by James Cook
All that remained of Red Square was the murky glow of streetlamps in the little park surrounding Lenin’s tomb and the blurred shapes of the guards on the walks surrounding it, goose-stepping into eternity. The great Kremlin wall had vanished and so had the double-headed imperial eagles that still perched on its towers as they had for centuries. There was no swathe of red banners, rumbling tanks, or imperial pageantry, only this deep fog, as dank and merciless as ever cloaked the London slums when Jack the Ripper stalked his prey.
I left Russia without any rancor. I had decided to depart without bitterness or recrimination. And I did so, even though I had plenty to be bitter and resentful about. I deliberately made friends with all those things I could do nothing about. I gave up trying to gain custody of the children and made peace with Tania. I accepted the fact that no matter what influence I attempted to exert, I would accomplish nothing.
We had dinner together, Tania and I, at the Metropole one evening not long before I left. We danced to the American music the jazz band played and drank Champagne and toasted the morrow. I touched her hand across the table, held it to my lips and wished us both well. The next afternoon we went down to the registry office, entered our names in the big book and proclaimed to anybody who cared that we were dissolving our marriage.
In the end we were reasonable about it, adult, civilized. Tania would never come home to America with me and I could no longer live in Moscow. She could continue to use my name—to function as Citizeness Faust. And I—I had no idea of what I would do with my life, whether I would marry again or have other children, but whatever it was I could not do it in Moscow and at least now I was free to do whatever I chose.
I agreed to transfer a certain amount of money every month to an account in Berlin and Tania would write once a month to tell me about the girls and herself. She would send photographs and read my daughters the letters I wrote to them. It was an arrangement that lasted for nearly a decade until the day in the fall of 1941 when German troops crossed the border into the Russian half of partitioned Poland, the day the world broke in two.
Whatever animosity existed between Tania and me had died of its own exhaustion. We were still friends, two people who happened to be the parents of two children and no longer anything more than that. But I sometimes imagined I still loved her. I would always remember the passion and intensity with which she confronted the world—the briskness, the ruthlessness—the dedication she had to her country, her people, her daughters. More hauntingly I kept remembering the touch of her body in my arms; how delicate it was, those golden thighs and rosebud breasts. Sometimes I would hear the sound of her voice in my head, husky and languorous, and such sights and sounds would came to me at the most unexpected times for the rest of my life, with a vividness and poignancy that still make my heart and loins ache.
The day before I left Moscow I went one last time to the Churnuchin mansion to say goodbye to Tania and the children, and in my memory that farewell is something out of Anna Karenina—out of the movie perhaps as much as the novel, with the difference that Tania was Karenin and I Anna. Somehow in renouncing my commitment to the children, in letting them go, I was made to feel I was betraying them all.
We were all very formal with each other that day, formal in dress and in manner very stiff, very correct as if the revolution had never swept away the social rituals of the past. Tania had dressed the children like something out of a Victorian postcard with frilly outfits and their long golden hair cascading down their backs. I caught them in my arms, kissing their necks and looking into their clear blue eyes, rocking them, determined not to break down. Then Tania pointed out that I was wrinkling their carefully ironed dresses—“You’re ruining their little frocks, Viktor”—and I let them go. I thought my heart would break as I watched them go to their room with the nurse. I took Tania one last time in my arms and kissed her on the cheek.
Her body had no weight, no substance; it was like taking a creature of light and air in my arms, Ariel, the west wind, and I broke from her and wished her well.
On my way to the car Svetlana Churnuchin emerged from the garden. She came through the gate, took my hand and kissed me goodbye.
“I will miss you, oh son that I never had. I am so sorry for everything. I did everything I could. I have always been on your side. I tried to persuade her to go to the United States of America with you but she would have none of it. You know how she is—so hard, so harsh, so unyielding.”
“I should have been harsher with her myself. I should have been more Russian.”
“You let her go in your grief,” she answered with a faint smile. “What could be more Russian than that?”
I had grown extremely fond of Svetlana. I felt a warmth and affection for her that I could never find in my heart for Mama Eva.
“We shall see each other again one of these days,” she said.
“No we won’t, but I shall never forget you.”
“Or I you.”
And I left her there.
Manny, Yelena, and Mama Eva had left for home a month earlier, leaving me to close up the office, dismiss the staff, and move our records to Red House. They looked like your typical European family that day in the train station. Mama Eva in a mannish no-nonsense suit, the cool auburn-haired Yelena, the impeccably tailored Manny, and little Immanuel, dressed in a sailor suit like the Tsarevitch in one of those Fabergé picture frames we later sold at the gallery. I saw them into their railway compartment, Yelena and little Manny on one seat, Manny and Mama Eva on the other across from them, Mama Eva checking her purse to see that her papers were in order, Manny already pulling the newspaper from his bag and slapping it open before I could even slam the doors shut.
“I’ll see you next month in New York,” I said. “I wired Eddie and told him to meet you.”
Yelena threw me a kiss goodbye. Mama Eva settled her enormous purse on her lap and looked impatient.
“Till we meet again.” Manny said wearily without lifting his eyes from his paper.
It was funny, I have to admit. I would have given anything to bring Masha and Kasha and even Tania back home with me. Manny would have given as much to leave little Manny and Yelena behind. “I am through with her, Victor” he had told me one evening not long before. “I’ll do whatever is necessary to give them a comfortable life but our marriage is over. We can’t live together anymore. I can’t bear to be with her. She leaves me as cold as a dead herring, and the child—you know how I feel about children. I’d as soon have a dog.”
I didn’t entirely believe him. I think she had made him afraid of her. He could no longer control her. He could no longer manipulate, maneuver, or browbeat her. Her mind moved in a different constellation. A woman who could hold a cigarette to his eyes could as easily shove a knife through his ribs. And I’m not sure I blamed him.
But I told him he couldn’t turn his back on his wife and his child. I told him if he wouldn’t take them with him I’d bring them back to the United States with me myself. She adored her son; he had become her whole life, at least what was left of her life. and she could never give him up.
Without my intervention, Yelena would certainly have gotten a divorce and let Manny go. Why should she want to leave her country? she would ask. She was a Russian, what could America offer? She thought she would die in the United States, and was sure she would hate being there. But I cared about her, I wouldn’t give up on her, and I managed to frighten her. I told her her life was in jeopardy, she had already lost her career, and when we left she would be exposed as someone who had consorted with subversives, counterrevolutionaries, foreigners. There was no way she could know what they would do, and finally I told her if she stayed here in Moscow she would most likely be poor, living with a half dozen others in a crowded room somewhere. And that did it. She consented to go, and with that accomplished, Manny agreed to take her along. But he never forgave me for that.
Red House was empty without them, with only Pop and me and a handful of servant
s. Pop and I went about our separate lives, only occasionally meeting each other in the lobby or in the second-floor corridor heading in opposite directions to our rooms. He was going to stay on after we had all gone, gathering treasures for our new gallery operation in New York, acting in effect as Faust Brothers’ Moscow agent, its buyer and procurer.
The morning I left, I got my things together and wandered through the house to find Pop and say goodbye.
I found him in the library, that vast cavernous room on the ground floor overlooking the courtyard. The limb that had come down in the storm the previous October had long since been cut up and removed, soon after the black malevolent body of Cerberus was carried off and buried.
Pop was standing by the windows looking out.
“I thought I’d stop in and say goodbye,” I said.
He turned away from the windows and came part way across the room toward me.
We didn’t know what to say to each other.
“You’re going to be lonely here all by yourself,” I said.
“I’m used to that. I have a few friends left.”
“Boris and Svetlana will always be glad to see you.”
“I expect you’re right,” he replied.
The fog was so thick you could see nothing outside the windows.
“I’m sorry you’re not coming with us.”
“I have plenty to do here. I always wanted to be a shopper. a bargain hunter. It’s good to have something useful I can do with my life.”
He didn’t have any choice about it and we both knew that. He couldn’t go home: the U.S. wouldn’t give him a visa, so he might as well have been back in prison again. And Manny at least was glad of it. “It’ll keep him out of our hair for a while,” he said, “and we need somebody here to scout out the art treasures we’ll need in New York.”
“I don’t know what we’d do if you weren’t staying on,” I said. “We’d be at the mercy of the ministry.”
“You’d hire somebody else,” he said.
I realized suddenly how desolate he must be. He must have long since given up any dreams he once had of leading the second American revolution, and he knew he had fallen from favor here in the city that once honored him above all others. He had lost not only the honor but the prestige and influence he had exercised. Even Olga had packed up her things and left, abandoning the job he had given her and the room down the hall and taken up with a young party bureaucrat. Pop was no longer revered in the city of his heart’s desire; he had lost control of the family’s fortunes and his life was reduced to scouring the city for artifacts of a regime he had committed his life to destroy.
He offered me a drink, pouring it for me himself.
“To whatever may lie ahead.” He downed his glass in a single deliberate gulp.
We stood looking at each other and then avoiding looking at each other.
“I’ve never seen the fog so thick,” I said.
“It happens.”
The silence was palpable.
“We’ll miss you.”
“You’ll manage somehow. I never did run this family as a patriarchy.”
“I suppose not.”
“Maybe I made a mistake,” he said with a hint of a smile.
I finished my drink and stood looking at him, uncertain what else to say or do and suddenly I found myself putting my arms around him and hugging him goodbye. “You take care of yourself.”
He clutched me tight, and then let go of me.
“One of these days we’ll all be together again in New York.”
“Give your mother a kiss for me,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and left him there.
My train was three hours late getting in from Rostov and four hours late leaving for Berlin. All Moscow seemed to be waiting with me, listless, resigned, for whatever train would come finally to take them to wherever they wanted to go. Finally a bell sounded; the crowd began to move forward along the tracks and piled aboard. I headed down the platform to my carriage, a first-class one with a red star stenciled on the door. I traveled alone and I traveled light, nursing my depression with a bottle of vodka, black bread, sausage, and cheese. I made up my berth early and went to bed.
By the time I awoke sometime around dawn the train was no longer moving. We had stopped at Scolpce on the Polish border to shift trains from the six-foot Russian gauge to the four-foot eight-inch gauge of Europe. It seems to me now you passed almost imperceptibly from one world and into another. Everything changed—the rhetoric of your speech, the quality of your mind, and your view of the human condition.
The train began to move, sluggish, ponderous. We crossed the border into Poland and I felt a sudden surge of elation—as if a great weight had been lifted from me, as if the air had suddenly grown fresher, more intoxicating. As the train rolled on through the flat snow-covered Polish countryside I heard myself saying half aloud “I am free”—heard myself saying that without having known I had ever felt imprisoned—“Free, free, I am free.”
And so it was over.
But of course I would never be free. You don’t just close the record on ten years of your life and reopen a new ledger somewhere else. You are left with a greater sense of loss and dislocation than you had ever believed possible. In those ten years in Moscow, I had come of age. I was barely out of my teens when I arrived and was pushing thirty when I left. Though I still felt as awkward and ill-formed as ever, as boyish and immature, I was no longer a boy. I had lived as an adult for nearly a decade. I had married and had children. I had moved among the important people of the time and had guided a series of fairly large and successful enterprises, yet nobody seemed to recognize that I was totally ill-equipped for any of these roles. I had been gauche and awkward, as unsure of myself as, to tell the truth, I have been all my life.
I had come to Russia on the great adventure of my life and when I left I had been changed forever. Everything was different. In some way I had become myself at last. I had reached one end of my journey.
I had become what I was meant to be.
V: Fausts in America
New York, 1931–1976
What remained was the rest of our lives.
I settled into that big empty four-story house in Chelsea Manny had found for me and began learning the gallery business from Tuffy Tufenkian. Tuffy had all the merchandising skills of an Armenian rug merchant, which is what he had once been, and his business strategy was to let the world know what he had available and count on it to beat a path to his door.
I soon discovered that running a successful art gallery was just like running anything else. You had to build the market, create a fashion for whatever you were offering and establish its rising value, even if sometimes behind the scenes you had to bid the price up yourself. That was the half of it. The other half was developing an exclusive clientele. In the New York art scene, success depended on who you knew and still does, and so I set about cultivating the ladies with money and their men, the art critics and the museum curators, the newspaper people and their friends. I concentrated on throwing openings that would attract picture spreads in the New York Times or the rotogravure sections of the Herald Tribune.
Even Mama Eva inadvertently did her bit. Instead of settling down in the old Victorian house in the Bronx, she moved into a palatial twelve-room apartment on Central Park West and resumed her old life. She’d never liked being a hostess and housewife in Moscow, and, now that she was back in New York, her life, her concerns, her politics meant something again, and she was happier than she had been in years. If she missed being with Pop she must have missed him in the middle of the night because the rest of her day was full. She once again became active in the Democratic Party, supported Roosevelt in his various runs for the presidency, and became a crony of women who mattered in Democratic politics in New York—women like Eleanor Roosevelt and Frances Perkins. For us—for Faust Brothers, that is—her widening circle of wealthy and influential friends proved useful in developing
clients for the gallery and in giving Manny access to politicians and powerbrokers who might otherwise have been beyond his reach.
Things went so well that after a year Manny and I decided that we needed a more fashionable showcase than Tufenkian’s rundown gallery on East Thirty Seventh Street. After considerable acrimony we dissolved our partnership with Tufenkian and found a location on Fifty Seventh Street off Park Avenue. In April of 1933, we opened our own gallery, Faust Brothers, with an exhibition and celebratory party that attracted most of the people who were anybody in the art world in New York.
During the decade we spent in Moscow, Manny had somehow managed to maintain his connections with New York’s under- and overworlds, so that the parties we threw afforded a raffish and clamorous mixture of the elegant and the notorious—each was intoxicated with the opportunity of ogling the other—and the mixture was considerably upgraded in time by Manny’s expanding political and cultural connections. With our Moscow base and Pop’s growing expertise we had a supply of priceless tsarist treasures to offer—and a steadily increasing number of customers eager to acquire them. In spite of the difficult economic times the gallery yielded enough for all of us to live in comfort.
Manny went back to living in the carriage house in the Village, but Yelena and little Manny never lived with him. He found them a house in Brooklyn Heights not far from the thriving Russian community in Brighton Beach and distant enough from him and Manhattan to keep her out of his hair. Once he’d accomplished that, he and Yelena scarcely saw each other again. Sometime in the thirties he got around to divorcing her, and that was the end of that.
For a time Yelena made a fitful effort to resume her singing career. She performed her gypsy repertoire at the White Russian nightclub in Manhattan and met with a fairly enthusiastic reception. But Yelena wanted something more electric and the New York Russian community was not large enough to yield her the adulation that she wanted. The truth was that out of nostalgia for a time and place they would never revisit, the audience would have cheered anyone, good. bad or indifferent, who’d just arrived in New York from their homeland. Despite her ambitions she didn’t really care to reach for a different and wider American audience, as émigrés like Zorina, Nazimova, Anna Sten, and Maria Ouspenskaya had done. And so her singing career lapsed.