The Russian and The Recluse

by Roger Repohl

“Cornish, New Hampshire. Not far.”

Andrei was stretched out beside the wood-stove in the cabin we’d rented near Sharon, Vermont, in March of 1991. A wet snow was falling outside the window. Before him on the floor was a map of New England and an open copy of Ian Hamilton’s book, In Search of J. D. Salinger, the mutant remains of a biography of the mythic recluse, who had blocked several earlier versions for unauthorized use of his letters.

“I would like to bring greetings to Jerome Salinger from the Soviet people.”

“Greetings?” I asked.

“Why not?” said Andrei, tracing his finger along the blue line between Sharon and Cornish. “He lives so close to here. How can we not stop in to see him?”

“You’re wasting your time,” I told him. “Salinger’s made a business out of his privacy. Nobody’s seen him for years. He’s probably got the whole town sworn to secrecy.”

“I know about his privacy,” he replied in newly-acquired English. “To me, it is almost the most important thing about his life. In Soviet Union, writers are political figures. They must do what the Communist Party wants. If they do it, they are glorified. If they don’t, they are imprisoned. No matter what they write, it is always political statement.

“To Soviet writers,” he continued, “Salinger is a hero. When his stories first came to us in the 1960s, it was like a window to the real world. This man wrote for himself. He wrote from a spiritual point of view. He had no politics. Then when he refused to publish his writings, when he refused even to socialize with writers and withdrew to himself, it was even much bigger thing than writing. It was not political behavior. It was cultural behavior. To us, it was pure unpolitical resistance to his society. In America, this behavior is possible. This is why we envy you.”

“But what about his privacy?” I protested. “Doesn’t tracking him down violate his express wish to be left alone? Doesn’t it violate the very thing you admire most about him?”

“Maybe,” Andrei replied, folding up the map. “But we are not reporters. We are not paparazzi. We are ordinary people. When he sees we do not want to take advantage of him, he will welcome us. I want to tell him how much Soviet people love him. How will he know unless I tell him?”

There was a certain very Russian logic to that, I thought. Privacy is an official thing, bound up in legalities and politics and money and social groups. Why should it come between the desires of the heart?

On the other hand, I speculated, Andrei may not even understand privacy in the same way Americans do. In the Soviet Union, there was no debate about a “right to privacy.” There, every act was a public act. “In the Soviet Union,” Andrei told me later, “privacy is — nothing.” And although, as he put it, “for the ordinary man, it is easy to lock your door,” even there privacy was more a wish than a reality. Andrei himself grew up in a “common apartment” in Novosibirsk, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom with three other families.

The following day, we packed up the car, locked up the cabin, and crunched through the snow to the interstate. As we motored south, a knot began to form in my stomach. I was hoping Andrei had come to his senses, shelved his idea, and would let me drive to Boston in peace.

I glanced to my right. Andrei had unfolded the map.

“Cornish, New Hampshire,” he mused distractedly. “Very close now.”

“Give it up, Andrei,” I growled. “It would be a miracle if we even found his house, much less saw him.”

“No matter,” he replied. “As we say in Russian, potseluyu zamok — ‘I’ll kiss his lock.’”

I had underestimated Andrei’s persistence. But how could I have? Soviets, like Westerners, worked hard to build lives for themselves. But unlike Westerners, they had to do it not only with their jobs but with the monstrous and tangled social system itself, a task that occupied them night and day and that demanded a highly specialized set of skills: carefully establishing a grapevine of contacts, collecting items to barter, developing an almost psychic awareness of the location of available goods and services, and cultivating a sophisticated, almost Confucian, psychology of human relations that allowed people to take advantage of one another and maintain their friendship at the same time. But unlike most Soviets, Andrei’s skills extended beyond getting American jeans, a bottle of vodka, or fresh fruit in winter; they went right to his life’s work itself.

As a student at the University of Novosibirsk in the mid-1970’s, he talked himself into a job at the local TV station as a reporter on Soviet youth. Still dissatisfied, he convinced a professor of medieval Russian history at the university — himself an iconoclast, as he had made religious history his specialty within an ideology that denied the existence of religious history — to allow him to design his own curriculum, studying fifteenth- and sixteenth-century church-state relations. After graduation, he got an appointment at the Institute of History at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Once there, he refused to live in the student dormitories and instead stayed with friends and without official permit in an old apartment building that was slated for demolition. One by one the tenants were forced to move, till he, under the bureaucratic radar, was left by himself. The city shut off the utilities, but he had made friends with the meter-readers, whom he persuaded to turn them back on. He had become a nonperson in the housing bureaucracy but lived like a prince until the wrecking crews came.

While at the Institute of History he published over 70 scholarly articles on Russian religious history and, in the glow of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the late 1980s, two popular books on the same subject which sold a couple hundred thousand copies apiece. In 1990, at the age of 35, he got an appointment as a visiting scholar at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard.

As we sped down the interstate that snowy spring morning, it occurred to me that if anyone should meet J. D. Salinger, this man should. Andrei was something of a Holden Caulfield himself, transposed into the antimatter of Soviet life. Holden rejected the phony conventional way and found life in the forbidden fruit of the underside of American society; Andrei rejected humiliating servitude to the system and found life in a peculiarly Soviet kind of forbidden fruit: history, and religious history at that.

Still, the whole business troubled me, and my stomach packed itself into a snowball as I pulled off the interstate at Windsor, Vermont. The only reason I did it was my absolute conviction that Salinger could not be located, and that after an hour of symbolic searching, we’d be back on the road to Boston congratulating ourselves for the effort.

Riding through the sleepy town, we looked for a bridge across the river into Cornish. A rugged man with a blond beard was walking on the other side of the street.

“Which way to Cornish?” I shouted at him. He pointed at the cross-street.

As I was preparing to turn, the man signaled to us. “Where in Cornish?” he asked.

“We’re looking for J. D. Salinger,” I shouted back.

“Oh, Jay Dee! See that white house up there? That’s his place.”

I spotted a tiny speck high up a mountainside.

“How do we get there?”

“Well, you cross the bridge, then zzzzzzzzz.”

His words turned to static in my head, like Communists jamming the Voice of America.

The jamming stopped momentarily, and I heard the man say, “Now see over there, that’s his brother Pierre’s house!” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s portly press-secretary, the political commentator? They’re related? Didn’t Hamilton write there was no …?”

I looked at Andrei for help. He stared at me earnestly but blankly, like a baby. He’d only begun to speak English confidently the week before.

Too embarrassed to ask the man to repeat the instructions, I thanked him and drove across the bridge.

There was a general store on the other side of the bridge. I pulled up outside.

“I’ll go in with you,” I told Andrei, “but you ask. I’m not going to ask. This whole thing is a joke.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Andrei said to the man at the counter. “I am looking for the house of the famous writer Jerome Salinger.”

“Salinger,” said the man. “I think you turn at the cemetery.”

“Have you ever met him?” I asked cautiously.
“I’ve lived here seven years and I’ve seen him maybe twice. He’s not very sociable. I’ve heard some stories. I’d be careful if I was you. There’s no telling what he might do.”

I was sweating in the freezing weather.

“Vperiod!” shouted Andrei gleefully, mimicking the Young Communist slogan. “Onward!”

We turned at the cemetery and drove past several houses, examining the mailboxes.

“This is preposterous!” I fumed. “Why would a recluse put his name on a mailbox? Let’s turn around.”

We returned to the intersection at the cemetery.

“Maybe we will ask somebody else,” said Andrei.

“Whom do you suggest?” I asked, eyeing the graveyard.

I drove back toward the bridge.

“I think this is really foolish,” I told Andrei. “Let’s just get out of here.”

“So close, so close,” he repeated quietly.

At his insistence — “One last time!” — we asked a passer-by. Amazingly, the man proceeded to draw us a detailed map: Turn here, turn there, pass these houses, and there it is.

We went up a hill, turned here and there. The road was icy. In my anxiety, I bounced the car off a snowbank, below what our informant said was Salinger’s first house, a rustic structure with colorful designs covering one side.

We got out. A rambunctious young golden retriever suddenly appeared, barking in mock anger. I cringed as the noise echoed in the snowy silence. I petted him, and he quieted down.

We walked up the road, the dog leading the way. Andrei was eating an apple.

“This is it!” whispered Andrei. “Vperiod!”

We walked up the driveway and around the side. The house was set back from the road, but there were no fences, no barriers at all.

“You go,” I mumbled to Andrei. “I’m not. I think this is an invasion of privacy.”

Andrei went up to the door and knocked. A chorus of little dogs yelped inside.

A young woman with a pleasant face framed by short sandy hair and wearing a cook’s apron opened the door.

“Excuse me, miss,” said Andrei. “I am from the Soviet Union and have come to greet Mr. Jerome Salinger!”

She began to explain in a kind and even voice that Mr. Salinger does not receive visitors, when a man came up behind her — a striking figure, tall, soundly built, deep-set eyes, thick shock of white hair.

“What do you want? Why are you here? Don’t you know I’m a recluse?”

“Yes, I know,” Andrei continued, “but I am here doing research in Russian church history at Harvard and I know all your books in the Soviet Union and I wanted to tell you how important you are to Soviet people.”

“Harvard?” — Salinger balked for a moment, then resumed: “I don’t have anything to do with the Russian church. I wrote a book about the Jesus Prayer a long time ago but that was it. I don’t have anything to do with it now. Leave me alone. My works speak for themselves.”

I was standing 10 yards away, holding on to the retriever, who was eager to investigate the dog-noises still coming form inside the house.

Andrei would not give up. He told Salinger about his research, and Salinger said he was not a scholar. He told him of the respect given his works in the Soviet Union, and Salinger said he is no longer a writer: “I’m somebody else now.”

A strange thing was happening. As Andrei drew from his intellectual bag more and more information — about the influence of Chinese philosophy on Russian Old Believers, about the possible usefulness of Russian spirituality to the American soul — Salinger appeared alternately drawn to the ideas and angry at the intrusion, as if his natural intellectual curiosity was doing battle with his eremitical image.

In the midst of this curious and oddly touching exchange, Salinger looked up at me as I stood timidly aloof, restraining the slavering dog. He suddenly smiled warmly, ironically; both of us were watching something quite amazing, quite appealing – and quite un-American.

“I’m sorry,” he returned to Andrei at last. “I can’t talk anymore. I’ve got a dentist’s appointment at one o’clock. You’ll have to go.”

Andrei thanked him and told him he’d send him his books.

“All right,” he said, “but you must realize I never answer my mail.”

Thank you. Good bye.

We walked back down the road, the dog playing with a stick he’d found in the snow. Andrei was radiant, contemplative, like St. Peter descending Mount Tabor after witnessing the transfiguration of Christ. I was as confused as I imagined Salinger to be, paradoxically more sure than ever that the man be granted his privacy from prying journalists and even the prying public, and yet just as sure that this meeting was almost meant to be — the fruit of passion, persistence, and luck. Andrei did not secretly photograph or tape-record, he did not scale walls. He went up to the door and knocked.

“Ah, America, America!” Andrei smiled as we joined the interstate back to Boston. He was looking at the map again.

“The famous Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn lives in Vermont somewhere. Solzhenitsyn . . . . Maybe he is waiting for us.” B

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