This penultimate part of LATH, this spirited episode in my otherwise somewhat passive existence, is horribly hard to set down, reminding me of the pensums, which the cruelest of my French governesses used to inflict upon me—some old saw to be copied cent fois (hiss and spittle)—in punishment for my adding my own marginal illustrations to those in her Petit Larousse or for exploring under the schoolroom table the legs of Lalage L., a little cousin, who shared lessons with me that unforgettable summer. I have, indeed, repeated the story of my dash to Leningrad in the late nineteen-sixties innumerable times in my mind, to packed audiences of my scribbling or dreaming selves—and yet I keep doubting both the necessity and the success of my dismal task. But you have argued the question, you are tenderly adamant, yes, and your decree is that I should relate my adventure in order to lend a semblance of significance to my daughter’s futile fate.
In the summer of 1960, Christine Dupraz, who ran the summer camp for disabled children between cliff and highway, just east of Larive, informed me that Charlie Everett, one of her assistants, had eloped with my Bel after burning—in a grotesque ceremony that she visualized more clearly than I—his passport and a little American flag (bought at a souvenir stall especially for that purpose) “right in the middle of the Soviet Consul’s back garden”; whereupon the new “Karl Ivanovich Vetrov” and the eighteen-year-old Isabella, a ci-devant’s daughter, had gone through some form of mock marriage in Berne and incontinently headed for Russia.
The same mail brought me an invitation to discuss in New York with a famous compère my sudden Number One position on the Bestselling Authors list, inquiries from Japanese, Greek, Turkish publishers, and a postcard from Parma with the scrawl: “Bravo for Kingdom from Louise and Victor.” I never learned who Victor was, by the way.
Brushing all my engagements aside, I surrendered again—after quite a few years of abstinence!—to the thrill of secret investigations. Spying had been my clystère de Tchékhov even before I married Iris Black whose later passion for working on an interminable detective tale had been sparked by this or that hint I must have dropped, like a passing bird’s lustrous feather, in relation to my experience in the vast and misty field of the Service. In my little way I have been of some help to my betters. The tree, a blue-flowering ash, whose cortical wound I caught the two “diplomats,” Tornikovski and Kalikakov, using for their correspondence, still stands, hardly scarred, on its hilltop above San Bernardino. But for structural economy I have omitted that entertaining strain from this story of love and prose. Its existence, however, helped me now to ward off—for a while, at least—the madness and anguish of hopeless regret.
It was child’s play to find Karl’s relatives in the U.S.; namely, two gaunt aunts who disliked the boy even more than they did one another. Aunt Number One assured me he had never left Switzerland—they were still forwarding his Third Class mail to her in Boston. Aunt Number Two, the Philadelphia Fright, said he liked music and was vegetating in Vienna.
I had overestimated my forces. A serious relapse hospitalized me for nearly a whole year. The complete rest ordered by all my doctors was then botched by my having to stand by my publisher in a long legal fight against obscenity charges leveled at my novel by stuffy censors. I was again very ill. I still feel the pressure of the hallucinations that beset me, as my search for Bel got somehow mixed up with the controversy over my novel, and I saw as clearly as one sees mountains or ships, a great building, all windows lit, trying to advance upon me, through this or that wall of the ward, seeking as it were a weak spot to push through and ram my bed.
In the late Sixties I learned that Bel was now definitely married to Vetrov but that he had been sent to some remote place of unspecified work. Then came a letter.
It was forwarded to me by an old respectable businessman (I shall call him A.B.) with a note saying that he was “in textiles” though by education “an engineer”; that he represented “a Soviet firm in the U.S. and vice versa”; that the letter he was enclosing came from a lady working in his Leningrad office (I shall call her Dora) and concerned my daughter “whom he did not have the honor to know but who, he believed, needed my assistance.” He added that he would be flying back to Leningrad in a month’s time and would be glad if I “contacted him.” The letter from Dora was in Russian.
Much-respected Vadim Vadimovich!
You probably receive many letters from people in our country who manage to obtain your books—not an easy enterprise! The present letter, however, is not from an admirer but simply from a friend of Isabella Vadimovna Vetrov with whom she has been sharing a room for more than a year now.
She is ill, she has no news from her husband, and she is without a kopek.
Please, get in touch with the bearer of this note. He is my employer, and also a distant relative, and has agreed to bring a few lines from you, Vadim Vadimovich, and a little money, if possible, but the main thing, the main thing (glavnoe, glavnoe) is to come in person (lichno). Let him know if you can come and if yes, when and where we could meet to discuss the situation. Everything in life is urgent (speshno, “pressing,” “not to be postponed”) but some things are dreadfully urgent and this is one of them.
In order to convince you that she is here, with me, telling me to write you and unable to write herself, I am appending a little clue or token that only you and she can decode: “… and the intelligent trail (i umnitsa tropka).”
For a minute I sat at the breakfast table—under the compassionate stare of Brown Rose—in the attitude of a cave dweller clasping his hands around his head at the crash of rocks breaking above him (women make the same gesture when something falls in the next room). My decision was, of course, instantly taken. I perfunctorily patted Rose’s young buttocks through her light skirt, and strode to the telephone.
A few hours later I was dining with A.B. in New York (and in the course of the next month was to exchange several long-distance calls with him from London). He was a superb little man, perfectly oval in shape, with a bald head and tiny feet expensively shod (the rest of his envelope looked less classy). He spoke friable English with a soft Russian accent, and native Russian with Jewish question marks. He thought that I should begin by seeing Dora. He settled for me the exact spot where she and I might meet. He warned me that in preparing to visit the weird Wonderland of the Soviet Union a traveler’s first step was the very Philistine one of being assigned a nomer (hotel room) and that only after he had been granted one could the “visa” be tackled. Over the tawny mountain of “Bogdan’s” brown-speckled, butter-soaked, caviar-accompanied bliny (which A.B. forbade me to pay for though I was lousy with A Kingdom’s money), he spoke poetically, and at some length, about his recent trip to Tel Aviv.
My next move—a visit to London—would have been altogether delightful, had I not been overwhelmed all the time by anxiety, impatience, anguished forebodings. Through several venturesome gentlemen—a former lover of Allan Andoverton’s and two of my late benefactor’s mysterious chums—I had retained some innocent ties with the BINT, as Soviet agents acronymize the well-known, too well-known, British intelligence service. Consequently it was possible for me to obtain a false or more-or-less false passport. Since I may want to avail myself again of those facilities, I cannot reveal here my exact alias. Suffice it to say that some teasing similarity with my real family name could make the assumed one pass, if I got caught, for a clerical error on the part of an absentminded consul and for indifference to official papers on that of the deranged bearer. Let us suppose my real name to have been “Oblonsky” (a Tolstoyan invention); then the false one would be, for example, the mimetic “O. B. Long,” an oblong blur-sky, so to speak. This I could expand into, say, Oberon Bernard Long, of Dublin or Dumberton, and live with it for years on five or six continents.
I had escaped from Russia at the age of not quite nineteen, leaving across my path in a perilous forest the felled body of a Red soldier. I had then dedicated half a century to berating, deriding, twisting into funny shapes, wringing out like blood-wet towels, kicking neatly in Evil’s stinkiest spot, and otherwise tormenting the Soviet regime at every suitable turn of my writings. In fact, no more consistent critic of Bolshevist brutality and basic stupidity existed during all that time at the literary level to which my output belonged. I was thus well aware of two facts: that under my own name I would not be given a room at the Evropeyskaya or Astoria or any other Leningrad hotel unless I made some extraordinary amends, some abjectly exuberant recantation; and that if I talked my way to that hotel room as Mr. Long or Blong, and got interrupted, there might be no end of trouble. I decided therefore not to get interrupted.
“Shall I grow a beard to cross the frontier?” muses homesick General Gurko in Chapter Six of Esmeralda and Her Parandrus.
“Better than none,” said Harley Q., one of my gayest advisers. “But,” he added, “do it before we glue on and stamp O.B.’s picture and don’t lose weight afterwards.” So I grew it—during the atrocious heartracking wait for the room I could not mock up and the visa I could not forge. It was an ample Victorian affair, of a nice, rough, tawny shade threaded with silver. It reached up to my apple-red cheekbones and came down to my waistcoat, commingling on the way with my lateral yellow-gray locks. Special contact lenses not only gave another, dumbfounded, expression to my eyes, but somehow changed their very shape from squarish leonine, to round Jovian. Only upon my return did I notice that the old tailor-made trousers, on me and in my bag, displayed my real name on the inside of the waistband.
My good old British passport, which had been handled cursorily by so many courteous officers who had never opened my books (the only real identity papers of its accidental holder), remained, after a procedure, that both decency and incompetence forbid me to describe, physically the same in many respects; but certain of its other features, details of substance and items of information, were, let us say, “modified” by a new method, an alchemysterious treatment, a technique of genius, “still not understood elsewhere,” as the chaps in the lab tactfully expressed people’s utter unawareness of a discovery that might have saved countless fugitives and secret agents. In other words nobody, no forensic chemist not in the know, could suspect, let alone prove, that my passport was false. I do not know why I dwell on this subject with such tedious persistence. Probably, because I otlynivayu—“shirk”—the task of describing my visit to Leningrad; yet I can’t put it off any longer.