The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  Eventually, when the arteries in his throat calmed he ordered coffee and water and sat back to watch the rooftops silhouette against the first lightning flash. Now the day’s static would be discharged, the air would sweeten and soften his hangover. A glass of wine would help, hair of the dog, but no, he wouldn’t. He was hitching to the wagon again. For a while.

  Gia’s and Masha’s stuff would be well over the Turkish border. The paperwork was in order and all was well again with Gia.

  English voices drifted from a far table, businessmen laughing with the gracelessness he had come to associate with that greedy little island. In Moscow at the Old Spies Network – a club with no premises where the members socialised with the gay abandon of actors who know they’ve done their last job – the Brits were particularly loathsome. He recalled Maclean and his English rose wife, trailing scents of tea and Cambridge lawns in their wake, and how after a bucket of whisky the old-school-gentleman performed the Mr. Hyde twist into violent ass bandit. At the other end of the scale festered the bickering of Moris and Leona Cohen, a union made in Limbo of a man feeding his insatiable dissidence by railing against Soviet plumbing, and a woman refusing to be critical of anything east of the Brandenburg Gate. How hopeless could principle become, Max wondered? Didn’t it all boil down to incontinence and fear in the end? The philosopher Locke said we are what we remember. Fine by me, thought Max, because I can’t remember a fucking thing.

  Sweat pattered on the ground between unpolished shoes. Two small vodkas would stop this confounded shaking. He looked up and an anonymous Georgian kid strolling past with his father looked at him as if he were deformed. The kid’s stare knocked him from his drunk’s disdain into a puddle of shame. He jammed his tongue out aggressively. The lad turned back into his father; dad’s hand rested on his shoulder and they continued down the hill, leaving the old heap in a bluster of righteous indignation at the contempt of the young. He banged back his coffee and snapped at the waiter to bring him another.

  A flurry of ‘fucks’ burst from the Brits. “Weaned on sophistry and hypocrisy”, Modin said of the English. Particularly Philby, a man for whom treachery was oxygen, and a twenty-five carat drunk till his Russian wife put the mockers on that. “Two whiskies only or he gets his arse spanked” Alexei used to crow.

  He had shared propaganda tours with Philby – speeches, awards, and hatred in the street, dinners with grim Hungarians and Czechs, and functional sex with waitresses in freezing eighteenth century bedrooms overlooking the Vistula in spate. Philby was surface and meretricious glitter, a calibration of balances and gyroscopes absorbing every blow, twist, breeze and vibration, hiding and storing, multiplying meanings; born to treachery. Two beers would do, get rid of the shaking. Ames apparently drinks too, he’d read. Burgess died of drink. What’s this thing with spies and drink? Fuck that kid. Staring at me like that. I could go to the bar near the apartment. Shit. I’m barred there.

  As he lifted his shopping the tendon on his hip pulled and the limp home was divided into short relays with pauses for rest and back rubbing. Many a bar mocked him on the way, but he passed by and got to the last junction before his apartment. It was now eighty metres of pavement and thirty-six stairs to the triumph of arriving home vodka free and thwarting Gia’s doleful disapproval. His breath came in miserable rations, his arteries beat in toothache thumps, his tendon nagged like a persistent wailing child till he wanted to give it a damned good thrashing; body and age conspired against him.

  He bent with his bags to the pavement, laid them down and placing his hands on his lower back near the source of the pain, hauled himself vertical in steps, moving his palms up his sacrum with each upwards creak till he was able to stand tall and empty another bag of quiet curses into the Tbilisi night. To his left the road rose steeply to Rustavelli Street and on a high balcony of the hotel a woman in half silhouette stared out over the city, her blonde hair haloed by the light from her room, a goddess of capitalism, in tourist luxury high above the penury and darkness below. He looked the other way across the river at nothing, at black blocks of an invisible city. No streetlights burned; no tourist hotels bathed blonde visitors in light; pinheads of candles were the only evidence that people existed out there.

  What difference does it make, he thought, the universe will die one day like a rotting cat and leave God waiting for Welfare. That is a scientific fact and there will be nothing the priest, the Mullah or the philosopher will be able to do. “We shall have strutted our stuff across existence and left no print” he said quietly to the blonde on the balcony, exhorting her not to be so fucking pleased with herself. But up above him she sipped her coffee unconcerned, then turned her head, and light shimmied across her hair and a chill went through him, perhaps simply because she had seemed like a statue, then moved as if she had heard him. But she was too high and far away to have heard him and the fear shocked him and left his rattling arteries scurrying and leaping like a chorus of frightened ring tailed lemurs against the bars of their cage.

  He stooped to his bags on the pavement and his tendon sent a twinge across his hips and all philosophy was eclipsed by lower back pain.

  Early 1964

  I let all lines go dead, hoping the investigation would run aground; many have in the past and many innocent officers have been investigated for a host of mysterious and misguided reasons – it is part of the landscape. If worst came to worst I could take my chance with the interrogators, but this was a desperately foolish place to be and I knew I was probably holding a loser’s hand. I also knew Yura and the Russians knew why I was holding my ground and resisting an immediate defection. Peg was the fatal weakness; for her Marxism was no alternative to moving up to three bedrooms. She was not designed for the political debate and too woven into the old Eisenhower fabric of nation, family and marriage for the subject to be broached.

  “We know you are in such a painful place, but the consequences of not going over will be much more painful” said Peter, “at least this way Peg knows you’re alive and perhaps one day something can be worked out. Who knows? But we can’t negotiate with the electric chair.”

  I met Peg when she was a schoolgirl, Henry’s kid sister; the bobby dazzler who had the High School boys almost reading Rimbaud. I thought nothing more of her; she was funny and very beautiful and we communicated on a level of mischievous insult whenever Henry took me to his Mom’s for Sunday lunch.

  I was a swimmer, county freestyle champion at sixteen and although the martinis rapidly began to inhibit my training programme, in those days I swam almost every day. One night I saw a white blonde head pushing a swell of water up a lane and lo and behold when she touched the side it was Henry’s kid sister. She was a swimmer too – school captain and on the verge of State representation. So I took her for a hamburger and we exchanged swimming notes and it first occurred to me that the twinkle in her eye might not just be for my coaching hints. This flummoxed me and I took it to Henry.

  “Of course. It’s puppy love.”

  “Maybe I should stop coming round to your mother’s for a while.” And I did. For two years, and next time I returned the young girl had become a woman, self-assured, calm, operating with a different set of coordinates in the human map. Her mature beauty had a force to it that overwhelmed me. In this I was no different to the rest of the male population outside her door, yet she was modest and decent and often complained about how she hated being stared at.

  Who could blame the passer by for staring? Some beauty places the bearer beyond the norms of sexual reaction and they become a human aesthetic, an ideal by which the mass can place itself, and Peg was like that. Hers was a lonely place because it isn’t easy being natural around someone blessed with such extraordinary looks. Small talk is impossible. However the wit still bubbled under the elegance. Her swimming career had stuttered; a series of back strains had edged her out of the State side; the ladder to national level and may
be even Olympics had been pulled up.

  I took her to the theatre a couple of times and a feeling between us could no longer be ignored. So it went on, sweetly, clandestinely, chastely, till we had to tell the family. They seemed thrilled and confident I would conduct myself like a gentleman, and I did – her mother scared me too much for anything else. Away from Peg I drank like a lumberjack, but she was the decency in me. Seven years younger, she nonetheless anchored me to a sense of being normal.

  Our courtship was chaste, formal and conducted within the classic rituals of that time of Schwinn cantilever bicycles, tin coke ads and drive-in movies, when being an American really seemed the greatest blessing in God’s world. Kent State, Oswald, drugs and Vietnam lay in ambush in the next decade.

  Peg had had boy friends, but she was a virgin, a not altogether exceptional state in those days, and remained so until her marriage night. I, on the other hand had negotiations of a less pure nature with Boston girls when I was at Harvard, and my barroom hobbies occasionally led to waking to strange ceilings with an unknown face on the pillow beside me. I had also begun to pass information across.

  When I told Henry that I had proposed to his sister and she had accepted, we waltzed arm in arm through the Washington snow from bar to bar to celebrate our new affiliation till poor Henry couldn’t drink any more.

  September 1998

  Coffee went over the white tablecloth and her suede Birkenstocks. Her second Tbilisi morning started badly and as waiters fussed around, the fuck-this default position clicked in. She could fly back from Tbilisi with connections in Vienna, but when the receptionist asked if she would like to book, her resolve stumbled. The morning continued with a bad fall on her father’s stairs and she hung from his courtyard gates, rotating her foot like a dancer till the nausea subsided. Now she hated the city, her father, and everything east of Highway 5. The dog garden and Joseph’s house were passed without notice and the ankle became so painful she had to turn and walk up the hill backwards.

  Limping into the refreshment bar on the stout arm of the Cossack doorman, she hid her bruised dignity behind indignation. She was finished with her father. The Cossack nodded, and lowered her onto a banquette by the big windows then brought her a glass of tea in a silver Georgian holder.

  Her head tilted back onto the top of the leather banquette and the sun haloed her exhausted face. Shoots of ruby bounced from the maroon Formica into the smoking tea in her shadow. Morning sunshine shrouded her into a ghost. She was fading like an unfixed photo of herself, dissolving in light.

  Max left early and spent the morning in a music shop, browsing the manuscripts and discussing politics, music and soccer – about which he knew nothing – with the proprietor over an endless succession of coffees. He bought a Schubert manuscript he didn’t really need because he had to leave the shop with a gesture to the morning’s goodwill.

  Approaching home he saw a woman hanging onto his gates and the old alarm in his head blasted off. Automatically he hid in the park trees on the other side of the road. Hugging the Schubert sonatas to his chest, he saw Peg waiting for him at the gates, rotating her foot like a ballet dancer. Turning profile to limp along the embankment, Peg faded and something of him washed glassily underneath. Then the woman was round the corner and gone.

  He was shaking. I’m in shock, he thought, this is a hangover hallucination. But all the rationalisations were swept away by some unquestionable force of evidence and instinct.

  Strolling casually across the junction he saw her struggling up the hill. She was obviously in physical distress, and for an eerie moment he felt concerned. Something about the shape of her head, the angle of it to her shoulder as she leaned against the wall and the way her hair tumbled down the side of her face left no doubt that this stranger extended his line on Earth.

  He always wondered if the child might turn up. He had told no one about her; only Party colleagues in the old days knew about little Lucy from official sources. Now all the resurrected ghosts pulled his thinking back to his baseline state of escape and the logarithms and binary systems of his nature rolled out the automatic fight instructions.

  Gia had gone skirt-hunting the previous night, but might have been back when she called and the beans may have been spilled. He imagined Gia’s shock. Masha’s reaction did not bear thinking about. Friends would hide him without questions; he should run back, pack a few things and vanish – explanations could come later. But some other buried thing pulled him a new way and sucked him after, squinting along Rustavelli’s walls for a hand helping the injured ankle or the blonde head shining in the crowds. In a hotel entrance he glimpsed the Cossack doorman supporting her.

  He had occasionally allowed himself to think about her. He remembered the baby vividly. Asleep on her mother’s chest, she had been preserved tiny and helpless, locked in time, although he had sometimes worked out the years and tried to imagine what she might look like as she grew. Now an adult from a future he left behind replaced the tiny thing he had last seen in his kitchen. There was no doubt. He was shaking, he should go; this was far too dangerous. But he found himself in the lobby, positioning himself so the archway wall bisected him and edge-framed her. A slight lean to his left and he would disappear. Twenty metres away he and his ex-wife’s youth shimmered in the sunlight, ghost dancers preserved in living aspic. Peg’s throat shifted under his jaw, a bigger bosom than Peg’s drew his eye, but his wife was much younger than this woman, slight and vulnerable compared to the buxom blonde who seemed mother to the breast he watched feed her. A spoon tapped a glass and clattered Formica. She had his mouth. He hoped she didn’t have his teeth.

  “Hello Max.”

  The Manager shook his hand; the Cossack had the other in a vice. He had fallen for the classic pick-up. The Cossack retrieved the music from the floor.

  “Schubert! Wonderful.” They were gliding forward. “Come on Max” said the Cossack.

  “Nothing to worry about” added the manager.

  “Please stop this....”

  Eyes floating above smoking teas followed his humiliation.

  “Miss?”

  The sunlight switched up the blue and he saw Peg. When her face tilted into shadow the eyes became grey and Peg dissolved.

  “Miss, this is your father. Max, meet Miss Lucy. Your daughter.”

  Like workers not certain something will stand, they waited for a moment. Schubert was laid on the table; sunlight bleached his portrait on the yellow cover. The manager and the Cossack smiled discreetly and left for guard positions by the arch.

  He was thinning but not bald. She had thick eyelashes, like Peg’s, corn coloured beneath the mascara. Her hands were disproportionately small. His shadow flitted in a spray of light dancing on the ceiling. Voices scattered sibilants through slanting sunbeams. A man standing at the corner table turned a page and flattened it.

  “Hello” she said.

  “Hello” he replied. “How’s your ankle?’

  “I fell on your stairs.”

  “Oh, they’re vicious.’ His hands were intertwined in front of his belt; his thumbs moving vertically round each other slowly and smoothly. “I’ve fallen down them myself.”

  No shit Sherlock, she thought. He drinks like a Georgian the Embassy Brit had said. Max saw the spray of light above and glanced out the window for the source. One of the women in the corner burst into hysterical laughter.

  “I’m sorry I’m such a mess.” She fingered the abrasion on her knee.

  “No, don’t apologise. Please.” A silence seethed at them. “Can I get you another tea?”

  “Actually I’d like a strong coffee.”

  “Excellent idea. I’ll have one too.”

  The manager watched Max from the lobby. Lucy’s chest was tight as a drum; she took a couple of deep breaths and the man at the corner table peered over his glasses
at her swelling breasts.

  For Max the immediate problem was coping with the engulfing sense of public shame. His conviction was that all eyes were on him and he embellished his walk to the counter with a ham actor’s insouciance. As yet he couldn’t bridge beyond embarrassment to the reality of what had happened.

  As he brought the coffees and sat she observed him leave a discreet space between them. He loaded sugar into his and started slightly at a noise or movement she could not detect. She dropped three sweeteners into her coffee and felt naked revealing her sweet tooth and weight concerns. But all alcoholics have a sweet tooth she counselled in her head, he has a sweet tooth, look at him taking coffee with his syrup.

  “I haven’t spoken English for some time. Although I occasionally teach it. On an informal basis.”

  “You translate, don’t you?”

  “Ah. You’ve been checking up on me.”

  “Have you ever checked up on me?”

  He felt a hot rose unfold under his ear and spread through his skin like warm water. Another smile greeted the empty space in front of them. Sipping coffee and looking up at the dancing light, he unconsciously turned the music manuscript over so Schubert couldn’t see him.

  “When did you arrive?”

  “Yesterday. No. Day before. I was in Moscow for two days. Three days. Two days. I leave tomorrow.” She didn’t know when she was leaving. She was letting him off the hook and cursed herself for it. Already she was giving in.

  “What’s the coffee these days in America?”

  She shrugged. “Starbucks. Chains. Lots.”

  “I can’t remember what it was in my day.” His face lifted to the ceiling. “Maxwell House!”