Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  In the morning, just before daylight, I was awakened by the night porter. There was a man at the front gate claiming he was my brother and demanding to be let in. The porter didn’t believe him. He knew my brother Manny, but this was somebody else, and the man was so insistent he decided he had better disturb me.

  I followed the porter down the stairs. It was still dark out, but there was Eddie.

  I was pleased to see him. We went upstairs to the parlor and without being asked he went to the table and poured himself a drink.

  “Things didn’t go well,” I said.

  He shook his head. It took him a while to get going, but once he did, it began pouring forth in a torrent.

  “They held the whole thing in this huge room,” he said. “There were red banners and spotlights and microphones everywhere. They talked and listened and talked some more and when they were done we lost everything. Absolutely everything. And then they rubbed our noses in it.”

  “That’s what everybody predicted would happen.”

  “I guess some people kept hoping things would be different anyway.”

  “Everybody else saw it coming,” I told him.

  Even I could. A few days before, the praesidium had issued a paper denouncing the American leadership as right-wing deviationists, unprincipled opportunists, gross intriguers, slanderers of the Russian Communist Party, and on and on. The things they always said no matter what you’d done or who you were.

  “We didn’t take it lying down,” Eddie said. “The boys came up with a paper of their own—I mean Gitlow and Lovestone did. It wasn’t very long, and all it said was we stuck by our right to make decisions on matters relevant to American conditions. You could tell nobody had ever dared to do anything like this before.

  “Stalin was there on the platform, wearing black boots and a military uniform, smiling, stroking his moustache and puffing his pipe, and then he got up and went to the podium. He’s a dark and very intimidating man, hulking, fierce, very oriental-looking. Yet when he began speaking, his voice was so soft you could hardly hear it, even the translators had trouble hearing, but what you did hear was enough to chill your blood, The more intense his words got, the softer they became, so that you could hardly hear more than three words out of five.

  “It was a terrifying performance. He went right after Lovestone’s claims that we represented the overwhelming majority of the party. ‘You have that majority,’ Stalin said, ‘only because in the past you accepted the will of the Comintern. You reject that, and you have no support at all.’ He wanted the praesidium to take an immediate vote affirming the Comintern’s position and it did. The motion was adopted unanimously, except for one vote, Gitlow’s for the American party.

  “You could see that Stalin was outraged by Gitlow’s resistance and he seized the podium demanding that each member of the American delegation announce his position, with working class members leading things off. He must have thought we wouldn’t support the party’s position. Everybody was scared. The room was very quiet, and you could feel that everybody else in the room was against you.

  “The first two guys in our group stood up and held their ground. But the third broke with us. He had tears in his eyes; he was shaking, but he broke with us, and it was like being hit in the stomach. I thought for a moment it was all over. And then the fourth guy got up, but he didn’t back off. He recited what had become the formula for us all: I oppose the Party’s declaration as damaging to the interests of the party in the U.S. He sounded pretty feeble, but he didn’t break. Then the machinist from Detroit got up and said the same thing, only he hollered it out, really hollered, and nobody had any doubt where he stood. It was like a tide rising. The next guy followed with a cry even louder, and you felt the sense of solidarity taking hold of us all. We were all as one on this issue, and our voices rose and soared in that hall, and you knew that this was what it was all about, joining together with the other guys to assert your right to justice and brotherhood, and when the last voice had died away, the hall was dead silent.

  “Jay Lovestone got up then and said in a firm quiet voice that the Comintern’s decision would greatly hurt the party in the U.S. Americans lived and worked in a society that had not descended from feudalism. They had no clearly defined class tradition and so needed special consideration from the international organization. The American party wasn’t intransigent. If the decision was a matter of party discipline, if it was important that all of us stand together, he would accept it. I know that must sound gutless but it still took a lot of nerve. We stomped our feet in approval and cheered but the rest of the crowd quickly drowned us out.

  “Bert Wolfe stood up and said the same thing, only his voice wavered a little; it sounded thin, almost defeated. He must have decided by then that we had already lost everything, that the party leadership should never have left its power base behind it in New York and come begging to Moscow. He rejected the party’s position, he said, but as a matter of discipline, like Jay Lovestone, he would nonetheless support it if he had to. We again cheered him on, whistled wildly, and stomped our feet.

  “And then Ben Gitlow got up, he who had announced the party’s dissenting vote in the first place, and reaffirmed our position. He thought the Comintern declaration was damaging to the American party. But he didn’t stop there. He gathered his voice to its full strength and shouted: ‘Not only do I vote against this decision, I will fight against it when I return to the U.S.’

  “The room exploded with shock and outrage, and all of us just sat there. It was really all over this time, and we knew it. We didn’t cheer or stomp our feet. We didn’t do anything. We simply sat there looking straight ahead. We were all proud of Gitlow. He had redeemed us all.

  “But Stalin was beside himself. He rushed to the platform and even before the crowd quieted down began talking. This time he had lost all control, shouting, his words coming in a flood. I have never heard anything like it in my life. The translator couldn’t keep up with him. He went on and on, and began to chew out the international party, not just the Russian members but all the people who were there. Three of us got up and tried to leave, but the guards forced us back into our seats. I heard him say, ‘And you—who do you think you are? Trotsky defied me and where is he now? Bukharin defied me, and Zinoviev, and where are they all now? I destroyed them all and I shall destroy you. You will get back to America, but when you get there no comrade will greet you in the street and break bread with you or look upon your face. Only your women will be able to endure the sight of you, and not all of them.’

  He started down the central aisle with all his bodyguards and secretaries trying to keep up with him. The entire auditorium got to its feet as he passed. When he got to our delegation, he put his hand out to one of the Negro members who stood on the aisle, but the man jerked his hand away, and said, ‘Why in hell is this bastard picking on me?’ Stalin didn’t know any English but you could tell from the man’s voice, face, and gesture what he meant by it, and Stalin turned and barreled on up the aisle to the street.

  “It was nearly four in the morning, and we all went out of the hall together in a group shoulder to shoulder, into a square. The rest of the crowd drew away from us, and somebody spat on the man who wouldn’t shake Stalin’s hand, but otherwise they left us alone. We didn’t know what to do or where to go. There was a street peddler outside, and we bought oranges from him and ate them. They were sweet and juicy. Nobody could say anything. If we did we knew we would cry.

  “I’m not sure it wasn’t a mistake to come here,” Eddie said after a while. “Sometimes it’s better to think that somewhere people are treated like human beings, rather than that there is no place on this earth where people can live free.”

  In the end, Eddie fell asleep, and I put him to bed on the couch.

  When Tania came home and saw him, she said, “Get that piece of garbage out of here.”

  “He is my brother.”

  “Not any more,” she said, “There are no b
rothers other than the party.”

  “You’re wrong, you don’t understand.”

  “Get that man out of here or you will destroy us all.”

  “In the morning,” I said, “in the morning.”

  And that night was the end of it.

  IV: A Ticket to Leningrad

  Moscow, 1929–1931

  i

  I told Eddie he didn’t need to go back to the hotel, he could stay at Red House with us. We had plenty of spare room, and I didn’t care whether Tania liked it or not. I had an obligation to this man who was my brother, who had become my brother in the weeks since he’d come here to Moscow. I felt closer to Eddie in fact than I ever had to Manny, and I was not going to turn my back on that.

  Things had started to go wrong between Tania and me long before Eddie became an issue. When did the disaffection begin? I don’t know. All I know is that I woke up one morning and realized that whatever we once had together had gone and, even worse, that Tania had realized this long before I did.

  Maybe it had begun with the children. We had quarreled about them almost from the very beginning. Masha and Kasha were identical twins, same blond hair and blue eyes, same petulant mouth, each with a lock of hair on the foreheads though curling in opposite directions. I’d have thought you’d do everything you could to de-emphasize their common identity. But not Tania.

  Which is how they got their names. Tania wanted rhyming names, Kasha and Masha, I lost that battle, though I held my own by calling one Maria and the other Katerina. I lost all the other battles that followed. Tania scrupulously dressed the two girls exactly alike, and if I tried to take them for a walk with sweaters or hats that didn’t match, she would pursue me down the hall till things had been put right. The duplication was endless—the toys, same bedclothes, same food, and if Katerina or Maria should began to evidence some insidious individualistic behavior, she would ruthlessly curb it.

  None of this was that important, of course, but it irritated me all the same, more acutely the older the girls got.

  When the girls were two and a half, I began to be bothered that all they could speak was Russian, and I decided it was time they began to learn English. I tried talking to them in English but nothing I ever said seemed to make much of an impression. My Russian was not all that good, and I suppose I didn’t spend enough time with them. I told Tania I thought we ought to get an English-speaking governess. One of these days we might be going back to the United States, I reminded her, and they were half American, after all.

  “The American half doesn’t count,” she had replied. “Here is where they live and breathe, here they will learn the language that will shape their minds and souls as Russians. Russian is good enough for me: it will be good enough for them. Besides, I can’t imagine their ever wanting to go to a capitalist country. I saw enough of what capitalism is like when we lived in France. The cruelty, the exploitation, the heartlessness of everyone toward everyone else. I am Russian, they are Russian, and they are going to stay that way.”

  “Even so, if we were to go the United States, you wouldn’t want them not to speak the language, would you?”

  “I think that’s all theoretical.”

  I didn’t think there was anything theoretical about it, but that was another argument I didn’t think I had a chance of winning, so I let it go.

  Without telling Tania, I hired an English-speaking woman from the university to come in and spend an hour playing with the children in English every day. Who could possibly object to that? Tania and I were away at work, and it couldn’t hurt to broaden their horizons. But when Masha told her mother what was going on, Tania accused me of plotting against her behind her back and sent the woman away.

  I had never seen Tania like this before. She was a woman possessed. She stalked around our rooms, her voice low but on the edge of a scream, her lips stretched against her teeth, her sharp fingernails flashing.

  “I want you to understand, Viktor, they’re my children, I gave them birth, I brought them out of my body in more pain and anguish than you can possibly imagine.”

  “Nonetheless, they are my children as well,” I replied. “My children as much as yours.”

  “Your children!” she cried out. “Look at their faces, pure Russian faces, look at their hair and eyes, do you see any sign of you in their blood? When did the Fausts ever have blondes? They are mine, the fruit of my body, the effusion of my soul, and I want to be sure you understand that.”

  I let it go.

  I asked Mama Eva to spend more time with the girls, speaking English to them, but when Tania discovered her mother-in-law was coming down the hall to see them, she told her to please stay away. Mama Eva had never been a great lover of children, her own or anyone else’s, and was glad of the excuse to desist. I don’t want to come between husband and wife, she said.

  I was astonished myself at the claim the two girls had on my heart. My chest ached when I thought of them; my eyes watered. It wasn’t at all what I had expected being a father. I had always wanted to have children, but abstractly. All young things are delightful—puppies, fledgling birds. They are so new, ungainly, and adventurous, so undaunted, imaginative, and vulnerable. Our girls were all this and more. They were beautiful, intelligent, and graceful.

  And yet, as with so much from those days, I can’t quite remember them. The outline is there, but the emotion I felt remains invisible. All that comes back is the weight and heft of their bodies, cradled in the nook of either arm, then a sort of warm moistness rising from their clothes, compounded of heat, sweat, and urine, and then the viselike grip they would exert on your finger, or the gurgle of delight—the burbling laughter—when you tossed them in the air. And the tug in your heart when they hurt themselves playing and came to you grief-stricken and inconsolable.

  I have a few photographs from that time, but I can’t recapture how my heart swelled with love and gratitude, watching them crawl across the floor or hold themselves up by the arm of a chair, knowing that they were there for me to protect and nurture and love. I can’t re-experience that. After forty years, the memory has almost vanished entirely, a few faded images on brittle pieces of photographic paper.

  But why should I remember? I never did see that much of them. When I came home from the office, they were usually asleep, and in the morning they were preempted by their nurse getting them dressed and fed. On our days off, when we all might have been together as a family, Tania really never wanted them with us, not when we walked in the park by the river or had dinner together at home, even sitting around in the evening talking. She saw them only as an adjunct of herself, toys in the playroom for her occasional diversion and delight. She wanted to dress them up and show them off, march them out on display when guests arrived, and then put them back in their boxes until the next time opportunity arose.

  On the surface nothing seemed to have changed between Tania and me, and yet everything had. Living with someone is always a matter of accommodation—cultivating the pleasures of living together, ignoring the irritations—and for a long while we had stopped doing that. When did it begin? Was it the day I found myself getting irritated that she wouldn’t pick up the newspaper when she was done with it or put the breakfast tray outside the door for the housemaid? Or the night I began getting impatient because she took so long getting dressed to go out? Or the day she spanked one of the girls, and I thought I saw something cruel and satisfied in her face? Or the morning I reached for her in bed and heard her sigh before she turned onto her back to submit. Or was it the night when we came home and I touched my lips to her bare shoulder, and she reached to take off her earrings, saying, “Really, Viktor, why don’t you get yourself a mistress, I’m much too tired tonight.” Tonight, any night.

  After that she was almost always too tired. She didn’t like to be touched anymore. She shrugged off my embrace when I greeted her, and turned away from me in bed, slid away when I tried to align myself against her back, rest my hand on her hip. And when she d
id not, it wasn’t herself she offered, her warmth, her comfort, her affection. She reduced herself to her anatomical essentials. It’s not that my demands were excessive. We saw all too little of each other for that. She worked late at the ministry, and I was often away.

  I ought to have found myself a mistress, the way Pop had, or Manny. But I didn’t want one. I wanted a wife, someone to share my life with and bring up our children with, to experience the joys, comedies, and even tragedies of life. So I didn’t get a mistress. I did a lot of reading, drinking, and listening to the jazz records our New York office sent me.

  I know people make much too much of sex these days, but Tania turned off the sexual charge between us as casually as she’d turn off a light. I’m not really talking about passion, sexual fulfillment, orgasm, I’m talking about sexual togetherness, the continuing bond sex forges between two people throughout their lives, ever renewed, a kind of pervasive music underlying everything, a river flowing through their lives even when they are apart, life-producing. Break the bond and what’s left lacks focus, direction, and heart. And Tania and I somehow had lost it somewhere along the way.

  If I was hoping to trigger a confrontation with her that morning I invited Eddie to stay with us in Red House, I was rapidly disappointed. I needn’t have worried, because for Eddie it would have been unthinkable to abandon his fellow delegates and move out of the hotel. He had obligations of his own, and after what he and his comrades had been through in the Comintern hearings, he wasn’t about to turn his back on them. And so that morning after Tania delivered her ultimatum, Eddie cleaned himself up, dosed himself with lots of black tea, and took himself back to the Bristol.

  Once the Comintern proceedings were over, all anyone wanted to do was go home. Everybody had had enough of politics and politicking. The trip to Moscow was all for nothing. The decision against the American delegation had been made long before they left New York.