“Should we?” But beyond all that, Hollis thought, Alevy was playing a dangerous game, dangerous because it had become a personal game with no official backing or backup. Someday Seth Alevy would find himself alone with his cyanide pill. Hollis found himself saying something he’d thought about in Pavel’s izba. “Those people have enough problems, Seth. They don’t need you hanging around making things worse.”
“Bullshit. Things get worse for Jews only when they try to accommodate their persecutors.”
“Maybe. Look, I don’t talk politics or religion — only sex and football. I’m just telling you as a colleague, and yes, you idiot, even as your friend, that the KGB will forgive your spying, but not your Judaism. We need you here, especially now, until this new thing is settled.”
Alevy did not acknowledge Hollis’ words at all, but asked, “So, where and when are you meeting Ace?”
Hollis knew he couldn’t very well refuse to answer. “Gogol’s grave. Next Sunday. Three P.M. Give or take a few hours.”
“Where is Gogol’s grave these days?”
“Beats me.”
As Alevy and Hollis walked toward the exit, Hollis noticed that the Marines, the three secretaries, and the nurse had joined forces and retired to the lounge. The Horgans must have left without his noticing. The lanes were empty and quiet. And so were the game rooms and the swimming pool and all the other activity centers in the compound except the bars. There was a sort of mass lethargy that gripped this place, especially with the onset of winter. Hollis had never seen this kind of aimlessness and listlessness in any other American embassy. He didn’t know what a behavioral psychologist would make of this maze and its white rats, but Hollis’ theory was that the people inside the walls had somehow absorbed the malaise of the people outside the walls.
Hollis stared at the exit sign above the elevator and a word came to mind: bezizkhodnost. Exitlessness; dead end; futility; hopelessness; going nowhere — all contained within that one expressive word that the Russian people used but Pravda never printed. “Bezizkhodnost.”
Alevy looked at him and seemed to understand. “That’s what’s left when you subtract God from man.”
“But I see it here too. I think it’s catching.”
“Maybe,” Alevy said, “but not for us. We know what we’re about, don’t we, Sam?”
“Indeed we do.”
“Fuck the Reds,” Alevy said.
“Each and every day,” Hollis replied, but at the same time thinking that was no longer enough. Thinking that this time he had a chance to do something positive, to put Haiphong harbor to rest in his own mind, and to put the whole MIA question to rest for his country.
The two elevators came simultaneously. Hollis got in one, and Alevy the other.
16
Lisa Rhodes picked up the telephone in her office, dialed Hollis’ office, then before it rang, hung up. “Damn him.” She dialed Alevy’s office, and his secretary put her through. Alevy said, “Hello, Li—”
“Did you tell Sam Hollis to stay away from me?”
“No, I wouldn’t—”
“Are you lying to me?”
“No. But to be honest with you, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to get invol—”
“Don’t fuck around with my life, Seth.”
“Just calm down.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay. Sorry.”
“Look, if he’s done a disappearing act on you… Anyway, I still love you. Why don’t we talk—”
“We talked.”
“I should really be angry. What happened out there in that village?”
“It’s in my report.”
“Lisa—”
“I have to go. Bye, Seth.” She hung up. “Damn men.”
Lisa looked at her watch, saw it was five P.M., and poured herself a bourbon. She pulled a press release toward her and worked on it without knowing what she was writing.
A few minutes later Kay Hoffman walked in and took her favorite seat on the hot-air register. “Ah. You ever try this?”
Lisa didn’t reply and went back to the press release.
Kay Hoffman picked up a just-arrived copy of the previous day’s Washington Post and scanned it, then glanced at Lisa. “You all right?”
“Yes.”
“Monthly blues?”
“No.” Lisa struck out a line of the typed copy. She reflected on her job in the United States Information Service. She wrote news releases, but she was also the resident Russophile, responsible for cultural affairs. She arranged for Soviet cultural missions to tour the States. They sent the Bolshoi, and the U.S. sent Van Halen.
Lisa Rhodes loved Russian poetry in its original language, and Pasternak moved her deeply. She was an expert on icons, enjoyed Russian ballet, traditional Russian cooking, and folk art. She thought she understood the mysticism in the Russian soul — the unsevered link between the Russian race, the land, and the Orthodox church. And since Yablonya, she thought she felt her own Russianness more.
She sometimes thought of herself as a thin rope bridge between two iron superstructures. But if the Americans and Soviets were determined not to understand each other, that was their problem. One day they’d blow themselves and the rest of the earth into oblivion. Then the two cultures would be similar.
She made a few more notes on her press release. She usually wrote two releases — one for America, one in Russian for the Soviet news service, Tass. Tass used what they wanted without attribution. In that respect, at least, the Soviet and American press were alike. She looked up at Kay. “Do I have to be nice to Van Halen or to the audience?”
Kay glanced up from her newspaper. “Oh… are you still working on that? That has to go out today. Just sound up.”
“Where do you get your orders from?”
“I don’t get orders, Lisa. Only direction.”
“From where?”
“High up.”
“Someday I’m going to write what I want. What I really saw here.”
“Some day you can. But today you write what you’re told.”
“That’s what some apparatchik is being told at the Tass office tonight.”
“Maybe. But we won’t shoot you if you don’t do what we say. So don’t tell me we are no different from them.”
“No, I meant… there’s more to the story. The whole idea of the Russian youth enthralled by Western pop culture. Every kid there was dressed in blue jeans. They were shouting in English, ‘Super,’ ‘Beautiful, baby.’ It was…” She thought a moment. “It was surreal is what it was. But was it revolution?”
Kay Hoffman stared at her awhile, then said, “If it was, that is not what you will write about.”
Lisa went back to her press release.
Kay went back to her newspaper.
Lisa thought, But what was it? What is going on here? Questions such as that, however, were not within the purview of the USIS. Working for the USIS was like working for the Ministry of Truth; when the party line changed, you changed with it.
At the moment, Soviet-American relations were on the verge of a breakthrough. Thus all this cultural activity was a precursor to the diplomatic activity. Her orders — her directions — were to be positive, upbeat. Think peace.
Those had been her orders some years back, before Nicholas Daniloff, an American correspondent, had been arrested by the KGB on a trumped-up spy charge. Then new orders came down: cancel all cultural exchanges. And so it went, in an Orwellian about-face, in mid-sentence, the word processors ceased churning out puff pieces and began issuing terse sentences of canceled events. But for the moment, puff was required. Though now there was the Fisher affair. She said to Kay Hoffman, “I don’t appreciate you writing that press release about Fisher’s death and you putting my name on it.”