by James Cook
I called an American newspaperman I knew, the Moscow correspondent for one of the big international wire services, a man who knew as much as anybody about how people got out of this godforsaken country, even if he never wrote about it but Katya had not been to see him either.
I tried to talk him into doing a story for his wire service about her disappearance, maybe put some pressure on whoever had carried her off, even though I knew as well as he did that such a story would never get past the censors and if it did he would probably be handed his walking papers the moment it appeared in print.
I made the long trek across town to the Khitrov Market and found the building where Katya had lived with her sister, but Varya had disappeared too and nobody seemed to know anything about her. Nobody wanted to be seen talking with me, they didn’t remember any girls living on the fourth floor in the back, and they certainly weren’t living there now. A Turkic couple with five children had settled into the space where Katya and her sister used to live. Nobody seemed to know how long the family had lived there or even to understand what I was asking.
In the end, I even turned to the person least likely to lend me a sympathetic ear: Tania. But why not? We were good friends if not, in the peculiar terms of our relationship, lovers. She was in the press section of the foreign ministry, and so in a position to know what was going on, and her father was a big cheese in the defense ministry, so that I could presumably make inquiries with impunity.
We had lunch at a café in the Arbat, once Moscow’s Bohemian quarter, and I told her what had happened, how I was beside myself with worry and how I needed help from somebody.
“You poor boy,” she said, simultaneously putting me in my place and emphasizing her greater age and experience in these matters. She already knew everything; I did nothing but tell her what she already knew. “I thought Manny had warned you of the danger she was in.”
“But Katya didn’t have a political thought in her head. I never heard her say anything against the regime, not even when she told me about how they had killed her father and taken his farm. She felt for people and what was happening to them, that’s all.”
Tania smiled wryly. “I don’t really know anybody who can help. And it’s dangerous. You put her in jeopardy just by being involved with her. You are a foreigner and all foreigners are suspect. But for you, they might never have paid any attention to her.”
“You’re saying it’s all my fault?”
“I’m saying you may have had something to do with it.”
“But aren’t you exposed yourself? Am I endangering you?”
“My connections are better than hers, and besides dealing with foreigners is my job. Viktor, I am so sorry.” She took my hand and held it against her face, kissing it and I completely lost control, blubbering like some adolescent there in that crowded café in front of everybody.
“I’m sorry. I have no control of myself. I have no control over myself these days,” I said.
“I don’t promise anything,” she said, “but I’ll try. Can you get me a photograph?”
“They took everything. No photographs, no letters, not even a strand of hair. They left no physical evidence that she had ever existed.”
Tania put me in touch with a commissar in the GPU and a detective in the homicide division of the Moscow police department. She had me marching up and down half the corridors of the government bureaucracy, but nobody had ever heard of Katerina Ivanovna Arkadyevna, nobody knew why anyone would want to abduct her, push her into a black van, and carry her off in the middle of the night. I knew even before I asked that nobody would know anything, and so did Tania.
“Did you report her disappearance to the police?” one man said. “Those men who took her away—they may not have been police at all. They may have been counterrevolutionaries masquerading as secret police. In fact I think that’s likely. After all, the Fausts are people of some importance, and something like this doesn’t happen unless some people in very high places in the government want it to happen.”
So I finally gave it up. I couldn’t spend the rest of my life following every woman I saw on the street who had the same cut of hair or the same way of standing.
Manny, Pop, and Mama Eva decided to pretend nothing had ever happened. They never spoke of Katya again, never once, and within a week I resumed the full routine of my life, except there was no longer Katya to share it with. I had nowhere to go in the evening and no one to go anywhere with, nobody to share my bed. I would sit in my room in the dark drinking vodka and watching the moon come up over the courtyard. It fell in bright silver shadows across the rug. And eventually, out of exhaustion, I would finally fall asleep.
I got over it. Now fifty years later I can scarcely remember Katya and the love we had for each other, the joy we discovered. Was it really anything other than one of those mementos you summon out of your memory in old age to assure yourself that in the time of your life, yes, yes, you really had been alive?
III: Parallel Lives
Moscow, 1924–1929
i
You might think that converting our private trading company, Faust American, into a government agency would be as easy as changing a name, substituting new management for the old, and announcing that henceforward the American-Soviet Trading Organization (Amstorg) would handle all export-import matters between the Soviet Union and the United States. But it wasn’t that simple.
The export-import trade, like most other businesses, is a matter of personal relationships. If you have any choice about it, you do business with people you know and trust, so over the next several months Manny and I and occasionally even Pop spent our time introducing our American clients—people at Ford, General Electric, and a fistful of other American corporations—to the government people they would be dealing with in the future. The names were now Bagdanov, Pliakov, and Klebnikov rather than Faust, Faust, and Faust, but the game would still be the same.
It was a delicate transition. Our American customers wanted to know what it all meant. Was foreign investment no longer welcome in the Soviet Union? Or were the Russians simply moving downstream into one of the most important areas of Soviet economic activity?
We dismissed the takeover as simply an organizational change, the way a U.S. manufacturing company might decide to replace an independent sales agency with one of its own. That’s what the Foreign Affairs Department was saying to Manny, so we said it too. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. As it turned it, it was the first of a series of maneuvers that over a period of several years would shut us—and most other foreign investors—out of the Soviet Union entirely.
The transition meetings with our clients were handled either by Faust American alone or jointly with Amstorg Trading. They took place over lunch at the Metropole Hotel, at receptions at Government House, at our offices in Koznetsky Most, or even at Red House. The talks went fairly smoothly, and we lost only one client—a Midwest farm equipment producer, who refused to deal directly with the Russian government.
For reasons I never understood, Tania was assigned by the press office to monitor these transition meetings. She always claimed she didn’t know why the assignment had fallen to her. We spent more and more of our working days together, not just as friends but as colleagues, and somewhat to my surprise I enjoyed working with her a lot.
In those days Westerners liked making jokes about women in the Russian bureaucracy. They were humorless and repulsively unfeminine, they affected a mannish manner and style of dress that put most foreign visitors off. Garbo in Ninotchka, most memorably, and in a sense Tania fit easily into that mode.
But on her such mannish costumes seemed anything but masculine. They brought out her femininity, her seductiveness. Tania had more in common with the androgynous or bisexual modes that were fashionable in Berlin in those days, and in a less straitlaced society she would probably have started wearing pants the way female revolutionaries did in Europe from the time of George Sand.
Tania considered her
self one of the Soviet Union’s new women, a pioneer in shaping a society where female roles had always been far more submissive than they were anywhere else in the West. Listening to her, you might sometimes have thought Russian socialism was a revolution in sexual mores rather than in class and economic structures. Tania considered herself the equal of any man, and in every respect that mattered to her—though not necessarily to me—she most certainly was. Women should be as free to dispose of their bodies as men were. She dismissed marriage and the traditional family as bourgeois institutions designed to keep women enslaved to men. All that mattered was the human family; children were the offspring and the responsibility of the entire community rather than of any biological forebears.
I used to listen to her preaching her doctrines to the American engineers and sales representatives. I am not sure she realized how titillating it was to staid American engineers from Schenectady or Detroit to hear a glamorous woman talking about the right of women to take casual lovers, practice birth control and abortion, or bear children out of wedlock.
They got a charge out of talking with her, however, teasing her about her ideas, and a few of them even offered to take her out for a night on the town. Tania would send them packing. She may have liberated her thinking, but her behavior was as enslaved as ever, and she regularly slapped down those American pursuers who imagined she was ready to practice what she preached.
But such encounters were only the half of it. Tania was also expected to squire various English-speaking notables around Moscow to see the future at work, and she decided the company of a resident American made the Moscow experience less forbidding. So if the visitor was Will Rogers, John Dewey, Gene Tunney, W.E.B.DuBois, Julian Huxley or H. G. Wells, it was Tania and I who invited him to meet Maxim Gorki, Michael Shokolov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pavlov, Kondratiev, or Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stanislavski, and Eisenstein.
Tania and I might not have found each other anywhere near so congenial if I had had any interest in politics, but I didn’t take politics any more seriously in Moscow than I had in New York. Politics was power, I was not interested in power, and I wasn’t interested in the high-flown rhetoric used to exercise it. I wasn’t sure what I was interested in; maybe the simple pleasures of the groin that Tania extended to me whenever the mood struck her.
Once Pop, Mama Eva, Manny, and I got ourselves settled in at Red House, we began throwing a series of receptions and dinners that in fairly short order made Red House a meeting place for Moscow’s expatriate community, not the ideologues who had come to live in the Promised Land but the working people whose jobs required them to be in Moscow, Americans mostly, journalists, businessmen, sales representatives, even embassy employees, trade representatives, and diplomats. The Red House receptions became a sort of information exchange for what was going on in Moscow and the country at large, the kind of social gatherings you would expect a foreign embassy to foster and that the Soviet Foreign Office itself hoped to foster at the receptions they sponsored at their big house, Spudenoska.
The difference was that in the informal atmosphere of Red House information could flow more freely than it could in the context of any government sponsor, Russian or foreign. Years later, Manny told me the GPU had subsidized Red House, but if so I wasn’t aware of it, and as far as I know neither was anyone else. I kept the company’s books, not the household accounts, and Pop and Mama Eva managed Red House from a special fund whose contents I never examined.
I was never comfortable with my part in Tania’s international escort service. Manny had no qualms about serving as a government apologist, justifying its ways to outsiders, but I had plenty of them. I wasn’t good at making excuses for things I couldn’t excuse, and my complicity on at least one such occasion involved me in matters I would much rather not have been involved in.
One afternoon, the summer after Katya disappeared, Tania and I were invited to a garden party the Foreign Affairs Ministry threw in the Kremlin for an influential British Socialist and his aristocratic mistress. Maxim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was there, along with a number of other notables, and in the middle of an aimless and frivolous afternoon, the minister’s mistress presented Litvinov with a petition on behalf of a Russian-born American university professor, one Aleksandr Pavlovich, asking for help in arranging the emigration of his wife and three children.
It was a difficult case to make. Russian citizens were almost never permitted to take their families with them when they went abroad, and Professor Pavlovich hadn’t made his position any easier when a year or so after he left the country the Soviet government ordered him to return home and he refused to comply, for what were probably very good reasons. The professor had gotten nowhere trying to retrieve his family through normal channels and so in desperation, he turned to his British friends to short-circuit the procedure.
Emigration policy was not Litvinov’s responsibility, and he considered the petition a shocking violation of protocol, but the strategy worked. Litvinov ordered Tania to do what she could to arrange the family’s emigration, and before the British socialist and his lady friend had gone home to England, they had received government promises that permission would be granted.
I thought that was the end of it and then a month or two later I got a frantic personal appeal from the American professor asking for my help. Ever since his British friends had interceded on his behalf, he had lost all contact with his wife and children. He had been in touch with both the Russian government and the British embassy, but his wife and children no longer lived at their former address and nobody could find out what had happened to them. The professor’s British friends suggested he contact me, so I decided to do what I could.
Manny told me to mind my own business, I would only get myself into trouble, as well as Pop, him, and the Faust enterprises. Tania refused to have anything more to do with the matter. The government had authorized the family’s departure, she was sure of that, but beyond that she knew nothing. And after all, the government hadn’t made any promises about ensuring the family’s speedy departure. It looked to her as if the professor’s wife hadn’t wanted to go and decided to go under cover.
“You have to know better than that,” I said.
“Well,” she answered, “how else do you expect the government to act, especially after those English had made such an embarrassing public issue of it? The man refused to come home, and now he expects us to deliver his wife and child to his doorstep. You have to understand, Viktor. We are a government under siege. The rest of the world is determined to undo everything we have done here, undermine our good name in the world community. And you ask us to sit back?”
I listened to her, and I listened to Manny repeat the same arguments in a more judicious manner, but I wasn’t reconciled. There were human beings at stake, and you couldn’t dismiss their anguish so easily. I went to the house where the professor and his family had lived, but none of the neighbors seemed to remember them. I let it go at that. I could see in their frightened faces the memory of that black van that had pulled up at the curb outside and taken the family away.
In the end I wrote the professor explaining that I hadn’t been able to help him. Years later, I ran into the professor at a reception in New York. He had never heard from his family again.
With Tania and me working so closely together, one thing led to another, and we soon began spending more and more of our spare time together as well. My Russian was getting to be fluent enough so that I could at last go to the theatre with Tania without missing too much, not much more than I lose now in English, fifty years later, when my hearing is no longer what it once was.
Tania knew some of the actors, and we began inviting them to the parties at Red House. I was astonished and dazzled by their proficiency and thoroughness, the scholarship they devoted to their roles, their willingness to devote a year or more to the preparation of a performance. It was something the commercial theatre in New York had no interest in doing and even the Moscow A
rt Theatre inspired groups in New York, later on, never cared to imitate. As one actor once confessed to me in a drunken moment, “You get so bored after a while you could scream.”
I loved hearing the mythology of the company—the student who won a nonspeaking part in The Three Sisters—as a servant who answers the doorbell, and spent months working the role, how everyone really took seriously Stanislavki’s great dictum, There are no small parts, only small actors, or the accounts of the great man’s demonstrations of how occupation, language, nationality, and lifestyle transformed personality and character.
But the more I learned about the company, the less certain I was that I wanted to become an actor myself. I just didn’t have that kind of interest or commitment, and any thought I had of enrolling there as a student, part-time or otherwise, went up in smoke. I’m not even sure I agreed with its theory. What mattered, I thought, was not your ability to find personal equivalents to the experiences and motivations of your characters, but the trick was to work on the imagination of the audience so that your performance would produce the responses you wanted them to have—pity, fear, anxiety, exhilaration, laughter, joy. The truth is that Stanislavski never contended that all this soul-searching was the thing in itself, but a means to a larger end. “To be really creative,” I remember him saying, “you have to find your own way, create a method of your own.”
I began to realize finally that what I had ambitions of becoming was not an actor but a performer, an entertainer. I was interested less in exploring the intricacies of the human soul than in getting up on a stage and saying, “Look at me, everybody, look at me!” And one of the ironies of my life, I suppose, is that nobody ever did. At heart, I was always simply a dilettante or, to put it more tactfully, a connoisseur.