a worn white cloth, in a large, crowded, and smoke-filled dining room. My neighbors at the table were a pleasant-looking Russian captain and a girl in a lieutenant’s uniform, with a pale, sad face and black unkempt hair. The cubical pianist and a few other artists of the evening’s performance also sat with us. After some small talk I turned to the nice-looking captain and asked him why the evening’s program did not contain at least one work by a contemporary Soviet composer. Realizing that I was some Russianspeaking kind of foreigner who wanted an explanation, instead of giving me the propaganda line he said quite frankly: “You see, we don’t really like the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev. . . . It’s strange to us . . . its language is unfamiliar . . . it’s too complicated, too dissonant . . . and not enough melodichna.” While he talked, the lady pianist and some of the other artists nodded approvingly.

“But isn’t this just your personal feeling?” I insisted. “Don’t the majority of the Russian people admire Prokofiev and Shostakovich?”

“Yes, we do . . . admire them,” he answered, making a special inflection on the word admire, “but admiring and liking are two different things, aren’t they?” and he smiled disarmingly.

“Most of us in Russia,” broke in the girl lieutenant on my right, saying Russia instead of the usual Soiouz (Union), “don’t like to listen to this new music. When I go to a concert, I want to hear exactly the kind of program we heard tonight. Didn’t you think this was a splendid concert?”

I heard these opinions often, especially on those occasions when, after some drinking and eating, Soviet citizens would unbend and forget about the presence of a foreigner. Later, when the music purge took place, it occurred to me how much their point of view conformed to that of the Politburo and Stalin, or rather how closely their taste and opinions in regard to music (as represented in the edict of the Central Committee of the Communist Party) reflected the incredibly old-fashioned provincial taste of the new uneducated middle strata of Soviet society.

4

BUT the main purpose of my coming to Berlin and working on General McClure’s staff had little to do with the recalorization of German trombone players or the observation of Russian tastes in music. My job was to track down those Russians in the Soviet administration whose task was the same as General McClure’s — that is, the control of German press, publications, radio, films, theater, and music. After finding the recalcitrants, I was to persuade them of the urgent need and the general usefulness of establishing a Quadripartite Directorate of Information Control with the British, the French, and the Americans.

My difficulties in unraveling the structure of the Soviet military bureaucracy in Berlin seemed normal. I knew that the secrets of bureaucracy have to be penetrated gradually and that the technique of penetration should be based upon (a) tenacity, (b) constant pressure on sources of information, and (c) luck.

One day after nearly two months of frustrated efforts, Colonel Kirsanov, the editor of the official Soviet German-language daily, the Tägliche Rundschau, gave me a tip. He informed me that two important personages had arrived from Moscow and that both of them were to reorganize the information control bureaucracy of the Soviet Military Administration. He promised to introduce me to the august arrivals at the party Marshal Zhukov was giving in Potsdam on the 7th of November, to which all of our generals and colonels were invited.

On November 7, our general was out of town, so a friend, an American colonel, and I pocketed his invitation and drove to the party. The crowd of hosts and guests got drunk and noisy an hour after we arrived, I could not find Kirsanov anywhere and began to think that his tip was one of those deceptions and evasions to which I had become accustomed in Berlin. I went despondently through all of the halls of the Crown Prince’s palace where the reception was being held. I inspected every corner, looking behind every group of red, roaring faces. He was nowhere to be found. My colonelcompanion (a nondrinker) suggested that we leave.

“It’s no use.” he said, “your colonel pulled another one of his usual tricks.” We went towards the exit. But I had forgotten my coat and went back to the check room. There, helping someone out of his fur coat, I recognized Colonel Kirsanov. He turned around and said, “Ah, Nikolai Dimitrievich, here he is! This is Colonel Tulpanov and this,” and he directed me to another figure standing behind him, “this is General Bokov.” The General seemed to be the open-stock pattern Russian general: stocky, short, round-faced. The Colonel was different. His face, his manner, his whole appearance immediately arrested my attention. His head was clean-shaven and sat, totally neckless, like an oversized billiard ball, on a short, well-built body. His eyes were narrowly slit, his cheekbones protruded, and his nose was flat and turned up at the end. When he smiled, as he did when he greeted me, his eyes took on a shy and somewhat foxy expression. His whole manner of greeting me was both polite and reticent, awkward and friendly. I was struck by the absence of rows of medals on his worn-looking khaki coat — only one or two little patches of ribbons and a small red star dangling near them.

I did not know what to say and how to begin but he helped me. “You don’t mean you are leaving so early,” he said, “from such a . . . gay party?” and his eyes squinted. I replied that I had to, but that I was full of regrets because I had hoped so much and for so long to see him.

“But could I perhaps call on you . . . tomorrow,” I said, “and extend to you at that time an imitation from my general, General McClure?”

“Not tomorrow,” he said. “Tomorrow we will be resting and digesting,” and he looked up at Kirsanov and laughed. “Besides, I do not know anything about the things you want to talk to me about. Better give me a ring in a few days. Colonel Kirsanov knows my number.”

“Call me up tomorrow,” said Colonel Kirsanov as the group moved towards the party.

5

TULPANOV was Zhdanov’s choice for the job of chief of Agitprop (Agitation and Propaganda Administration) for Germany. He and General Bokov were to be the eyes and ears of the Politburo in the S.M.A. Only gradually did we come to know the importance of the “Tulip.”To us, in November, 1945, he was just another Soviet colonel, who had been sent to Berlin to put some order in the disorganized Soviet control of information media and, we hoped, come to terms with us and begin coöperating in our dreamland organization: the Quadripartite Directorate of Information Control.

Although I obtained the Tulip’s telephone number I could not reach him. The other end of the wire would either not react at all or after endless ringings a bland voice would answer: “I am listening to you ...”

“Is Colonel Tulpanov there?”

“No . . . he’s out!" and the receiver would be slammed down.

Finally I decided to go to Soviet headquarters and find Tulpanov in person. After a great deal of labyrinthine exploration, insistence and persistence, patience and mock indignation, I succeeded in tracking him down and obtaining an interview with him. He greeted me like an old friend, excused himself for having been “so terribly busy,” and promised to call “next week” on General McClure. “Next week,” surprisingly enough, occurred in ten days. He called on General McClure with two of his aides and agreed to meet with him and the British and French chiefs of Information Control on an “informal” basis to discuss “the points of common interest.”

For the next three or four months, instead of lessening, our frustration was to grow stronger and more intense. We met at regular intervals at so-called “informal" meetings of an “informal" committee to discuss “informally” our “informal” business. When either his British or his American colleague asked him when we would be able to drop this ballast of “informality,”his answer would be: “I am expecting new directives from my government.”

In the course of these months, I grew to know him quite well and, so it seemed to me, he started to take an interest in, if not a liking to, me. At every opportunity for a private talk he would ask me questions about myself. Through the grapevine of our intelligence I was informed that the hierarchically minded S.M.A. had an exaggerated idea of my importance. Because of that I understood the Tulip’s interest to mean that he wanted to find out who I was and what my duties really were.

General McClure was pressing me to get the Tulip to come and have a “quiet.” dinner with him at his villa on the Wannsee. In the good old American way, he thought that the way to do business with a tough customer was to invite him to a party, have a couple of Martinis (vodka would do) before dinner, follow them up with a hearty meal, then have more drinks, and in the course of it all settle some “mutually profitable” business. The Tulip, after much nagging and prompting, accepted the General’s invitation. But at the appointed hour he did not appear.

I was sitting in my office, waiting for him to arrive. It was arranged that I would guide him to the General’s house. Six-thirty passed. My telephone rang every five minutes. The General was on the phone, getting angrier by the minute. I and a colleague of mine were working two phones, calling every Soviet number we knew.

While this frustrating and absurd search was going on, I kept seeing before my eyes the General’s Martinis dissolve in ice, the roast shrink in the oven, the soup grow opaque, and the salad wilt. Finally at 8 P.M. we tracked down Major Dymshitz and by talking alternately we made him feel as if he were confronted with an ultimatum: “If Colonel Tulpanov is not going to come then . . .”Curiously enough it worked. Ten minutes later the Colonel called me. “But I thought it was the eighteenth and today is the sixteenth,”he said in an unperturbed voice. I replied dryly that he must have on his desk a “reminder" which had been sent to him only two days ago, “Noo . . . all right,” he said, “if it isn’t too late and I won’t disturb the gospodin General McClure I will come.”Half an hour later he arrived in my office in his long greatcoat and a Papakha, the tall gray Astrakhan fur cap of the Cossack cavalry. He smiled slyly and said: “Noo, Nikolai Dimitrievich, poydem [let’s go]. I’m awfully sorry. I hope your general will forgive me.”

The first part of the dinner was icy and all my premonitions about the Martinis, the soup, the roast, and the salad came true. It took General McClure some time to control his indignation and decide to make the best of it. The Tulip, on the other hand, was all charm. He talked about the war and his wounds during the defense of Leningrad and the way the Germans were beaten in the battle of the Don. He asked the General about the landing in Normandy (a topic which no American general can resist) and the liberation of Paris and . . . by the time the dinner was over the General’s ire had subsided. No business, however, had been discussed and there was not a glimmer of hope left that it would be.

When we got up from the table and went to the living room the Tulip, pointing at an upright piano in the corner of the room, turned to me and said: “Ah, now I’ve caught you! Get down at the piano and start playing.” And he turned to the General: “Gospodin General, please order him to play.” I had the feeling that, by that time, the General knew that the game was up.

6

IT WAS dark when we slipped into the Tulip’s big black Horch. “Where do you live? I will drop you,” he said. I gave the driver my address, and we started bumping on the worn, narrow road. He hummed for a while the last song of the evening. Then he stopped. “Well, here we are,” he began in a low, slow voice. “You, a Russian, and I, a Russian. Only you . . .” And he stopped for a moment as if searching for words. “ You . . . are in this strange uniform and I . . . I wear our old Russian Cossack Papakha and the epaulets of the great Russian army.” He stopped as if waiting for me to say something but I kept mum. “Ni-ko-lai Di-mi-tri-e-vich Na-bo-kov,” he continued, pronouncing with care every syllable of my name. “What a good, well-sounding old Russian name. And here you are . . . in that uniform.”

I felt suddenly that I had to speak, that I had to say something simple, something definite and true. “In this uniform,” I said, “you can’t do anything to me. If I didn’t have this uniform on now . . . if I had stayed there, I wouldn’t need any uniform. I would be dead. I would . . .”

He laughed quietly, slyly. “All of you émigrés,” he remarked in a didactic, paternal way, with a barely perceptible overtone of contempt, “all of you have a thwarted, a distorted idea about our Fatherland. We have gone ahead and a new world has been born in Russia. The Revolution has receded into the dialectical process of history. The doors are open again for all Russians everywhere.“ I felt his eyes look me all over, as if bailing me: “A man with a name like Nabokov should be in Russia, working, toiling for the new life, for the future. You are a musician, aren’t you? A composer?” And he stopped, waiting for my answer. But I couldn’t speak; I had nothing to say.

“We need composers in Russia,” he continued, “and you know what has happened all over Russia? New towns have sprung up all over the place, and each one has a new university and a technicum and a conservatory. I saw some of these wonderful new towns in Siberia. They were built by the Red pioneers, during their summer vacation.” The tone of his voice began to mellow. It grew emphatic and lyrical. “In the middle of the town stands a factory, say a tractor factory, and around it are clean, neat workers’ dwellings. The whole town lives for the factory. Imbued with pride in its rising production, it follows the statistics of the factory’s output with intense excitement. When a tired father comes home from a day’s work in the factory his children jump all over him and shout:

“‘Tell us, tell us, Father, how high was the output today?’”

The car stopped and the driver rolled down the window and asked for directions. I told him where to turn and again dropped back into the darkness of my seat. “Yes, Nikolai Dimitrievich Nabokov,” started the Tulip, picking up the thread of his talk where he had left it, “a man with your name and your intelligence should be wearing our uniform or should be teaching in one of our schools or our conservatories. We need people like you. Of course,” he continued, and I felt the contempt so well concealed by the quiet paternal tone, “of course you wouldn’t hope to find right away a teaching post in Moscow or Leningrad, or even Kharkov or Kiev, but . . . but in one of those new Siberian towns . . . there . . . there you would have a good place to live, to teach and to work.”

I waited till the car had stopped in front of my house and the chauffeur had come out and opened the door. In the pale light of our door lantern I looked at Tulpanov’s face. I saw his bare, naked forehead, his protruding ears and the sly, foxy eyes. He was looking at me, smiling, laughing, full of brazen scorn and contempt. “Thank you, Sergei Ivanovich,” I said calmly and slowly, “but I prefer the climate of New York,” and I shut the door of his car.

As I tiptoed upstairs to my room I heard the quiet snoring of Colonel Nicholson. “Thank God,” I said and went straight to bed.