Testimony and Demeanor (5 page)

“I don’t know about that,” I said, and told him about the report on me—“bright but not too bright.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” he said. “You can’t imagine how similar.”

That Saturday I took him on a tour of Washington. He was surprised to learn that I was born here and grew up here. “A real native.”

It was always a daydream of mine to take an intelligent, appreciative foreigner on a tour of Washington. Pavel even wanted to see where I went to high school. In fact, he even wanted to hear detailed accounts of the football games I’d played in. It was nice. My ordinary childhood had never seemed so exotic to me.

We went to see the theater where Booth shot Lincoln. “Alexander II emancipated the serfs also and was assassinated also,” he said. “But what is not similar in this case is, I think, that our nineteenth-century assassinations had more constructive significance.”

That rattled me. “I think I see what you mean,” I said. “I mean, if you’re just being comparative.”

He said he was just being comparative.

He was amazed to find a mosque in Washington, and he was amused that it was air-conditioned.

“Are there Muslims in America?”

I said I thought this mosque was mainly for diplomats. I
didn’t want to go into the Black Muslims, because I didn’t really know.

“There is a mosque in Leningrad,” he said, “which is really for Soviet citizens, for people from the Central Asian republics.”

I said I thought that the government was down on religion.

“That’s not entirely true,” he said, “but the mosque was built in the nineteenth century.” I admired his answer. “You would like Russia,” he said. “Would you ever be sent there?”

“With H.E.W.?” I said. “Are you kidding?”

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you also worked with an overseas agency.”

“That was just a summer thing,” I said. “I was still in college.”

I realized that I had at last given him a definite answer to his old question. I looked at him, but his face showed no satisfaction.

“You should take a trip if you can,” he said. “You would like traveling in Russia.”

“Are you still in intelligence work?”

“No,” he said. “I work on consular matters—visas and other consular matters. I have also duties of cultural attaché.”

His English got suddenly worse, as though he was trying to make the point that he hadn’t understood the implications of my saying “Are you still?”

“But you would carry out intelligence assignments?” I said.

“How shall I say?” he said. “Our diplomatic and consular activity is governed by laws and conventions of proper diplomatic and consular activity.”

“That’s a very good answer,” I said. His accent had got even thicker.

He smiled and put his palm on his chest. “I am a very good man,” he said.

“The soothsayers of Rome used to smile when they passed each other on the street,” I said.

He didn’t understand. I explained.

“Oh, I see,” he said. “You’re very well read.”

We continued the tour.

Every time I saw Pavel, I liked him more. And I felt I knew him better and better. Of course, I did think sometimes: He’s still on the job, wants to find out state secrets. But then, I didn’t know any, and I enjoyed his company.

I think he could see how I’d become the way I was better than I could see how he’d become the way he was. When we were talking about World War II, I discovered that he was a little older than me. I remembered that when the news came that the Japanese had surrendered, I’d just won a sailing race at summer camp. I was annoyed that no one noticed I’d won. He remembered the beginning of the war. He remembered being evacuated from Leningrad in a truck convoy. They drove across Lake Ladoga while Leningrad was being shelled from the other side. He lived on a farm until a year after the war was over, waiting for where they were moving back to to be built.

I wondered if all that made him different, tougher. He couldn’t say; he didn’t know how tough I was. In general, though, he thought Americans were cold-blooded. I said I thought that, on the contrary, they were mushy. He said that could be—they were cold-blooded about being mushy. He didn’t mean to be insulting; he was just learning the language.

I wondered, too, what they had taught him in school. In my schools I was taught to be myself, to be a gentleman, to be a success. Several different things, it turned out. But what had they taught him in school?

Pavel worked harder at his embassy than I did at H.E.W., but I got to see him quite often. But there were still areas of misunderstanding—I’m not sure whose fault they were. For example, one time I decided to fix him up with the roommate of
one of my girl friends. I confess I thought the girl I was interested in would be impressed. A real Russian. I was taking him along for his postcard value. I was guilty of that.

We were going over just for supper. The girls made a Mexican dinner and brought out some tequila. Pavel got smashed. Not sedate drunk, but just the way Hollywood/Broadway portrays Russians getting drunk. As soon as we got there he started putting it away. What the girls had in mind was a high-tone question-and-answer period. Pavel, ignoring a question about the preservation of folklore in rural Russia, leaned forward and said, “I look forward until fashions change in Leningrad and skirts are that short.” The girls tucked their legs in and tugged their skirts down. “But what will I see there?” he said, turning to me. “Potatoes. Knees like potatoes. But here we have such sweet little knees, like little apples. Bright little apple knees.” He got on his own knees and advanced toward the little apple knees, smacking his lips and sighing extravagantly. Both girls leaped from their chairs.

“I frighten you,” he said. He turned to me. “I frighten them.” To the girls again, as he continued to advance: “Come back, darling little apple knees, come back and I shall behave, my juicy little apples.” He drooled. He caught it while it was still on his chin by damming it with his forefinger and flicking it back upside his lower lip. He lay down and laughed quietly to himself.

“I’ve got to go to work pretty early tomorrow,” my girl friend said. “I’ve already been late twice this week.”

It was only after several days that I decided the girls were too severe, especially in the context of how ordinary and uninterrupted our lives were.

I still had my suspicions about Pavel. He never mentioned that evening one way or the other, but one day he asked me if there were any corrupt officials where I worked. I gave him a
fairly straight answer—that is, that the corruption was really petty, mainly to do with expense accounts and ducking out of hard jobs. When I asked him why he wanted to know, he said that he was just interested in making comparisons. He seemed to adhere to the convergence theory.

“In so many ways,” he said, “we do not split the world in two. We are making it all the same. For better or for worse.”

“Well,” I said, “I hope for the better.”

“That would be nice, of course,” he said, “although you must know that you and I are not going to have any great effect.”

I said, “If there are lots more people like us—”

“No,” he said, “I don’t mean people like us. I mean as single human beings, you and I. Neither you nor I have that desire, that high fever to devote each moment of our complete lives to changing all other lives.”

I said that that might be so, but that I still worked pretty hard doing something that was pretty good.

“Of course,” he said. “We aren’t selfish. But we first of all wish to observe, to understand, to have our place in the world—and then we do our bit of good. We are officials, after all. But the real question is, who is leading the life we are building? We are not intending to sacrifice everything for the future. Therefore we keep trying to find pieces of this better life—like cooks who are tasting spoonful after spoonful of what they are preparing for others.”

I laughed. I could see the people I knew in Washington tasting away: “Now there’s a tasty program of a million dollars. I think we should take a little trip (
slurp
) just to see, and appoint a commission of a few of us, and run a little study (
slurp
) in our leisure time.…”

“It is not completely satisfying,” Pavel said. “We are neither feasting nor starving. I don’t mean riches or power that we nibble at. I mean possibilities of life in general. I mean time; I mean everything. We are not completing anything. And we are
not being used up in order for anything to be complete. Everyone is becoming a little official. It is very badly arranged, I think. All the mechanics of policy should be only the outer defense for whatever part of life can go on. But the mechanics are still in the middle, taking up the space and the time, until no one knows anything else.”

He paused again. I said I didn’t think it worked out so badly. I was trying to get him to take it all less personally and not be so extreme.

“Were you ever ambitious?” he asked.

“Only a little,” I said.

He laughed. “Only a little?” he said, and held his hands about six inches apart. “I was so ambitious at one time that I wanted things to melt in me. That is what I hoped for; that was my ambition precisely. To make many different things melt into one thing. I wanted to be able to announce something new. Perhaps to announce that
I
was something new.”

“What?” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “it was a very”—he held his hands out again and curled his fingers up—“a very nameless ambition.”

“But that’s not what you want now?”

“I am less ambitious now.”

I think it was the next day I had my first visitor at work. I had just sent a note to Pavel (I knew it was awkward calling him at work) inviting him to go quail shooting at my uncle’s farm in Virginia. My visitor took me to an empty conference room. He said, “There is no need for apprehension on your part; this is a routine check on all contacts of the nature of the contact you have been having with diplomatic personnel of one of a number of specified foreign powers.” He showed me his identification. “This identifies me to you, but let me encourage you to call this number”—he showed me a number—“to satisfy yourself that I am the agent identified on this identification.”

I understood that he had to be thorough, but the third time through my very boring narration of every conversation Pavel and I ever had, I was beginning to lose patience. I, of course, wasn’t supposed to say to anyone what I had been doing in Helsinki, but finally—just to get done—I let a long silence on the subject give a clue.

My visitor said, “Without going into the actual purposes of your visit to Helsinki, could you tell me if any other agency of our government was concerned?”

I looked uncomfortable and said nothing. From that silence he deduced that the whole thing was the concern of “another agency.” At least he stopped asking questions, encouraged me again to call the phone number, and left.

The Friday before the Sunday Pavel and I were going to go quail shooting, I had a second visitor. He took me to the same empty conference room and showed me his identification. He was from another agency. Different phone number. He asked me if I would be kind enough to meet him that evening at an art gallery on M Street.

I went to the art gallery and the owner, after watching me awhile, asked my name. He took me to a back room. My visitor of that afternoon was there and said, “Hi. Sorry to put you out, but we’re mildly curious about—”

“My social life.”

He nodded.

“Are you worried about me or interested in him?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said. “I guess you’ve had another visitor.”

“I’m not supposed to say,” I said.

“That’s just routine, I suppose,” he said reassuringly.

“I don’t really see a possibility of anything you’d be interested in,” I said. “Of course, I don’t mean to presume on your expertise.”

“I think you could do a little something for us,” he said. “It wouldn’t take any time, and we’ll take care of any expenses. We don’t want you to propose anything specific. It’s not a
question of that. Just find out what you can about whether he’s interested in talking to someone a little further along the line. Always gently, discreetly, ambiguously. You know.”

“No harm in that,” I said. “But I really don’t think there’s anything there.”

“Can you see him this weekend?”

“I’ll try,” I said. I could have said I’d arranged it already, but I wanted to impress him with my efficiency. I suppose that’s one of my government habits. But having been a little dishonest, I made up for it by being frankly discouraging about the chances of my helping his project. I said, “You know what he was supposed to be up to in Helsinki?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we reached a comfortable standoff on the whole subject.”

“Let’s just keep our eyes open for any counterindications on that score,” he said.

We set up our next appointment. He gave me an
objet
to leave the gallery with. It was a nice-looking pewter inkstand. He said that I should bring it back next time. I was reassured by his agency’s sense of economy.

Saturday morning I went to work for a half day. My boss called me in and said he thought I’d had my security check the year before. I said I had.

“I don’t see why you’re getting another,” he said. “You’re not thinking of leaving us for another job?”

I said no, that it was just some foreign contacts I had and that I hoped he wouldn’t mention it.

He said of course, and that he’d said there was, of course, no question in his mind about my loyalty.

I said that was right.

He said that he’d said I didn’t have any classified information available to me anyway.

I said that was right, except for one of the reports on school funds that had somehow got marked “Confidential.”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I don’t know how that happened.”

I felt better—I mean, I hadn’t realized I’d been feeling bad until I felt better hearing us both dismiss it all. I was glad my boss sounded worried about my leaving. If you’re going to be a workhorse, it’s nice for people to know it.

On my way home that day, I went to have lunch at Bonat’s with another H.E.W. fellow. It’s not very far from the Soviet Embassy, so I wasn’t too surprised when Pavel came in with a group of men all dressed in lumpy Russian suits. I began to get up. Pavel managed to get behind them and nod curtly to me. Then he turned away, his face blank and bored. It made me mad at him. It made me suspicious, or in any case righteous, about how open I was willing to be.