Last Call for Blackford Oakes

by Buckley, William F. ;

  “Yes, Rufina,” Andrei stretched out his hand as he might have done to silence a student exhibiting his ignorance, “but he was talking about the peasantry. It is they who drink too much.”

  The hearty knock on the door interrupted the banter. Rufina went to the door and brought in the Gromovs.

  Andrei rose from his easy chair. Those fat folk, Ursina thought, will need to enter the room one at a time. And, true, Maksim Gromov’s girth was enormous, his wife’s torso equally so. “Ah, Maksim, Irina, how nice to welcome you other than in a classroom setting. Have a drink of vodka before Rufina consumes it all.”

  They drank together and nibbled on the zakuski. Ursina turned to Maksim. “Tell me something you learned this week in class from Andrei Fyodorovich. Oh, I’m sorry—I forgot. I wasn’t supposed to ask about what he teaches. If Rufina correctly describes the scene, we must assume it is very secret. Does it tell us, Andrei Fyodorovich, how we can overcome the West in agricultural production?”

  Rufina shot a look of exasperation at Ursina. Andrei’s face was suddenly rigid. He lit a Gauloise cigarette. And then, a mild reproach in his tone of voice, he said, “The Marxist revolution is not about how to make corn grow more plentifully than they evidently manage to do in … Iowa?” His patient smile now resumed, and he reached for his glass. Andrei liked to drink and smoke simultaneously, and frequently.

  “Of course, of course. On the other hand,” Ursina took a conspicuous bite of one of the zakuski, “is there anything grander than this smoked salmon? You’re not going to try to trump that as a Soviet accomplishment, this salmon? With what? A peaceful revolution in Nicaragua?”

  Rufina sighed resignedly. She turned to Maksim. “Maks, the way Ursina Dmitrievna is going, we won’t get her to talk sense unless we start conversing about men’s genital problems and getting it wrong. That’s the only subject about which I assume she knows something.”

  “You want to talk about that?” Ursina laughed. “Well, there was this man called Adam, and this girl called Eve—”

  “Oh shut up, Ursina, and have another drink,” Andrei said.

  “I’ll gladly help you change the subject,” said Kirov. “I will tell you about three British authors I have been reading. They are Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. Andrei Fyodorovich, you probably have heard of them.”

  “Actually, I have known all three.”

  Kirov was stunned to hear this. But he was confronted with the hard stone wall that encircled Andrei Fyodorovich Martins. All Kirov could get from his host was that he had “brushed up against” those British authors while studying in England as a very young man. But whereas Kirov, the elderly and soft-spoken scholar, was willing to retire from the fray, Ursina persisted. “Can’t you tell us anything about these famous British writers, Andrei Fyodorovich? Like—did they fight in the Great Anti-Fascist War?”

  “Yes. I think they were all … involved.”

  “Were they in favor of the war during the Stalin–Hitler pact?”

  The reference brought silence. That episode in Soviet history, when Stalin had joined Adolf Hitler in a mutual security treaty, had stupefied Marxists and fellow travelers around the world. They had been taught that any concession to Hitler was a violation of the faith. The Stalin–Hitler pact was simply not mentioned.

  Kirov spoke up, reproachfully. “The Soviet Union, Ursina, was fighting for time, and had to make a truce with the devil.”

  Irina Gromov backed him up. “The anti-fascist constancy of the Soviet Union is a matter of record. We fought them, after all, in Spain.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Kirov said, “Greene and Muggeridge were actively opposed to Franco. Not so much Waugh—he was a Catholic in his politics and of course Franco’s fascists were Catholics.”

  “History obliges us,” Andrei said, faltering a little in finding the Russian words, “to recognize Josef Stalin as a great war leader and sturdy champion of the revolution. But we are not obliged to applaud everything he did.”

  “And just now,” Maksim, heretofore silent, observed, “Comrade Gorbachev has furthered the cause of peace by leading the American president to remove intermediate-range missiles from Europe.”

  “Yes,” said Ursina. “Comrade Gorbachev is in favor of peace. Everywhere except Afghanistan.”

  Rufina’s distress was no longer concealed. “We will not talk politics any more. This is a celebratory dinner. Celebrating Ursina’s celebrated appointment as a professor and the great accomplishments of Soviet science. I present a toast: to Professor Ursina Chadinov and to—”

  “Don’t toast to an early end to men’s problems. Vladimir and I would be out of business.”

  Everyone laughed, and with some relief, Rufina put on a new recording of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony.

  CHAPTER 6

  Gus Windels, who had been living and working in Moscow since reporting for duty in April, kept busy in the United States diplomatic legation, as a public-affairs officer. His native fluency in Russian permitted him to scan the day’s papers easily, and his political sophistication put developments rapidly in their ideological place. This morning, the tall, lanky, young American read the welcome news.

  A Nobel Prize for Joseph Brodsky! Good stuff! Charlie Wick—Wick was the director of the United States Information Agency in Washington, a keen cold warrior and a personal friend of President Reagan—would eat that up. He’ll have that instead of breakfast, Gus figured.

  Inevitably, somebody—maybe Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary, or George Shultz, secretary of state—would be cabling the ambassador asking how come the United States Embassy in Moscow, with its nine hundred employees, hadn’t got wind of this propaganda coup, a Nobel for a prime Soviet target.

  Gus thought about it.

  Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad Jew, superb poet and essayist. In 1964 they had arrested him and sent him to Gulag. He was there for eighteen months, until General Secretary Brezhnev—successor to Khrushchev—who had carted Brodsky away, decided that detaining the newsworthy young writer wasn’t really worth the cultural uproar.

  For all his experience with Soviet culture, Gus sometimes wondered in full voice about the sheer public-relations stupidity of the Kremlin. There were plenty of Russians they could more or less safely torture in Gulag. But Brodsky was (1) a young man (twenty-three), (2) a poet, (3) a Jew, who (4) wrote poetry in Russian and in English, if you please, and had an international fan club—“Everybody is asking, where is Brodsky?” someone had written in Playboy. So what does the dumb Soviet Union do? Charges him with the crime of “parasitism” and sends him to an Arctic labor camp!

  The Soviet Union, eight million square miles, was not large enough to contain both the Kremlin and the poet, so the Communists finally deported him, as they would Solzhenitsyn a few years later.

  Gus, baptized “Sergei” as an infant in the Ukraine twenty-nine years ago, had escaped, at age fourteen, with his mother. Why did his mother take the name “Windels” for herself and her son? “Because,” Gus had once heard her say in broken English, that name—Win-dels—picked from the Manhattan telephone book, was “zee most un-Russian name I could find.”

  Gus and his mother had traveled to Iowa to join her brother, who had got out of the Soviet Union several years before. Gus went to school there and was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency.

  His training was technical. He knew all the tricks—and on occasion used them. But for all his technical training he was, first, a Sovietologist. He served the U.S. Embassy openly in the press detachment, where he was occasionally consulted on the language of Soviet fulminations. He knew there would be huge resentment over the Nobel award to Brodsky. But there had been such a record of Soviet fiascos, the Kremlin might just be careful, this time around.

  The Kremlin had forced Boris Pasternak to reject his Nobel Prize; Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had declined to travel to Stockholm to collect his prize, for fear he would not be allowed to return; following which came the infinit
ely embarrassing Andrei Sakharov business. The great man of science, principal engineer of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was not allowed to travel to Oslo to receive his Nobel Peace Prize—and then was sent to “internal exile” in Gorky.

  The Kremlin is not looking for another battle with the Nobel committee, Gus calculated. There wasn’t, after all, anything they could do to Brodsky himself—he had already been exiled as an enemy alien and lived safely abroad. And there was the other point: Every now and again the Nobel committee honored a Russian artist or scientist who was in good standing. The Kremlin liked it when that happened. Categorical denunciations of Nobels diluted the honor for such comrades.

  Gus wrote out a note to the deputy chief of mission: “Soviets probably won’t thunder over the Brodsky award. Maybe we shouldn’t, either.”

  He got a call two hours later. “The ambassador agrees on Brodsky. We’ll play it down. What he’s most interested in—what everybody’s most interested in—is the International Peace Forum coming up. Keep your eyes on it.”

  Gus Windels would do so, of course—he already had it in his sights. The peace forum was a Gorbachev initiative, scheduled to take place after Gorbachev’s visit with President Reagan in December. The announced theme of the peace forum was to be “A Nonnuclear World for the Survival of Mankind.”

  Such a forum! Under such auspices!

  Surely Pierre Trudeau of Canada would be there. And full-time Soviet apologist Armand Hammer. There would probably be some of the same U.S. celebrities (Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal) who had been assembled two decades earlier to promote Fidel Castro in Cuba. But Gus had heard that this time the Kremlin was going to try for some new blood.

  Well, Soviet-backed public conferences always had tactical, as well as strategic, objectives. This time around, of course, the objective was to put pressure on the United States to slow down, perhaps even to abandon in the near future, Reagan’s anti-missile program. Gus would be interested in what Ursina Chadinov had to say about the peace forum, when he met her at the Mussky restaurant that evening.

  CHAPTER 7

  The custom at Moscow University was to greet foreign students at a public assembly the first Monday of every month. “This custom is quite new,” the public-affairs officer at the embassy had informed Gus Windels in April, when he arrived in Moscow. The departing press officer, after a four-year tour of duty, was being reassigned to Leningrad. He sat in the office he would turn over to Gus, a room bursting with newspapers and files; in his hand, a Coca-Cola with a straw. Gus had told him of the personal work he longed to complete—a history of the czar’s secret police, the Okhrana.

  “Up until two or three years ago,” the departing officer said, “foreign students were all but physically blocked from Moscow U., unless they were coming in under ideological patronage. Every black African who could read and write and would cheer for democratic socialism was welcomed. Granted, they then had to learn Russian or English or German to make their way around the academic halls. But it’s a little different now, the tone of the place. There are even people there who are interested in scholarship. Russia has plenty of geniuses, but they have to make their own way unless they are in ideological harness. What am I saying, Gus? That if you’re going to start in on your research at Moscow U., you should attend one of their Monday open houses.”

  Gus did. He brought along a folder with research he had done at Georgetown. It included a suggested reading list of material published in Russian and housed at the Moscow University Library.

  On that Monday he was one of thirty men and women, most of them in their twenties or thirties, occupying one tenth of the seats in the little auditorium. At one end of the stage a covered piano rested. The overhead lights seemed to peer down with an intensity suitable for an operating room; or else they were turned off, when a speaker was at the lectern, leaving the rest of the room in near total darkness. The headsets permitted listeners to hear what was being said in Russian, English, French, and German.

  This Monday, to introduce newly arrived researchers to the hours and protocols and divisions of the mammoth university, there were four speakers. Two spoke in Russian, two in English. The first speaker was the chief librarian, an elderly woman with thick eyeglasses and anarchic gray hair, wearing black pants and a dark burgundy blouse. She spoke of the resources of the library, the hours it was accessible, and the credentials that needed to be presented by the individual researchers. The next two hosts spoke of the history of Moscow University, giving the names of some of its illustrious graduates.

  The final speaker was a professor at the School of Medicine. Gus, who was looking down at his notepad when she began to speak, was struck first by her fluency in English. He looked up with curiosity at Professor Ursina Chadinov. She was a woman of commanding presence, perhaps five feet eight inches tall. Her light blond hair, swept back in a stylish French twist, heightened her brown eyes. She permitted herself a half smile at intervals, exhibiting a perfect set of teeth illuminated, almost glaringly, by the spotlight, which seemed especially focused on them.

  She spoke of research being undertaken at the university in medicine, disease control, and general hygiene. Her tone of voice was pleasant if a bit imperious. One questioner, a Scandinavian by his appearance, asked flippantly if Professor Chadinov herself engaged only in research, or was she also a practicing medical doctor? She replied that if the questioner arrived at the hospital admissions desk with a certain order of complaint, he might be directed to her office.

  So much for you, buster, Gus thought.

  Gus was inventive. The next afternoon, before going to the stacks, he walked into the hospital and told the woman at the desk, “I have a certain complaint and have been told to report to Dr. Chadinov.”

  The woman asked his name. He gave a modified version of Windels that would be pronounceable in Russian.

  The receptionist talked into the headset’s microphone. “Mr. Vindellz is here for his appointment with Dr. Chadinov.”

  Gus raised his hand. “I didn’t say I had an appointment—”

  But the receptionist was talking on the phone. “Da … da … da …” She then turned to Gus, “You are to go to 912B; that is in the next building. The nurse there will direct you.”

  Gus rather enjoyed the daredevil aspect of it all, and a few minutes later was at 912B. He showed his identification card. The nurse, who spoke within earshot of two other nurses and a male orderly busy assembling medicines on a trolley, asked, “What is the nature of your complaint?”

  What could he come up with? Gus Windels was tall and lithe. His face showed a trace of freckles leading to his full head of hair, in childhood almost certainly red, now a rusty blond. He could not suppress his cheerfulness. “Ma’am, if you do not mind, it’s rather … personal.”

  She looked up at him with condescension. If Gus had been a little older, she’d have scolded him to the effect that one does not have “personal” problems in medicine. If he had been five years younger she’d have told him to act like a grown man and answer her question. But as it was, her expression turned motherly. “All right. Sit over there. You will be called.”

  A half hour later, an orderly told him to follow her.

  He was led into a small office. Dr. Chadinov was seated, and nodded to Gus to sit down opposite.

  Gus spoke his impeccable Russian. “Dr. Chadinov, I hope you will forgive me. But I heard you speak yesterday and I would dearly love it if you would let me take you to dinner.”

  She paused for a moment, looking concentratedly at her patient. Then, “I would be delighted to have dinner with you.”

  CHAPTER 8

  At a few minutes to eight, Gus arrived at the Mussky restaurant and was taken to the table he had reserved for two. Making reservations at that restaurant was not easy to do. It required blat—the Russian word for influence, usually exercised in the form of bribes. Gus had blat at hand, and used it in talking with the headwaiter. He sat down and ordered a bottle of Russian wine. At eight
fifteen, Professor Chadinov had not arrived. At eight thirty, Gus dejectedly concluded that the beautiful, dynamic, bilingual professor had had second thoughts about the date, or perhaps had never intended to keep it.

  He lingered on for a moment, looking over at his third glass of wine and wondering whether to order a meal for himself, or take the metro back to his apartment, make a sandwich, and get on with the book on the Okhrana. Then she appeared. Accompanied by an older man, whom she introduced as “my dear old friend and colleague, Dr. Vladimir Spiridonovich Kirov. I knew you would be glad to meet him.”

  Gus suppressed his disappointment, and rose to greet the two doctors. He signaled to the waiter. “Professor Chadinov, is this wine,” he pointed to the half-empty bottle, “all right?”

  “It’s all right if”—she went into English—“if you are unfamiliar with alternatives. I know of an alternative available at the same price. May I?”

  The waiter brought the wine she asked for, and they were well into the next bottle before they paused in their conversation to order food.

  Ursina addressed Gus familiarly, and appeared genuinely interested in everything he said.

  Gus spoke about his mother’s life in Kiev and of his early years at school there.

  “Why did your mother leave? What year did she leave?”

  Gus replied diplomatically. If the question had been asked a fortnight later, after two more visits with Ursina, he might have said, “Why on earth would she not have left the Soviet Union?” Tonight he said only that an uncle who had moved to the United States before the war had succeeded as a farmer in Iowa and had arranged to bring his sister and her fourteen-year-old son to live with him. “My father had died—well, we always assumed he had died. Mother didn’t hear from him after he was taken away in 1960. When word came from my uncle, we felt we were very lucky.”