something about wasps flowering and a necklace of windows. When he paused long enough we knew he was done, so we clapped. He beamed. Karel got up, and I took his chair. Louis said, “Now that you’re sitting I can face you!”
Vera and Ludmila laughed, and when they quieted, I saw Vera’s big, drunken eyes holding on to me. Her black hair hung loosely down her back.
“They told me about it,” he said. “This book of yours.”
“Oh great.”
“I hear it’s autobiographical. That so?” He spoke our language surprisingly well.
“Everything’s autobiographical, isn’t it?”
Louis laughed expressively, as though he were on a stage and had to project to the back rows. “Very good, very good!”
I hadn’t said it to be funny, but they were all laughing with him, even Georgi, and I didn’t know if this was because it actually was funny, or if they were trying to stay in France’s good favors.
“I just finished an epic poem on the most glorious of all human desires: revenge. I swear, there is nothing more sincere. What about your book?”
“It’s about my time during the war.”
The Frenchman stopped laughing and put on a very serious face. “And what did you do during the war?”
“Killed people, of course.”
Louis winked. “Me, I hid under my mother’s skirt!”
Everyone laughed again, and even I cracked a smile.
11
The conversation was literary before it became political. It started with some French poets I hadn’t read, then some Italians I’d read in translation, and finally came back home. Karel, Vera’s husband, brought up August Menish, who had been released from internal exile two months before and was busy editing his prison memoir. “It’s going to be incredible,” he told us.
“That’s what you told us about Brest’s camp book,” Vera said as she put out her cigarette. “And that ended up worthless.” The smile on her gaunt philosopher’s face was directed at me.
“Menish has the books behind him-he’s got the evidence,” said Karel. But no one was listening to him anymore.
Louis talked about the bus strike going on in Montgomery, Alabama, in the United States. A couple people waved his comments away, because we’d heard enough of the story from The Spark — further evidence of capitalism’s racist underbelly-but Louis insisted that we listen. “You should hear this reverend they’ve got leading them. His name’s King — a doctor, in fact. He’s one hell of a speaker. He’s putting nonviolent resistance on the map.”
“That was Gandhi,” said Ludmila. “The Americans would have you think they invented water next.”
“Didn’t they?” said someone I didn’t know.
Miroslav pulled out a pack of cards to start the games, so I moved to the deflated sofa in the living room and half listened to Vera provoke Louis into a debate on existentialism-she questioned his credentials, which was something Vera loved to do. I stopped listening. On the far wall was Georgi’s old poster for the Fifth Soviet Five- Year Plan, of kerchiefed women working in fields, below the enormous face of Stalin filling the sky, a chalk-scribbled beard over his wide chin. Georgi had been drunk when he defaced it, and everyone over that night-myself included- had applauded.
Georgi Radevych was known as a drunk and, briefly, as the author of a small volume of state-published poetry that made his name. He had used that momentary fame to secure his position as an arbitrator of all things literary. He gathered writers in his home and made them perform for him, and sometimes from these evenings self-published manuscripts emerged that bore his name on the front page. After my own little book came out, he showed up at the Militia station and introduced himself. I couldn’t help but admire that. He had a card with the profession poet inscribed in cursive beneath his name. He invited me to his evenings, and over the last four years I had met almost everyone who did any worthwhile writing in the Capital, before forgetting their names. They came through his apartment, drank his wine, and performed impromptu readings under the gaze of his bearded Stalin. Even I got into the mood now and then and said some spontaneous lines, but those were rare intoxicated moments, and seldom worth a listen.
Georgi flopped into a chair and asked how the criminal classes were coming along. I told him about the dead man in the kitchen. He waved his red hands. “This is what passes for criminality these days?”
“Suicide’s illegal.”
“A sin, you mean. Just a sin. And a coward’s way of breaking the law. You’ve got to stay alive in order to face the punishment. Tell me, Ferenc,” he said, dropping to almost a whisper, “what have you got for my new collection?”
He had been asking for months. They were going to put out another volume of writings, dissident writings perhaps, on the theme of responsibility. He wanted a piece from everyone. Another basement-printed book-maybe just some stapled pages to pass around to friends and talk over in smoky living rooms like this one. “I don’t have anything.”
“Weren’t you writing in the provinces?”
“I was trying to restart my marriage.”
“And?”
I drank the wine, but it had a spoiled edge. I set it on an end table. Somebody in the kitchen turned on the radio, and we heard static until voices rose through it. It was the American station that you could sometimes hear from Germany, broadcasting eastward. In certain weather it drifted through. News and music and more news. Georgi’s eyes closed as he meditated on the commentary on developments in Poland: negotiations between Moscow and Warsaw to end the unrest. “The Frenchman, he’s staying here?”
He nodded, eyes still shut. “Been here two weeks. But tomorrow it’s off to Prague, and then back home to Paris. A glorious tour of the People’s Republics.”
“There was no trouble, then? Him staying here? No knocks on the door?”
Georgi opened his eyes, then his hands, and spoke with the simplicity of spirit that reminded me that I actually liked him. “We’re living in the most wonderful of times, my friend. And if we’re not, then please, don’t let me know.”
12
“I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” said the Frenchman. He had come in after Georgi left and leaned forward on the edge of the chair. “I’m trying to grasp this situation we’re in right now. It’s unprecedented, you know, in human history. The entire planet is split between two camps, and the rest of us are intermediaries. We’re the ones fighting it out. I want to find a way to express this puppetry. Because that’s what we are. We’re puppets of history, and we’re playing out a tragedy. Those hydrogen bombs are ready to be dropped. There are enough idiots in the White House and the Central Committee to ensure one of those buttons is going to be pressed. And the longer the wait, the bigger the explosions-they’ll put bombs into space before long. I’m not kidding, all our leaders are mad. In the West we vote them in, but the vanity only makes them more crazy. Don’t you see? All our efforts are toward our own annihilation.”
He was drunk, but this was something he’d thought about for a long time and needed no sobriety to express- just a listener.
“Now, I’m not trying to deride this situation. I’ll leave that to the pacifists. It simply is, and I want to see it as clearly as I can. Without prejudice.”
“So what’s this?” I asked. “Your visit here. Research?”
