Buying the Night Flight (27 page)

As we left the museum, I must have fallen silent, for even Ia, who had been so proper and pristine-pure, suddenly volunteered some thing. (This, I found, often happened -- you could never push people to talk in Russia, but they suddenly would when you least expected it.) "We think he did more good than bad," she said suddenly, as though I had asked or criticized something. I simply looked away.

Then Ivan sprang to life. "Let's go to the country," he said. "Let me take us to dinner. ..." I hesitated, but then he added, "It's my friend. I'm the godfather of their child. He is chairman of a
kolhoz
and they'll be happy to have us for dinner."

The farmhouse turned out to be large, perfectly square, and made of plain brick and wood. Inside, the furniture was heavy and nondescript, but what was so memorable was the fact that the walls were painted a very bright red. Over every one hung the omnipresent picture and the hard black eyes of Joseph Dzhugashvili.

Dinners like this in Russia take on a peculiar rhythm of their own. There is a point-counterpoint of eat and toast and drink and joke and eat and toast and drink that leads on to an ever higher level of joviality, before it catapults into oblivion. But it was always forced joviality, and it was always forced drinking.

After the dinner had started, the husband, a husky, swarthy farmer, raised a toast of homemade wine "to the friendship between Stalin and Roosevelt." "They greatly respected each other," he said, and "that shows the Americans and the Georgians are friends." He raised the two-foot-long animal's horn that Georgians adore drinking from, filled it with homemade wine, and passed it to me.

I felt more like vomiting. Stalin had killed up to twenty million Russians alone. But what exactly was one supposed to say at a moment like this? "It would make me sick," I said, only. And I pointed to the end of the table. "Please, the small horn," I said.

And I remembered then what the great writer, a liberal, Victor Rozov had said to me in Moscow: "I think to this day people are still seeking new ways of development after the death of Stalin. This is still under way. Some people, especially in the West, thought after the death of Stalin that everything would change magically, but, to be serious, it will be very long. I personally do not believe in magic."

Even then the workers -- the Russian "hard hats" -- yearned for the days of Stalin, when there was "order" and when the "intellectuals" were not allowed to "raise hell." To the common people Stalin was their
vozhd,
their Russian
"Führer."
He was the direct emotional successor of the czar, their Communist "little father," who would save them from error, protect them in war, punish them for their own good, and take care of them just as the czar had ... and just as the czar had
not.

Who would not then resent and even hate someone like Khrushchev, who destroyed the security of fealty to the
vozhd,
who demanded the rigors of knowing the truth, and who tore away the comforting curtains of the past, even if to Westerners, with our ideas of freedom, they seemed more like shrouds. Discarding Stalin meant having to grow up into thinking, individualized, self-regulating human beings. As I thought about this, in Russia, I thought about
machismo
in Latin America, about Saul Alinsky with his insights into power and its mechanisms, about Eric Hotter and his, about dictators and free people, the totalitarian mind and the free mind -- everywhere. It was very saddening.

We reached the hotel about 10:00 p.m. and they dropped me off, everyone still feeling quite jovial, at the hotel. Ivan walked me to the door, said he would phone the next morning to go swimming, and left. He could not have been more polite and I found myself chiding myself for my inordinate suspicion. I
should
have gone to dinner with him, how stupid and silly of me! What a puritan you are, Gee Gee! My phone was not working, so I strolled down the hall to the floor woman's desk to make a phone call to Nellie, my Moscow guide, who had not felt good and thus had not gone with us. Then I returned to my room.

At ten thirty there was a knock on the door. I thought it must be Nellie. I called out, "Who is it?" but no one answered. When I opened the door a crack to see who was there, there stood Ivan. He pushed the door inward, violently, pinning me behind it.

"Nyet, nyet,"
I cried out angrily.

But within seconds he had locked the door behind him and stood facing me.

The most astonishing thing -- what had it been, thirty minutes, forty at the most? -- was the extraordinary change in his appearance. When he left me at the door, he had been tastefully dressed, a perfectly decent young man of twenty-eight with impeccable manners who seemed totally in control of himself and blessed with a rather fey sense of humor.

And now ... now his face was grotesquely contorted. His skin was flushed. His jacket was slightly askew, and his tie and the top of his shirt were open. His eyes had taken on a strangely savage look, and his mouth was set in a cruel expression that was so different from the slightly bemused and tolerant expression it had had all day that I wondered if I were seeing the same man.

Later I would remember the words of an anti-Nazi Austrian officer, who said of this kind of Slav: "They're like that. Suddenly something snaps and they become raging beasts. During the war they were very kind to children, they never fired into children, as the Nazis did. But they were terribly brutal with women."

He held me tightly by the left wrist, staring at me with those strange, feral eyes. I had never been nervous, much less hysterical, but now I felt the hysteria rising inside me. Was this a political setup? I must admit that, ironically, that was the
first
thought that went through me, for the Soviets were so adept at that. Or was he going to rape me? Kill me?

I had always thought, when I allowed myself to think of it, that I would rather be raped than murdered, and occasionally I had wondered what exactly I would do. Now there was no more wondering, and my reaction surprised even me.

"No," he said with a quiet determination behind the crazy eyes. "No, I have come to stay." Then he raised his large hand and ripped my nightgown down the front.

Questions flew through my mind. How had he gotten in, with all those guards and floor women? Could the floor woman hear me? Could I get to the open window? Could I jump two stories? Could 1 get from him the bottle of liqueur the farm family had given me? I knew the reason behind the last question -- and it rather frightened me -- and it was because I was going to kill him with it if I could.

Then, instinctively, I began screaming. I screamed loud. And I saw the rage rise in his face. The first blow was so stunning that I spun against the desk and lay there, while with his other hand he still held my wrist. When I came to and could look up again, I could feel the excitement rising in him. He liked this. Perhaps it was
this that he had come for.

"I want a drink," I said. I wanted the bottle, and I was as calm as death about it.

"Oh, no, oh, no," he shouted. "I'll get it for you." He wouldn't let me anywhere near the bottle.

I screamed again. He hit me again, this time nearly knocking me unconscious. I hit him back, again and again. He laughed at this presumption and struck me again. I remember only my body hitting furniture, over and over, until I was almost unconscious. He was more and more enraged at my resistance and started screaming, "Pig," in English and then
"Schweinehund,
" in German (which he purported to speak, poorly I can assure you).

"Tomorrow the police, tomorrow the police," I kept repeating.

"What police?" he shouted, laughing a nasty laugh. "I'm with the television!"

I started to scream again, perhaps because it was the only way I could assert my humanity, my response, any control. His response was to keep slapping me, and all I remember was spinning off more sides of furniture until I could barely see anything but his ugly face, with his teeth bared and his eyes heavily dilated.

"This," he shouted, now brandishing a fist that could easily break open my skull if he hit me with it.

Now I was desperate. Should I let him stay -- in effect, let him rape me and then try to call the police? Should I let him rape me and just try to get him out? By now I was far more desperate about staying alive. But just as I was about to sink into some oblivion of conscience and consciousness, one of the stranger things of my life occurred.

Suddenly his eyes started to get groggy and his head began -- just began -- to sag. I could feel just the slightest letup of the viselike grip on my arm, the first tremulous feeling of blood flowing back to my hand. He forced me to sit down on the bed, but he didn't touch me. I sat as far away from him as possible. Strangely, he said in Russian, almost appealing, "You want me."

"I don't want you, I don't want you," I spat out.

Then, almost defensively, he asked, "Why not?"

For a moment he seemed to be thinking. His demeanor was growing more and more groggy, remote, strange. Finally he said, almost sleepily, almost as if his feelings were hurt, "If you don't want me, I'm going to go."

"I don't want you," I said softly in order not to break the mood.

To my continued amazement, now he stood up and pulled me up by the wrist. "I'll go if you promise me two things," he said, as if we had been having a cocktail party conversation.

"Of course, anything," I murmured.

"If I come to the United States, you'll sleep with me? And tomorrow we'll go swimming?"

"Of course," I said, scarcely able to believe what was happening.

"Things are much different in Chicago, much different than here."

"You promise?" His eyes were growing heavier and heavier.

"Yes, of course. Tomorrow at three."

"Tomorrow at three." He repeated it like a parrot. Then he let go of my wrist for the first time in perhaps forty minutes. He stepped to the door, opened it, and, without another word, left.

Unbelieving, I stared at the door. Then I ran to it, sprang upon the key, and locked it. I ran to the window, and though it was on the second floor, I locked
it.
For a few seconds I sat on the bed, trying to draw my breath again, trying to figure out what in God's name had really happened. Within minutes I went down to Nellie's room and told her the whole story. A wonderful Russian-Jewish woman from Moscow, Nellie had been with me for weeks -- she knew what kind of woman I was.

"Tomorrow morning we'll decide what to do," she said finally, veritably choking on her fury. "We'll get this man's job -- that's the least thing."

I lay there all-night, awake and terrified, waiting desperately for the dawn. And as I lay there, I became aware of a pain in my leg that got worse and worse and worse. By the first lights of dawn I was in agony. I couldn't wait for seven, when I had told Nellie I would call her, so I got up at six and stumbled downstairs. I couldn't put any weight on my left leg and the pain was almost unbearable. It had also turned black overnight and I was convinced it was broken.

At 7:30 a.m. exactly Nellie came into the dining room looking frantic, her eyes wild. "Oh, my God, I thought you had gone somewhere," she said.

Nellie made the rounds of the hotel and came back looking utterly disconsolate. "He bribed everyone in the hotel," she said, a strange thing for a Russian Intourist guide to admit.

I told her we had to "do" something. She said it was the same for women everywhere -- they would "only make it look bad for you." I told her it wasn't that way in America. She said angrily that it was. And she was more right than wrong.

Ia appeared and sat in the room with "I told you so" eyes and her pursed virgin's lips, even though, I reminded her, it was
she
who had "known" him, who had praised him. "I'm sure he is sorry," she said coolly to me, her eyes still veiled and accusing. To Nellie, on the side, she said, "She deserved it, she brought it on." Though I hadn't
done
anything, barely talked to him, I had allowed him to buy food for me by taking me to the dinner.
"Buy food for me?"
In Georgia, she said, that means a woman has "agreed." So when he came to my room expecting payment for the coffee, sugar, bread, and sausage, he had every reason to be angry. And to act as he did? "Yes."

Beating women, of course, is an old and revered custom -- in Russia even more than most places. Why, after all, are the poets Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko always writing poems about wife-beating? It's an old custom, even more fun if the woman is not your wife, and one of the few that have survived with no modifications into the Soviet period.

Nor did Ivan himself appear to think he had done anything even untoward. The next afternoon he duly telephoned at 3:00 p.m. on the dot, as I lay there in agonizing pain. He wanted to know if I wanted to go swimming.

But what came to be most interesting about the entire situation -- and in many ways most horrible -- was not what he had done to me but what I saw, first, in people around me and, second, in myself.

Back in Moscow I immediately phoned my "friends" in the American embassy and went over there, as difficult as that was since any pressure on my left leg left me with extreme pain. I will never forget sitting in the office with these men I considered my friends and having them say, their eyes all too eager for every telling detail, "And then what happened?" First I blushed crimson, the whole situation was so frightful to me. Then I blushed out of sheer anger. At the end they did not really want to do anything about it. As one put it, "Do you really want people to
know
this?" I hobbled out of the embassy with a new, colder anger.