The Stone Bridge

The Invisible Man

THE INVISIBLE MAN

Konstantin umansky left a short, broken trail, fragile as footprints in the sand. Almost no one wanted to remember the dead father of the beautiful girl who was shot in 1943.

I met with Goltsman before breakfast, before the beach filled up with old women and children, and we sifted through Umansky's 43 years of life, until we saw it for what it was: a small, smooth thing, worked over by the waves until it was the size of the dash engraved in Umansky’s concrete headstone between the numbers 1902 and 1945.

“He was Jewish. Born in Nikolayev, the son of an engineer. After the revolution he turned up at Moscow University, but studied for barely a year. He showed exceptional linguistic abilities. He knew English, German and French well, Italian and Spanish less so. As a very young man, he authored a book about new Communist art. A representative sample of the book: ‘And although Kandinsky, as a consequence of spending long periods of time abroad, is often assessed in Moscow circles as a Western presence, I have no doubt whatsoever about his purely Slavic roots, about his eastern aspiration to break free of the fetters of the material, about his purely Russian and universal humanism’.

“The People’s Commissar, Anatoly Lunacharsky, took note of Umansky and sent him, while he was still a seventeen-year-old upstart, to Germany “to foster the propaganda of new art forms.” Once there, Umansky forgot the reason he had been sent, and became an employee of the Russian Telegraph Agency. He lived well, representing the agency in Europe for thirteen years — Vienna, Rome, Geneva, Paris. Only occasionally did he visit to the site of the Socialist experiment back home in Moscow.

In 1931, however, he came back to Moscow, to head the press department of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Accredited foreign correspondents remember him for his ferocious censorship: those who dared to write that there was famine in the USSR wouldn’t get tickets to the sensational trials of the first “saboteurs.” He accompanied western literary luminaries on their inspections — Feuchtwanger, Shaw, Barbusse and Wells. Stalin took note of him. It was reported that on several occasions he acted as an interpreter for Comrade Stalin. The People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov called Umansky “Mr. Magic Touch” — the papers that he drafted were signed by the Emperor without corrections.

In April 1936, Umansky went to the USA, in the rank of counselor. Two years later, he was the Ambassador. He was disliked there. Some historians believe that in 1939-1940, the Soviet Ambassador functioned as a resident agent for the foreign department of the NKVD. Umansky was recalled at the start of the war, but no persecution followed. He spent two years in de facto honorable retirement as a member of the Board of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, and then finally was again appointed Ambassador, this time to Mexico, scheduled to arrive there on 4 June 1943. One legend has it that when he presented his letter of credence to Mexico’s President, Umansky promised that in six months they would be able to speak to one another without an interpreter. Two months later, in October Umansky made his first speech in Spanish (the Mexicans didn’t suspect that Umansky had studied the language for years). Ambassador Umansky became “a national hero of the working people.”

On 25 January 1945 he boarded a plane to Costa Rica; it exploded in flight.

The historian Aleksandr Sizonenko provided seven hypotheses for the catastrophe:

Tragic coincidence. The pilot took off at the wrong time, flew into the wake turbulence from the plane that had taken off right before them, and lost speed. Other evidence suggest that the pilot lost control of the plane, was unable to even out the roll of the aircraft, and during takeoff one of the chassis caught on the fence of the landing strip which caused the plane to crash and explode on the ground.

An act of sabotage by German agents.

An American operation, one of the many missions that were to curb the “Communist threat” in Latin America.

The Poles. Several hundred Poles fled to Mexico seeking refuge from the war. The uprising in Warsaw that was organized from London by the Polish government in exile there, was drowned in blood by the Germans, and the Polish capital was taken by the Red Army just before Umansky’s flight, bringing in the so-called Moscow Poles. In retaliation, the London Poles blew up the Soviet Ambassador.

The Trotskyists, taking their revenge on Stalin for the murder of their leader. Umansky may have taken part in planning the assassination of the emperor’s personal enemy; the operation was planned in the US, and it is unlikely that the Embassy was not involved. Further, during his time in Mexico Umansky tried to get Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, released from jail. Trotsky’s widow Natalia stated directly that thanks to Umansky’s efforts, Mercader was treated well in prison.

Umansky was killed by Mexican fascists — enemies of the USSR.

The NKVD. The emperor was preparing to destroy the Anti-fascist Jewish committee. Umansky’s connections with actor and activist Solomon Mikhoels and poet Itzik Feffer, and his active work “in the Jewish sphere” in America and Mexico could not go unnoticed.

Goltsman put only two purple check-marks in his notebook, and after a long silence, said:

“That’s all that exists in open sources.”

He had shaved and had his hair cut, and was attired in a light white suit and summer shoes. When working, Alexander Naumovich always gave the impression of a slightly frightened person who had heard an unfamiliar rustle in the middle of the night.

“Don’t you find it strange, Alexander Naumovich, that no one seems to remember Umansky personally? There hasn’t been a single publication in the last sixty years. All the diaries, memoirs, letters, commentaries on letters that have come out? Nothing. Nothing from the foreigners — who was it he escorted around? Nothing by Gorky — and Umansky went to his banquets. Nothing from his friends, Mayakovski, or Yevgeny Petrov. Or Mikhail Koltsov — though they were supposedly close friends, like brothers. Not even the White émigrés… How come Bunin didn’t take a poke at him — he made fun of everyone else. The subject of our inquiry is a charismatic man. A prominent diplomat. Died mysteriously in the prime of life. And the tragic story of his beautiful daughter… How is it no one remembers?”

“They say Gromyko didn’t like our client. He served under Umansky in Washington; when he became the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he forbade any mention of Umansky.”

“That’s not very convincing.”

“There’s a one-page passage, a look at Umansky’s life as a whole. Nothing significant. But the name of the author is noteworthy.”

“One of the repressed?”

“If only! Ilya Ehrenburg,” Goltsman handed me a photocopy.

Ilya Ehrenburg, deputy of the Supreme Council of the USSR of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh convocations, winner of two Stalin Prizes and the International Lenin Prize, vice-president of the World Peace Council, wrote several thick novels that no one wanted to read and seemed to be the freest person in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

He served the country of victorious socialism and served the emperor, dooming some, when necessary, elevating others, when possible, and spending most of his life in the comfort of bourgeois capitals. He crossed the iron curtain with suspicious ease in search of “material” for work and, armed with approved talking points, defended the interests of the nation of workers and peasants in disputes with various giants, Cyclopes and monsters of world culture.

Ehrenburg became hugely famous, not to say notorious, for his vehement wartime goad: “If you have not killed at least one German today, you have wasted the day.” The men on trial at Nuremberg all looked up as if on command when they were told that Ehrenburg himself had taken a seat in the viewers’ gallery. Contemporaries (our witnesses) referred to Ehrenburg as a “communications officer” between West and East, “Stalin’s court lackey”, “an unsurpassed master of life” and a “screen.” Even a tenth of the freedom that Ehrenburg received from the government would have landed any other man with a one hundred percent chance of being shot as early as 1934, regardless of the results of his work. And a ten thousand percent chance in 1937. And a labor camp in the early ‘50s, after the authorities adjusted the intensity of the Soviet Jewry’s national self-esteem. Yet Ehrenburg lived out his seventy-six years without hindrance, outlived the emperor, and left for posterity three volumes of memoirs which he titled People, Years, Life…. He wrote about the bloodier times in passing, by hints and innuendo and mostly focused on his own purity and his numerous friendships with Nobel laureates and other geniuses, while admitting in passing that he didn’t know the answer to the question of why Stalin didn’t have him killed.

The lack of a sufficient explanation (excluding for the moment the possibility that he sold his soul) means that the true life of Ilya Ehrenburg, dubbed during his lifetime the “conscience of the world,” leaves us with a fractured, jarring echo, hiding something that it would be better not to know. The fact that only Ehrenburg had examined Umansky’s life had to mean something.

Ehrenburg befriended Umansky, eleven years his junior, in 1942, and they met after work every night, at two or three o’clock in the morning. Kostya was different from most people in Ehrenburg’s circle. He was too young to have been one of the brilliant protégés of the disgraced People’s Commissar Maxim Litvinov. Neither was he one of Molotov’s people who might become the next People’s Commissar and did not talk much about the past (why?). Umansky’s book, New Russian Art, was published in Berlin and concerned itself with Lentulov, Mashkov, Konchalovsky, Sarian, Rozanova, Chagall and Malevich. Umansky was curious; he liked poetry, music, painting, everything interested him: Shostakovich’s symphonies, Rachmaninoff ’s concertos, the frescoes of Pompeii, the first garbled output of the so-called “thinking machines.” In his room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Moscow he hosted Admiral Isakov, the writer Yevgeny Petrov, the diplomat Boris Shtein, the actor and director Mikhoels, and the pilot Chukhnovsky (high-society figures of the Empire, the founding fathers of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. But where are his wife and daughter? When did he move to the apartment in the Government House?)

Ehrenburg mentioned Umansky’s extraordinary memory and hatred of the bureaucratic spirit. In his memoirs, he captured Umansky’s informal voice, and this was now our only chance to hear it, albeit in Ehrenburg’s retelling, twenty years after the fact of their meeting. Like listening to a soft tapping through thick ice. But better than nothing.

“We do not understand the things that we have the right to take pride in. We prefer to hide the best, arrogant as clumsy teenagers, but at the same time we are afraid that some nimble foreigner will get wind of the fact that there are no washing machines in Mirgorod.”

Foreign correspondents, hated Umansky for his sadistic censorship. One of them wrote, “Kostya Umansky, the new censor, smiled at me with all his gold teeth and flashed his thick glasses. That brassy smile. It spoke volumes. ‘I don’t like you,’ it said, ‘because I am an egocentric Soviet fixer, but you’ll see, I’ll be promoted to Commissar.’ He must have read my smile just as well. ‘You pompous careerist,’ it said, ‘you’re just exploiting the benefits of the revolution. You hate me because I can see who you really are — a little shopkeeper in the alleyways of the revolution.’”

Umansky on Americans: “They are gifted children. Sometimes charming, sometimes intolerable. Europe is in ruins, the Americans will be in command after the victory. After all, he who pays the piper orders the tune… Don’t judge all of America by Roosevelt, he is far superior to the rest of his party.” (If he really wrote that, he only made up half of it.)

Umansky on Picasso: “I once mentioned his name, and I was shouted at, told that he was a charlatan who mocked capitalism and lived off scandal. If you read Shakespeare’s poetry to the secretary of some regional party committee” — but had Umansky ever even seen such a creature? — ”who doesn’t speak English, he’ll say it’s a mess and miss the poetry! Anything they don’t understand is arcane for them. And their tastes are compelled, in any case, by Moscow.”

Ehrenburg wrote: “I think Umansky was born under a lucky star.”

But suddenly, the lucky star fell, according to Ehrenburg, “because of a tragic and stupid coincidence.” “A teenager, a classmate,” Ehrenburg reports, killed Umansky’s daughter, “shot her after a heated exchange, he shot her and killed himself.” Umansky adored his daughter. She was the only thing that held his family together. “I knew that there was great emotion in his life, that in 1943 he experienced such torments as those described by Chekhov in his story The Lady with the Lapdog.”

And then came the unexpected outcome of the drama.

“I’ll never forget the night when Konstantin Alexandrovich came to see me. He could barely speak, he sat there with his head in his hands. A few days later he left for Mexico. His wife (Raisa Mikhailovna) was put on the flight to Mexico City all but comatose with grief. A year later he wrote to me: ‘The sorrow I have suffered destroyed me. Raisa Mikhailovna is an invalid, and our condition is much worse than it was on the day that we said goodbye. As always, you were right, and you gave me some good advice which I, alas, ignored’.”

In concluding this section, before getting back to the business of narrating his own life, Ehrenburg gives a final rhetorical shrug: what advice did I give him? I don’t remember giving any advice.

The water was clear and undisturbed. The siren at the railway crossing trilled like a living thing. Trains came to Feodosia from the north, and the local residents, with the satisfied look of hunters on their faces, took the disembarking vacationers, like slaves in a marketplace, bent under the weight of their suitcases, to the apartments the locals had rented to them. These holidaymakers, despite the late May cool, stubbornly trooped down to the gray-pebbled beach. Seagulls dropped into the water when one least expected it. Girls stuck umbrellas into the pebbles and undressed.

We sat facing the sea, feeling its breath and the reach of its emptiness, and it blended with the sky far away in the distance, a warm eternity.

“What do you think, Alexander Naumovich?” I asked.

“He was a careful person. There are a lot of questions about him. No one seems to know the details of his daughter’s death. What was the advice that Ehrenburg gave him? Could it have saved Nina’s life? Some of the twists in his biography are difficult to explain. I think I probably will find out eventually whether Stalin really did know him. The plane crash, or explosion, is a separate topic altogether. But here’s what I find most intriguing” — here Goltsman turned away from the sea and looked at me with his tense, heavy face, his blue eyes bright and almost transparent in his old age — “Litvinov, Molotov, Gromyko. Three Ministers. The top of the Soviet foreign affairs establishment. And they all knew our Kostya. Gromyko didn’t like him and tried to make sure that he was forgotten. Litvinov and Molotov, as we know, couldn’t stand each other. Umansky began his diplomatic career under Litvinov, and rose quickly. So why didn’t Molotov touch Umansky when he had Litvinov placed under house arrest and all of his people purged? Then Litvinov was brought back and sent to the States — as Umansky’s replacement. Kostya was recalled, but again, he wasn’t touched. And two years later they gave him the ambassadorship to Mexico. Whose man was he? Why did you decide to start with him?”

“The parents of the boy, Shakhurin, lived to an old age, we’ll find people who knew them and are still alive. Umansky’s wife died with him in the plane crash in 1945; there can’t be many left who knew the family. Something else caught my attention, too. The guy who came to recruit me at the market said that Nina was killed on the third of June. Umansky flew to Mexico on the fourth. For all we’ve heard about how he adored the girl, how come he didn’t stay behind to bury her?”

We got up.

“This all needs to be checked,” I said. “You don’t like Kostya already. He’s going to have a tough time with you, I can tell, but perhaps this will help. I got these from the foreign affairs archives, personnel file #1300. It cost two hundred dollars. I’m keeping track of the expenses.”

I shook twenty-two photographs out of an envelope: a skinny Jew with a gap-toothed smile and a thick head of hair; the same man years later, after he matured and put on a lot of weight, in profile, with a high forehead; Umansky with the gray-haired Bernard Shaw next to an open car, with the Kremlin towers behind them; ancient Mexican women, big-boned and loaded with flowers, next to the extravagantly polished coffins of the plane- crash victims; Umansky’s mother, a stout woman with a masculine face; a fuzzy-haired five-year-old girl standing in the grass on a riverbank, pulling up her white panties, her squinting, blissful father behind her. And so on.

Finally, two newspaper clippings with almost identical photos, both dated April 13, a Monday. One from a Washington newspaper and the other from the Omaha World Herald, with the caption, “Konstantin Umansky, the new Counselor at the Embassy of the USSR, with his young daughter Nina, on board the ocean-liner Paris after arriving in New York.”

I held one of these newspaper photos a bit longer. A beautiful child in a good, warm coat, a tiny beret on her head, was hugging her young, handsome father, with her hand in the collar of his coat. Umansky was squatting down, and the girl seemed to be taller than him. Both of their faces glowed, and they had the same eyes.

“Their eyes are absolutely identical. So are their teeth.”

“Here’s another photograph. Look closely.”

Umansky, wearing glasses, his face turned away from the camera, works the tuning knobs of a radio with both hands. To the right there seems to be a balcony. Either curtains or patterned wallpaper. On top of the radio sits a portrait of the emperor and a coffee cup on a saucer.

“Look at Stalin’s portrait,” Goltsman said, and pointed. “See, there’s something written on it, diagonally across the bottom. You can make out, ‘To Comrade Umansky’, but the signature and date are illegible. Can it be that Stalin signed a photograph for him?”

“We’ll have to find out.”

“Yes, that and another thing: did Gromyko write memoirs?” Goltsman asked. “Incidentally,” he continued, “they say The Lady with the Lapdog was Stalin’s favorite story.”