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PARTISAN REVIEW
on curved swords with elaborate, jeweled handles, and displayed an
immense, childish curiosity about what Americans looked like when
they sat on the toilet. Later in St. Petersburg, American and Russian
diplomats agreed Reed was aspy. He was given twenty-four hours
to leave the country via Vladivostok by officials who were supremely
unconcerned over the fact that no trains were departing for that
Pacific port within the allotted time period. Their business, they pa–
tiently explained, was banishing people , not administering railroads.
Reed bribed his way onto a train leaving for Romania, but a clever
police agent caught him just before the border and spirited him back
to the capital city. He was expelled on the next train and hustled to
the Romanian border. There guards tore the lining out of his cloth–
ing, pulled the innersoles out of his shoes, and confiscated all his lug–
gage before pushing him across the Pruth. By then Reed had seen
enough forest and field, eaten enough caviar, drunk enough vodka
and heard enough talk of both political and spiritual revolution to
leave with the impression that Russia was the most interesting coun–
try in the world. Perhaps you have to be a graduate of Harvard to
have such an opinion, or maybe it is only necessary to be an early
twentieth-century artist, a devotee of Dostoevsky and Nijinsky.
Neither Chaim Baer nor his grandson fit into either of those catego–
ries, so neither would ever be able to accept Reed's opinion of Russia.
Daphne Merkin
THE FEET OF A KING
Where was
my
father?
My imagination, usually so busy, failed me when it carne to
him. I invent no one in his place, no alternate father visions, the way
I do for my mother. He is too distant, or she too potent, a presence;
Editor's Note: This story is excerpted from
Enchantment
by Daphne Merkin . Copy–
right
c
1986 by Daphne Merkin. To
be
published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc.
