Unfortunately, she could not control her anger. In a burst of fury, she stormed over to his house and returned all his things, including a ring he had given her. Three days later, in a five-page letter, she tried to explain why she had been so upset. It is a very sad letter.
She had come home from an unsatisfactory meeting with him—she realized he had made sure to have his housekeeper present to avoid her passionate expectations. Then she found out inadvertently that his excuse for cutting their encounter short—that he had to meet an ambassador for lunch—was a lie. He had really been having a casual lunch with Dmitri Nabokov and his wife.
She got home in a horrible mood, which as usual she acknowledged was her own fault—she should not have barged in on him. Then she found that a rat had come to die in her garage. It was an ordinary domestic drama—a neighbor had probably set out rat poison—but for Svetlana it was traumatizing.
The animal looked dying, breathing heavily, could not run away and looked at me with that terrible expression of a dying creature, not much different from a human being. I am not afraid of rats and mice, as some people are, but that was different, that was frightening because it was death. May be simply my nerves were already strained. The rat could not go away from my garage, she came not from my home, from outside, and she just came here to die. I locked the door from the garage to the kitchen, and could not eat any supper. From time to time I opened the door to see. The rat was slowly crawling over from one place to another. The big flies were already sitting on her back.
Louis, that night was really a nightmare. I did not sleep, thinking about that animal in my garage. We were two alone in the whole house. . . . I was thinking about myself in the most gloomy and tragic ways—just something like that rat, whom nobody really can love or need. . . . This rat was like something very BAD in my own soul.
And—in half an hour—Burgi called to tell me the terrible news about Robert Kennedy. . . . [Kennedy had been assassinated at midnight on June 5.]
And, of course, I was already in a tragic mood and horrible news only PROVED that there is NO justice in this world, so the answer came back to my mind very quickly. Everything is so bad, because Louis does not love me anymore.15
It is hard to know how a man like Louis Fischer would have reacted to such a letter. Her candor and the intensity of her feeling may have moved him. He knew her history—few were more intimately acquainted with death than she. But he was far too cynical and far too worldly to want to take on her raw need.
The affair continued but remained secret. When the Kennans invited her to dinner, Svetlana would suggest it might be nice if Mr. Fischer joined them. Fischer took to phoning her every day at 10:00 a.m., and he would drop by 85 Elm Road to sit for an hour or two while she read him pages from the new book she was working on. When he was away, as he often was, she sent him chatty letters and settled for the assurance of his continued attachment. There was another explosion when she suspected he was seeing a young woman named Deirdre Randall. Her suspicion was right, of course, but he must have reassured her. He remained tentatively in her life.
The hook for Svetlana was that, as Fyodor Volkenstein had once done with her first book, Fischer was encouraging her to write. She was working hard on her new manuscript, but she wrote to him, “I need a help. It does not mean that I need an editor or advisor or co-author, no, but I badly need the help of sircumstance [sic], the help of an atmosphere which surrounds me. . . . I need your presence . . . even a silent one.”16
However, to understand this love affair, it is important to know who Fischer really was. He was a romantic predator. He drew women in but had no desire to fulfill their expectations once he’d raised these. Svetlana was simply one in a long line of women who’d fallen for him.
Meanwhile, fifteen months after her defection, political intrigue continued to swirl above Svetlana’s head. When Robert Rayle and his wife, Ramona, returned from India that April, Rayle’s boss at the CIA asked him to serve as Svetlana’s case officer. He would be responsible not only for her welfare but also for her “exploitation” for the maximum benefit to the US government. The idea now was to make Svetlana the center of a “propaganda campaign” against the Soviet Union.17
Rayle told him this was a bad idea. If the CIA tried to make Svetlana a “featured, public spokesperson against the USSR,” she would feel manipulated and might turn against the United States. He refused the assignment. Instead, he worked on covert actions to help émigré groups and facilitate the transmission and publication of dissident literature. It was exciting work: one of his student contacts came back from the Soviet Union with “a footlocker of manuscripts by Nadezhda Mandelstam.”18
Rayle’s boss next turned to Donald (Jamie) Jameson. This was a wise choice. Svetlana soon trusted Jamie and became very fond of him. When he visited her in Princeton, she would tell Louis Fischer that her “‘invisible friend’ from Washington” was in town.19
It was probably Jameson who facilitated her application for “residence status.” In June 1968, she took the bus to New York to get her resident card and her reentrance permit. Alan Schwartz accompanied her to the INS.20 “We were both so worried, like schoolchildren before an exam,” she wrote to Fischer. “Actually I feel a little different after this, somehow calmer. Driving home on the bus yesterday feeling totally, totally at home.”21
She told Fischer that while she was in the city, the General (her lawyer, Edward Greenbaum) gave her yet another “astronomy lesson,” as they called his talks about her finances. “I find it so difficult and I understand very little, but I’m trying.”22 Her money was invested in the name of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst in a New York bank, which sent regular monthly transfers to her bank account in Princeton. When she wanted to buy a large item, she had to ask her lawyers to send her an advance.23
One of the items she bought that summer was a bottle green, four-door Dodge sedan, which she kept for ten years. She had fantasies of driving across the country, but she didn’t have a driver’s license. Evenings, she sat behind the wheel of her car, remembering her days as a teenager when she drove surreptitiously through the streets of Moscow with her Alliluyev cousins. Finally the gardener’s son offered to teach her to use an automatic transmission. She passed her driving test. Now she felt free; she could go anywhere.
That July, after she’d submitted an outline and a first chapter of her new book, she signed a contract with Harper & Row for an advance of $50,000 (Copex Establishment was not involved). The amount reflected the middling sales of Twenty Letters to a Friend. As Pamela McMillan had feared, Greenbaum had oversold the serialization rights; people read the extensive extracts and didn’t buy the book. But for Svetlana, money had no real meaning; she was simply happy to be back at work.
She spent her days writing. Placing a low stool on her back terrace and her typewriter on a chair, she sat barefoot in shorts and T-shirt, smelling the freshly cut grass, and worked. She still wrote in Russian, and the ideas flowed quickly. She would take breaks and head to the local grocery store on Nassau Street to buy her food or to Urken Hardware to buy supplies from friendly Mrs. Urken. Sometimes she would take the bus to New York to see her editor, Dick Passmore, at Harper & Row, and it became their habit to go out for a quick supper at the Jolly Shilling on Lexington Avenue, where the steaks were good and a blind pianist played with his Alsatian dog resting beside him.24
Svetlana was still getting so much mail that she longed for a secretary rather than all her lawyers and agents. One letter in particular must have moved her deeply. It was from the Russian writer Arkady Belinkov:
AUGUST 18, 1968
Dear Svetlana Iosifovna,
I read your book four months ago in Moscow, but, of course, couldn’t write to you from there about its enormous meaning, high literary achievements, and role in our fate. Books like these people read at night and all in one go, from them are written out quotes that are passed around the city and return to you as almost unrecognizable tales. You Mus
covites, you all remember this so well.
The first book that was given me on my day of freedom was yours. Now I gift it myself so that each of my new friends will be tempted to bring me great spiritual happiness.
I write to you as an authoress, author of an astounding book, showing your incredible knowledge of the agonizing history of Russian cultural thought; you are a comrade in this difficult craft of writing.25
In 1944, at the age of twenty-three, Belinkov had been arrested for writing an anti-Soviet novel and circulating it among friends. Betrayed by a stukach (informer), he was sentenced to death until Count Aleksei Tolstoy interceded with Stalin. He spent twelve years in the Gulag, one of those years in a cell once occupied by Aleksei Kapler. “The chamber was still full of stories of him,” he wrote to Svetlana.26 Belinkov was freed in 1956, but the repressions of the Brezhnev government led him and his wife, Natalia, to flee to West Germany in 1968 and then to the United States. That Svetlana’s was the first book he read as he prepared to leave for the West and that he gave it to friends was the deepest affirmation she could wish for.
Svetlana immediately phoned to say she would love to meet the Belinkovs. She would drop by on her way back from a trip to Boston. The idea that someone could so casually drop over still shocked them. In a book Natalia and Arkady Belinkov wrote together, Natalia described that first meeting in Greenwich:
She was of an average height, a fragile, red-haired woman who was warmhearted and gentle. At the same time, Svetlana’s resemblance to her father made anyone speaking with her a bit uncomfortable. . . . Imagine a house that I already described as “rural” in the suburbs of New York. (Tranquillity in the park beyond the windows.) The face of comrade Stalin is leaning over his escaped victim, and the hands of his daughter gently touch Arkadii’s stooped shoulders. And a quiet voice: “Everything will be all right. Everything will be all right.” Who was Svetlana persuading that time: him or herself?
Our “foreign” fates were so similar! We agreed that as soon as we would get the chance, we would come to Princeton. “And we will drink tea in the kitchen! Yes?” (Svetlana felt joy from the renewal of Moscow customs.) “Some evening in the kitchen, over a cup of weak Moscow tea, could be a revelation” . . . she wrote in one of her books.27
The previous January she had written to the critic Edmund Wilson to say she was grateful for his review of Twenty Letters to a Friend in the New Yorker, and now she wrote to him again to ask him if he might be interested in the work of her friend Arkady Belinkov. Wilson asked her for more information about him, and she replied that Belinkov was an intelligent and charming man who had suffered terribly, and she wanted to help him. The circles he had landed in at Yale were inviting him to lecture, but their liberal delusion that “capitalism and socialism [could] meet halfway” drove Belinkov crazy. He had been imprisoned in the “socialist” Gulag. She told Wilson she rather enjoyed the fact that Americans seemed healthy, naive, and openhearted. It was a relief after “Russian psychological complexities,” but Belinkov was finding it hard going.28
On September 10 the Belinkovs took the bus to Princeton. They were impressed by Svetlana’s spacious house on Elm Road, with its grand piano, and amused to find bouquets of plastic flowers jumping out from the linen closets where Svetlana had stuffed them. The three spent most of their time in the large kitchen drinking tea and talking of their escapes, their common friends in Russia, and the current repression under Leonid Brezhnev. The Belinkovs were already aware of the tactless behavior of the Russian émigré community toward Svetlana. As Natalia Belinkov put it, “Some treated Svetlana with utter spite because she was the daughter of a tyrant; others fawned over her as if she were a crown princess; yet others were not against marrying her or, at the very least, borrowing money from her.”29 The Belinkovs were eager to assure her that their friendship was genuine.
For much of that summer, Louis Fischer was not in Princeton. He traveled often to New York and had flown to Paris in mid-August to work on the manuscript for his new book, Russia’s Road from Peace to War: Soviet Foreign Relations 1917–1941, published by Harper & Row in 1969. The night of August 20, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. Everyone was reeling in shock from the terrible news, though Svetlana explained that it was a logical move for the Brezhnev regime. She told George Kennan that the invasion must be an indication of turmoil and dissention at the top in the Politburo, which might lead to further unexpected events.
Soon she was hearing of arrests in Moscow. She wrote to Fischer:
Did you know that Pavel Litvinov is arrested? Larissa Daniels, and many others? Arkady says that he knows them all well, and that he recently received a letter from Moscow which said they just started grabbing them and choking them—so far events in Czechoslovakia are stealing the attention of the public from such “minutia” like some poets and intellectuals—horrible. It’s necessary to pay attention to the news every minute.30
As the repression continued, she worried for friends—the authorities were arresting so many—and was desperate for news of her children. She knew that the Komsomols and the Communist Party would be exerting brutal pressure on all youth—the slightest statement or action would lead to expulsion from a university. “All of this seriously complicates my contact with my children,” she wrote to Fischer. “That’s unavoidable. I’m really trying to avoid danger. I’m always trying to guess whether Katya has applied/been accepted to MGU [Moscow State University].”31
At a distance, the relationship with Fischer continued smoothly. She sent him chatty letters, tried to reply to his questions about Politburo members like Zhukov and Mikoyan, and reassured him: “Be good and calm, dear Louis, I embrace you tenderly, like always. Kiss your dear eyes, your hands, your face.”32 By the end of August, Louis was on a beach in Tunis editing the manuscript of his book, and sent Svetlana brief notes on hotel stationery. She responded with her chatty loving letters.
One piece of good news was that she’d found a house to buy at 50 Wilson Road. The Kennans had noticed it was for sale and urged her not to miss the chance. She’d decided to look at it because it wasn’t far from Fischer’s house near Bayard Lane, and once she saw it, she knew she must have it. She was rather appalled at the price—$60,000—but this was not extravagant for Princeton. She had $50,000 from the advance for her new book, but she still had to request the remaining $10,000 from her New York lawyers. She had begun to be annoyed that she had to ask for her own money.
It was a typical New England frame house, cozy and compact, with a big study, a screened-in porch, a lovely terrace, and a small backyard filled with dogwoods, forsythia, crab apples, and lilac bushes. It reminded her of her dacha in Zhukovka, where she’d spent each summer with her children. The rooms upstairs were even laid out the same way Katya’s and Joseph’s had been. “I’m having strange premonitions about this house,” she told Fischer. “Strange analogies: nice and sad. This house is calling me in to itself. These rooms upstairs, it’s as if they’re waiting for my children. I can’t describe to you what the feeling is like.”33 She was tired of living in other people’s houses, and at least Fischer would finally discover what her personal “lifestyle” was like. She would be able to move in on December 20.
Fischer was due home from Tunis on September 17. Svetlana went to his house to bring some welcome-home flowers to greet him on his arrival. When his housekeeper, Mrs. Duffs, let her in, she found on a shelf intimate possessions of Deirdre Randall, who was working as his “research assistant.” Svetlana wrote in fury to Fischer about this “evidence of [his] lies” and demanded that he choose between them. She concluded: “I could never expect you to be so dishonest to me.”34
But in this soap opera Fischer was staging (it must have been addictive to have women fighting over him), this was exactly what she could expect. As usual, the women turned each other into enemies. Randall reported coyly to Fischer that Svetlana had phoned—her voice had had “the elaborate sinisterness of people in Eisenstein movies”—
and had asked, “Are you wearing your beautiful nightgown?” Deirdre told Fischer that she had replied, “Of course not. Most of the time I was in bed naked.” Her attack on Svetlana was cheap:
I think she’s absolutely crackers and that one of us is going to end up with an icon buried in her heart. My mommy told me not to fool around with married men. If you get home at a reasonable hour, better call her. I really feel awful. I hate being bullied and I hate most of all being afraid and she’s so crude I feel I know what it was like to talk to Stalin.35
Svetlana resolved to end the relationship and wrote to Fischer that it was best if they parted. But she could not so easily exorcise her feelings for him. By the end of October, she confessed:
I’m so frightened without you . . . my whole life is falling apart, I can’t do anything, I’ll either die or go crazy. . . . Don’t leave me without any live contact with you—that’s inhuman. I cannot think, I cannot work, everything is falling out of my hands.36
She asked to meet him on October 31. She said it was a sad and meaningful day for her, two years since Brajesh Singh died. They could have breakfast. She wouldn’t offer this to anybody but him on that day; he must at least acknowledge this. She wouldn’t call, since he had told her not to, but she begged him not to leave her completely alone on that day. Fischer did not come.
There was one piece of good news during this dark time. She received in the mail a photograph of the walls of her hospital in Kalakankar. She named it the Brajesh Singh Hospital. She wrote to Joan Kennan: “You know, what does the medical help mean for a large rural area, where thousands of people—women and children—have no doctor. This hospital will provide for them a free treatment. It makes me feel perfectly satisfied that after all—I have done something for the real people.”37 Joan, who had worked for the Peace Corps in Tonga, would understand, unlike other people who “often do not care about others at all.” The barb was clearly directed at Fischer. She told Joan she had finished her new book. All she needed was one more month to reshape and edit it.
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