Testimony and Demeanor (6 page)

Sunday morning was a perfect gray fall day. Pavel and I left Washington for my uncle’s farm at seven. Legal shooting began at eight.

The only reminder of what I was supposed to do was that Pavel asked how far away the farm was. I said about a thirty-five-mile drive.

“You see,” he said, “we’re only allowed to go fifty kilometers outside the city. That’s about thirty miles.”

“If you draw a straight line,” I said, “the farm’s only thirty miles away. The drive is sort of roundabout.”

We drove past the new C.I.A. building in Langley. He didn’t look up.

We picked up the tenant farmer’s dog, a middle-aged black Labrador, and got the guns from the main house. The dog began to jump when he saw the guns. He knew I was a terrible shot, but he may have had hopes for the other fellow. He kept nudging Pavel’s knee with his nose.

An odd thing happened about then. I know it may seem paradoxical, but hunting was the most pastoral, quiet, private,
and gentle part of my life. My uncle got the farm when I was nine. It wasn’t in the gentleman-farmer Middleburg-Warrenton axis. It was north of all that, in an untidy backwater of independent beef and dairy farms. For example, there were more likely to be pigs than horses in the back yard, and there was a lot of rocky, weedy wasteland. More barbed wire than rail fence. More tar paper and corrugated metal than wood in the sheds, barns, and silos. So when I was going to school I only brought friends out whom I really trusted to like doing nothing and who would understand what was nice about the place being unimproved, dreary, and still. Later on I preferred going alone—especially when hunting. And later yet I never gave any thought to the condition of the country as far as the Health, Education, or Welfare went. I’d brought no visitors or thoughts there since I was sixteen. So, although I’d taken Pavel around Washington and hadn’t minded introducing him to girls I knew, just before we set out with the dog to go through a stretch of woods I felt a resentment at his intrusion. His intrusion into my land, into a piece of nurtured schizophrenia that gave my ordinary life its only other dimension. I felt more secretive about the feelings I had out there than any I had in the institutions I went to or worked for. I was even secretive about keeping my feelings secret.

We set off through the woods, each of us with a double-barreled 20-gauge shotgun, the dog trotting in and out of the oak trees and sniffing deeply at the piles of leaves by the roots. Before we got out of the woods, Pavel stopped me and asked how big a quail was. I showed him with my hands. What shape? I drew a picture in some mud with a stick. I thought I’d better tell him how they’d go up when the dog ran into a covey. “Yes,” he said, “we have quail too.
Perepyolka
.”

“Did you do a lot of hunting?” I asked. It struck me that the only picture of Russian hunting I could imagine was a Turgenev/Tolstoy one.

“Yes,” he said. “Not for quail so much as for—I don’t know the name.
Kurapatka
.” He drew a picture in the mud.

“Some kind of grouse?” I said. “Or partridge.”

“And this,” he said. He drew another picture.

“It’s either a woodcock or a snipe,” I said. “That’s sort of in between.”

“Smaller,” he said.
“Byeskaz.”

“Snipe.”

“And ducks,” he said. “They fly down the rivers in the fall. They fly all the way to Persia. Even to India, they say.”

We stepped out of the woods. The meadow stretched for more than a mile, rolling down to another stretch of woods that lined a creek. The grass was knee high in places. There were a few solitary stunted pines, some flowering thistles, and dried-out Queen Anne’s lace. High above us there was a wind blowing the clouds slowly to the west, where—far in the distance—we could see the Blue Ridge. There the sun was shining through breaks in the cloud cover.

He walked ahead of me and stopped to look. I felt a twist of annoyance. The dog trotted stiffly back to him and nudged his knee. Pavel didn’t pay any attention to him and the dog lay down heavily, raising his eyes to me to see if I’d be any quicker to get down to hunting. Pavel turned around and looked at me curiously. I don’t know what he saw in my face—I was in the middle of changing my mind about having him there. After all, he was as much another dimension as the place. He raised his free arm and let it fall back to his side.

He said, “I would never have known this part of the world was like this.”

The dog got up, stretched, and yawned. I said to him, “Hie on.” He began to quarter the field with his stiff trot, going back and forth like a windshield wiper, always about thirty yards in front of us. We went across the field, pulling our legs through the tall grass, the dog padding back and forth, concentrated
and happy, and far, far in front of us the Blue Ridge were spotted with moving sun and shadow.

The day went by as though it were tied to us—slowly when we were going slowly through the grass, enveloped and calmed by the still air; and then whirring up with the covey, swinging with the guns, bounding around with the dog as he eddied through the cover finding the fallen birds; and then stopping with long bright surprise as a single quail popped up and away past our empty guns; and settling on us again as we passed through some more woods and into a farther field.

We circled back to the house about four in the afternoon. Seven quail. Not bad, not good. We thought it was a triumph, and the dog thought we were geniuses, since he couldn’t count. We cleaned the birds and fed him the hearts and livers. We fried two of the birds, along with some bacon. We made a fire and let the dog come in the house. We had a few drinks and watched the sun go down.

Just as we were getting back into the car after dropping the dog off at the tenant farmer’s house, I was feeling so full and effusive that I almost told him everything about what I was supposed to ask him. As a kind of present of confidence. Of course, I checked myself.

In fact, I could almost feel the caution—the security—fence off that whole subject in my mind. It was a sudden shock, as though something clanged down around me. At first I was pleased that I knew how to keep quiet even after a few drinks. Then I had a sense of resentment even stronger than I’d had in the morning at Pavel for coming into my land. But it was a more frustrated resentment, because there was nothing I really wanted to do about this intrusion. In a way, it was my own.

The following Tuesday I went back to the art gallery on M Street. I was careful to bring back the
objet
. I went to the back room and said, “No go.”

My visitor from the other agency said, “What did he say?”

I said, “He’s very loyal, that’s all.” For some reason I’d thought that would be all I’d have to say.

“How do you know?”

“He said so,” I said. “Sort of.” I wasn’t very well prepared. It upset me, because I usually like to do presentations well—especially to other agencies.

“What
did
he say?”

“He didn’t say it in so many words,” I said. “I just inferred that he liked it here O.K., but that he would be glad to get back. That’s all.”

“How do you know?”

And so it went. Did Pavel try to make an overture to me? Did he complain about any of his superiors? Did he seem very knowledgeable about the United States? Did he have any special interests? (I said he liked hunting.) What did he say about girl friends? Did he express himself in any way about his job? Was he overworked? Underworked? Bored? Tired? Did he need money? Et cetera. We went over the same ground several times, each time with different footwork.

“I guess it’s a blind alley,” I said at last.

“That seems to be your unshakable opinion,” the man said. He was annoyed. “Did it occur to you that you may have done a disservice to your friend as well as to us by not really pursuing the matter as we agreed?”

“Of course,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while. I thought he was trying to think up some new way to get at me, but finally he just asked what my expenses had come to. I said I’d skip the expenses.

“I’d just as soon you didn’t,” he said. “It makes the record sloppy. How far did you drive?”

“Seventy miles or so,” I said. “Round trip.”

“Beyond the thirty-mile limit?” he said.

“No,” I said, and explained. He shrugged and counted out
some cash for the driving expenses. He said he’d be in touch if necessary.

During the next day I didn’t think too much about it all. I thought I’d adroitly made myself as neutral as possible over something that could be forgotten.

The day after that I had a sudden fit of thinking I’d been wrong. Maybe the man was right. Maybe he knew much more than I did about Pavel’s wanting to come over and I was the only way to contact Pavel, but he couldn’t trust me with the whole story.

But then I thought Pavel would surely have spoken to me. He knew me; he was a friend of mine. Of course, institutions, I thought, even in this country, know more than friends. I had a friend at Yale, a graduate student, whose girl friend found out he was going to propose to her when she saw, by chance, his application for renewal of his research grant. He’d asked for more money, and explained to the foundation that he was going to get married. She said nothing. When he got the money he asked her to marry him. She wasn’t mad that the foundation knew before she did. She knew that that’s how life is nowadays.

I balanced all these thoughts by thinking I’d been deceitful with Pavel, that one of the few values I still imagined myself holding had to do with friendship, with being truthful in friendship. I realized that I hadn’t ever been put in a position where I had to examine what I meant by friendship. All I’d ever had to do was put a drunk to bed, vote for a friend’s membership in a club, go to weddings. I hadn’t even had to lend anyone more than twenty dollars.

The third day, I decided that on the basis of the past week my life was gray and feeble. I realized I should have resolved to play it out all the way. I became obsessed with garish, disruptive possibilities. No matter which way Pavel was working, I
should have hired a girl to seduce him, offered him stock in General Motors, a plane ticket to Rio. Asked him to rob a bank. Anything to see in his face what was in his mind. I wanted to find out things just for myself. To have some interest—even some duplicity—of my own.

Even when I subsided and was working quietly along on my H.E.W. chores, I would suddenly think that at the very least I should have asked Pavel to confide in me—offered to explain my own small part—exchanged my own fabulous lies for his fabulous lies, some invention of what I was for his invention of what he was. At least that—at the very, very least.

But I subsided even further. I began to guess that the only value at the bottom of my life was preservation of a personal status quo. Me in my right place. I was apparently ready to work for twenty years—or, as they used to say around the office, work for one year twenty times.

But after a week of yearning for turbulence and revelation, the automatic pilot of my life kept me routine. It took a special effort to lift the phone and call Pavel at home. I was even relieved when there was no answer. But I kept calling regularly until I had worked up enough frustration to call the Soviet Embassy the next day. They said he wasn’t in—to try the consular affairs number. I did. They said there to call the embassy number. I did. They asked me to leave my name and number and said he would call when available. He didn’t. I called again the next day. Same runaround. I went to his apartment. No one home. I left a note. Next day still no response. I had my secretary dial the embassy number while I dialed the consular affairs number. They both said to call the other number. I said to the embassy that I was connected to the consular number and that the consular people said to call them. There was a silence. Then they gave a third number. I called that. A man answered and said to call the other two numbers.

“No,” I said. “I’ve just called them.”

Silence. “Who do you wish?” I told him again. Silence. Then a conversation aside in Russian. The man said, “Not available.”

“Oh, well,” I said, “I’ll leave a message.”

“Not available,” the man said. “Not available on a permanent basis.”

“What does
that
mean?” I said, but he hung up.

For a moment I assumed that it meant something dire. I couldn’t think of anything to do, of course. I didn’t know how to get hold of my contact from the other agency. What could he do anyway? Raid the Soviet Embassy?

My secretary went out for lunch. I stayed at my desk thinking. I kept lapsing away from the problem into all my other thoughts—thoughts about what my yearning for disruption meant to me or about me. I began to feel that my mind had suddenly become double-jointed. I began to have a yearning for the boring competence I’d developed over the past three years, and then, like the coils of a Slinky toy going down a flight of stairs, my thoughts would flip over and be about how to cut loose from it all.

Pavel came into the office. “Farewell, farewell,” he said, “unless you haven’t had lunch yet.”

“I thought you were supposed to be in trouble,” I said.

“Ah,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

“I’ve been trying to call you.”

“You were worried about me?” he asked.

“Of course I was.”

“Then you are not yet completely dead as a human being,” he said.

“What’s going on? What are you doing? Where are you going?”

“To Paris,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s nice?”

“I thought you’d done something bad,” I said.

“Perhaps I have,” he said, “and Paris is my reward.”

“Be serious,” I said. “I wish you’d tell me exactly what’s going on.”

“Come have lunch,” Pavel said. “I want to eat a crab before I leave.”

We took a cab up to a restaurant by the National Theater and had crabs.

“This is a perfectly normal move, then,” I said. “You’re just getting on in the world.”

“Yes,” he said. “This is still all my career.”

“I didn’t mean just that,” I said. “I thought you’d gotten mixed up in something important. I mean, what were you doing here, really?”