The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  The stutter of a distant tractor blew among the rustling leaves. “In the first year of the purges, they brought two thousand here. We heard some of them being done from this very spot. Under this old tree. Hi, my friend!” he waved to the tree above us. “It was never mentioned in the village, even when the wind was right and everyone heard the shots.

  “I looked it up in the archives. Their best day was the twenty-eighth of February nineteen thirty-eight. They got through five hundred and sixty two. That’s a day’s work. I would have been at school. I was thirteen. What were you doing in nineteen thirty-eight? The Mickey Mouse Club?”

  I asked about the bodies.

  “‘Under the green sod.” I could smell the thick grasses, the wild flower; feel the ground on my belly.

  “Drop in the ocean. Nobody was safe. I’m surprised Stalin didn’t have himself shot. Two of my mother’s brothers died building the Volga Moscow canal. Probably in the concrete in one of the locks, waste not, want not.”

  I remembered tinted Stalin smiling fatly over his Mother’s table.

  “And my father’s cousin, Olga, died building Norilsk. Don’t bother with Norilsk. Two thousand miles northeast, a ten-month winter. Hell isn’t hot: it’s cold, and it’s Norilsk. Clouds of smoke from its big chimneys, filthy white on filthy white, yellow sky from the chemicals, slush and smoke and darkness and stink. The prisoners designed it, built it; nickel mines, roads, houses, power stations, mills, brick factories. Cousin Olga was one of them. She was young. She was a metallurgist. An economic necessity.”

  He watched a tiny spider crawl hyperactively over his knuckles. “They would let the male prisoners rape the women. Organized, en masse gang bangs. Queues of them with their hard-ons. Some of the weaker women were literally fucked to death. Olga might have gone that way. It’s how I’m trying to go.” He put the little spider back on a stalk of grass. “Would you fuck Petra?”

  “What?”

  “Would you fuck my gorgeous wife?” I stared at him in the long grass of his morbid childhood. “If you were in a camp and Petra was there, would you fuck her?” His blue eyes drilled up over his irritating film star smile. “You would.” He nodded at the bright green clearing and the oak and elder, aspen and birch, rippling in the sunlight. “This is idealism’s terminus.”

  Spring 1999

  Max’s letter was a crisis for everyone. Thirty years of sediment shook up and Henry called his whole daft life into question. Peg was incandescent with indignation, and Arnold – Peg’s ancient and very rich third husband – worried for Lucy. Timmy was so terrified Lucy would drink he bought her a cell phone and checked up every hour till she left it switched off. Curiously for Lucy, the trauma blew away the craving for drink and left her motoring along in a stunned haze. Within AA, her opinion became that of the last person she spoke to. Many were emphatic she should not go, but the siren voice from the east started its sales pitch: the arguments for and against dizzied her. Then one morning she woke to a state of clarity.

  “I’m not going. It would be madness. I’m getting on top of this shit and I need to carry on.”

  Timmy joyfully rang Henry at his publishing house who interrupted a meeting with an important author just to take the call. When Timmy told him Lucy’s decision, the brightness in Henry’s voice dulled. “Yes, well, I suppose she’s being sensible.”

  “I am just so relieved.”

  “Yes it’s the wise decision I suppose. I have to go now Timmy. Give her my love.”

  However when Timmy got home she had mailed a letter to her father saying she would come to Georgia, but only if her mother, uncle Henry and Arnold could come too. He freaked.

  “Relax. He’ll never agree to those conditions.”

  “Then why give him the fucking choice?” She had never seen him as angry. “What about me? What if I don’t wanna go?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Lucy’s challenge gave Shota his best laugh for a long time.

  “It’s her way of saying ‘no’. She’s just passing the buck.” Max grasped desperately for an escape.

  “Why?”

  “Oh come on, she knows these are impossible conditions. She knows I can’t possibly accept them.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  They would beat him with the conviction that everything on their side was right and everything on his wrong.

  “You made your bed. Now lie in it,” said Masha.

  But there was no question of the rest of the family being invited. A letter was drafted graciously declining Lucy’s conditions.

  “Why?” said Shota.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What they going to do to you? Cut your balls off? They’re no use now anyway.”

  “My ex-wife Shota, my ex-wife? I still have her car keys.”

  “Time to give them back.”

  “Very funny.”

  “She can’t chew your balls because Henry will have cut them off.”

  “Ah Henry.. yes, Henry. No, no that. Once CIA always CIA.”

  “Not you though.”

  The village wanted the wedding. Max had ignited something and it was clear the response to his daughter’s conditions would determine his position in the village as respected elder, or mouse. The bluff of a gesturist was being called. “Jesus,” he said in a desperate moment, “where’s that bastard with the Slav eyes now I need him? Tolya, I’m ready for you.”

  The sea washed in and out. How reassuring to be a wave shifting endlessly across the globe, to be unthinking, unfeeling, just a motion without senses.

  Dear Lucy,

  Of course the family is welcome. But please be aware that this is not Florida. I shall send a driver to pick you up in Tbilisi. I haven’t driven for years and I shall have to hold the helm here.

  Look forward to seeing you all.

  Max.

  One other place in the village sold alcohol but stopped serving Max when Poland became free and Shota made it clear he would not serve him. Max was shocked his drinking was a public concern. A few nights in police cells, a brief break in the Tbilisi asylum, and a certain amnesia about what might have happened or been said several-nights-befores hardly amounted to a problem. When things seemed to go a little too far, he would stop for lengthy periods. It was nothing to worry about, but the village had him on probation; the marriage was a gleam of international brightness after Gia’s murder and years of poverty, and the locals were not going to let Max urinate in his daughter’s trousseau. Some spirit was abroad, frail as a new born calf and they were fighting to give it life.

  Curiously, Max was reassured; if the wedding belonged to the villagers as much as to him they might draw flak and absorb the impact of the family. Only Masha remained aloof, and this was an irony too far for Max; it was her invitation to California that provoked his incomprehensible offer, and importantly, she was the one person in the village able to provide a healthy cash injection, but it was too late for that.

  “Its going to clean me out, Shota.”

  “To hell with the money, Max. The important thing is we do it good. All of us.”

  The idea that the wedding should be held in the church with full Georgian trimmings gained ground. The devout were reassured there was no offence as the couple were already married and this was to be a symbolic ceremony. As an atheist, Max was deemed unfit to approach the eccentric Father Gregory, but Masha had his inner ear. However, she cried blasphemy.

  “Of course it’s jealousy,” maintained Shota. “You’re reclaiming your line into the future, your posterity, Max. She has no one.”

  “My daughter is simply a biological fact.”

  “You’re a biological fact ahead of her.”

  Nevertheless, Shota told her she was tak
ing things a little far, and that her resentments found little sympathy in the village; this was something to celebrate, not regret.

  He and Max approached Father Gregory with all the wiles in their repertoire. Gregory was initially suspicious that two of the unfaithful – one a well known atheist – had arrived on the church’s doorstep with enough charm to float a musical, and was appalled when the reason for their unexpected visit was revealed. The church was not a theatre to be hired out and he was not an actor. However, that evening something about the idea of a lost child returning caught him in the silence of the church and persuaded him to rethink. Even the atheist must never be turned away from Christ’s door, so over a large Ukrainian brandy that Shota told him was French, he agreed. Max raised his Pepsi, Shota poured himself a real Scotch, glasses clinked and the church became Lucy’s. As long as the Bishop didn’t find out.

  Now the adventure had an attractively heretical quality, things were falling into place, but as the days crept closer to the event, Max began to be horrified. A terror he had not felt since the months leading up to his defection rose in the morning and stumbled through the day with him into bleak stretches of insomnia. He raged against his insanity in bringing it all back on himself and lay in bed feeding the night with schemes to call the whole thing off, but could never find the wherewithal to do it. The village had preparations in full swing and their anticipation trapped him. The tension wound into increasingly irresistible compulsions to drink.

  “When sorrows come, they come not single spies. But in battalions.” Shakespeare’s phrase came to him when he put down the phone. Fate or God added a spicy ingredient into this mix of fear and regret that his moment of irrational generosity had produced. He took a call from Irakli. There had been some talk around the drinking dives in Batumi of a ‘witness’, a leak from the Batumi police; nothing specific, nothing heard of any plan to deal with the witness or who he was, and certainly no news of anyone beating a fast path from Moscow. They were just asking out of interest more than anything else who the witness was. “Curiosity, Mr Agnew, that’s all, bar chat. Don’t worry; nothing’s going to happen. Not from any of us anyway. Us Georgians. It’s nobody’s beef down here, but I suggest you keep an eye out. If anything specific was happening, we’d probably have heard.”

  “Probably?”

  “I’m sure you’ll be okay.”

  “If it’s a leak from the police, surely the police could leak my identity?

  “There’s all sorts of shit happening with the police at the moment – ’scuse my language, Mr Agnew – accusations of corruption, that sort of thing. So nobody’s going to be leaking anything for a while. How are the guns?”

  “The guns are fine. How’s your daughter?”

  “Thank you for asking. She’s done well in her exams. Especially in German and physics.”

  “Congratulations to her. And thank you for the warning.”

  “It’s an honour to do business with you. If I hear anything more, I’ll let you know. Don’t worry, Mr Agnew, don’t worry.”

  And that, of course, was the thing Max did till it put him in a trance. Days passed in contemplation of the guns; one bullet would avoid everything; the simple squeezing of a trigger and the family filled with vengeance, the slit-eyed killer and his loneliness would all disappear. A magic trick: now you see them – worrying you, making you conscious only of your shortcomings, keeping you awake at night – now you don’t. Disappeared. “He who dies pays all debts.” Shakespeare again. All solutions to be had in a finger movement. “You won’t even hear the gun go off, or feel a thing. The last thing you’ll hear and see will be the waves. It’ll be like switching off a television.” He scrutinised the hair fine scratches on the chamber of the Makarov and wondered what had made them: where had this gun been, who wielded it, who suffered it? Matchless designs and engineering, dedicated to the extinction of human life. What a curious and skilled occupation. And yet necessary, given the lizards who stalked the earth in human form.

  He loaded the Makarov and sat with it in his hand. There were twelve bullets in the clip: eleven of them unnecessary. He could have bought one gun and one bullet.

  With a drink inside him he could probably do it.

  The Batumi bus disgorged him at a drinking den that had his elbow imprints on the bar. No one greeted him; no one greeted anyone in this place. He saw the hunched bodies and vacant faces staring over half empty glasses, tables sticky with beer and loaded ashtrays, watched the beer dribble from tall, swan neck spigots into thick glasses with the sound of an enlarged prostrate piss slowly filling a toilet bowl, scrutinised the huge barman in his chef’s whites and turban looking at him blankly, again scanned the drinkers from the shabby wreck in the corner with a hole in his ancient suit to the gaggle of businessmen laughing over a bottle of cheap local champagne, heard some nutter bark obscenities at nothing. Max turned and walked out.

  In a tiny store he found himself hanging around the drinks shelf. A small bottle of liqueur with an ornate yellow label attached itself to his hand. It was a rather pathetic drink but the bottle was flat and would lie in his jacket without being conspicuous. It was also small enough to avoid a major drunk, just enough to relax him. But would it be enough to get him to that point where the impossible was possible? Anything short of complete inebriation might leave need for a little courage and he couldn’t be sure of finding that. Too much and he knew the brake would go off and the bogey would run to the end of the line, which was always unconsciousness. He would wake with an unfired gun in his hand and a hangover. “Or you might miss,” he said to himself and laughed. The storeowner looked at him with the weariness of a man sick of the defects crawling into his store with the dramas in their heads.

  “Couple of drinks will be nice, though.” He muttered to himself on the bus home, and as the landscape of his adopted home slipped past he experienced a warm sense of relief. The Americans would be rich; they would witness how shabby his life was and judge him on that. He had passed out at Harvard summa cum laude and ended up with a couple of pianos, two guns and an unfinished translation of Fear and loathing in Las Vegas. It was always about superiority with Americans, and he had nothing to fight them back with. His hand pressed his jacket to stop the bottle continually clinking against the gun.

  Shota was waiting when he got back and hung around sniffing for traces of booze. By now Max wasn’t absolutely certain he wanted to kill himself, but a little time off from this sense of approaching doom would be nice, a brief holiday in the bottle. His past was relentless; it would overtake him sober, drunk or dead. It was merely the manner of the last inch or so that was at issue.

  Back home he stared at the bottle and at the Makarov. The Ukrainian irregulars who were used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews in their villages were fed on vodka. Daily drinks were dispensed to concentration camp guards like pharmacy prescriptions. Bottle and gun. One facilitated the other, a partnership of oblivion where the unthinkable was easy. He held the gun in one hand: the cold, mechanical object that produced so much feeling in the human race: grief, fear, the elation of the victorious, the dark satisfaction of the natural killer. In the other was the bottle, the magic potion that made order out of disorder and sense out of nonsense and vice-voluptuous-versa.

  “Not today.”

  Today he wouldn’t kill himself. Nor would he drink. With a supreme effort he cleared space among the cleaning chemicals in a kitchen cupboard, tucked the bottle away at the back unopened, then wondered why he was hiding the drink and who the hell he was hiding it from.

  The next few days introduced a fresh headache courtesy of the local press who heard the whispers that a former People’s Hero and holder of the Order of Lenin First Class was to be giving away his American daughter in marriage. Several phone calls were fielded and all the old skills of diplomacy and evasion leaped into play as Max fought for a square inch of anonymity. But it was
clear such a thing was impossible, so he tacked with the wind and explored the best way of minimising the damage this publicity might bring to his safety. This involved a certain degree of accommodation with the pencil chewers. In exchange for some compromise over discretion he was prepared to offer a limited amount of information. A couple of journalists were permitted into his house and despite a ban on photographs a camera hack crept in on their coat tails as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. With as much good humour as he could muster, Max made it clear that questions would only be answered if he remained photograph free. He didn’t want Tolya Verkovensky picking up a newspaper over his morning eggs and saying “When’s the next flight to Tbilisi?” The photographer was abandoned on the sofa in a funk till he took his cameras onto the beach to amuse himself with the solitary beach girl and a couple of kids who were happy to pose for him.

  Events were painting him into a philosophical corner. He had no control. Sometimes he was able to shrug and surrender to this, sometimes it flew him in a panic to stroke his Gyurza and its armour piercing bullets and to dream of the yellow labelled bottle among the cleaning fluids.

  The press of course, got round their arrangement by printing an old shot of Max in the local paper.

  “None of them expects me to get through the wedding sober.”

  The Communist and God’s representative had to meet to prepare things. Father Gregory declared the marriage a healing of a sundered family and of past and present, and as such it would be churlish to stand back and do nothing. As long as the Bishop didn’t find out, again: “I must stress that”. He insisted on learning part of the ceremony in English and took instruction from Max and over the course of the English lessons, Max, who had spent his life deriding the superstition of religion became aware of a warmth and an openness infusing their exchanges. It occurred without effort, as if by stealth, and he soon found himself disclosing things to Father Gregory that he would deny ten minutes. Curiously, Max who had spent his life deriding the superstition of religion, found himself willing to disclose things to the priest that he would deny ten minutes later to anyone else.