The difference in their social status notwithstanding, the welder and the construction director met often and spoke openly, without fear.
“You’ve made the right choice to come here,” Bunyan once observed over dinner in his bungalow. “This is the ultimate land of opportunity. Extraordinary wealth is perpetually up for grabs. Billions of dollars in gold, soon to be dwarfed by immense wealth of oil, coal, ore, steel. All of it changed hands in 1917, and it may again.”
“I didn’t come here for wealth,” said Lewis.
In those days, he still found it difficult to accept the idea that a white man of Bunyan’s stature would find him a worthy interlocutor.
“Nor I,” said Bunyan. “I came here to help them make something of it. To give them focus.”
“You seem to be succeeding,” said Lewis. “The blast furnaces are going up.”
“By hook or crook. Do you know what makes this country run?” This was, of course, a rhetorical question. Bunyan leaned back in his chair to offer the answer: “The mandates.”
A mandate was no more than a piece of paper: a letter, preferably handwritten, from a high-level bureaucrat, stating that the bearer should be given whatever it was he seeks. Some used the mandates for their personal benefit. Others, like Bunyan, to break through bureaucratic logjams.
At that time, Bunyan operated with a supply of mandates from Sergo Ordzhonikidze, the people’s commissar of heavy industry.
“These are simple pieces of paper, not always on letterhead, not always stamped,” Bunyan continued. “Just imagine having a mandate from Stalin himself. There would be no stamp, no letterhead, no date of expiration. Who’d ever dare to check whether it’s real? And how would you check?”
“I wouldn’t want to be caught with one of those,” said Lewis.
“Neither would I.”
Bunyan’s ability to procure freight trains, copper wire, pipe, lumber, and welding torches was legendary in Magnitogorsk. Indeed, were it not for Bunyan, the construction of the kombinat would have turned into an exercise in marching in place, and without Magnitogorsk, Russia would have had less pig iron, less steel — and fewer tanks, planes, and Katyushas — when it needed them.
Were it not for Charles Bunyan, the war could have been lost.
* * *
As he had come down from the scaffold, Lewis showed up wearing a singed sheepskin coat, an ushanka with ear flaps down, and black valenki, felt boots that had all the traction of bedroom slippers and left his ankles wobbling. Large gloves protruded from his pocket.
“This is our brigadier of welders, Comrade Friederich Lewis,” Bunyan said, introducing him to a diminutive, middle-aged, paleskinned man and a young woman.
Lewis had never heard Bunyan call him comrade before. After all, neither of them was Soviet or, technically, a Communist. Bunyan worked for McKee and drew a hard currency paycheck. Lewis had overstayed his McKee assignment, and though he was being paid in rubles, he was still an American.
“This is Comrade Solomon Mikhoels and his assistant, Tatyana Goldshtein,” Bunyan said in English. “They are from the Jewish theater in Moscow, here making preparations for filming.”
Mikhoels sat beneath a large portrait of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin. It was an oil, in a heavy gold-leaf frame, a big portrait probably done by a big artist. In accordance with long-standing tradition, the portraits of Soviet leaders weren’t hung flat against the wall, but were angled slightly, to create the impression that the leader is looking down at the viewer.
Lewis nodded politely. What did any of this have to do with him?
The man looked like a Party worker, a new aristocrat traveling with his mistress. He wore a blue European suit and black leather shoes that were so small and delicate that they surely precluded any attempt at mobility in the frost and mud of Magnitogorsk.
* * *
“Kak vam nravyatsya nashi zhenshchiny?” Mikhoels asked, looking over the unusually pigmented builder of Socialism. How do you like our women?
This was not an effective icebreaker.
“Our women…” Lewis knew that even people who swore to have negated race could not be trusted on the subject of what was once known as corruption of blood. Did he catch Lewis staring at that girl’s charcoal eyes, her thick braid, her small upturned breasts?
Did this man, who surely lived in a heated apartment, understand what it was like to live in the Magnitogorsk workers’ barracks, where every square centimeter was shared with others, and where fucking was, in effect, a spectator sport?
Did he want to know about peasant girls who raised their skirts — actually, untied the drawstrings of their trousers — without waiting to be asked? Or did he want to know how Lewis’s adolescence shaped his attitude toward white women? If so, he would want to hear that after the murderous Omaha race riots of 1919, Lewis’s mother took to smacking him upside the head every time he looked at a white girl. Would this Comrade Mikhoels care to know that punitive measures intensify one’s interest in the forbidden?
Cringing, Bunyan translated Mikhoels’s artless question. He knew that Lewis’s Russian was good and getting better, and he sensed correctly that with or without a translation, the question would remain unanswered.
The intense stare of Mikhoels’s dark eyes glaring beneath a soaring forehead added to Lewis’s discomfort.
After a long, tense pause, Mikhoels posed another question: “Vy Kommunist?” Another icebreaker.
“Tell him I have no part-bilet,” Lewis replied in a mixture of Russian and English.
Indeed, Lewis was not a card-carrying Communist, and the reasons for his decision not to join the Party were inseparable from his reasons for declining to discuss “our” women.
“How can I help you?” Lewis asked in English.
“We’d like you to consider appearing in a film,” said Mikhoels in Russian.
“That’s not what I do,” Lewis answered in English.
This wasn’t a conversation. These were chunks of ice slamming into each other randomly, with great force.
“Vy budete igrat’ vashego soplemennika,” Mikhoels continued. You will be playing one of your tribesmen. That was an odd choice of words: tribesmen. What did he think Lewis was? A Zulu?
Surely Mikhoels understood that the audience had gone home, yet, speaking slowly, enunciating, he proceeded to lay out his film’s storyline: a Jewish Communist, a bricklayer, returns to his native shtetl after twenty-eight years of laying brick in America. He is accompanied by his wife and a Negro comrade …
“Why?” Lewis interrupted in Russian. “Why not just have him travel with his wife and no Negro comrade?”
“Your Russian is very good,” noted Mikhoels with a faint smile.
“And that surprises you…”
“It does, I confess.”
The smile was still there, infuriating, frozen. What was its cause? Did this man think he had solved some quintessential mystery? Was he pondering something Lewis didn’t want him to ponder? Lewis wanted out of that room, out of that idiotic conversation, away from that clueless film that shouldn’t be made.
“Then maybe you’ll answer my question: Why not leave that Negro at home?”
Mikhoels turned to the young woman: “Tanechka, please go down to the cafeteria and bring me a glass of tea.”
The young woman got up with hesitation and slowly headed for the door. Lewis refrained from watching her leave. This was what they wanted, of course, to catch him casting a glance at her buttocks.
“Let me guess, your Negro comrade is incidental to the story,” said Lewis as the door closed.
“He is…”