SAMBA by Doran Larson
Before a third stroke rendered him speechless, Vladimir Lenin dictated letters urging the removal of Stalin and other Party officials. Frost framed blazing sunset in the last moments of his life. His eyes sought the light. Someone asked, hopelessly, “Whom can we trust?”
A miracle, the dying man lifted a statuesque finger. He pointed at the boy weeping quietly in the corner. Trotsky cocked an eye. He leaned down. He whispered, “Dimitri?”
The finger dropped. Trotsky chuckled bitterly. Family and comrades turned upon the thin young man. Thus, despite the sobriety of his corpse, only Dimitri witnessed the shadow of a smile that passed over Lenin’s lips.
Dimitri’s father had served and died with the Czar. An embarrassment to his father’s employer, Dimitri had lived for fourteen years at the back of a closet, surrounded by boots and brushes. He was not stupid. He simply knew no pleasures beyond buffing his smiling reflection into tailored leather. Lenin had coaxed the boy from behind a curtain of coattails. Dimitri began desperately shining the great man’s shoes. Lenin had kept him as a specimen of what the species–without the help of the Party–could be reduced to. Trotsky plied him with friendly questions. Like a kindly priest after proofs of natural religion, he was amused by all of Dimitri’s answers. Dimitri served and was petted. Then the Chairman of Commissars was dead; and by 1925, Stalin could swing a bullying thumb at the youth and proclaim, “If I did not keep faith with Comrade Lenin’s words, would I suffer that idiot?”
But it was because he was thought simple that Dimitri could be trusted. He would join no conspiracies. True, he did not like Stalin, who beat him severely. But his temper was so mild that his only revenge was to recall the sleepless nights when Comrade Lenin recounted his life in Zurich. He missed his jokes. (“Never play cards with a Dadaist. They’re obligated to cheat.”) He never understood them. Yet Dimitri would smile, for they were offered with affection. He pictured how he would command if he were Party Secretary. He would earn respect through kindness. He cared for Stalin’s suits and caps while his men bullied out collectivization; he heard the undisputed leader whisper “Ekaterina” in his sleep and tried to decipher if he was calling to his mother or his first wife; he lit American cigarettes (his hand detectably shaking) as the Secretary ordered Trotsky expelled. As the Purges emptied the adjacent halls, Dimitri imagined offering gifts of chocolate and books to his own servants. He heard the gentle phrases even as he was ordered rudely about. He was sometimes afraid, more often disgusted. He lived like a flea clinging tight between the eyes of a bull goring an endless troop of would-be matadors. He was thirty-four when he poured vodka for Stalin and Molotov, who had just drawn a thick black line through Poland. Dimitri was not happy. He was not unhappy. His world was Stalin’s apartment, his office, the closet where he unrolled his bed each night and kept his mind on his duties. Then came word that Trotsky was dead.
Despite eyewitness telegrams, Stalin could not sleep. Dimitri was up all night. Silently grieving, he poured coffee and cognac. Sunrise cut the aging boy’s tall silhouette against a window.
“You!” Stalin shouted.
Dimitri jumped. The black eyes that burned from billboards and banners lit up as though Dimitri had popped from imagination. The General Secretary would have the word of a man whose loyalty was mere instinct. He would not believe Trotsky dead without the word of his simpleton.
It was 1940. Dimitri had rarely ventured outside the walls of the Kremlin. He was even more terrified than the border officials who went pale when they opened his papers. Nervous meals at depot cafés across a warring continent were not exactly a grand tour. But to Dimitri each hour was a revelation. He ate strudel light as goose down. He blushed at the painted faces of winking women. He gave up counting the languages spoken on the ship crowded with fleeing rich and poor. Then the train into the dusty interior of Mexico; and finally–filthy and magnificent, worldly and primitive–Mexico City.
The world was so large! It was so different than he had imagined reading Pravda in his bed behind Stalin’s coattails. Then he was following a chubby man in a lab coat into shadows. A sheet peeled back. Dimitri looked into the first familiar face since leaving Moscow.
He had caused that face to smile. It had given up a patient even-ing to teaching him chess and describing escapes from prison. He touched a cold hand. The callous on the middle finger was like a jewel, stained amber by cigarettes. That hand had guided Dimitri’s, carrying a rook to knight’s seven. He stroked Comrade Trotsky’s cheek. A gray stubble had grown up from the cell he would never escape. In the murk of a basement morgue, the lights rose upon Dimitri’s life.
He could see every face from twenty-three years of service. They popped from censored photographs, beside the hats and glasses left standing on mantles and table tops. They stood together on the stage of Stalin’s apartment. They faced Dimitri. They leaned back. They laughed and laughed at the only man stupid enough to be entirely trusted. He inhaled death and chemicals that hollowed his stomach.
But what was he to do? He knew only service. The man in rubber gloves pointed to his watch. Dimitri saw Lenin: still, impotent, his throat thick with labored breaths. He could hear the fat man’s watch counting the seconds.
Looking again at the cold face, he felt Stalin’s power in his bones. He’d been tossed from between the bull’s eyes. He smelled its breath blowing damp around him. And he wanted nothing more than to return. He could imagine no safe place on earth outside his closet.
The views from train cars and portholes were fragments of film in reverse. He entered Stalin’s office. He stood with his cap in his hands, his eyes lowered.
Stalin’s mustache spread like a small black dog in its morning stretch. He slapped Dimitri on the back. He did not see that it was no longer an aging boy but a broken man who stumbled forward.
Dimitri’s glee in lighting pipes and cigarettes had once been an amusement to men determining the fates of millions. Now he was virtually transparent. Malenkov’s glass filled and matches flared at the tips of Beria’s and Khrushchev’s cigarettes by magic. He spoke so infrequently his voice sank into phlegm in his throat. When Stalin ordered everyone out of the room to speak with a Party faithful, Dimitri remained, their isolation no more compromised than by the images of Marx and Lenin lurking in the shadows. The Red Army approached Berlin. Dimitri heard the names that would rule over Rumania and Poland. He listened as the wheels turned, drawing the Iron Curtain shut before Churchill named it.
But Dimitri was not the man who’d boarded a train for Mexico. He had trembled before the power emanating from these rooms. Fear had passed into reasoning terror. He learned the invisibility of a mirror, emptying himself of himself in order to double what and who-ever entered between these walls. When Bulganin smiled, he smiled; when Stalin frowned, he frowned. He had his opinions. But disgust and outrage became a subterranean stream beneath a field of grasses combed by the passing wind. To aid his efforts, he kept a diary.
He was working at these notes on the last night Stalin dined with his ministers. He dozed and woke to find Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev lowering the Secretary into his bed. Odder still was how Stalin simply lay there, motionless in a way Dimitri recognized, staring at his servant. The sun rose. But Stalin’s guards never came to wake him.
They had done it. Dimitri was horribly thrilled by those great black Georgian eyes shouting revenge above the maw of bowed heads that eventually surrounded him. With his final breaths, like Lenin, the Secretary raised one arm, then dropped it. His daughter Svetlana would swear he had called a curse down upon them all. But Dimitri understood. It was winter. It was twilight. Stalin wanted the shade raised that he might die gazing out like Lenin. Dimitri simply stepped into the corner, where those eyes could not find him.
The room held its breath. Stalin lay dead, and Dimitri felt all too visible. He slipped away. He vacated his closet. He took his diary and the clothes he wore. While the men inside the Kremlin wrestled behind a curtain of public mourning, Dimitri slept in storerooms. During the day, he walked the halls. He kept his diary inside an official-looking envelope as though on important business.
No one dared to stop him. For whom did he work? To whom was he loyal? The man seemed vaguely familiar. And vagueness of any sort was dangerous.
Dimitri fought the impulse to light cigarettes or kneel to wipe shoes. But he listened. He caught the talk and charted the various contenders. He picked out Khrushchev, that roaring semi-literate whom he’d watched survive every internal struggle since 1934. He lit his cigars. He brushed his lapels. He was a kinder, if less predictable, master than Stalin. Like a buffoonish reincarnation of Lenin, he found Dimitri amusing.
He tried his old strategies. But Khrushchev’s light was too blunt and robust. Dimitri could not both serve and remain in hiding. He did all he was asked while searching for a new way to behave. Khrushchev pushed him from the room when he wanted privacy. But the man’s moods were thunderstorms. He could hear him roaring from the next room. Dimitri saw Khrushchev’s direction. In 1955, the answer came to him.
Khrushchev noticed least those who served his ends. He was preparing to escape the long reach of Stalin’s shadow. Dimitri managed to get out the words: He requested a private hour.
On the desk where Stalin had orchestrated famines, Dimitri’s shaking hands turned the pages of his diary. Khrushchev pounded the desk. Dimitri could hardly understand the words coming from his own mouth: fear choked him; vengeance against Stalin wanted to scatter his syllables into laughter. Dimitri only smiled once the fat man picked him up and cracked his spine in a hug. He asked what Dimitri would have of him: anything, anything he wanted–women? cars? an estate?
“Nothing, Comrade Secretary,”
“Name it!”
“If something occurs to me, Sir . . .”
Crack-crack-crack.
The trick worked. He regained the invisibility he’d longed for. And for several years it never occurred to him to ask any favor. Lack of exercise had atrophied his appetites. He now had his own small room. He read of the new Warsaw Pact and the Prague recidivists. He listened to the radio. He learned to smoke. He’d grown into a barrel-torsoed man without expanding his needs. Then, at the age of fifty-one, Dimitri began to follow the guerilla war in Cuba.
From his experience years before, Latin America remained in his mind a place that naturally inspired revelation. He’d read official histories of American intervention in Mexico and Guatemala; occupations of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Yet his memories hung in their own glowing gallery: the Mexican desert, the aquatic heat of the Caribbean–a world where veils dropped and one could see into the truth of one’s life. The Party papers spoke of the revolutionaries like bearded sons of the Motherland. But the reports were suspiciously thick with rhetoric and thin on details. Dimitri harbored a vision of men who’d stolen the heart from the corrupted corpse of the Soviet.
It was a frigid January, 1959, when the newspaper fell from Dimitri’s hands. Across his knees, Fidel and Raul and Che waved to maddened crowds. Dimitri was fifty-three. He gazed out into a slate-gray sky. His years as an invisible man, a mouse scurrying across the rafters above a murderous machine suddenly weighed upon his shoulders. He felt his age. He looked again at the picture. He wondered if he would ever touch the full current of life.
Nikita swore he would miss him. But of course, naturally! That raving drunk McCarthy had been denounced. But Eisenhower and Nixon–terrified of their own terrified people–would surely cut the island off. Who better than Dimitri to present a smiling Soviet face even before those young men discovered how badly they needed new friends?
Setting one frightened foot above the other, Dimitri climbed out of freezing sleet and into an Aeroflot plane. He stepped out into a bath of humidity. Cuba was every shade of green.
On the tarmac, Dimitri stood at the top of the stairs drawing the tropical air into his lungs. He had left his heavy coat inside. He laughed. He would never need it in this country. He realized for the first time how much he’d hated Russian winters. Things were already so much clearer! Women and children waved. He waved back. He wept. He felt he deserved this.
Bearded men in crisp fatigues hurried him into a car. Dimitri hung at the open window. He grinned at the sandaled families in sidewalk cafés, jeeps and donkeys, the beat of a drum and guitars from a balconied window. They passed between more young soldiers into a courtyard. At the top of a winding staircase, he entered a large office where he was immediately bound up in Castro’s arms.
Was the man raging or happy? Old fears returned. Dimitri nursed a fat cigar and clung to the words of the translator. How was he to serve a man who one moment quoted Lenin, then damned the Church, then sang a refrain from a love song? He held back tears. He should have stuck with Nikita!
Then Castro was hugging and pounding him on the back and pushing him out the door. The translator, a thin, bookish young man named Arman, talked to Castro in private before leading Dimitri back downstairs. He drove Dimitri through the city. A law student, Arman pointed out the locations of the events and subsequent celebrations of the revolution. He was so calm, so quietly self-confident that Dimitri felt his own heart settle. By the time they entered the countryside, Dimitri was happy again. Arman named the passing crops–tobacco, cotton and sugar cane–winding around crater holes until they turned through a blasted gate. At the end of a road through a grove of mangos, Dimitri spied a large white house surrounded by a deep porch. Three people were sitting on the front steps. They jumped to their feet. Arman brought Dimitri’s bag. He introduced him: Lupe, the cook; the housekeeper, Anna; and Santiago, the man-of-all-work. Dimitri shook their hands. He was flattered by their respect. They would not be hard to work with. But who were they to serve? Finally he asked Arman, “Whose house is this?”
Arman glanced at the others. He smiled. He pressed his glasses tight to his brow before turning back to Dimitri.
“It is yours.”
Dimitri blushed. The young man was joking. But was this the Premier’s, or Castro’s, or simply Arman’s sense of humor? Arman spoke to the others in Spanish. They laughed. The cook, Lupe, an old woman with crooked hands, waved Dimitri inside.
It was a large house. There were books on the shelves, fine art and heavy furniture in every room. Then he noticed the bright rectangles on the walls.
Patches of unfaded paint glowed like holes into memory. Pictures had hung here–a family now dead or lingering in prison. His stomach hollowed as it had over Trotsky’s corpse. But he was older now. He breathed. He reminded himself that revolutions swept people away. His presence was simply the aftermath. What he found impossible to grasp was that the four people hovering around him awaited his command.
Arman asked, “Are you tired?”
With the words, fatigue softened his bones. The young housekeeper, Anna, helped him into the bedroom. He collapsed. An apology filled his throat as she slipped off his shoes. She and Arman whispered behind a wavering veil. Dimitri slept for hours. He woke into a new world.
* * *
Something skittered over his face. Lupe was seated nearby, holding up a wriggling green lizard no longer than an eyebrow. She imprisoned the thing in her calloused fist and asked him, in very rough Russian, what he would like to eat.
It was evening. The sky was the blue of cigarette smoke. Still groggy, he feared he was paralyzed. He moved his lips. His throat opened. On cue, Arman entered to translate Dimitri’s groan: “Anything will be fine.”
But Dimitri was not fine. He washed his face. He sat on the porch with Arman. He breathed deep and tried to wake up, to feel the warm evening on his skin, to understand where he was and what he was here for. A slab of light fell from inside the door. Leaves rustled in the twilight. Yet it all felt staged. Arman described the local life, the daily rituals. Workers instantly appeared on the distant road, walking home. They called and joked to one another through the heavy evening. Arman explained: the man who had owned this house had been generous to his family and brutal to the peasants. The young man exhaled smoke: “This is better.”
But what was this? When Arman produced a new cigarette, Dimitri wanted to light it for him. A match flared. The cigarette was a handle stuck into a bowl of grinning teeth. Dimitri turned away. He had never felt so lost in his life.
In the days that followed, whenever he left the house, Dimitri stuck close to Arman. They walked the former estate. He met the local farmers. They held their hats over their hearts as he asked after their wives and children. All were very much better since the glori-ous revolution. They nodded deeply in delivering their replies to Arman.
Inside the house. Lupe scolded him for trying to make his bed or clear away dishes. Anna giggled as she tugged dirty clothes from his hands. He napped. He read the paper with the help of a dictionary. He dawdled over meals. He listened to Arman translate Fidel’s six-hour radio speeches. Jeeps and trucks went bouncing down the road. But he received no letters or telegrams from the Premier or Castro.
Dimitri was sitting on the porch, Gorki splayed over his knee when the truth became as obvious as the scent of spiced pork from Lupe’s kitchen.
He felt himself present. He flexed his hands–a man of flesh and sense. He was here, in command of a household, but a man who had again disappeared.
He’d supplied the tools to cut Khrushchev’s profile into the history inherited from Stalin. In order to harrow the souls of men who lived from their hordes of inside information, Khrushchev must gain his knowledge by magic. Dimitri sighed simply to feel a breath in his throat.
He had himself made sure that no one would remember him. He had never been photographed. His expenses could be clawed away behind the paws of a small pet. And above that quiet dog, Premier Khrushchev would rise, omniscient.
Arman stepped onto the porch. Inside the square of light–self-assured, arrogant–he taunted Dimitri with his profile.
Dimitri had ceased to exist in Russian eyes. If he could only reappear. If he could feel his own presence before the four adults who committed their days to his care!
The next morning his eyes clicked open as though he had never slept. He watched a centipede cross the ceiling. Before the thing had wriggled to the corner, his mouth soured with a vague resentment. He threw off the covers. He ate his breakfast. He smoked and took a shot of rum. But his very pleasure only made him more restless.
His greatest joy since entering the house was in practicing the kind of command he had once imagined. He gave no orders. He asked if things might be done, at a moment of convenience. Now, impatient, he saw his mistake. Anna grew sullen. Lupe shook her finger. Arman did as Dimitri demanded with maddening patience. Then Dimitri woke from a late nap into an itch of dissatisfaction. He could not keep still. He walked around and then inside the house. He found Arman bent over a book. When the young man turned with his customary calm, Dimitri actually yelled at him to get the car.
He would see Castro. He would demand something to do. He’d shove him into a chair and shine his boots!
Arman liked to take his time, to make his employer wait. Dimitri returned to his room. He smoked a cigarette. He took a long bath. Finally, he descended the stairs, tightening his tie like a man angered to suicide. Arman sat behind the wheel, smoking as though he had no intention of going anywhere. Dimitri drew in a breath to shout again.
Twenty meters away, the man of all work, Santiago, talked to a woman over a mango. The fruit had been sliced in half. With a knife, Santiago was cutting out cubes of golden flesh. He fed them to the woman who laughed and wiped her lips with her wrist.
Dimitri stared. Arman stood. He rested one arm atop the door, the other on the roof of the car: “His daughter. In his village, he disowns her.” He glanced at Dimitri. He turned back. “But he is a man, and she is so very beautiful. They are like lovers, no?” His bemused eyes settled again upon Dimitri. “You cannot understand.” He sighed smoke across the gulf separating the Slavic and Latin minds. “She, too, studies law. Una chica moderna.”
Dimitri felt his pulse in his throat. He looked more closely. They might have been arguing. But every time Santiago placed a cube of fruit on her tongue, the woman laughed. Santiago was Dimitri’s age. The woman was perhaps twenty–the kind of beauty that tells us that we are indeed an accident of evolution. For from the hands of God, we would all bespeak such grace.
Dimitri loosened his tie. Arman announced, “Constancia,” with a smoky laugh at his employer’s expense. The woman turned and gazed at Dimitri.
From his first moment on the island, eyes had followed Dimitri as his had followed Lenin and Stalin and Khrushchev. Having once been a mirror, he’d become the image in the glass. Everything had flipped backwards. She seemed to see this, and amused herself with turning him inside out.
And what did she see while Arman lounged on the car? A man lost in his own house; a man wandering among the hours of the day, in a maze of withered appetites.
Dimitri heard the engine start. He felt the door extracted from his hand, the tires crunching onto the gravel beside the house. Then Arman stood beside him. He was grinding his cigarette beneath his heel as Santiago and the woman approached.
Arman spoke. Dimitri raised his hand. Her fingers touched, then held him. Her eyes were so large he fell inside; her face became a mere halo. Arman and Santiago discussed the weather. Dimitri seemed to feel the air for the first time. She was evoking his very flesh into existence. The men glanced at his face. Yet he could not have resisted if she’d taken hold of his mild erection.
She spoke only once–“Buenas noches.”
That night he lay awake, sweating as she whispered goodnight at the door, at the windows of his bedroom.
Was he in love? He was certain only that he felt pathetic spying on Santiago in hopes of another visit. He was disgusted by his own attempts to draw Lupe or Anna into revealing what they knew of her. Arman seemed to enjoy his agitation. Over lunch and dinner, he smiled at Dimitri’s inability to speak his desire.
A week passed. When she did not reappear, his restlessness came roaring back. He wrote to Khrushchev. He described the house and staff–all perfectly satisfactory. But Comrade, a man could stand only so much idleness!
For a month he watched the road for a courier. After three months, even as he read the few papers still available, he looked for signs. In pictures of smiling peasants harvesting record crops, he sought some hint of what he was meant to do. Had Khrushchev forgotten him? Then, over lunch, Arman announced that Dimitri had an appointment in the city at five.
Dimitri’s very frustrations, his dashed fascination with the girl, had thickened his sense of himself. He felt a new man rise up: “You might have told me earlier!”
Arman offered a satire of a bow: “I hadn’t realized your day was so busy.”
Dimitri flushed. He growled. He yelled at Anna to draw his bath.
In the back seat of the car, Dimitri’s heart bounced with hope and trembling as Arman drove to a café in one of the better districts of Havana. They stood at the bar. Arman ordered a coffee for himself, then gave Dimitri directions: through the alley, two streets over and into the back of an apartment. Dimitri longed to assert command but he was too anxious. Arman clearly didn’t like his going off alone. When Dimitri asked for instruction a third time, he grew even more patronizing. Dimitri wanted both to tell him to shut up, and to cling to him. Then the younger man waved him out. A few minutes later, Dimitri stood behind a heavy-set Russian as he laid out maps.
Sites were under construction: runways, communications, launch pads. American missiles threatened the Motherland from Turkey. War for Yankee capitalists was a foreign movie. The safety of the world required a balance.
Dimitri had heard of bookstores that catered to Russians. For several months, the soap in his house had borne a familiar limey smell. Yet he’d been told nothing of these larger developments. (Had he remained so close to home in order to avoid the evidence?) His disappointment was sincere: the island had become yet another vassal state. It was also brief, and rebounded into anger. He’d have been happy to report tobacco production. Yet the newly substantial man he’d become felt slighted.
“And what exactly . . .” (He vented resentment in a cough.) “What, Comrade, am I to do?”
“You are trusted,” the man announced, as though this explained everything.
“Comrade Premier Khrushchev–”
“Yes.”
“And Castro?”
“Castro?”
“I met the man once. Nearly a year ago. What can he know of me?”
A crooked smile as unassailable as a steel door: “That is our affair.”
Dimitri’s tongue filled his throat. Who were the we that he, Dimitri, was not?
He felt lost again, forgotten, even as his longed-for work began. The soldiers guarding the sites were impressed by Dimitri’s papers and refolded them carefully before handing them back to Arman. They toured enormous pits and low weavings of reinforcing bar where concrete would soon be poured. Dimitri’s sense of disillusionment–for himself, and the island–proved abiding. But he did his job. He took notes. Arman typed these up each evening. Life took on a semblance of routine. By now Lupe and Anna could anticipate all his needs. Arman always knew where to find the sites they were to visit. Dimitri had simply to wake and be assisted through his day. Every week Arman waited in the café while Dimitri met with the Russian, who seemed more interested in showing off his record collection than in discussing military secrets.
A year passed. Dimitri’s days were busy. He suspected they were also meaningless occupation for an ex-servant’s time. After breakfast one day, he announced as casually as he could, “I think I’ll stay home.”
Arman exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. He shrugged, “As you will.”
Dimitri pounded the table. Glass and china rattled. The man would madden a saint!
“What are we about then! What is the point of my days?”
Arman looked at his watch. “You will excuse me,” and slipped outside.
Dimitri sat on the porch in a flush of anger. He smoked, by turns resolved to apologize to Arman and to fire him. Or was it Arman who could do the firing?
Then voices rose from the abandoned field to the west of the house. He went to the corner of the porch. Arman and Santiago were arguing. Santiago threw down his machete. Dimitri felt a vicarious thrill as the older man cursed at the younger. But this very satisfaction galled him.
His confidence had vanished. He spent his days in the handling of others, watching developments he was powerless to stop. And here, in his own house, he felt not only unable, but forbidden, to intervene as Santiago shouted his way out of sight down the road.
Arman mounted the porch. Dimitri managed to clear his throat. The young man halted.
“He’d become unmanageable.”
“I–I did not approve this.”
Arman turned but did not look at Dimitri: “You do not understand how things work here.”
These familiar words suddenly chilled him. After supper, Arman went to his room. Anna and Lupe whispered in the kitchen. They laughed, hitting his ears with a slap.
It was all an elaborate charade. They were not paid to serve but to imprison him! He went to bed but did not sleep.
Was his Russian contact in communication with Arman? Did Arman take orders from Castro? Castro from Khrushchev? Or was the conspiracy contained inside this house? The mirror had multiplied into a circle. Faces shrank away in every direction: Anna, Lupe, Santiago, Castro, Khrushchev . . . Arman. Into the shadows of the night, each stood both in front and in back of the others. And all staring in at Dimitri. He dozed. He started awake beneath a standing shadow.
It lifted the sheet. It slipped into his bed. It lay breathing, naked, beside him.
A heartbeat thundered in Dimitri’s ears. His own? Or the female body breathing the air into steam? He could not decide. He was too painfully conscious of his round body, the coarse gray hairs on his chest, his genitals lying slack between his pencil legs. Then the shape slipped away and over the windowsill.
On his tour the next day, Arman took notes while Dimitri saw only the phantom. Who was she? Where did she fit into the circle of surveillance he was convinced surrounded his days? But all his questions vanished when she returned that night.
Her fingers ran over Dimitri’s heaving chest. On the third visit, those hands awakened the length of his body. He had not lived fifty-seven years without knowing desire. But inexperience had turned his own flesh into a kind of abstraction. Her breath was sweet. Her fingers seemed to sculpt his senses out of the darkness. She never spoke. And Dimitri could not form a word while her hands worked him into existence. He slept. He woke into an emotional fever. His daylight hours felt drugged. He no longer cared what or who had sent her. Under trees beside missile sites, he resumed his mid-day naps in order to be alert for her visits. Then, as suddenly as they began, the visits ceased.
Dimitri continued bathing and dousing himself with cologne before going to bed. He lay awake to every creak and bump. He cursed himself when he dozed. Finally, he gave up. And then she was back. Like some demon of his desire, she appeared only when he despaired.
He listened to Lupe and Anna’s simplest words for clues to the riddle. In Arman’s suggesting they stop at a bodega for a cool drink, he heard insinuation. He gave up wondering whether she was part of a conspiracy, or what his own indifference signified. He’d become numb to his own humiliation. He had felt life. He had felt alive as never before and cared for nothing but the chance to be touched again.
She appeared twice in one week, and not again for three. Months passed. There was a new American President–a fool, Dimitri thought with prickly satisfaction, reading of the tons of food and medicine paid in ransom for his invaders. The days became more crowded without gaining significance. Now the heavy Russian wiped his brow and read his reports in detail. Yet even there, in every glance and grunt, Dimitri sought hints of his phantom.
In August, he read of the building of the Berlin Wall. He remembered filling the pen that Stalin had drawn through Poland. She came that night. Mad with longing and strengthened by his memory, Dimitri found the will to lock her in his arms.
She struggled. She bit his shoulder. As he reached for the light, a hand that had given him unimagined pleasure pounded at his left eye.
She escaped. He lay panting, cursing his weakness. The next day, he felt them all laughing. He was sure she would never return. Sick with regret, he told himself he was thankful that his nights would again be his own. He sat up late reading a book. A sense of peace did wash over him. He was alone in the utter quiet.
He was fifty-seven years old. Intimacy had come late. But he hadn’t missed it entirely. He looked at the crescent of red holes in his shoulder and laughed. Suddenly he felt that this house was indeed a reward for his years of service. He closed his book and set it on the night table. He turned off the light and slipped happily into sleep.
He was being interrogated. A hulking man who was nonetheless Arman stood behind a spotlight. Then the lamp was on in his room. A woman was standing over him, her fists on her hips.
It was the phantom, dressed now in Constancia’s body. “No fighting,” she commanded as she unbuttoned her blouse.
Dimitri could not catch his breath. He wanted her to stop even as she carried him into joyous stupidity. What was her purpose? Who had ordered her to make him so happy? But all his questions finally dissolved beneath her hands. Watching her dress, he knew he would forgive her anything. He hardly cared what, or even whether, she answered when he asked, “Why do you come?”
Her black eyes pinned him to the pillow.
“Why do you stay?”
Then she was gone, leaving Dimitri with the answer. His waking hours were simply the time between her visits.
Was this all his life had to come to: an aging man, trusted by dictators, yet played upon by a girl? But it was true. Years of experience–history itself had collapsed into a bullet of ache lodged beneath his bladder. To taunt him, she began to appear in the daylight.
He saw her near the pump house, charming the old man hired to replace Santiago. He heard her voice in the kitchen. He found her on the porch, sharing a cigarette with Arman.
“You may remember Santiago’s daughter.”
Dimitri wanted to strike the smile from the young man’s lips as Constancia held out her hand.
That night she came. He waited for her to speak, to confess, though he knew not what. Then she was gone. He cried. He beat his fists into the mattress. He was a man who was trusted. He had duties. If history were a history of caresses, there would be no history at all! He resolved to finish it. The next evening, after distracted hours in the field, he lay in the bathtub. He masturbated in order to weaken her hold upon him. He reminded himself of the peace he’d felt when he thought he would never see her again. He dressed and entered the dining room.
She was sitting beside Arman. She smiled as though she joined them every evening.
“An old friend of the house,” Arman grinned. “I thought you would not mind.”
A scream leaked from Dimitri’s throat. Premier Khrushchev had given him this house! He would not play the fool at his own table!
“As though my opinion matters!”
But what was he to do? If he sent Arman from the room, he would be left alone with her in the stink of Arman’s disdain. If he ordered her away she might never return. And this–to his shame–he could not risk.
A smile hovered across her lips. Arman’s brows raised a mockery of awaiting instruction.
Dimitri shouted, “The devil!” He pounded on the table. But his voice rang hollow; his fists were rubber on stone. Arman smiled at her: amused, suggestive. Dimitri turned away. He could not watch her respond. He yelled to Lupe to serve him in the library and stormed from the room.
Lupe brought his meal on a tray. As she withdrew, he felt as humiliated as though ordered from his table. They were whispering. Constancia laughed. Then Lupe began to shout. He listened as she took their plates. She routed the young woman from the house! Dimitri felt tears on his cheeks. The old shrew endeared herself to him forever.
Constancia did not return. He grieved. He groaned though he craved rest and an unvarying routine. For now there was real trouble. Trouble enough that one morning a jeep arrived, driven by an old soldier bearing a letter from Khrushchev. Dimitri laughed bitterly. Things must be in quite a state if the Premier had suddenly recalled Dimitri’s existence!
The Americans would “quarantine” the island. They’d discovered that warheads were coming. But they were still ignorant that others were in place. Negotiations were in progress. Dimitri was to submit daily reports, whatever he could pick up. (Castro could be relied upon for nothing but his mood of the moment.) How might the Cuban people respond? Would they have a counter-revolution on their hands? The Premier needed the honest opinions of men he trusted.
Dimitri read the letter again, his heart thumping. He had met the soldier at the bottom of the porch stairs. In the cool October sunlight, the old fellow stood at stiff attention, eyes forward. He seemed unwilling to breathe in the presence of a man of Dimitri’s importance.
Dimitri wanted to shout. He wanted to run inside, push the letter into Arman’s face–from Premier Khrushchev! To a man he trusted! He took a breath to calm down. He would act with the dignity the old soldier expected.
“You will drive me into the city,” he told him. He saluted before Dimitri had finished speaking. It was all Dimitri could do to suppress a gratified squeal.
He dressed quickly. He was embarrassed when Lupe followed him to the jeep, pushing a piece of sweet bread into his hand and reminding him to eat when he arrived.
He looked back as they turned onto the road. He was riding away–without Arman! He had escaped! From the top of the steps, Lupe gestured to her mouth. Arman stood behind her, smoking.
* * *
The old soldier, Carlos, knew every street of the city. Dimitri explained that he did not want stories from the paper. He wanted to hear what people were saying. His Spanish was good enough to gather the gist of overheard conversation. Carlos delivered him to a café. Dimitri blushed when he found himself ordering the breakfast that would satisfy Lupe.
The café stood on a corner, its high doors open to the sidewalk. Dimitri ordered from a waiter who might have been Arman’s cock-sure brother. A woman, already drunk, came in and leaned on Dimitri’s table. She cursed spittle in his face, damning all Russians. The waiter withstood her weak flailing as he pulled her to the street and out of sight down the sidewalk. A man in a white suit and hat leaned over and apologized: “Some people expected the Revolution to fix all their problems. We are having our growing pains. But we are better off now.”
“Under quarantine?”
He shrugged, “If the Americans force us to take sides . . .”
A woman with a child turned and agreed. “Even with a Catholic President, they do not understand the chance they miss.”
Then the man and the woman spoke at a speed and in a dialect that Dimitri could not follow. Troubled, uncertain what he thought, Dimitri ate and returned to the jeep. They drove to another quarter. They spent the morning in cafés and waiting for buses they had no intention of boarding. Dimitri even had his teeth cleaned. With his jaw yawning open and string sawing over his gums, he heard the Russian people praised as though Dimitri had never met one. They passed the afternoon and evening in the countryside. Enthusiasm for Russian aid was even more vehement. People were concerned. But such was the price of independence so close to Yankee Imperialists.
They drove to the police station where Dimitri was to report his findings. Alone in a back room, he sat at a small desk and strangled a pencil, trying to decide what to write. He had heard opinions. But with the paper beneath his hands, he discovered that he trusted only one.
The drunken woman. Blind, hopeless, she had spoken from her heart. He chewed his pencil. He wrote: Opinions mixed. Difficult to assess situation.
He could report where he had traveled, how hard he had worked. But that would underline how little he had gathered. Then he recalled that he had only been given his orders the previous day. Surely, Nikita would not expect a report so early. It might look suspicious! He tore up the paper and returned to the jeep. But the next day was the same, and the next. Then Carlos brought a telegram. He saluted and stood at attention as though the paper were Comrade Premier Khrushchev himself.
Where was Dimitri’s report? The world would not wait upon his fulfilling his orders. Proposals were being drawn up. Would he or would he not do his duty?
Dimitri did not have to be told that decisions could be made without him. Indeed, the note was an indication of the strain under which the Premier was working. The man was surely at his last resort when he could relieve himself by kicking such a small dog as Dimitri!
He resolved to send his report that evening. They spent the day like others. They returned to the house. Carlos joined him on the porch. But the old man could not settle into the casual mood that Dimitri’s nerves demanded. (He’d noticed that Arman kept his distance whenever Carlos was near.) Anna brought their drinks. Her gentle demeanor only thickened the silence that weighed on Dimitri’s nerves. She was turning away when he asked her, “What do you think of the situation?”
She stood still, clutching the white and red tray. She looked to Carlos. Her mouth opened. It closed, then poured out the words he’d heard before: The glorious Revolution had liberated the working people of Cuba as it would the workers of the world. Cuba’s right to defend itself was unquestionable, but no more heartfelt than her gratitude to the Soviet peoples for their assistance.
Disappointed, irritable, Dimitri dismissed her. The men drank and smoked. Conversation had become easy between them while driving. Now Dimitri was thankful when Lupe called them to supper. But there, at table, the silence became intolerable. For the first time, Dimitri turned and demanded, “And what do you say?”
Carlos had done all that Dimitri had asked of him. They’d become nearly as comfortable together as Dimitri had felt with Lenin. So he felt a stab of betrayal when Carlos repeated the customary views. Lupe came to remove the dishes. He gripped her mottled arm.
“And you?”
But she nodded at Carlos, to say he had said what she believed.
“Señor.”
Arman was leaning in the hallway door. Like the gallery of faces discovered in a dream, bearing witness to some obscene action: they were all there–Carlos and Lupe, Anna and Arman. Thin as a curved knife, Arman shrugged: “We do what we must.”
The room turned before Dimitri landed in the chair where he was sitting. At the center of the circle of faces, Dimitri felt the air throbbing in his ears: the young and the old woman; the young and old man– they were players acting roles, masks decorating a prison cell. From the bottom of a hole, he pulled up his voice. He ordered Carlos to the jeep.
The report. He would write the report. Comrade Premier Khrushchev had not abandoned him. The conspiracy was only here. It lived only in this unnatural heat. Carlos would help him escape and write to his Premier, to his loyal friend. He stood. No one tried to stop him.
He felt better, he felt himself breathe once away from the house. He was grateful for the wind and noise of the jeep on the dirt road. But as they bumped up onto the streets of the city, Dimitri’s resolve wavered.
What would he write? Words fled his mind. Then he heard himself shout, “Stop!”
They did, though Dimitri could not say why. The chipped columns of an apartment building framed Carlos’s profile, awaiting direction.
“Take me–take me . . .”
Carlos turned. Dimitri stared at the dashboard. For several long seconds Carlos watched Dimitri hang from his own silence. Was he taking pity? Did he find him pathetic? After the scene in the house, was there any trace left of his old respect?
Then Carlos set the jeep in gear. They turned two corners to the mouth of a blind alley. At its end, traces of light and music spilled from around shuttered windows onto the sidewalk. Carlos nodded, not unkindly: “I will wait.”
Dimitri was afraid. What was the man about? But he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be free of anyone who knew him, who had seen him inside his own house. He stepped down. He commanded his limbs to carry him toward the light and sound.
He opened a door into a bath of glare and noise. The place was crowded, the crowd exuberant. The only free chair was in the midst of other tables, near a dance floor packed with writhing bodies. The band was five chubby men intent on beating their instruments to pieces. Dimitri sat down. Even those seated around him were in motion. From their shoulders to their feet, they swayed and shimmied. Dimitri ordered a drink. He had never danced in his life. He was a butte of stone amid hips and torsos swaying like a patch of seaweed.
New laws restricted nighttime movement. Added to a shortage of basic goods, there were few such clubs left in the city. The spaces between the tables had become impassable. The bartender handed his drink over the bar to the nearest hand, which passed it to the next. Drinks traversed the room. Yet everyone seemed to understand that this was intended for Dimitri. The glass made a circuitous, laughing route before a woman with a gold tooth set it down on his table.
Dimitri felt horribly self-conscious. But he was thankful to Carlos. The stop had served him. The thought of escaping this room, even to write his report, touched him as a great relief. He was rising to go when the patrón stepped onto the stage, calling for silence.
He was a trim, dignified man. Dimitri sat while the crowd applauded. The patrón thanked the band that stood into a thunder of clapping. Then the man’s chest rose in earnest.
“Countrymen! We are at a great and terrible moment in our history!”
The crowd conceded its patriotic attention. The man went on about the world looking to Cuba to read its fate, that this should be a source of pride. Then he paused. The room waited.
“But good things come even amid trouble. We are embargoed. Cut off from the world. But we are also honored with the prolonged presence of our best friends!”
The crowd was cheered by this new direction. Dimitri squirmed.
“With us tonight, we have several of our international brothers. I ask these friends to rise.”
A half dozen men rose to their feet. The applause was ecstatic. Hands pushed at Dimitri. He stood, to get the thing done. The others sat down. Dimitri dropped and clung to his chair.
“We are particularly honored, my friends, by the presence of the attaché to Brazil.”
A light-skinned black man rose again and bowed. The applause was more respectful. The patrón concluded, “In his honor, we present that Brazilian gift to the world! The Samba!”
The band broke into a new mood, at once more suggestive and pounding. The dance floor quickly filled. The attaché was pushed to his feet. A path opened into the center of the dancing.
Dimitri was thankful for the band’s starting again. He was up and ready to make his exit.
The diplomat’s hips moved as a woman emerged from the crowd. She was tall. She was beautiful–a beauty Dimitri felt pierce his groin.
He fell back down. She led the attaché to the outer edge of the floor, where everyone could see them. The man was a fine dancer. But she was better. Across a single table, Dimitri could have leaned and touched Constancia’s swinging hip.
But he could not lean. He could not move. The band had fallen mute inside his head. Was this what Lenin and Stalin had suffered? He hadn’t been shot or poisoned. Yet while she lived so fully before him, his only working organs were his eyes and his heart, the means to see and to suffer watching her. The crowd swayed. They laughed without making a sound. They pounded tables into a rhythm that echoed the ugly truth of what amused them.
The dignitary danced well. He confirmed a regional solidarity more sure than any political alliance. But the man was also being given a lesson in his native rhythm. The woman’s movements–ceaselessly twisting forward- and side- and back-steps–seemed rather to lead than to follow. There was a deliberation in his steps, which Constancia’s sinuous grace both mocked and pitied.
And this–he saw it as her eyes swept across, and knew him–was what she had felt in bed with Dimitri.
The crowd shared the joke in the sway of their bodies. The Brazilian danced, blind to what was happening. But Dimitri was on his feet. He was up and moving all his limbs in shoving his way to the sidewalk.
Carlos leaned on the hood of the jeep. He climbed in as Dimitri ran from the alley. They rode in a silence that seemed to expose all of his weakness to the older man. He was too upset even to care if Carlos had been part of this cruel prank. They stopped before the police station. Then–shaken, tearful–Dimitri sat at the desk where he had failed to write his report. He hardly knew what he was doing before the words appeared beneath his hand.
Withdraw. In exchange, the Americans do not invade again.
He rolled the pencil between his sweating fingers. The beat of the music surrounded his heart, confusing its rhythm.
Castro will serve our ends. If he lives to one hundred, the people will follow him.
He read over what he had written. He thought, Russians or Americans, we are as likely to control these people as age is to overcome youth. But he added only,
And it will mean nothing.
* * *
While Carlos drove, Dimitri turned his face to the deserted sidewalks. He felt better, but weak, as though he’d emptied his stomach of illness. There were so few clubs left, he was willing to believe his seeing Constancia had been mere coincidence. He clung to the fact that he had written honestly. He had done his duty. They entered the countryside. He tried to keep his spirits up. But they were driving into the picture of Arman, wailing.
The night was neither cool nor warm. It touched his skin without letting itself be felt. A few hundred meters from the turn through the broken gate, Dimitri told Carlos to pull to the shoulder and turn off the engine. He did, his profile full of all that he was not saying.
Dimitri stepped down at the edge of a field overgrown with grass. The blades licked at his knees as he walked toward a half moon in a sky pricked with stars. A breeze touched the grass. He stopped. With his arm at full length, he could blot out the light from his house with two fingers.
Light poured from the kitchen in back. A window glowed through a blind. The breeze stilled. Music. But the sound so faint it mixed with the echoes of samba.
Dimitri closed his eyes, to push away the rhythm. He breathed rapidly and grew dizzy.
In the spinning darkness, his heart opened.
He remembered a late evening with Lenin. The Poles were pushing back the Red Army. Lenin had been reading a history of the Napoleonic wars. He rubbed his eyes. He looked at Dimitri for a long moment. Then, “Why is it, Dimitri? Why do men resist their own liberation?”
Though nervous, Dimitri was always flattered when Lenin sought his opinion. He shrugged, “Perhaps–perhaps they are accustomed to the way they are?”
Had Lenin laughed? Was he troubled? Did he wince at the bullets lodged in his shoulder and lung? Standing amid blades of grass, Dimitri could see the exhausted face. But memory failed him. He was certain only that Lenin had laughed or sighed at the honest words of a loyal servant.
He would return. He opened his eyes wide to the night. He would go back to Moscow. Stars turned, or he did, yet it all made sense.
Dimitri’s rest had come early. It had come in preparation for his concluding years of service. He looked toward the house. A red dot glowed, faded, and glowed before the drawn shade.
He walked. He trotted. He ran to the road.
He laughed, yanking the driver’s door open and Carlos from inside. The old soldier watched as Dimitri ground gears and spun the jeep around. Then Carlos and house and fields were flying away behind.
Dimitri leaned toward the headlights. He pictured the box of cigars he would deliver to the Premier. The air sang of crackling Russian nights, of Nikita’s crooked teeth. The jeep danced. The rough road sent him giggling into the air.
Doran Larson’s stories have appeared in Boulevard, The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly, and Best American Short Stories.