17
« on: January 25, 2013, 06:01:40 PM »
The noir thread reminded me of an amazing story my dad told me a few years ago. In 1976, or thereabouts, he was invited to a university in Novosibirsk to read from a paper he'd written as a graduate student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. The dean managed to get a business visa for his trip and worked with the authorities to arrange his travel. Since you couldn't fly directly over the U.S./Russian border, he flew to Paris, then to Moscow, then to a small private airport in the countryside.
As soon as he'd disembarked from the small plane, a long grey car rolled up. Two men stepped out. One of them said, "Dr. Smith?" Dad wasn't within spitting distance of a Ph.D., but he thought it best to answer in the affirmative. "Come with us," the man said calmly, in a way that discouraged debate. My dad, thoroughly steeped in the cultural effects of Cold War paranoia subtle and not-so-subtle, recalled thinking that the man had probably developed this tone of voice in a process of trial-and-error, the possible circumstances of which he tried not to think about as he got into the car.
The two men sat quietly in the front seat. My dad thought it might be a good idea to memorize the location of the door handle in case he needed to grab for it in a hurry. He looked down at the padded interior of the back door and saw a smooth panel of upholstery, pocked here and there with something about the size of a gun butt. He realized the door had no handle.
The car drove for an hour. There was nothing resembling a city anywhere on the horizon. There was only the road -- a long, straight, pitted road that looked like it might not take so much as a dogleg on its way to hell. The road was bordered by long fences made of wire and behind the fences stretched acres of clean snow that met with a dark sky. Black birds traced shapes in the sky. The car kept driving.
The car finally parked in front of a squat-looking municipal building and the man on the passenger side got out. He opened the back door. "We thought, naturally, that you would like the privilege of sitting in on our legislative session," he said, making a small bow in invitation. My dad got out of the car and looked warily around. There was a narrow path of slush leading from the car to the large wooden door of the building. Figuring that was the rest of the invitation, he got out and sloshed to the entrance. The door opened, and another grey-suited man led him down an upholstered hall. He began to hear a curious sound as they approached the closed, ornate doors of the main chamber. It sounded like a circus.
It was a circus, of sorts. The grey-suited man swung open the double doors to reveal the "legislative session" in full swing. Short, stout men and tall withered men leaned into one another with gale force, shouting and exhorting and wheedling and palavering and swearing through the full rhetorical gamut of any legislative session anywhere in the world. It was a cross between the New York Stock Exchange, an Irish wake, and the Raiders' locker room, and it was lubricated by the careful consumption of vodka; careful in the sense that once your glass was filled to the brim by the young boy who dashed around the pit with the enthusiasm of a major-league waterboy, you had to exercise caution when bringing it to your lips so as not to spill a drop. In this way, the session proceeded, the polyglot bickering rising imperceptibly until it exploded into a combination Bronx cheer and bullfighting chant. "They are going to dance now," the grey-suited man told my dad.
He followed the legislators down the hall to a room with wooden floors where a phonograph spit out creaky swing music and two dozen bored-looking women were waiting for dance partners. When the tide of legislators rolled in -- red-faced, back-slapping, sagging on their feet like the tail end of a double header -- the women got up coolly, held out a hand, and proceeded to be whisked about the room and bandied like fresh mackerel between the shitfaced and sweating civic leaders.
My dad left the festivities early ("before I did something stupid") and retired to his room at a nearby hotel. No sooner had he begun to unpack his suitcase than he heard a frantic knocking at the door. He opened it. A woman with long black hair and a fur hat stood there, twisting a notebook nervously in her hands. Oh shit, he thought. "My name is Natasha," she said.
Double shit.
Somehow, and this part was conspicuously vague in the re-telling, Natasha convinced my dad to come with her to... an unspecified location. They trudged silently through the snow until they reached a low wooden building. At the sound of the door opening, thirty small faces turned outward toward the night. My dad stepped into a classroom, the only room in a one-room schoolhouse. "This is Dr. Smith," Natasha announced proudly. "Go ahead-- ask him!"
The kids looked at one another, and a boy shyly raised his hand. "Dr. Smith," he says in careful English, "please, what is a gat?"
"A cat?" said my dad, puzzled.
"No," the kid said, "a gat. And please," he looked guiltily at Natasha, "what is a broad?"
Dad stared at the kid, then it dawned on him, holy shit, this kid's been reading Mickey Spillane, or something. And how did Mickey Spillane, or something, find its way unflagged to a one-room schoolhouse in the Siberian tundra? And how much trouble would Natasha be in if one of the libidinous grey-suited patriarchs of the Duma-bacchanal - or any drab-suited local authority - found out about it?
But he didn't have much time to think about that. Hands were springing up all over the room. "Please, Mr. Smith-- what is a slug? A mug? A schnozzle? A beezer? A bindle? A roscoe?"
For the next two hours, my dad stood at the front of the class and told the kids what a roscoe was, and a croaker, and a copper, and a patsy. If he didn't know, he made it up. When their appetite for slang was slaked, Natasha walked him back to the hotel through the snow. When they got to his room, she asked if she could stay. He said no.
"No."
Then he went to the city and the conference and nothing happened, or else something so interesting happened that he still thinks I'm not old enough to hear it.
He says that all this shit is true. He also says that, while in Moscow, he went into the KGB headquarters to ask for directions to a restaurant.
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