The Man Who Remembered Ch. 01

Lev Davidovich carefully dripped one spoonful of honey into his tea. On the checkerboard tablecloth, the glass sat like a bull’s-eye, the drops of honey hitting the exact center of the target. “Ah,” he thought, “I was a marksman at the academy, but I never got to shoot in the field. Just as well.” A CD player, a holiday gift from his son the fairly honest businessman in St. Petersburg, played music he bought the day before when his pension check arrive.

“Papa, you like that old music, now you can listen to it as much as you like,” his son, Grigori, had said a few weeks earlier. “You’ve got a computer, it makes sense you have a CD player. I even got a collection of music for you, to get you started. Vinyl is so . . . Brezhnev.” With bemused enthusiasm, Lev had unfolded the wrapping off the box. Inside, he found a dozen sets of good Russian works, Mussogorsky, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, David Oistrakh on the violin, Shostakovich’s complete symphonies.

“Shostakovich, now he had a difficult time of it,” Lev said to his son, tapping the CD. “He walked a tightrope over a shark tank. A wonder he survived.”

“A wonder any of you survived,” said Grigori. “You, mother, Uncle Nahum. I don’t know how you did it.”

“We did what we had to do. I did my job.” Lev smiled through his thick glasses at his son, seated on a worn couch in the apartment, below the ancient picture of Lev’s grandparents, a man with a grey beard and a woman in a head scarf, dead together for 60 years. “Just like you do your job.”

As he sipped his tea in the porcelain cup with the flower design, Lev was grateful for the CD player. The radio played such junk these days. He preferred his own musical selections, conjuring beauty and order in a land bereft of both for as long as he could remember. And he remembered a great deal.

Lev looked at his Poljot cosmonaut watch with the multiple dials, a bit of masculine decoration that felt heavy and solid on his wrist. He remembered his visitor would arrive in five minutes, at 1 pm. He assumed the visitor would be prompt.

At exactly 1 pm, the buzzer rang.

Lev stared at the button on the wall that opened the foyer door. He knew that, once he pushed the button and admitted a visitor from the Competent Organs, one synonym for the intelligence services that he especially liked, the door would not swing closed. In Russia, a visitor from the Competent Organs never truly left; he knew from experience. Lev suppressed a smile. “Tak,” he said. “So.”

Lev pressed the button, then set out a mismatched teacup, this one with a country scene, part of a set Polina Abramovna bought during their tour of duty in England, early 1960s. While the elevator wheezed up the five flights, he surveyed the table, with teacups, tea bags, lumps of sugar, sliced pickles, neatly arrayed. Something, however, seemed missing. “Polina, tell me, please, you were good with the guests,” he thought. “What must be done?” He looked at their wedding picture on the wall, slight smiles on their lips, the radiant future in front of them, not behind. Lev closed his eyes and, sure enough, her voice drifted into his mind again. Just as Lev pulled two neatly creased napkins from the sideboard, a confident knocking at the door echoed through the apartment.

“Odny minutuchku,” he called, carefully laying the napkins beside the teacups. “One moment.”

He unsnapped the three locks, then shifted the iron bar that leaned against the door. It swung inward. Lev found himself facing a tall man, mid-40s, neat blond haircut, long camel-hair coat dusted with early-season snow.

“Lev Davidovich, it is an honor to see you again,” said the man, extending his hand.

Lev shook the hand, vigorously. He still had the unassuming strength that his children loved -- and his enemies overlooked, until he chose to apply it. “Oleg Sergeyevich, I am happy to welcome a colleague.”

Oleg removed his coat and folded it neatly over the back of an old-fashioned chair. The two sat at the table outside the tiny kitchen, where only one person could squeeze in. Lev went to the kitchen and brought in the whistling tea kettle with hot water.

Oleg, with practiced sincerity, looked somber. “Lev Davidovich, I give you my condolences on the passing of Polina Abramovna. I am sorry I was away at that time. Unavoidable business in Moldova, somewhat unpleasant but necessary. I trust you understand.”

“Thank you, Oleg. We were together 45 years. She was a wonderful woman. But, her time came, and she is gone. My time has not yet come, so I remain here. For how long, I do not know.” Lev sipped his tea, tenderly holding in both hands the cup that Polina bought. “And yes, I understand about unpleasant business. I was in your line of work, too.”

“She was an honest Soviet citizen,” nodded Oleg, falling back on a cobwebbed cliché from decades past.

“At one time that meant something, an honest Soviet citizen,” said Lev. “Now, no Soviet, and not many honest citizens.”

“She served the Motherland,” said Oleg. “She was the best instructor I had at the academy, incredible knowledge of research and record management. I would like to think she, and you, and I, served something larger than the Party. The Motherland. Like during the war. Our fathers and mothers fought for the Motherland, not for the Party or Stalin. The new generation scoffs at the concept, I know, but when we had to fight, we fought for something older than the Party and Stalin.” Oleg looked thoughtfully at the balding man with fleshy cheeks and a poker-still expression, between mournful and thoughtful.

“If you wish. Of course, that anti-Party line would get you killed then. We kept our mouths shut and did what we were told to do.” Lev said. Even now, the habits of decades separated his mind from his mouth. He wanted to avoid a political discussion. Inwardly, he wondered at Oleg’s exuberant “we” and invocation of the Motherland. His tone rang falsely for a condolence call on a former comrade in the Competent Organs. Oleg was a Young Pioneer in knee pants when the tanks rolled into Prague, ’68. Lev was there. That shameful episode was service to the Motherland? What did Oleg truly know about fighting for the Motherland in Sevastopol, Stalingrad, Kursk, Berlin, or ten thousand other boneyards? Unpleasant business in Moldova, he says? Lev chuckled inwardly, imagining how the starry-eyed agents he recruited in New York would have responded: “He doesn’t know from unpleasant business!”

“Oleg, I must say, I was intrigued when you called me. I have been out of the service for over a decade. My skills are duplicated many times over by younger men,” said Lev, shifting the conversation. “This visit involves more than condolences and an enquiry into my well-being.”

Oleg smiled, with the slight, informed glance of a chess player gazing many moves ahead. “Your modesty about your abilities is misplaced. Yes, the service has younger men, raised in the new thinking. They are quite bright and aggressive and can perform well in our complex times. But they simply cannot match you in certain ways. Yes, Lev, I do have something to discuss with you.”

“Whatever you need, why turn to an old man for it? I thank you for your praise. But the new generation uses computers and I am a man from the era when manual typewriters were considered dangerous. I did my service. Let others do theirs, for the Motherland or the dollars or for whatever motivates them. Let me rest.”

Oleg sensed Lev’s heart was not behind his protests. Oleg let the old man talk so he could gauge the density of any obstacles. Lev was arguing for form, not for true objection. Three months earlier, with voluble, protective Polina Abramovna at the table, the discussion would have been short and curt and Oleg out the door in minutes. But Polina Abramovna no longer contributed to the discussion. Or, mused Oleg, she mattered in unspoken ways, hovering like a shadow just beyond the frame of a photograph.

Oleg leaned forward, straining to connect with Lev across the gulf of years and experience. “What you say is true, about the younger generation. I would note, however, that you have a new computer on the desk behind me, the latest Dell. You obviously retain your interest in technology beyond typewriters."

For the first time, Lev smiled broadly. "Touche. So, I like to keep up with the world. I am not going to wither away just yet."

"A gift from your son Grigori, the computer entrepreneur?"

"Yes. A good son."

"So you are not so far behind the new generation, at least in attitude. And, you have something the new agents will not have for decades. Trust me, Lev, this is a truth.”

“Oleg, you have set me up with a riddle so I must ask. What do I have that they will not have for decades, besides grey hair and a pension?”

“Memory.”

“Ah, a trait in short supply when I was a young operative.”

“That is the tragedy of our country and our service. The men with memory were killed. Your generation had no, what is the word in English?”

“Mentors.”

“Yes. The men who would have been your mentors were slaughtered like sheep in ’37, ’38.”

“They were killed because of their memory. Stalin wanted no memories except of himself, in his glory." Lev allowed himself a tight, ironic smile. "Smert Shpionam. Death to spies. Only Stalin killed OUR spies."

“But you, Lev, survived, and you remember.”

Oleg saw restless energy flicker in Lev’s eyes. He sensed a spark in the pensioner, adrift and alone in his apartment and his memories.

“I remember more than I want. Please, come to the point of the visit,” said Lev, drumming his fingers on the desk. He wanted to stop the nervous action, but his operational patience was wearing thin. He had to know what Oleg wanted.

“Very good, yes, we have reached the point,” said Oleg. He unsnapped the locks on his titanium briefcase, with a pistol-like snap that echoed in the apartment. The retort ricocheted off the tea cups, around the book shelves, circled the photos on the walls, mercilessly flashed through the bedroom until recently warmed by husband and wife, bounced off the screen of Lev’s Dell computer, and returned to oiled hinges of the silvery briefcase.

Oleg pulled a six-inch stack of folders from the depths of the briefcase. A red string bound each tightly, so no paper could slip out. With the subtle flourish of a showman stoking an audience’s anticipation, he fanned the folder out on the table, like playing cards. Lev kept his eyes on Oleg, to avoid the appearance of unseemly curiosity.

“Take a look, Lev. Do you recognize them? Don’t touch them, yet.”

Lev gazed at the folders laced with string. The thick paper was faded and smelled musty, from too many decades in airless storage vaults under the Lubyanka or in a concrete directorate warehouse down an unmarked guarded road outside Moscow. Across the top of each was a label with project and agent codes, dates, and routing numbers.

“I would say they are operational files, quite old, judging from their look. I could perhaps place them more accurately if I saw the labels. But I’m not authorized to look at them, correct?”

“The younger agents could learn from your sense of propriety and compartmentalization, Lev,” sighed Oleg. “You look at what you’re supposed to look at.”

“Unless I’m instructed to look at things I’m not supposed to look at,” corrected Lev.

“Well, if anybody can look at these files, it’s you, Lev Davidovich.”

“And why is that so, Oleg Sergeyevich?” asked Lev, sipping his tea.

“Because these are your files. They concern the recruited agents you ran in New York.”

“Indeed?” said Lev, trying to contain the excitement in his voice. “And the files have not yet been sold to Western scholars, to paw through? They must have little of interest in them.”

Oleg made no move to open a file. They sat in the space between the men, like fish swollen with secrets. “That’s a matter for us to decide, not scholars or other meddlers. Of course I have looked through them.”

“I would be disappointed if you were not throughly prepared for our little chat.”

“You remember what Polina used to say to the new agents, in her class on research?”

“Yes, quite clearly. ‘Old operational files are like wine in a cellar,’ she would tell them. ‘Some age poorly and become useless vinegar. But given time, others age well, and after enough time, are far more valuable than new files. You, as the swords and shields of the revolution, are tasked with uncorking the finest vintage.’ Or words to that effect.”

“You quoted her perfectly. Her lectures on research strategies and record management were legendary. We loved Polina Abramovna, surely you know that? Not like you loved her, but as an honest model, a teacher.”

Lev sat quietly, sensing the spirit of his Polina drift among the bundles bound with red thread. Oleg had been one of her favorite students, a ruthless learner who used the service as his escape from a dreary provincial factory job. Yes, the students loved her as a teacher, and Lev loved her in other ways. Now, they all loved Polina in unfading memory.

Lev swallowed and blinked away the barest hint of tears. “Yes, files can mature like fine wine. So, Oleg Sergeyevich, you have come for a tasting with an old vintner?”

“Precisely so.”