Visiting Professor
Legends
The Company
Walking Back the Cat
An Agent in Place
The Once and Future Spy
The Revolutionist
The Amateur
The Sisters
The Debriefing
Mother Russia
The October Circle
Sweet Reason
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter
This edition first published in the United States in 2006 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
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Copyright © 1994 Robert Littell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-906-6
F
OR
H
ENRI
B
ERESTYCKI
I
N MEMORY OF
S
UZANNE, HIS SISTER
So where is the visitin’ professor visitin’ from, huh?
And when he gets his act together, what is his act?
—Word Perkins
Order. Routine. Chaos. Joie de vivre.
—M. Ravel
Hey, I like your music. C major, wow! Rock ‘n’ roll.
—The Tender To
Lemuel Falk, a Russian theoretical chaoticist on the lam from terrestrial chaos
, threads thick, callused fingers through a tangle of ash-dirty hair that manages to look wind-whipped even in the absence
of wind. He leans his brow against an icy pane as the train spills through the marshaling yard toward the terminal; departures
he can cope with but arrivals give him indigestion, migraines, shooting pains in his solar plexus. An implausible fiction
stirs in his brain: he is the Great Headmaster, circa 1917. Long shot of a train creeping into the Finland Station. Tight
on the paramount
Homo sovieticus
, seen through a rain-stained window, worrying himself sick he will be lynched or, worse, ignored. Vladimir Ilyich’s edginess
infects Lemuel. His headache presses against the back of Lemuel’s eyeballs; his cramps pinch Lemuel’s intestines.
The fiction ebbs as Lemuel’s train docks at the quay. Shabby billboards advertising budget rental cars, mint-fresh toothpaste,
a local MSG-free Chinese restaurant, graffiti denouncing plans to establish a nuclear waste dump in the county, piles of freight
stenciled
THIS SIDE UP
drift past the window. In any given country, who gets to decide which side is up? Lemuel wonders. Under foot, there is a
hiss of hydraulics, a shriek of wheels. The train shudders to a stop. On the overhead rack, an enormous cardboard valise teeters.
Lemuel, with
improbable agility, reaches it in time and wrestles it to the floor. Outside the window, a figure Lemuel instantly identifies
as a
Homo antisovieticus
is stamping his feet to ward off frostbite. Immediately behind him, two men and two women breathe great clouds of vapor into
the night as they eye the passengers descending from the train.
Lemuel recognizes a reception committee, as opposed to a lynching party, when he sees one. Heartened, he raises a paw and
salutes them through the rain-stained window. A woman wearing fox cries, “That has got to be he,” and holds aloft a cellophane-wrapped
beacon to guide him to the Promised Land. Shrugging a worn strap of his old Red Army knapsack onto a shoulder, clutching the
cardboard valise in one hand, a duty-free shopping bag in the other, Lemuel lurches up the aisle to the vestibule, spots the
reception committee milling on the platform in a brackish pool of light cast by a naked overhead electric bulb. Struggling
with his luggage, he backs down the steel steps, turns to confront the reception committee.
The Director, tall, thin, abstemious, floating in a ski parka that makes him look lighter than air, peels off a sheepskin
mitten, cracks several knuckles and offers a cold hand. “Welcome to America,” he declares with manifest sincerity. “Welcome
to upstate New York. Welcome to the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies.” He tries to smile but
his facial muscles, frostbitten, only get as far as a smirk. His lips, which appear to be blue, barely move as he pumps Lemuel’s
hand. “I am delighted the Commie bastards finally let you out.”
“Out is where they let me,” Lemuel agrees fervently.
“To tell the truth, I never thought I’d see you on this side of the Iron Curtain.”
Lemuel mumbles something about how there is no Iron Curtain any more.
A gust of Arctic air brings tears to Lemuel’s eyes. The woman wearing fox lunges forward and thrusts six cellophane-wrapped
red roses under his nose. “Russians,” she emotionally informs the others, misreading his tears, “wear their hearts on their
sleeve.”
Until he misplaced the book, Lemuel taught himself rudimentary English from a
Royal Canadian Air Force Exercise Manual
. At a loss to see how it is possible to wear a heart on a sleeve, he pushes the bouquet back to her. “I am allegoric,” he
explains. He is desperate to make a good impression, but he is not sure how to go about it. “I break out in tears in the presence
of flowers or cold.”
The woman wearing fox and the Director avoid each other’s eyes. “Summers must be living hell for you,” the Fox remarks in
a language Lemuel takes to be Serbo-Croatian. “Winters too, come to think of it.”
The Director serves up a formal introduction. “D. J. Starbuck,” he informs Lemuel, “teaches Russian Lit 404, which is mostly
but not all Tolstoy, at the university. She is here in her capacity as chairperson of the local Soviet-American Friendship
Society.”
Lemuel, bowing awkwardly over the Fox’s hand, mumbles something about how there are no Soviets any more.
Impatience flares in D.J.’s eyes. “We are looking for a new name,” she admits in her guttural Serbo-Croatian Russian.
The Director, whose name is J. Alfred Goodacre, waves forward the committee. A man wearing windowpane-thick eyeglasses, an
astrophysicist studying cosmic arrhythmias, is introduced. “Sebastian Skarr, Lemuel Falk.” Skarr angles his head and addresses
his remarks to a distant galaxy with a mysteriously irregular pulsar throbbing in its core. “I was stunned by Falk’s insights
on entropy,” he says, almost as if Lemuel were not there. “I was mesmerized by his description of the relentless slide of
the universe toward disorder; toward chaos.”
An older man stumbles forward, removes a fore-aft astrakhan, exposing a scalp covered with a crewcut gray fuzz. “I’m Sharlie
Atwater,” he announces, slurring consonants so that Lemuel has trouble following what he says. “When I’m sober, whish is weekdays
before noon, I do surface tension of water dripping from faucets. Your paper on the relationship between deterministic chaosh
and what you call fool’s randomnesh took my breath away.”
A handsome middle-aged woman speaks up in a clipped English accent. “Matilda Birtwhistle,” she introduces herself. “I cultivate
chaos-related snowflakes in the Institute’s antediluvian laboratory. We followed your exploit with pi—calculating it out to
three billion, three hundred and thirty million decimal places. Your formulation about how if pi were truly random it would
seem at times to be ordered struck us all as incredibly elegant. None of us had given much thought to the enigma of random
order being a constituent of pure randomness.” She flashes a thin smile. “The faculty are keen to have one of the Western
world’s preeminent randomnists join the staff.”
Lemuel, roused, seizes Birtwhistle’s hand and, bobbing, brushes his chapped lips against the back of her hand-knit Tibetan
glove. The gesture is mean to convey old poverty as opposed to the newer, sweatier,
more desperate poverty of the proletarian masses. Straightening, Lemuel coughs up a nervous rasp from his throat. Dealing
with abstract ideas, he likes to think he can hold his own with an Einstein; he is less sure of himself and easily intimidated
when it comes to dealing with people. On this occasion he ducks for cover behind memorized phrases: He begs them all to presume
he is elated to have been named a visiting professor at the Institute, to believe he is eager to plunge into its chaos-related
waters.
Searching the faces of his interlocutors, Lemuel slips into a delicious fiction: The Swedish embassy has turned out to inform
him that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in pure randomness. Close in on the ambassador, wearing
sheepskin mittens. Pan to a certified bank check for three hundred and eighty thousand United States of America greenbacks
as he hands it to Lemuel. Negotiated on the Petersburg black market, that should bring roughly 380 million rubles. Set for
life, set for the next one too, Lemuel sniffs at the cold; it burns his nostrils. The pain reminds him who he is and where
he is. The members of the reception committee are staring at him as if they expect an encore. Traces of alarm appear in the
corners of Lemuel’s bloodshot eyes. His brows arch up, his nostrils flare as he departs from his prepared text, memorized
during the interminable hours of the Petersburg-Shannon-New York flight. The voyage has exhausted him, he says. He desperately
needs to urinate. Would it be imposing on their hospitality to ask for a cup of authentic American instant coffee?
Charlie Atwater, who has been holding his breath to extinguish hiccups, says, “How about shomething with a teeny-weeny bit
more alcohol content?”
Muttering “Falk badly needs a hat or a haircut,” the Fox pivots on the spiked heel of a galosh and stalks off in the direction
of the station’s coffee-vending machine. With a toss of his head, the Director invites Lemuel to follow her.
And follow her he does. With listless gratefulness, Lemuel permits himself to be sandwiched between the people who are proposing
to deliver him from a fate worse than death: chaos!
The last thing
Lemuel expected when he applied for an exit visa was to get one; the last thing he wanted was to leave Russia. It was an
un-pleasant
matter of fact that the former Soviet Union was spiraling into chaos; shelves in stores were bare, people had taken to trapping
cats and pigeons, to brewing carrot peelings because tea was too expensive, inflation was running to three-digit figures a
year, the ex-Communists who claimed to be governing in Moscow were distributing money as fast as they could print it. Lemuel’s
salary at the V. A. Steklov Institute of Mathematics, where he had worked for the past twenty-three years, had tripled in
the last four months. The price of a loaf of bread, when bread was available, had quadrupled. Pretty soon he would need a
fifty-liter plastic garbage sack (impossible to find) to bring his ex-wife her monthly alimony. Still, the chaos had the advantage
of being Lemuel’s chaos. The English scriptwriter Shakespeare had put his finger on it: Better to bear the chaos we know than
fly to another chaos we know not of. Or words to that effect.
This being the case, what prompted someone as viscerally cautious as Lemuel (he has always taken the position that two plus
two
appears to be
four) to head for allegedly warmer climes and allegedly greener pastures?
He had applied for an exit visa every year since he began working as a randomnist. It was his way of taking random samplings
of the political climate. Come September, he would fill in the appropriate forms in triplicate, stick on the appropriate government
tax stamp and drop the application into the overflowing in basket of the appropriate time-server at the Foreign Ministry’s
visa section. Every year the application would come back with a bold red “Refused” stamped across its face, proving to Lemuel
that the world he knew but did not necessarily love had the saving grace of being in order. For Lemuel, it seemed, had a working
knowledge of state secrets. Because of this, he was not permitted to stray beyond the state’s frontiers.
When, this year, a stamped, certified visa miraculously appeared in the communal mailbox, he panicked. He fitted his eyeglasses
over his eyes and read it twice, removed his glasses and cleaned them with the tip of his tie, put them back on and read it
a third time. If they were letting Lemuel Melorovich Falk—winner of the Lenin Prize for his work in the realm of pure randomness
and theoretical chaos, member of the elite Academy of Sciences—slip through their usually sticky fingers, state secrets and
all, it meant that chaos had infected the rotting core of the bureaucracy; it meant that things were worse than he had imagined.
Because they gave him permission to leave, he decided the time had come to go.
He had made the acquaintance of the Institute’s director a dozen years before at a Prague symposium on the relatively new
science of chaos. Invited to deliver a paper, Lemuel had dazzled the assembly with his work on pi, the Greek letter that represents
the transcendental number arrived at by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. In his quest for pure, unadulterated
randomness, he had programmed an East German mainframe and calculated pi out to sixty-five million, three hundred and thirty-three
thousand, seven hundred and forty-four decimal places (a world record at the time) without discovering any evidence of order
in the decimal expansion of pi. The Director, impressed not only by the originality but the elegance of Lemuel’s dissertation,
had arranged for the paper to be published in the Institute’s prestigious quarterly review. One article had led to another.
Already eminent for discovering potentially pure randomness in the decimal expansion of pi, Lemuel, essentially a randomnist
who dabbled in chaology, began patrolling what he called, tongue in cheek, Falk’s Pale: the gray no-man’s-land where randomness
and chaos overlap. Every time someone put forward a candidate for pure, unadulterated randomness, he would subject it to the
rigorous techniques of chaology, then advance proof that what looked like randomness was in fact determined albeit unpredictable,
and therefore not pure randomness at all. Nature, according to Lemuel, generated complexities so vast, so unpredictable, that
they appeared to the naked eye to be examples of pure randomness. But this “fool’s randomness,” so he argued in a paper that
gilded his reputation in America, was nothing more than the name we gave to our ignorance. We did not know enough. Our instruments
were not sensitive enough. Our sampling was not spread over a long enough period—something on the order of a million years.
Once you burrowed under the surface—once you perfected the instruments with which you measured randomness, once you increased
the period over which the measurements were taken—you discovered (to Lemuel’s bitter disappointment) that what passed for
pure randomness was not random at all, but a footprint of what physicists and mathematicians had taken to calling chaos.