Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  “I know that. Don’t think I don’t know that. Oh, how could you, Viktor?”

  “I couldn’t help it, Katya. We’d been drinking. It’s never happened before, and I didn’t do anything. It was all her idea.”

  “You just lay back and enjoyed it. Well, why not?”

  “Bunin was taking her home in the car,” I said. “I’d had a lot to drink, and suddenly it was happening. But it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Between us, everything counts. Wouldn’t it count if I started working on Manny? Wouldn’t you be upset?”

  “You wouldn’t do this to Manny.”

  “If I had enough to drink, maybe I would.”

  “It’s you I love, only you, I think of you night arid day. I can hardly wait to see you, to touch you, to make love to you. You have to know that.”

  “I know what I know,” she moaned.

  But she forgave me; she took me into her arms and we knotted ourselves into a ball and for a while truly loved each other. Afterward she lay on the bed beside me and I realized her face was wet with tears.

  When I asked her why she was crying now, hadn’t she forgiven me after all, she burst into tears again.

  “Nothing in life ever lasts, I know that” she said, “not between two people. They can talk about love and devotion, they can promise fidelity, but they never live up to it. But I want this to last. I want it so much.”

  “Why did you think of Manny? I asked suddenly. “Doing something like that to Manny? Why would you think of it?”

  “All right, Ivan Chrenobyl at the shop.”

  Suddenly I didn’t want to think about it.

  “It’s going to last,” I said. “I don’t know if forever, but a long long time, until we are old and gray and full of foolishness.”

  “Not forever,” she said. “Eventually something will happen. Not right away, not this week or even this month, but soon, Viktor my love. I don’t belong here, I know I ought to leave on my own before I’m forced to go. You’ll be better off. You don’t know it yet, but you will.”

  “How can you say that? Don’t you know what I had to go through so we could stay together, what Manny had to go through, how many strings we had to pull just to get you here with me?”

  “Manny wishes I would leave. He doesn’t say so, but I know it.”

  “You’ve got a political problem, and Manny never likes to deal with any more politics than he has to. It isn’t his fault; I swear it isn’t. Do you know how much it cost him to arrange it?”

  “How much?”

  “Plenty, he had to pay off a lot of people.”

  “But he did that for you, not for me.”

  “Manny’s my brother, he looks after my interests.”

  “If he really had any interest in me he wouldn’t be trying to throw you together with Tania.”

  “But she doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “Not yet, but she will. He thinks you could do better with somebody else. With her, with that grand duchess Tatiana. I understand what his problem is and I don’t really blame him. You’re foreigners here, Amerikanen, and the party doesn’t like foreigners. I haven’t got any political connections, and that’s all that Manny really cares about. I don’t know the right people, I’ve got no money, no power, no friends, nobody, nothing but you.”

  “Was she as good as I am?” Katya wanted to know suddenly. “Did she please you as much?”

  “It wasn’t anywhere near the same. Nobody ever did that to me before; it was different. I could feel her tongue, her mouth, and I kept fighting to hold myself back.”

  “But then you came anyway.”

  “It was different from making love to you. With you, I have a sense of giving something of myself. With Tania I felt like I was being taken from, almost against my will.”

  “But not quite.”

  I shook my head, “No, not quite.”

  “Would want me to do that for you.?”

  “Of course not,” I answered. But suddenly I wasn’t sure.

  After the night of Lenin’s funeral, Tania always seemed to be with Manny and me—at the office, the luncheons, receptions, and dinners we went to—and I began to believe that Katya was right. This wasn’t just happening. Manny was doing everything he could to bring Tania and me together. He wanted me to go on a holiday with her at Yalta in the Crimea on the Black Sea, and when I told him I wouldn’t leave Moscow for that long, wouldn’t leave Katya alone, he told me it was important I do so. Not for him, but for Faust Enterprises and even for Pop.

  “I don’t like Tania,” I told him, “I don’t enjoy being with her.”

  He said, “Look, Vic, I don’t care what you like. She’s important to us. It’s not just her job in the press office. Her father is a big shot in the Ministry of Defense, and she’s got connections in the Politburo. Everything we’ve done here is in danger of going down the drain.”

  “I don’t understand,” I told him, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “We’re in a precarious position, we could lose everything we’ve done here. It’s been coming a long time, and now that Lenin is dead I’m not sure what’s going to happen to us. We’re making too much money—a lot more than anybody expected. Saul Bron keeps talking about wanting to take us over. Nothing comes into this country from the U.S. except through us, and not much goes out. The Faust American Corp. is for all practical purposes the government trading company, and there are people, not just Bron, but Trotsky, Stalin, a lot of others who think what we do ought to be a government function.”

  “But I thought the whole point of the New Economic Policy was to let private enterprise back into things.”

  “But not foreign enterprise. Lenin is gone, and a lot of people didn’t like the NEP in the first place. They thought we were selling out their Marxist heritage, and maybe they were right.”

  I swore I wouldn’t think about it. It was Manny’s problem, not mine.

  But, of course, it was mine, too. We spent that weekend in Yalta, Tania and I, lying in the hot sun, drinking vodka under the palm trees, dancing to some hot jazz from the orchestra, and in spite of all my resolutions it happened again, and again, and I couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to stop it. She wouldn’t permit a more normal intimate relationship, but I would have been ready for that too. I finally said “What are you doing, saving yourself for marriage?” “Something like that,” she replied. “And what do I have to gain? A pregnancy, a child, a husband who walks out on me? Most of the men I have known even seem to prefer it, as if it’s something special. It gives you a real sense of power, as if you’re calling the shots and not somebody else.”

  So I gave up. It was how she was playing the game. It was strange, and kissing her sometimes I found it unexpectedly exciting to think of what else those lips had done.

  After that weekend in Yalta, my feelings toward Tania began to change. Her mother had been an actress, had in fact played Masha in Stanislavky’s original production of The Seagull. Tania had known Chekhov as a child and had spent weekends with her mother at his estate in the Crimea. She thought her mother might have been his model for Madame Ranevsky. I loved listening to her talk. She had known Turgenieff. She knew Gorki and, if she was to be believed, everybody who was anybody at the Moscow Art Theatre. I began to see Tania with new eyes.

  Katya sensed the change in my attitude. I was seeing Tania, not because I had a sense of duty, but because the woman and her background fascinated me. She was everything that Katya was not. She was slim and fragile, bird-boned, light as a feather when you touched her, as physically delicate as she was intellectually strong. By Moscow standards she was stylish, hair pulled back in a bun, her face heavily made up; she looked European rather than Russian. Katya by contrast was fleshy, large-boned, her hair curly, close to her head like a cap. Manny saw I was coming around about Tania, and that pleased him.

  But it was Katya I cared for, Katya who was my life. Was it true? I don’t know anymore, but I certainly thought
so at the time. And so she remained a problem for Manny.

  “I may not be able to protect her forever,” he told me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was seen with some deviationist, some counterrevolutionary at a café on the Tverskaya.”

  “They’re making it up. She doesn’t have any interest in politics. All she’s interested in is getting married and settling down on a farm somewhere and having children.”

  “Not yours, I hope.”

  “Well, why not?”

  “You’re hopeless. But this is serious. They weren’t making it up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, when I asked her about Manny’s warning. “I haven’t been seeing anybody. You’re just saying that because you think it makes things all right about Tania.”

  “You were seen,” I told her. “Don’t lie to me. You were seen in the Filipova Cafe on the Tverskaya a block or so beyond the big government gambling casino.”

  There, she remembered. “I saw Vasya. I had tea with him. I haven’t seen him in years. They can’t mean Vasya.”

  “Who is Vasya?”

  “We grew up together. He used to work on my father’s farm sometimes. He took care of the horses and other animals, we were about the same age. I ran into him on the street, and we had some tea together for old times’ sake. It was Vasya who took Varya and me and my mother in after they burned our house, the night after they killed my father.”

  She and Vasya had talked of old times. When the Soviets discovered he had given Katya, her mother, and sister shelter, they burned his cottage as well, declared him an enemy of the people, and he fled, leaving his mother behind. He hadn’t heard of her since. But like everyone else he had wound up in Moscow. If there was any hope for the future, Moscow is where he would find it.

  “And that’s all that was involved?” I wanted to know.

  “What else could there be?”

  “There’s nothing to worry about then.”

  But even hearing myself say it, I didn’t believe it.

  Then Pop and Mama Eva were there, my father and mother, and everything changed. Pop was not the man I remembered. He had shaven his head. They had run a razor over it in Sing Sing, but now it was totally bald, glistening, as if he had lost all his hair. They had made him a convict, and a convict he’d be, no matter the twists and turns in his fortunes, for the rest of his life. He was fifty or so, and he had grown old since I had last seen him, thinner, frailer, more drawn, with a trace of gray in his beard. His face was haggard, and he moved with a deliberateness that suggested he was pacing his life out with his feet. Mama Eva was the same as ever, smothering in her motherliness, indifferent in her affection. I had a sense of our entering into an elaborate foreordained charade, going through the motions of loss and reunion, sealing up the bonds of our family, drawing together, Victor and Manny, Pop and Mama Eva.

  It was the end of April. They had taken the long train journey from Berlin and were settled in a special suite down the hall at Government House. My father was treated as reverentially as they would have treated Lenin. Pop and Mama Eva, and by extension Manny and I, were now official guests of the Soviet State.

  Manny was out of town when they arrived, so it was up to me to play host and guide, loving son and acolyte. I ordered up a feast at a restaurant on the Petrovska, and we sat at the table glittering with silver and crystal, fine china and gold, and tried to recover the months we had spent apart. Mama Eva talked about how Palmer and the other red hunters had turned their sights on the League of Women Voters and her friends on the Women’s Committee of the Democratic Party. Pop talked about the classes he had held in the prison, the men he had met and taught and come to love and respect. I told them about Manny and Faust American and Yelena and Katya and the weekend in Yalta. We drank too much and ate too much, made our way back to the palatial quarters the government had provided for us at Government House, and said goodnight, as formally as if we were perfect strangers. Pop and I agreed to meet at the Faust American offices in the morning.

  I saw them for breakfast, with my mother ordering vodka to start the day and my father dressed in formal attire as if for some English garden party. Afterward, Pop and I went to the office together; I took care of some details of the business and then took him out to see Moscow. For him, we were traveling in holy land, the city was filled with greatness and history, history that he knew and I did not, including the confrontation between the revolutionary soldiers and the government cadets, that had taken place at the end of the square. We looked for the pockmarks artillery fire had left in the Spassky Tower in 1917. We even waited till the clock chimes played the Internationale and then joined the lines at Lenin’s tomb, viewing that waxen image draped at the waist with a fringed scarf, sacred and venerable as the shroud of Turin. We went through the Kremlin and took a look at Lenin’s study, maintained as a memorial, and we stood on the ramparts overlooking the Square, staring at the silhouettes of the double-headed imperial eagles that still topped the Trade Union House, the Cathedral, the towers that rose above the wall. We walked along the river and looked for the marks in the walls where the battle for Moscow had begun and took a trip in a sleigh to Lenin’s dacha in Nozhi Novgorod. We went back and sat in a coffee shop in the Petrovska, and I said, “It’s good to see you again,” and—when he said nothing in response—“I’m glad you came here rather than trying to tough it out in New York,” and then—“Well, Manny will be back by the weekend.”

  On Monday Manny returned and Pop and Mama Eva had the reunion that I had failed to provide them with—the love, the affection, the enthusiasm, the soaring high spirits—and the following morning the two of them sequestered themselves in Manny’s office at Faust American and went over what the company had been doing in the two years since they had last seen each other. I could see them bending over ledgers, I could see Pop nodding in approval, and every once in a while Manny would call me in to explain how we handled the currency arbitrage on the Ford tractors or the Harvester combines, and then dismiss me again as if I were some flunky, some lubricious Uriah Heep, while they conferred on private and secret and important issues.

  Pop and Mama Eva met Katya, and they didn’t like her. They didn’t think she was suitable. She’s just a peasant they told me, a farm girl, with about as much class as a garment worker in New York. It’s a classless society, I told them. There are no classless societies, Mama Eva said, only societies without classes. People still instinctively know how they relate to one another in the scheme of things.

  Pop thought Katya was pretty, admired her hair, her figure and, as she once suggested to me, may even have attempted to enjoy them, but physical charms were a glut on the market.

  I thought their response was despicable, arrogant and contemptible, and I let them know how I felt.

  After that first meeting, we went back to our room, Katya and I, and I tried to comfort her, but there was nothing I could say, because I knew that she could no more win my father’s approval than his second son could. And why should he approve? He knew I didn’t believe in his socialism any more than I believed in his family feeling. I had seen too much of him, and suspected more than I could ever bring myself to voice even to myself.

  With Pop in Moscow, Manny was able to arrange for us to get a house of our own. We couldn’t buy it, foreigners couldn’t own property, but the house was ours all the same, a 40-room mansion off the Garden Circle, around the corner from the Moscow Art Theatre, with marble floors and staircases, balustrades and oriental rugs, formal gardens, servants, and wine cellars, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a ballroom, a drawing room. The Fausts were to live there like kings—like tsars. We called the place the Red House, not because of any political association and not even because it was as grand as Red Square. They called the square at the Kremlin red because of the blood that was shed there, and we called our house on the Sadovaya Kudrinkskaya red because it was sheathed in red sandstone.

  My father
’s vitality and strength seemed to have been sapped. He had a pasty depleted quality, looking puckered somehow, as if he had spent too much time in hot water. His clothes no longer fit him and when he spoke he acted as if somebody was going to write it all down. There was a studied quality about his behavior, as if he thought someone was going to paint his portrait.

  He seemed to me frozen, icy, fixed in wax, like the body of Lenin in Red Square. It was only years later that I decided that I had misread him completely, that these poses, images, pronouncements were the devices he had acquired over three years in jail that enabled him to retain his dignity under circumstances that would have crushed most people.

  Clothed in such majesty, he assumed an honored place in the Soviet hierarchy—a merely honorific place, I always assumed, until years later I found out it was probably Pop who persuaded the Comintern to put up over $50,000 to finance the American Communist Party’s 1924 run for the U.S. presidency. They had given him a post on some Comintern committee, which I eventually discovered was the central executive committee of the agency.

  All I was aware of was that he seemed to have lost his force in the family. He had become a sort of a constitutional monarch, and Manny was his prime minister. It was Manny who assessed the present, forecast the future, and positioned us all to meet it. Manny still pretended that, though he might propose, in the end it was Pop who disposed, but I didn’t believe it. Now I am no longer so sure.

  Manny was growing increasingly uneasy over the way the political winds were blowing, and he decided it was essential for us to begin transferring funds, mainly gold, from our Petrograd bank into Revel in Estonia, now Talinnin, Riga. If necessary I could pack our cache of gold rubles into a suitcase, or a trunk, and physically carry it across the border beyond the reach of the government.

  “Manny, have you ever tried to carry a suitcase full of gold, never mind a trunkful?” I asked

  “Well, get a porter then, get a dolly, you’ll manage something.”

  I didn’t want to go but in the end Manny prevailed on Pop to put the screws on, and he did.