The Literary Murder

by Batya Gur

  Now this side of the tape came to an end, and Michael prepared to listen for the second time to the recording of his conversation with Boris Zinger. First the tape player emitted a creaking sound—Lowenthal sitting down on the hospital bed, like a son next to his father—and then Michael heard Lowenthal addressing Boris in fluent Yiddish, mixed with some words in English. “Vos?” the emaciated man lying on the big bed said. “What?” It was the only word of Yiddish Michael understood. The bedside table had held vases of flowers, candies, a Yiddish newspaper, and a Hebrew Bible. A television set hung from the ceiling.

  “I’ll tell him that you’re another literary scholar. That there’s a revival of interest in Ferber’s poetry. It’ll make him happy. Not a word about murder and trials.” Then Lowenthal had allowed him at last to enter the room.

  The body lying on the bed was ruined, as the lawyer had said. But the eyes! Like those of the prophets I imagined when I was a child, thought Michael as he looked into the deep brown eyes, full of ardent feeling and wisdom. Lowenthal plumped the pillows, and the man raised himself to a sitting position and leaned against them. A mane of white hair surrounded his shriveled face, which was an unhealthy pink color, and his smile was warm and full of life.

  Now his voice came over the tape recorder, and Michael thought again, as he had in the hospital, that on his way back, too, he would not linger in New York but would hurry straight home.

  “Anatoly,” said Boris Zinger in a voice full of longing and supplication, and he began to quote lines from “Requiem in a Black Square,” except that he said “Red Square,” and Michael suddenly realized that he knew exactly how Iddo Dudai had felt on that night when he returned to Klein’s house from North Carolina. It was shocking to think of Tirosh changing words that might have betrayed the source of the poems. Now Boris Zinger spoke, sometimes in Yiddish, which Lowenthal would translate without being asked, but for the most part in fluent Hebrew.

  In a low voice, which now sounded to him strangely stilted, Michael asked his first question, about Boris’s Hebrew. Anatoly, explained Boris, spoke perfect Hebrew, and it was he who had taught the language to him. For whole days at a time he taught him, and in the camp, he, Boris, had learned Anatoly’s lines by heart, “so that if anything happened, God forbid, if Anatoly didn’t live,” he would be able to preserve them. The prison authorities didn’t know anything about the Hebrew, “they weren’t interested in poetry there.” The hotel room filled with peals of childlike laughter, which seemed totally inappropriate to the figure Michael remembered, to the face with its sunken eyes. For a moment he had asked himself if the man was sane. “So how did it work?” asked Michael. “Did Anatoly write the poems down, or did he just remember them?”

  “Both,” said Boris. “He wrote them on pieces of newspaper, and he remembered them. But there is no point in explaining how people write in katorga. There are ways. All kinds of ways and systems.”

  The tape player was silent for a few seconds, and then Boris went on speaking, in a lower, less enthusiastic tone. There were camps, said Boris, where it was possible to obtain paper; you only had to know where to hide it. There was a boy with them in Perm who had learned Pushkin by heart and who spent his days and nights writing down his works. But in any case, it was impossible to rely on the written word; you had to learn everything by heart.

  “Where did you hide the manuscripts?” Michael heard himself asking in his Israeli accent, which sounded strange next to the Yiddish with an American accent that Lowenthal interjected from time to time and to Boris Zinger’s Hebrew with its heavy Russian accent.

  “There are places,” and Zinger had looked at Michael fearfully.

  But Michael insisted, gently. He even drew his chair closer to the sick man’s bed and repeated the lie he had agreed on with Lowenthal: the Institute for Contemporary Judaism wanted to document everything, they wanted a picture of Boris too. And slowly, as if he was still afraid, Boris elaborated.

  There were all kinds of places to hide writing. Inside the hollow iron legs of the beds, where no one looked. And in the place where they worked chopping down trees, they hid it there too, in the cracks in the walls of the cabin. But that wasn’t important—the hoarse voice rose—it wasn’t important. He, Boris, knew all the poems by heart, anyway. He was Anatoly’s secretary, and again laughter. And then the coughing. So on their way to work, and at night after the day’s work was over, especially when it was impossible to get warm, and it was almost always impossible to get warm, Anatoly would begin to recite the lines, and he, Boris, would repeat them, until he had them by heart. Under those conditions, said Boris—and Michael recalled the haunted expression of someone remembering and banishing the memory, but hanging on to it for a few minutes too—under those terrible conditions, they needed it.

  “Needed what?” Michael listened in embarrassment to his own stupid question, the answer to which was so obvious, and he remembered Boris’s forgiving smile. Max Lowenthal said: “What? What did he say?” Boris Zinger translated Michael’s question, and it was Lowenthal who explained: they needed to transcend themselves, needed things that were beyond the body, outside the cold and the hunger and the daily body searches, beyond the pain. There were solitary people there, but they, he and Anatoly, had each other. Like brothers. More than brothers, they were souls that complemented each other. Anatoly created, and Boris remembered. In those days, they were at the beginning of the road, today there were dozens of people in the Soviet Union copying the manuscripts, so that everything need not depend on one person; but then . . . And again there came the sound of Boris’s laughter, now mingled with sobs, and Michael, who knew the tape almost by heart now, waved his hand as if to rebuke himself for his sentimentality.

  “Perhaps the muses are silent when the cannons roar,” said Max Lowenthal suddenly, “but when everything has been destroyed, even without cannons, when people are crowded together in one hut, or one cell, when there’s no privacy, when you go out to work in the dark and come back in the dark, when you’re being watched all the time, day after day, year after year, when you discover that your main thoughts are of bread or cold or exhaustion—then your only refuge is an external reality. First there were Anatoly’s poems, and then Boris had something to live for: to take care of Anatoly and to learn the poems by heart. Four hundred and thirty-seven poems. And then Anatoly died. Of pneumonia.” Michael heard Lowenthal’s American accent coming out of the tape player. “And that’s something you won’t hear about from Boris. They don’t talk about things like that,” he added with pathos.

  The tape player emitted sobs and murmurs in Russian and Hebrew and Yiddish, “A beautiful soul . . . a great heart . . . ”

  Michael pressed the button. The voices were silenced, and he returned to the ordinary world.

  Outside the window, the darkness was absolute. The sights and sounds of the day echoed in his mind. The Southern accent of the two policemen waiting in the hospital corridor. To his relief, he had understood every word they said. They spoke to him slowly, as if he were dull-witted as well as foreign. They didn’t comment on his accent.

  He remembered the amazing sight he had seen outside the big white hotel. Across the road was a girls’ dormitory, “a sorority, for girl students only,” explained Lowenthal, and made a face.

  On the large veranda opposite the hotel entrance, ten girls had sat on wicker chairs around a circular table. They were wearing wide, dark skirts, and they had white gloves on their hands. They were sipping from delicate cups. Michael and Lowenthal stood next to the fence surrounding the round, Southern-style veranda and watched ten extended pinkies rise into the air along with raised teacups.

  “In the South you can see everything,” said Lowenthal dryly. “They’re still living in the last century,” and he described the rite of passage they underwent at the age of eighteen: the ritual of “coming out” into society. “Debutante,” Michael said, recalling the word used to describe such girls.

  He himself had come
here from Boston, Lowenthal said proudly, and he had chosen to live in the South and work there in the civil rights movement. “That represents exactly the kind of nonsense I’m here to oppose,” he said, pointing to the girls on the veranda.

  A quiet, pleasant breeze blew into Michael’s room, but the air was still humid. The moon above the magnolia tree pierced his heart with its beauty. All day long, Michael had felt as if he were being dragged against his will into another world. He shook himself and returned to the tape player.

  “What did you do after Anatoly died?” he heard himself say in the quiet, careful voice he had adopted throughout the interview.

  Boris had recited the poems over and over again, until he knew them by heart. In the last analysis, he knew that he was the only witness to the poems, the only source, and he was aware of their value, their greatness. The task of his life, his vocation, his mission, was to get them out. And when he received an additional sentence, he said, and was transferred to a camp outside Moscow, he was very worried.

  For five years, said Boris, he had worked at befriending a man in the camp near Moscow—not a prisoner but a worker, an illiterate plumber. He had taught him things, given him advice on his love life, and also bribed him with every means in his power, with all kinds of goods he had received or stolen. “The man was a simple kulak,” explained Boris apologetically, in his heavy Russian accent, “but there was no alternative. It takes years to get to know someone in those places. People don’t trust each other. Everyone’s suspect. I was afraid that I, too, would die soon. And I took my soul in my hands, as Anatoly liked to say, and gave the poems to the kulak. You know, in Russia there’s no censorship of internal mail. If you’re not a convict, you can send anything inside the country. I gave him the address of someone I had known as a student in Moscow, before I was arrested. A man who had recently arrived in the camp told me that he was still in Moscow, living in the same place. And so I tried, hoping that my old acquaintance would be able to pass everything on to somebody in Moscow who would be able to get it out of the country.”

  “All the poems at once?” Michael heard his own voice asking.

  No. There were ten parcels, and the poems inside were in very small handwriting. Now there were mutters in Yiddish again. The tape player emitted Boris’s cough and Lowenthal’s attempts to conclude the interview at this point: Michael could finish the rest later; now they had to let Boris rest.

  “Perhaps I could have just the essence now?” With a faint feeling of embarrassment, Michael heard his own voice and then Lowenthal’s impatient reply: He himself, Lowenthal, had received the poems, from a Jewish student in Moscow, in 1956, when the first rumblings of the thaw were being heard. It was during his first visit there.

  “In ’56?” asked Michael.

  “I know it sounds strange. It was very early for someone like me, who wasn’t a Communist or even a member of a front organization, but my involvement with civil rights got me in.”

  “You weren’t working for the CIA, were you?”

  “I certainly wasn’t. Not then or ever. But I’ve discovered that the most incredible things happen to those who don’t know they’re incredible.”

  From Moscow he had flown to Vienna, and there, he said with flashing eyes, he had met that talented youngster who later became an important poet in Israel. It had been at an anti-Communist conference at which both of them were student representatives. He had shown him the poems. Shaul Tirosh, said Lowenthal proudly, was the man to whom he gave the manuscripts. They sat at a café—he could even remember the taste of the strudel, but not the name of the café. Even then he had felt a need to share his experiences, explained Lowenthal, and so he had shown the poems to Tirosh. Tirosh was very excited and immediately offered to take them back to Israel with him. He told Lowenthal that he worked in the Hebrew Literature Department at the Hebrew University, that he had connections in the literary world, and he held the little pages with such love that he, Lowenthal, was sure they would be in safe hands. Tirosh translated a few lines for him, right there in the café, and even he, who didn’t understand the first thing about poetry, was impressed by their power. He knew that he could trust him, Lowenthal repeated, and sure enough, Tirosh had published the poems in an annotated edition. Unfortunately he himself, as Michael knew, had no Hebrew, and so he was unable to enjoy the fruits of his endeavors to the full.

  Here Michael interrupted to ask Lowenthal if he had shown Boris the book Tirosh sent him.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Lowenthal said in embarrassment that he didn’t know how to explain it, but the book had been lost a few years earlier. In a near whisper, he added that he had shown the book to someone who knew Hebrew and that this person had not been particularly impressed. And so, he said in the same embarrassed tone, he had not been overly concerned about losing it. He was silent for a moment and then said that the young man, Dudai, had promised to send him another copy.

  At this point Michael took the book he had brought with him out of his briefcase and handed it wordlessly to Boris. Boris stroked the cover with joyful excitement and then opened the book and leafed through it. The only sound coming over the tape player was the rustle of the pages.

  Michael vividly remembered the expression of confusion and dismay that spread over the sick man’s face as he failed to find the familiar words, the words he had preserved all those years and known by heart as if they were his daily prayers. He repeated the words “This isn’t . . . ” a few times and then said: “The young man, Dudai, said it was all right, that everything was all right,” and Michael thought of how Iddo must have had to restrain himself in order not to reveal anything to Boris, or even to Lowenthal.

  Then Zinger’s hoarse voice rose from the tape player, uttering a spate of quotations. Once more Michael heard the familiar, typical images of Tirosh’s poetry, together with the famous line: “At dawn violets wilted in your skin,” pronounced in the same way as on the cassette in the forensics lab in Jerusalem. A flood of quotes from “Apollo Appeared to Me by a Blasted Tree,” and from the long poem “On the Last First Man”: “Under the thin skin hides the warm fles.’ and the blood . . . ” and “In the yellowing skeleton of the living man the dust sings a siren song . . . ” and, afterward, “For if there is a spirit in man it is a withering wind . . . ,” and then Michael heard his own voice, tensely interrupting the compulsive stream of quotations with the question: “Is that what Ferber wrote?”

  And the man’s outburst of rage. “What is this?” he cried several times. And then the groans of pain and the sobs.

  Then Lowenthal’s pampered mouth tightened sternly, and he seized Michael by the arm and dragged him out the door and into the corridor.

  With a grave expression on his face, Lowenthal demanded an explanation of what had been said inside the room. Finally he asked Michael if there was a suspicion of plagiarism, and Michael nodded.

  Now the tape came to an end.

  In the mid-sixties, Lowenthal explained to Michael, as they sat in the elegant hotel dining room, the manuscripts began streaming out. Until then everything was sporadic, dribs and drabs. Manuscripts were smuggled out via channels that had been carefully checked in advance. They had to make sure that the source in the Soviet Union would not come to any harm and also that it wasn’t a trap. Lowenthal stuck his fork into a piece of sweet potato and lifted it to his mouth. He resumed talking before he had finished chewing: “That’s why the whole story is so fantastic, because in 1956 I was a total innocent. If I’d known then what I know today, I would never have smuggled Ferber’s manuscripts out of Russia. Only a lunatic or an idiot would have done what I did then.” He stared in front of him and shuddered, and then he continued speaking as if he were lecturing to a historical committee: Today there were ways of smuggling manuscripts, and for obvious reason he couldn’t go into all of them in detail. One example, he said, wiping his mouth with the white linen napkin, was a network set up in Italy by anti-Soviet left-wing Catholic activist
s who belonged to a group based in Milan. One of them was a librarian in Bologna, said Lowenthal in a dreamy voice. He himself knew only this librarian, who was able to get mail in and out of the Soviet Union. Lowenthal would receive the mail in America, in a parcel sent to his home from Bologna, and he would inform them of the exact date of its arrival.

  “Whom did you inform?” asked Michael.

  The librarian in Bologna. Lowenthal would also inform him of the state of the manuscript, and after showing it to Russian experts, he would pass on their opinion. Once the connection had been established, many manuscripts began to arrive. “You won’t believe it”—Lowenthal laughed—“but some of the manuscripts were sent in the Vatican diplomatic pouch. The Vatican has representatives in Moscow, and they made the connection. There are other ways too; journalists, for example. They use the diplomatic mail of their countries’ representatives in Moscow, sometimes even without the knowledge of the embassy people. They had an arrangement with someone at the American end, who would pass the stuff on to me. Sometimes it was a journalist, sometimes, I guess, someone from the CIA. Or someone on the Russian desk in the State Department. . . .

  “There’s another method too,” he said with renewed energy after an interval in which he polished off the rest of his chicken. “People who traveled a lot to Russia, like a Swedish biologist I met called Perla Lindborg. She went there several times a year, and she would send me the material from Stockholm. I can tell you her name now because she’s dead. And there was someone else, an Austrian physician who sent material from Vienna. It’s also possible via Hong Kong, but . . . ” Lowenthal looked at Michael dolefully and acknowledged that now he was trusted. They had begun to trust him after a number of Russians had given him manuscripts they had smuggled out of the Soviet Union. Lowenthal shook his finger at Michael. “There are things you may not know about,” he said. “Did you know that the YMCA Press in Paris prints smuggled manuscripts by Soviet dissidents?” And without waiting for a response, he added that an anti-Soviet publisher in Frankfurt smuggled manuscripts out of Russia, published them, and deposited the royalties in a Swiss bank for the authors’ accounts. In 1972, Lowenthal had flown to Frankfurt and given money to the people there. They had sent the money—royalties for smuggled manuscripts—by an unknown route to the authors in the Soviet Union. After that there were no more problems with regard to his trustworthiness. When he arrived in Russia in ’73, they knew that they could reply on Max Lowenthal one hundred percent. Even Andrei Sakarov had called him up and asked to meet him. By then there were no more questions. Why was he telling Michael all this? asked Lowenthal rhetorically. “So that you’ll understand what a complicated industry it is today, what a complex operation, and you’ll realize how primitive I was in 1956. I was careless, unsophisticated, I didn’t know anything. It was my first visit to the Soviet Union; how could I know? If I’d smuggled Ferber’s manuscripts out ten years ago, fifteen years ago, it could never have happened. But then? You’ll never believe it if I tell you what I did then. I took those little pages, covered closely with that tiny writing, and I felt like a master spy. The night before I left, I undid the waistband of my trousers”—here there was a demonstration: Lowenthal opened his narrow leather belt and exposed the inner lining of the waistband of his trousers—“I flattened out the papers”—he smoothed the tablecloth to illustrate his words—“crammed them in and sewed the lining up again.” That was all he could think of doing then. Half the night he spent sewing, he said, chuckling, he wanted so desperately to succeed.