Derek Lambert: The Red House

They had observed him over the past five years and he had passed their surveillance. Not for them to penetrate the secret sensibilities that are a man’s soul. The coil of poetry unsprung. Not for them to glimpse the doubts on which true strength is founded.

He lapsed into an excited doze, limbs twitching, eyelids quivering. Yellow cabs vanishing down narrowing vistas of skyscrapers, Manhattan a mirage behind a veil of snow. When he awoke he was confused about reality: he had dreamed so often about this arrival in a celluloid city projected on his private grey screen.

He climbed out of bed carefully, still in his underwear. It was exactly two hours: such damned precision. His wife slept serenely. Through a slit in the curtain he looked down on the synagogue, on the blue cap of a guardian cop.

In the bathroom down the corridor he shaved, drawing blood from his tired skin. He pressed his eyelids and his eyes ached back at him. He massaged a little pomade into his sleek hair and watched the wires of silver fade. He returned to the bedroom.

Valentina said, ‘Where are you going, Vladimir?’

‘I thought I’d take a stroll. I can’t sleep.’

‘You mean you’ve stopped yourself from sleeping.’ She knew him so well.

‘I may never see New York again.’

‘They don’t want you to go out alone, Vladimir. You know that. Why defy them on our first morning in America?’

‘I’m not their slave, Valentina.’

‘Don’t be foolish—remember how you’ve worked for this day.’ She sat up in bed, hair loose, the brown aureoles of her nipples visible through white cotton; in her waking moments she was more feminine than she cared to be.

‘A servant, maybe. But, I repeat, not a slave. I must assert some authority now before it’s too late.’

‘Come and lie down with me.’ She stretched out warm arms.

Vladimir Zhukov silently apologized to his wife for rejecting her comforts and put on his new dark-grey suit with the wide trouser bottoms which Western fashion was beginning to acknowledge. Except that with his trousers the width extended to the thigh.

Valentina said, ‘If you insist, then I shall come with you.’

But he wanted to see it by himself. Gary Cooper walking lone and tall down Fifth Avenue. Compromise—the dress-sword of the diplomat. ‘I’ll meet you later and we’ll have lunch together.’

‘Meet me? Where? We don’t know anywhere in New York.’

He reacted swiftly. ‘At the top of the Empire State Building.’ He laughed aloud for the first time since the aircraft touched down at Kennedy Airport.

He felt as if he had been released from prison and was vaguely ashamed of his exhilaration. But a lot of conformity lies ahead, comrade.

It was midday. The snow had stopped and the sky above the rooftops of Lexington Avenue was polished blue. A few jewels still sparkled on the edge of the sidewalk but in the gutters the slush was ankle-deep. They had a lot to learn about street cleaning, he decided proudly.

The Gallery Drug Store, Marboro Books. Sixty, 59, 58 … 53, 52. He enjoyed the drugstores. ‘Meet you in the drugstore, buddy.’ Sulky-faced girls with bobbed hair wise-cracking with chunky athletes with greased or chopped hair (Hollywood 1935–50). But it needed courage to enter one. They would call him mister and ask where he came from.

Bookshops, delicatessens, restaurants … the luxury seemed cosy and refined in this particular avenue. East Side, West Side. Which was which? Grand Central Station, Central Park, Times Square, Fifth Avenue, the Waldorf Astoria, Harlem, Greenwich Village—that was all he knew.

He found courage and bought two newspapers from the front stall of a drugstore. The New York Times and the Daily News.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ the girl sighed, yawning and chewing and talking simultaneously.

He tucked the papers under his arm like a baton wondering if he could be mistaken for an American. He looked behind to see if he was being followed. It didn’t look it but you could never tell.

What strikes me most? he asked himself, seeking first impressions for the album. It had to be the shops with their abundance of consumer goods: this he had been warned about—the products of exploitation, late participation in wars, geographical advantages, twenty million Soviets killed conquering the Hun. But the briefings hadn’t fully prepared him for the profusion, the multiplicity, the permutations of plenty. (How many variations of salad dressing could there be? How many odours of deodorant? and who wanted to smell of lemons or Tahitian lime anyway?) In Moscow he had queued for a ballpoint pen with a sputnik that slid up and down the stem.

And again, the cars—the automobiles. New Yorkers paraded in their cars. Vladimir Zhukov, crunching down Lexington Avenue with the enemy all about, lusted guiltily for a big tin fish with automatic drive and power-assisted windows. He was startled by the number of female drivers—girls with long, straight hair, smartly coiffured old ladies steering their vehicles like tank commanders. What happens to the babushkas? Do they have them put to sleep? or let them drive their tanks over the cliffs like lemmings?

He reached 42nd and turned right past Grand Central, remembering faintly from another life the stations of Moscow—cathedrals, fortresses, terminals of turreted grandeur where immigrant peasants wandered like bewildered insects.

He looked at the street numbers and knew with his mathematical certainty that he could never be really lost; just the same at that moment he was, gloriously and excitingly. Like a child trying to get lost and fearing the chilly second-thoughts of dusk.

Courage, comrade. He said to the cop frowning at the unplumbed depths of slush on a street corner, ‘Excuse me, please, can you tell me the way to the Empire State Building.’ His words froze and hung between the two of them.

The patrolman who had long sideburns and a squashed face said, ‘How’s that?’

Zhukov expelled the rush of words again, hating the sense of inferiority that accompanied them. Put this cop in Red Square and see how he managed.

‘Where you from, fella?’

‘Moscow.’

Enlightenment shifted the crumpled features around and Zhukov realized that it was a friendly face.

‘No kidding. One of those emigré guys, huh? And you don’t know where the Empire State is? How’s about that.’

Zhukov waited.

The patrolman said, ‘Two blocks down. Turn left down Fifth. You sure as hell can’t miss it. I guess that’s the one building you can’t miss.’

‘Thank you.’ Zhukov crossed the slush, wishing he didn’t look so conspicuous. Even though no one seemed to pay him much heed.

‘Okay, pal,’ said the patrolman. ‘Any time. Any time at all. Have a good day.’

The City Library. (Four million volumes.) Negroes, Italians, Poles, Swedes, Germans, Puerto Ricans (he presumed), hippies, producers in camel-hair coats, soldiers to be sacrificed in Vietnam, women in furs and boots as arrogant and vapid (he was sure) as fashion models, businessmen with slim black attaché cases—one there munching a hot-dog. All intent on something on this white melting day.

One thing he did not do: he did not walk along staring up at the narrow sky because that was the hallmark of the green horn. Which I am not, he thought. I am a representative of the greatest power on earth. It’s just that I’m a stranger. At which point he discovered that his head was tilting upwards like a peasant seeing his first aeroplane.

So there it was—a colossus of playbricks beneath him. Massive and vulnerable. You could crunch them, swipe them aside with one bear paw.

On the 102nd floor observatory, nicely placed at 1,050 feet, Vladimir Zhukov surveyed the enemy camp with awe and got annoyed about the awe.