The Patriots
Page 1
Copyright © 2017 by Sana Krasikov
All rights reserved
Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and Design is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
NAMES: Krasikov, Sana.
TITLE: The patriots : a novel / by Sana Krasikov.
DESCRIPTION: New York : Spiegel & Grau, [2017]
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2015045869| ISBN 9780385524414 (acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780399588846 (ebook)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Americans—Russia—Fiction. | Families—Russia (Federation)—Moscow—Fiction. | Families—United States—Fiction. | Cold War—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC PS3611.R373 R47 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045869
Ebook ISBN 9780399588846
randomhousebooks.com
spiegelandgrau.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Photo illustration: Debra Lill
Cover image: Getty Images (Red Square and boy)
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue / SARATOV, 1956
Book I
1: Qualitative Leaps / NEW YORK, 1934
2: Agnosia / WASHINGTON, D.C., 2008
3: Brooklyn / NEW YORK, 1932
4: Graphomaniacs / WASHINGTON, D.C., 2008
5: Dangerous Liaison / CLEVELAND, 1933
6: Steel / CLEVELAND, 1933
7: Departures / CLEVELAND, 1933
8: Arrivals / MOSCOW, 1934
Book II
9: The Great Communicator / WASHINGTON, D.C., 2008
10: Independence Day / MOSCOW, 2008
11: Homecoming / MOSCOW, 2008
12: Little Enemies / SARATOV, 1951
Book III
13: Magnetic City / MAGNITOGORSK, 1934
14: Gold / MOSCOW, 1934
15: A Man of the People / MOSCOW, 1934
16: The Heatbird / MOSCOW, 1934
17: A New Mentalìtēt / MOSCOW, 1934
18: Socialist Realism / MOSCOW, 2008
19: Conspiracy Theories / MOSCOW, 1934
20: Za Nas, Za Vas / MOSCOW, 2008
21: Tragic Errands / MOSCOW, 1936
22: A Clean Record / MOSCOW, 2008
23: Receipts / MOSCOW, 1936
Book IV
24: The Utopist Altar / MOSCOW, 2008
25: Cleaning House / MOSCOW, 1937
26: Our Friends from Geneva / MOSCOW, 2008
27: Life on the Mississippi / MOSCOW, 1939
28: A Dignified Exit / MOSCOW, 2008
29: Secrets / MOSCOW, 1940
30: Volgans / MOSCOW, 2008
31: Little Birch Tree / MOSCOW, 1940
Book V
32: Invisible Man / MOSCOW, 2008
33: Second Chances / KUIBYSHEV, 1943
34: Life vs. Pravda / MOSCOW, 1948
35: Escape / MOSCOW, 1948
36: With Good Steam / MOSCOW, 2008
37: Savages with Chronometers / MOSCOW, 2008
38: Comrade Brink / MOSCOW, 2008
39: Muzhchina / MOSCOW, 2008
Book VI
40: The Pilot / PERM, 1951
41: The Magic Flight / MOSCOW, 1975
42: The Dialectics of Florence Fein / MOSCOW, 1978
43: Avalon / MARLBORO, N.J., 2008
44: Brooklyn / NEW YORK, 1981
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Sana Krasikov
About the Author
On a Sunday in August, a boy and a one-armed man appeared on the platform of the Saratov train station. The train they awaited was due to arrive at six. In that early-evening hour the air was beginning to cool. The sunlight shifted, deepened and turned to gold the dust suspended by the shoes of hurrying passengers. Leading the way through milling crowds, the man drew a handrolled cigarette from his jacket and gripped it between his teeth. He worked a match out of a box with his one hand, struck it up with the flesh of his thumb, and leaned down on the flame. Sucking his cigarette, he glanced back to see that the boy had not been swallowed up by the masses.
All summer had found the railway stations mobbed as they hadn’t been since the war. To contain the stench of public toilets, the sanitation workers poured bleach powder in the latrine pits. The man forbade the boy to go alone into one of these facilities, knowing they were full of urki ready to slit your throat for the money you carried in your underwear. A wave of crime had hit the cities two years prior, for the first of the condemned to be let out were the pickpockets and prostitutes, the murderers, thieves, and onanists. Only now, three years after the tyrant had croaked, were the others being released—the fifty-eighters and counterrevolutionaries and enemies-of-the-people whose number was too absurd, too enormous for the bosses, with their abiding fear of chaos, to free all at once.
From Vorkuta they came, from Pechora and Inta, from Kolyma and Kengir and Perm. They arrived that summer moving south with the trains, like logs down a swollen river. Entire forests of people felled, bound and piled and now cast adrift into the rising water. A winter’s cut, carried aloft with frightening rapidity.
A signal blasted from the locomotive up ahead. A click and switch of iron rails brought the final filling of teakettles. When the second wail sounded, the boy wished he hadn’t heard it, then reproached himself for the cowardice of this wish. All week long he’d been failing to conjure her up in his head. Now, as he prepared to recognize his mother among the strangers rapidly streaming from the wagon, he felt swamped by despair. “Car nine,” said the man, and let the boy walk ahead.
His hair, freshly cut, fell across his forehead in a fringe that made him look younger than his twelve years. His clothes, though not new, were ironed and starched.
A woman stepped off the train, her mouth frozen in an imploring smile. Her olive padded jacket reminded the boy of the one worn by the farmer who delivered potatoes to his orphanage. Her thick sweater hung over a coarse-hemmed dress. The suitcase she set down on the platform was cardboard, reinforced with metal corners, and so small he couldn’t imagine it holding anything besides a few papers. The light that entered her face as she recognized him sent a twinge of nausea down his throat.
She was older, of course, her face pale and puffy. Her once-sculpted features were altered by an odd short haircut: parted on the side in two dove-gray streaks. Only her eyes, those heavy-lidded blue eyes that had always been the striking focal point of her face, were troublesomely familiar.
The man gave him a shove.
She squatted and cupped her hands around Julian’s face. “Let me look at you, my precious, sweet boy.” He caught the meaning of her words at the last moment. She had spoken them in English—a language he hadn’t heard or uttered in almost seven years. As if teasing, she said, “You don’t recognize me?”
“Of course I do, Mama!” he answered in Russian.
“That’s all right. I’ve turned into an old crow, haven’t I?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer this, and in a voice full of falseness said, “Let me carry your bag, Mama!”
The train was leaving. Bits of sky flashed between wagons. But where was her hair? The long, thick curls he’d buried his small face in, which he’d pictured for years in his sleep, all he’d been able to preserve of her—their loss felt like betrayal. He held her suitcase as she approached Mark Pavlovich, the children’s home director, and took his one hand in both of hers. She was thanking him for everything he had done for her son all these y
ears. Now that she’d reverted to Russian, Julian was suddenly stunned: her voice, surprisingly loud and clear, was afflicted with the thick lilt of an American accent.
How could he have not remembered this?
“We’ll be sorry to see him go,” said the director. “Yulik has been a real helper.” Briefly he glanced at the departing train. “You’ll see for yourself what a fine boy he is. An outstanding worker.”
“I’m certain I will,” she said, putting a hand on Julian’s shoulder. He felt his body go rigid. He’d have to leave school now, forsake the games behind the cowshed, say goodbye to his friends, to his whole life. The thought that he would have to go live with this woman made him want to crumble in angry tears. But the director, seeming to read his mind, said, “I hope you won’t mind that we’ll keep him a little longer….” It was less a question than a promise to look after him until she could get back on her feet. It had all been arranged beforehand. It was done this way for all the prisoners’ children.
His mother’s eyes filled with bitter gratitude, but still she looked at Julian to make sure he approved. He felt a pang of shame. It was clear she had no means to take him with her. Mark Pavlovich asked whether she wanted to stay that night, but she said she’d wait for the nighttime connection to Moscow. There she would sort out her life—obtain her rehabilitation papers, look for work, find a room for the two of them to live. “But everything should be in order by December,” she said with an effortful, slightly bronchial laugh. “Then we can celebrate the New Year together. Won’t that be something?”
For years he had rehearsed what he might say to her once they were together (Sit down, Mama, rest, I will take care of you). Now he felt like a conscript who’d evaded the draft.
“What’s a few more months after all this time?” she said. And with these words, his mother—the phantom of his exhausted imagination—reentered his life.
Breaking your family’s heart was the price you paid for rescuing your own. Florence had committed herself to this credo, letting it carry her through the cruelty of the past six weeks—so that she was surprised, on the upper deck of the Bremen, to feel her faith recede. From under her narrow palm she gazed down at the people crowding the dock. A May sun accosted the harbor and coated everything with a blinding shine. The air smelled of coal and rotted fish. Small green waves raced from the hull back to the pier, where her parents and her little brother stood squeezed in among strangers. She would have shouted out to them but knew her voice could not carry over the screeches of gulls and the intermittent bassoon of the ship’s tremendous whistle.
—
ONLY AFTER SHE’D BOUGHT her ticket had Florence told her parents she was leaving. Then she braced herself for the family volcano.
“Cleveland was not enough!” Her father’s shouts had rattled their Flatbush living room. “Russia! You want to go where they’re shooting people dead for eating their own grain?”
She’d fought back. “No one who’s traveled there ever reported seeing any such thing.”
He turned to her mother. “Never reported! They’re being duped, Florie. And you’re being duped.”
“Sure, and the factories are only burning straw to make smoke come out the chimneys?”
“You think I’m such a dummy that I don’t know what kind of hoodwinked world my own father left. A young person such as yourself, ripe for recruitment…”
“No one has recruited me!”
But his eyes were wild with lunatic distrust. “Let me see your Party card!”
“I don’t have one!” she shouted, her voice caving from tears. “For Pete’s sake, I am not a communist!”
“Then why, Florie? Just tell me why. What kind of madness is this, for a girl to want to leave her family, her home, all the people who love her? To the other end of the world!”
She could not tell him the truth. Could not show him the photograph of the dark-eyed man with the Apache cheeks, tucked in the back of her dresser drawer. Better they think her a communist than a nafka. “I am not leaving forever, Papa!” she said in a voice hoarse from shouting.
“Then tell us how long?”
“I can’t tell you. A year, maybe more.”
“And throw away another year of your life?”
“I want to live my life.”
“Go, then! I’ve had enough of you,” her father said. “May the day never come when you feel the pain we feel now.”
Despite their threats, her parents had come to see her off. Her mother gave Florence her own fur coat to brave the snowy Russian winter. Her father bought her a traveler’s trunk. They stood watching as it was tossed by a ship’s attendant into the hold, where it took on the size of a matchbox beside all the other cargo—enormous boxes and barrels, chrome automobiles, upright pianos. Her brother Sidney had given her his beloved BSA Taylor compass, whose cold beveled edges Florence now dug with torturous pleasure into the soft flesh of her thumb. She’d discovered it in her purse only after she boarded the ship. She wanted to walk off the boat and give it back to Sidney, whose muskrat’s hard hat of hair was still visible in flashes among the bodies on the dock. But it was too late; the third-class passengers were boarding, blocking the gangway with awkward bundles. Danes, Poles, Germans, stocky in their winter overcoats and rubber boots. With their American children in tow, they were returning to their homelands in search of work. Observing them trudge aboard, Florence suddenly felt she was watching an old Ellis Island film reel flipped by the Depression into reverse: masses of immigrants returning to the ship, being herded backward through that great human warehouse as Lady Liberty waved them goodbye.
Her reverie was interrupted by an argument on deck. Somebody was demanding to carry a poultry incubator aboard ship rather than abandon it to the hold. Into the fray came the noises of a hen cock crowing in defiance of the third steamer signal. Taking advantage of the clamor and tumult, one of the Poles was making the rounds with a collection box. When he saw a tall, handsome girl in a tailored green suit, he mistook Florence for a wealthy young lady and approached her with a heavily accented speech about penniless deportees. It was impossible to hear the story in the flapping of ropes and echoes from port. She thought she heard her name being called—her father’s voice a hallucination conjured by the wind’s eddies. Florence opened her purse and gave the man a coin.
She felt ready for the ship to cast off, but a fresh commotion had seized the crowd. On the gangway ramp, a girl of about eighteen had dropped her glasses and was now palming around for them, interrupting her search only to toss angry defenses at those she was holding up behind. In her myopic squint Florence recognized the feral defiance of someone who’d learned to carry her awkwardness brazenly. A girl accustomed to being out of place. But it was her physical appearance that most struck Florence. The girl might have been Florence herself—younger, shorter, and plumper, but otherwise bearing an almost familial likeness. Her skin was equally pale; her curls, only slightly darker than Florence’s, had the strong kink that Florence had learned to tame out of her own hair with relaxers and combs. Someone from the boat was sent to help the girl, and soon her spectacles were retrieved from between the gangplanks. The commotion was drowned out again by a final signal from the ship’s heights. The chimneys belched coal smoke, and the engines of the tugboats began to turn. At last the Bremen made its imperceptible slide backward into the Hudson.
A flock of gulls with black-edged wings circled the ship as it churned and split the water. Slowly by slowly the crowd on the pier receded, her family along with them. Only the gulls stayed close. Trailing the Bremen, they rose and fell on a tunnel of air which seemed to propel the ship and everyone on it down a course that stretched irreversibly into a bright, portentous sea.
—
The following morning the sun’s rays were unobstructed by any buildings or trees. An ocean chill drew bumps on Florence’s arms as she sat on a lounge chair in the scalloped shade of an awning. She drew on her round sunglasses and attempted to read a boo
k she’d brought for the journey: Red Virtue: Human Relationships in the New Russia by Ella Winter. Winter’s prose was making it hard to get past page 2. And another human relationship was presently competing for her attention: on the top deck, in first class, a tall madam with sunken cheeks and a greyhound’s ropy body was promenading on the arm of a much younger, darker-skinned gentleman. The man’s hair was gelled back like Valentino’s. His spine stayed rigid with military aplomb even as his companion petted his shoulder and brushed his ear with her thin lips.
“So—what do you make of her?”
Florence turned to find the girl she’d seen the day before. Her tortoiseshell glasses were now affixed firmly on the short bridge of her nose. Atop her curly head a woven beret was tipped at a precarious angle.
“Pardon me?”
“Ella Winter. Your book. Another phony Margaret Mead, if you ask me.”