Benchley, Peter - Novel 01 Read online

  Other than his expatriate comrades, Gino has few friends. He does, however, have a number of acquaintances. He has been around for so long, people know him. Barmaids, waitresses, prostitutes, saloon sitters. He can always cadge a drink or a cigarette. If someone wearies of giving Gino handouts, he scorns that person as someone who doesn't know the rules. "Man, it's like this. When I have something, you get half. When you have something, I get half. It works, man, it works." But Gino never has anything.

  I met Gino in a Paris discotheque, a bar where one can dance to recorded music. I had stopped in to have a drink on my way home, and I sat alone at a small corner table. Gino was also alone, at the table next to me. The room was dark, and at the tables nearby, people were sitting, eyes closed, listening to a moody Brubeck side. Gino leaned over to me and said, "Hey, man, got an extra cigarette?"

  I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, and he gave me a perfunctory nod, as though that was all so small a gift deserved. A few tables away, a lone girl rocked back and forth in her chair. She seemed to be in a sort of trance. Her head moved slowly up and down, and her lips were glistening wet. I asked Gino who she was.

  "The Nodder," he said. "Look at her go. Man, she's really on it tonight."

  "On it?"

  "Yeah. Pot. You know, man. A little screwing, a little pot, a little booze, and she'll sit like that all night." He sipped the cheap brandy that he had bummed from the bartender. A man in a blue suit came to the table and tapped Gino on the shoulder. "Hey, man," said Gino. "Grab a chair."

  "Can't," said the man. "I have to meet Jimmy at the Maggots. So we'll see you."

  "Yeah. I'll be here." The man walked away. "That's Eddie. You know who Jimmy is? Jimmy Baldwin. The writer. Now there's a cool guy. Five thousand skins he just got for an advance on a book he ain't even written. Not bad."

  "Is Eddie a writer too?" I said.

  "Yeah."

  "Is he successful?"

  "That depends, man. What do you mean by successful?"

  "Commercially."

  "Man, who needs it? He's got all the success he needs. Who needs the commercial stuff?"

  "Does anyone read him?"

  "Why, sure, man. I read his stuff. And Mailer and Baldwin and Jones have read it, too. Man, he's got it."

  "Does he have anything to say?"

  "You know it, man."

  "Well, doesn't he want people to read what he has to say?"

  "I told you, man, we read it."

  "I mean the general public."

  "The general public ain't got no more brains than a bug. Man, you can't tell the general public nothing. Your general public don't understand nothing. I could tell the general public a thing or two. I could tell more people than that, too. I could tell that fink in the White House a thing or two."

  "Like what?"

  "Look, man, that guy's trying to get us all blowed up over here. He's trying, and he's going to do it, too, if somebody don't do something."

  "If who doesn't do what?"

  "Anybody, man, anybody. What good's them bombs? He's gonna get us all blowed to hell. He wants to. He's crazy."

  "Why don't you do something?"

  "I been thinking about it, and I'm gonna. My old man's got a friend of his on the New York Times. I'm gonna write and have it printed that I challenged that fink in the White House to a television debate. You know, one of them things like they did at the election. We'll get on television and we'll talk about all them bombs."

  "What do you want him to do?"

  "The bombs, man. Get rid of all them bombs."

  "And the Russians?"

  "Ah, screw the Russians."

  "Easier said than done."

  "Just screw them, them and their bombs. They're no good, man."

  "That's too simple, Gino."

  "That's what we need, man, a little simpleness around here. All the foreign policy guys don't know nothing. Alls they do is talk, while that fink tries to get us all blowed up."

  I was going to say something further when Gino suddenly got up from the table. "Cool it, man. I gotta move," he said.

  "Yeah," I said. "I'll be looking in the papers for your debate."

  "You do it, man." He turned toward the bar. "Merci for the booze, man," he said to the bartender. On his way out, he stopped to bum a cigarette from a man at the door.

  What I wondered was, would Gino remember to wear a blue shirt instead of a white one, so he doesn't get a glare from the studio lights?

  6

  In late September, a Russian exposition opened at the great hall of the Porte de Versailles. It was billed as an exhibit of goods from all aspects of Russian life, from farm

  to city, from clothes to space capsules. Bob and I took the subway partway, then walked for a mile or so, enjoying the warm autumn sun. When we were three or four hundred yards away from the Porte de Versailles, I stopped. "Look!" I said, pointing at the hall. A

  Russian flag, perhaps ten feet by twelve, floated lazily over the building.

  "Good God!" he said. "They've landed."

  The nearer we got, the more flags we saw, gold hammers and sickles on red backgrounds. I had never seen the Communist standards in such numbers, had never been towered over by photographs of Lenin and Khrushchev and signs saying URSS, and for a moment I felt uneasy.

  The hall itself was mammoth, and packed with material and verbal tributes to Russian progress. On the walls were hung plaster tablets painted to look like marble, which displayed the sculptured figures and sayings of Russia's greats. Beside a picture of Lenin at the entrance was a tablet which said, Paix, Education, Culture, Les Trois Buts du Peuple Russe, and under a flattering bust of Khrushchev was the simple phrase, Education Pour Tous. Various anonymous heroes had contributed such statements as, Le Progres So-vietique Est la Meilleur Preuve des Merveilles de la Vie Com-muniste, and 1970 — I'URSS le Plus Grand Pouvoir Industriel du Monde. Crowded around the walls were booths of optical devices, radio-spectographs, computers, scale model factories, full-size automobiles, books, watches, cameras, engines, television sets, tractors, model cranes made by the students of such-and-such a school in Smolensk, and pictures of full-bosomed Soviet belles swinging scythes in the bright Ukrainian sunshine. In the center of the floor, a full-scale copy of Gagarin's capsule twirled sedately next to a model of the rocket that had sent it up.

  On a second level, reached by a spiral staircase that was apparently suspended from nothing, were models of all the best Soviet aircraft. Each plane was hung from a thin, almost invisible wire that led to the ceiling, some twenty feet higher. Two closed-circuit television sets, one on either side of the platform, were there to give visitors a running commentary about the planes, featuring films about the development and performance of each one.

  There were four rooms off the main hall, and they contained a movie theater that would from time to time present representative Russian films, a room of Russian paintings (most of them starkly realistic portraits of Russian farm girls and of staunch, weathered Russian mothers defending their children against hard, ugly brutish German troops), a room dedicated to pictures and models of the performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and the Moscow State Orchestra, and a room full of baskets and rugs made by Russian peasants, labeled Salon d'Ouvrages Sovietiques.

  As impressive as the factories and machines were, when we poked around from booth to exhibit we were struck by two lacks: first, a lack of originality. The cameras were obvious copies from the German, the watches from the Swiss; the television sets could have had Westinghouse labels on them; and what few machines we recognized displayed nothing new, but were simply new models of the basic tools of industry. The one item of striking originality was, of course, the space capsule.

  The second lack was of any displays, save a few black and white photographs, showing how the Russian people lived. There was no mockup of the average middle-class apartment, no exhibition of any facilities for leisure time, no indication of any standard of living whatsoever. The impression o
ne got was of being subjected to endless and clumsy propaganda. It was annoying, for the exhibition could have been fascinating.

  We decided to leave, and we started to walk toward the door. "Just a second," I said. "This is absurd. If we came all the way out here, we might as well get something out of it."

  "Like what?" said Bob.

  "Like talking to a Russian."

  "About what? The New York Yankees?"

  "I don't know. Anything. Just see what they're like."

  "Any Russian in particular?" said Bob. "Or just any Russian?"

  I looked around at the booths. "There's one who's not doing anything," I said, pointing toward a booth. "Let's see what he has to say."

  "You go ahead," said Bob. "I'm going to the restaurant upstairs to get a sandwich. I'll meet you there."

  The Russian was alone at the booth. The device he was assigned to explain was a big optical something-or-other, and the public was not showing great interest, so he wasn't busy. He sat at a small wooden table reading l’Humanite, the French Communist newspaper. He was of medium build with curly blond hair, and he wore tiny, perfectly round, rimless spectacles. He could have been no more than twenty-five.

  I had made up a question about the exposition as an excuse for speaking to him. "Pardon me," I said in French, "could I ask you a question?"

  The Russian looked up at me. He smiled, and his round face and bright blue eyes were friendly. "Of course," he said.

  "I've just been through the exposition, and I wondered if there was any room that showed more about the actual life in Russia."

  "No," he said. "It's too bad, in a way, because for someone not technically minded, I guess the exposition is dull. Was there anything specific you wanted to see?"

  "No, nothing in particular."

  "You're American?"

  "Yes."

  "I saw your American newspaper. May I look?"

  I handed him the copy of the Paris edition of the New

  York Herald Tribune that I'd been carrying under my arm.

  "Will you sit down?" he said. "My English is not good, and I would like to practice with you for a moment."

  I sat down and offered him a cigarette. "Ah," he said, "an American cigarette. I will, thank you. These French things are going to kill me one day."

  For five minutes or so we read passages from the paper aloud. "You see?" he said. "My English is not good."

  "It's a good deal better than my Russian."

  "You speak no Russian?"

  "Not a word."

  He nodded. "I hear it is a hard language for foreigners to learn."

  There was a pause. "Do you enjoy working at the exposition?" I asked.

  "It's not bad. I enjoy being in Paris. The work is not very interesting, but some of the people you meet are. And I do get to see some pretty girls. Lai" He shook his hand up and down in the French gesture of appreciation.

  "Have you been out with any of them?"

  "No. I haven't asked any. Anyway, I don't think I'd be permitted to go out with one."

  "Why not?"

  "I don't know. Just the rules, I guess. Maybe I would. As I said, I haven't tried yet. I may get up my courage and ask one." He added, "If I'm allowed to."

  A woman stopped at the booth to ask directions. When she had gone, he said, "May we read some more from your paper?" We spread the paper on the desk. As he began to read, I noticed two Frenchmen standing silently by the rail of the booth. They didn't seem to want anything, but were just listening to our conversation.

  "What's this?" said the Russian, indicating a paragraph in the paper. "I'm not sure I understand it. Please tell me what it says."

  I looked at the piece. "It says that an African delegate to the U.N. was beaten up by thugs in Central Park in New York."

  "But that's not true."

  "I'm afraid it is."

  "No, no, you misunderstand me. I know he was beaten up, but it was not by thugs. He was beaten up by the police."

  "Where do you get that?"

  "Here," he said. He reached under the desk and pulled out a copy of Pravda. He read from an article on the front page, translating into French. "You see?" he said. "It says he was beaten up by the police."

  "I'm afraid that's wrong." I looked around, and the two people at the rail had suddenly become six, all standing quietly, listening.

  "But no," said the Russian. "Your paper is wrong."

  "How can you be sure?"

  "I know it, that's all. In your paper is a lie."

  "And there's no chance that your paper could have made a slight error?"

  "None."

  "I see," I said. "Well, I didn't come here to fight with you, so let's drop it."

  "Fine," he said. He turned to the ten people who by now had gathered at the rail. "May I help you?" he asked.

  "No," said one of the men.

  We went back to the paper. "Here's another thing," said the Russian. "It says here that a boy was shot yesterday at the Berlin wall. Where does your paper get such information?"

  "From a reporter who was there," I said.

  "But it is a lie!"

  "It seems to have happened."

  "Well, I know nothing about it."

  "It's right there in front of you."

  "In your paper, yes. But I know nothing about it."

  One of the men at the rail said, "It happened."

  "No," said the Russian. "It didn't."

  "Do you mean," I said, "that just because it wasn't in your paper, it didn't happen?"

  "Yes."

  "So for you, all that exists, all reality, consists of what your government tells you. What about the things your papers and your government don't tell you? Do they simply not exist? I mean, even unimportant things."

  The Russian looked at the ever-growing crowd at the rail. "I cannot answer that," he said, softly.

  Another man in the crowd spoke up. "What would happen in Russia if someone openly disagreed with the government? Or with the papers? It's all the same."

  "No one does," said the Russian.

  "You mean everyone agrees with everything the government says?"

  "Yes."

  "That includes you?" I said.

  "Of course."

  "What about the rule on going out with girls while you're here?" I asked. "Do you agree with that, too?"

  He smiled faintly. "I'm sure it is the best thing."

  "It's a shame if there are no differences of opinion," I said. "If the government controls all means of informing the public, the public will be misinformed. The people lose all their power."

  He did not reply. He looked at the group standing at the rail. There were easily twenty-five people listening to us. Suddenly it occurred to me that I had unwittingly gotten myself into the position of having to defend my country in front of an audience. I was sure the same thing had occurred to the Russian, and I knew he had the advantage. His French was better than mine, and it came to him more easily than mine to me. Also, I was certain that he had been well briefed before being let out of Russia, his arguments reinforced with technicalities, treaties, declarations, and agreements that he could summon forth, sure in the knowledge that the average layman would have no documented counter to them. If I had been George Kennan, I might have stood a chance. As Peter Benchley, I was in a hole, and I was scared. I felt like an actor who knows he has forgotten his lines and waits in terror for his cue.

  I was thinking of feigning illness or otherwise stopping the discussion when suddenly a man in the rear of the crowd yelled, "Murderer! In Hungary you killed people, and now in Germany you kill people."

  The Russian paled, and his face got red with anger. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled. "I know nothing of what you are talking about."

  I decided to try to keep him on principle, away from my Achilles' heel, technicalities. "Wait," I said. "Granting for a moment that none of this happened, could you explain it if it did happen?"

  "Of course," he said. "You see, to us t
he state is far more important than any individual, and therefore individuals or, if you will, groups of individuals, have to be completely subservient to the will of the state."

  "And this theory, or doctrine, justifies killing hordes of people in Germany?"

  He snapped at me, "Why must you continually bring up Germany? Whatever happens there is not our affair. It is the affair of the German Democratic Republic. We do not now, nor have we ever, interfered in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation."

  The hue and cry at that remark stopped all conversation.

  Again, the Russian was furious. "You Americans get very self-righteous about Berlin," he said. "You speak of the shame of a divided country. Don't you realize that it was the Soviet Union that fought for a united Germany, and that it was the British who finally provoked the separation into two Germanies?"

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Yes. They were the first to institute a separate currency, and they were the ones who broke away from the central government and began to hold separate administrative councils in West Berlin, in places where no administrative councils had ever been held before. What do you say to that?"

  "I'm afraid I can't say anything."

  I was searching desperately for an avenue of escape when he struck again. "You have, of course, read the declarations of the Allies for the control of Berlin, no?"

  "Not recently," I said, choking on the words.

  "Then the Potsdam Agreement?"

  "Not in years."

  "In all these documents, the main point of agreement between the four powers was the complete extirpation of German militarism and Nazism. A simple point to agree on, don't you think?"