Just as I was getting up to leave.
“Hey, you,” Mr. Olashansky called to me. “Hold it a minute.”
Olashansky (a seventyish real-estate lawyer) had a soft custard voice, and a dark horizontal wrinkle across his hairless scalp. “Listen, mister,” he said, “if you’re the young man I’m thinking of, I got a story for you.”
Olashansky and I had come, separately, to sit shivah for my Uncle Harold, who’d died of a brain tumor that Wednesday morning. All around us in what had been Harold’s house, the mirrors were covered with black cloths of mourning.
“Bella tells everyone you’re a writer,” Olishansky said. “If I can trust you, I got a book idea that’s a million-seller for sure. I can trust you?”
I’d seen him talking to my Aunt Bella earlier, hands over hers, his honeydew head dropped in sympathy.
He was looking at me sideways: a gaze of disquieting intensity. ‘I know a lot of people say they have stories,’ this look seemed to say. ‘But the story you’re about to hear is nothing like the so-called stories you get from those other schmucks.’
It’s a look people had thrown at me before.
“Well, um,” I said, “the thing is.” I had my coat and gloves on already.
“If you’re not interested, fine,” Olishansky said. “Busy young fellow like you.”
He was sizing me up, tilting his face — as if trying to suss out a muffled noise in another room, a neighboring house, a far-off country.
“What are you?” he asked at length. “Thirty-two, thirty-three?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to hear his story, I told him; I was just in a rush to go home.
“It’s the life of my father,” he said, winking at me.
Here’s the story:
Father came from the old country. I mean Russia. Matter of fact, my father was a poet. Ever heard of Osip Mandelstam? No? He was very famous in that world, Mandelstam. My father was not as famous as Mandelstam. But close. Until 1929, he had a considerable following, my father. Then one day they stopped his works from getting published. My father’s name was Isaac Olishanski.
Anna Akhmatova — her I’m sure you know. Another famous poet. She was my father’s girlfriend for a time, sort of. ‘Wasn’t your image flickering sweet in the cinema palace of my brain/ Before we were even born?’ That lovely poetry line was my father’s. Well, it sounds better in the original Russian. He and another poet, a Mikhail Bronstein, were leading elements of the Zenithist school of writers; that I’m sure you’ve heard of, if you’re a real writer. No?
Anyway, my father was thrilled by the commie Revolution when it came. Don’t judge: a Jew back before 1917, even if he was an unreligious, famous poet, he was still a Jew, and that spelled trouble. That son of a bitch Lenin offered a change from the Czar, the Cossacks, that whole lot. My father (he was just twenty) started writing journalism praising Lenin. Oh, did he praise that son-of-a-bitch! “Our liberator has arrived.” That kind of nonsense. Not that he stopped doing real poetry, my father — but this journalism was taking up his time. He and Mikhail Bronstein had a lot of fights about this. ‘Olishanski, you’re giving your art short shrift’ — like that. Bronstein, who welcomed the February 1917 Revolution, but not the October 1917 Revolution, called my father a propagandist. That’s a word that really hurt my father, propagandist, because he was a poet above all else. I mean that — a poet above a father, husband, and son; a poet above a man. So he stopped speaking to his best friend Bronstein.
When Stalin came to power, God shit on that bastard’s head, my father’s friend and rival Bronstein disappeared. Most likely to Siberia, or worse. (Bronstein had written this epigram a week before they got him, ‘Murder must be fun/ For Russia’s Attila the Hun.’) Anyway, some loudmouths in the poetry world thought my father had betrayed Bronstein to the authorities. Ridiculous! But he wasn’t deaf, my father, to gossip. He understood this talk. All untrue, of course. Totally untrue! Because, you have to understand, Stalin then stopped my father’s work from getting out, too. I mean, would that monster have done to my father what he did if my father was on his payroll? No, that monster would not have done to my father what he did if my father was on his payroll.
Well, the critics over there had guns. Father had his hard times. No more poetry from Isaac Olishanski, the Soviets said. This made no sense! He’d been in the circle of officially approved poets.
After eight months of silence, my father became desperate. He wrote a history of Stalin, a long love poem I mean, very complimentary, a kiss upon that devil’s asshole, pardon my rudeness. Still nothing. My father was ‘doomed to silence’ is the way he put it himself. (Doomed. I guess if you writers can’t write, then it’s all doom doom doom. Well, it is not for me to judge. I’m just a lawyer who does big real estate deals.)
Anyhow, from bad to worse — my father got a call from a government official, a lowlife by the name of Andrei Andreevich, a cockroach. He was SSB, Soviet Security Bureau. My father was to come in and answer ‘concerns about the bourgeois, overly cerebral nature’ of his work, or some such nonsense.
Now, the SSB had been the agency that had exterminated my father’s friend and rival Bronstein. Possibly Andreevich had killed that poet himself.
This was bad news for my father.
He was very isolated by then. Thirty-five, thirty-six years old, he had zero friends, no wife at this time, et cetera. He was estranged even from his parents. He’d called them reactionary and spat in my grandmother’s eye. He was all alone, you see, for what he thought would be his last night alive. Andreevich was for sure going to have him killed. The thought of certain wrongs he had done to placate the Soviet government, unsuccessful moments of cowardice, came at him now, as he described it, like a woodpecker pecking inside his head. Peck, peck, peck, that kind of thing.
The SSB offices were at the Spasskaya Tower. For his hearing with Andreevich, my father had only one suit — a by now loose-fitting gray embarrassment — and, I swear, a rope for a belt. So he puts on that Frankenstein outfit, gets to the Spasskaya Tower, walks downstairs, and he waits. That’s it! My father the great poet waits six hours outside Andreevich’s office. Nothing to read, just listening to the thump thump thump of his heart for almost a whole day. Thump, thump, thump; peck, peck, peck. Hour after hour of this! Finally, at ten after five, the secretary goes home, the cleaning workers start to turn off all the lights, et cetera.
Now, my father didn’t know what to do. ‘Is this a trick?’ he thought. Someone must have been testing him, he thought. ‘You want me to wait, I can wait.’ So he stayed there in the dark. Just sat there alone, sweating. (He was a big man and often sweated like a milk cow.)
After 8 p.m., still nothing, so he just left, and you know what? He never went back!
Get this. Turns out, the bureaucrat cockroach bastard Andreevich had himself been arrested that same morning, for a supposed lack of allegiance to the Five Year Plan. You’re a writer: Imagine! The irony. The drama. My father missed death by a whisker!
Part Two
“So, Mr. Novelist,” Olishansky said. “You write this, they’ll call you a new Chekhov.”
The nature of his eagerness was familiar.
I smiled at him, the sort of narrow smile I thought appropriate for the moment. We were standing close. His sport jacket rustled as nodded. Meanwhile, someone had started to weep over in my Aunt Bella’s living room.
“Missed death by a whisker,” Olishansky said, again, and he winked as if he were telling me his father bequeathed him millions, or a comparable treasure.
I told him it was a wonderful story. His nods got more vigorous. The weeping next door grew loud. I looked down the hall and into the other room to see if it was Bella crying. It was.
Her old face looked squeezed by grief; the dark vigor of her wrinkles bespoke the lonely fear of a widow who’d never lived alone before. I turned so that she wouldn’t see I’d been staring.
Olishansky hadn’t stopped nodding at me.
So, was he thinking of writing the story as a book? I asked.
“Me?” he said. He fired a toot of irritability from the cannon of his nose. “Just listen, Mr. Writer,” he said. “There’s more.”
That whole thing with Andreevich spooked my father. Death had missed, but who knew if it would again? He decided to get out of Russia.
This was no easy thing to do. Some people in the West, however, powerful Jewish people in the Arts, still remembered the name Olishanski.
We ended up in Budapest for a month, waiting in what my father called a camp — but it wasn’t a camp; it wasn’t that bad. He was an artist, with an artist’s imagination, remember, and before long we all made it onto a steamer bound for New York in 1946.
Oh — that’s right: we. My father had met my mother in St. Petersburg in 1942. She was a hat maker, very pretty, who’d been put to work assembling tank treads. As for me, I was born in Russia in 1943, not that I speak that particular language.
I don’t want to complain, but people made it hard for us in America. We lived for a while in Little Italy. Of course, not many people knew Russian there in ’46. It was an unpopular tongue in the later 40s and 50s, put it that way. My parents stopped speaking it altogether, like a purge. And my father was naïve to think replacing the ‘i’ at the end of our name with a ‘y’ would change our luck.
What had happened to the powerful people who’d begged Isaac Olishanski to come to America? ‘Blown off like loose papers in a wind,’ my father said, in his way.
He started trying to write poetry in English. Just a little at first, he hoped to do some more as his fluency improved. He scraped by making deliveries for the Ansonia Pharmacy on Sixth, in the Village. (Didn’t you know pharmacies used to make house calls back then?) My mother worked in Chinatown, she was the only non-Chinese girl in this workshop on Canal Street that made knock-off leather gloves.
So, here’s where the story picks up again.
One day, my father has to make a delivery to this bigshot Fifth Avenue address, headache salts or something. Right near that park that’s by NYU with the big gate like they have in France. He takes his white paper bag of medicine up to the penthouse and presses the bell, which makes a beautiful ringing music.
Locks unlocking, two, three, click, click, click — how many bolts does this fancy door have already? And what is there to be afraid of in this neighborhood? my father wonders — and who opens the door to this fancy residence but Mikhail Bronstein, the Russian poet supposedly dead back in Russia?
‘Yes, hello?’ Bronstein says.
At that point the two Russian Zenithists notice each other for who they are. They stand there, silent as two old dogs going face-to-face.
It was not an easy moment, I can tell you. My father lost the breath in his lungs. Here was a grayer version of his friend and rival. Alive. In a silk robe. Was it really him? Had to be. The old-fashioned glasses over the old-fashioned nose. The watery-blue eyes. (My father described this scene to me so many times I, an eleven year old boy, could recite it with him.) Anyway, my father took a step backward, like a flinch, an instinct, and so did Bronstein. For a full minute neither could believe what he saw, though life should have taught them both to believe everything. Bronstein in silk? My father thought his eyes had lost their mind. A Zenithist poet, in the penthouse?
A hundred feet behind Bronstein, a big wide window gave a peek at the whole city, from this high-up height my father rarely got to see in his life. In the middle of the floor, a shiny piano had its shiny lid lifted. Nothing here was uncared for, or out or place; everything that could gleam had been made to gleam. It wasn’t an apartment where a guest would embarrassingly find curlicue hairs in the bathtub, or on his way back from the bathroom stumble on Russian papers and books that were too big to stow under a rickety desk. There was a fireplace, and what’s more it was spotless. There was music playing, the American Jazz my father never bothered to learn about. And there was Bronstein — most of all, there was Bronstein, looking at my father without blinking, or inviting him in.
Would he say something about their bygone days? A hatred grew tangled in my father’s chest. He thought he’d punch Bronstein if the guy was tactless enough to bring up their shared past in the light of their different presents. But he also wanted to punch Bronstein for being rude enough not to mention it. So you can see my father’s dilemma. Here’s where a good writer could do it justice. Does he punch him? The moment needs a really subtle writer, a Chekhov. I put it to you.
My father said, ‘You ordered this, mister?’ with that twist-mouth accent of his. ‘Yes.’ Bronstein said with the very same accent: ‘Well, my wife ordered it.’
Isn’t it funny how the eyes are sometimes drawn to things? Is it the Talmud that says God provides man the sixth sense that tells him just where to look, what to see? Maybe it was just in a poem I’d read. Over Bronstein’s shoulder, my father happened to notice a new book jacket, written in English, a poetry book with the name Bronstein splashed big on the cover. “Russian Days, American Nights,” it was called. That hurt, you can probably imagine.
My father said, ‘Seventy-five cents, please.’
Bronstein gave the money, but — and my father always pointed this out whenever he told the story — he didn’t look my father in the face. Bronstein’s eyes were on the floor when he thrust the money into my father’s hand. What could the floor tell him? Both men knew the real poet was now delivering headache salts. My father, a goddamn delivery boy! No, he was not that, not in his heart. He was no delivery boy in any fair world.
They didn’t cross paths anymore, my father and Bronstein. But the old woodpecker started up again. The woodpecker that he’d described from Russia. It started pecking and pecking at his brain. And it did this for the rest of his life, to be honest with you. Really; he talked about it to me. ‘That goddamn woodpecker,’ he’d say. ‘That goddamn woodpecker never takes a day off.’ Which you’ll admit is very poetic. But he never wrote a word of real poetry in English and lived very poor until I bought my parents a house in Florida six months before they died, one right in the after the other. The end.
Part Three
Olishansky was waiting for my reaction. “Well,” I said. “That is quite a story, all right.”
“Of course it’s a story. What else would it be, a show tune?”
He stared into my face with moist eyes. He put the tip of his tongue to his upper lip. He was bouncing on his eager feet, a little — and I could feel my own eyebrows lift automatically. Olishansky and I started to nod, together, in agreement of nothing.
I shouldn’t have let this go on, the two of us there in the spirit of a carnival seal and the guy who decides whether to toss it a fish.
I wanted to say something encouraging. I didn’t. And at that moment I couldn’t have said why. Maybe because I’d started to feel uncomfortably hot in my coat and gloves.
Olishansky’s face tightened all at once. He pulled unhappily at the cuffs of his jacket.
“Don’t patronize,” he said in a peculiarly calm way. “I’m aware of how evocative the story is. I said it needed a good writer. Guess I have to look someplace else.”
His outright displeasure lent him a certain dignity.
“Well, maybe that’s right,” I said. “It’s just, I don’t think I’d know how to tell it.”
I wasn’t lying. How would you shape that kind of story into a narrative? As often happens with life, the structure was nonexistent. The middle part had its own dramatic peak, and then, all that time later, a single moment of pathos. But you’d be lost trying to manage all the years in between.
“Besides,” I said. “It’s your story. Right?”
“What the hell you mean, don’t know how to tell it?” His eyes bulged, as if from a force inside his head. “What kind of a dumb question is that? You would just tell it. God in heaven. Straight! You’d tell it straight! It’s a beautiful story, what’s so hard?”
“Yeah, but there’d have to be some kind of framing device, I think. Some imposed narrative architecture, or–” I couldn’t find the word I wanted. “Anyway, it’s not mine; it’s yours, this story.”
He wasn’t listening. “Writers,” he said. “They go through life not recognizing gold when it falls in their lap.”
And then he waved me off with a hand gesture that meant phooey, and walked past me to the door and out of this story.
My Aunt Bella hadn’t quit crying over in the next room, not hysterically but like a tired child.
I was pretty sure I was the only person in my family who knew that my Uncle Harold had cheated on Bella for the last twenty years of his life. Who would tell that story, the life of Harold and Bella? Or the life of my own father, who’d made a fortune as a young man, lost it all, earned a second fortune, and then lost that, too? There were innumerable stories in the world, even in my own family, stories that belonged to me, they were mine, and yet the feeling to tell any of them crumpled up inside me like an old hat.
I waited another minute until I was sure I wouldn’t run into Mr. Olishansky and then I made my way home.
