So. You have made me come to you.
There is no point, I warn her.
There is always a point, if people are open to reason. Won’t you invite me inside? As you can see, I’ve brought a gift for Jacob.
I square my body in front of the door to keep her out, amazed that she still believes I can be bought for what she’s selling. Yasha is taking a nap.
Sid will be disappointed. I wait, but she makes no move to leave. I promised him I would say hello to his son, she persists.
Why doesn’t he come himself?
He feels unwelcome. And he’s extremely busy. Did you know he was in Iran again? The Fellowship is thriving. Projects are abundant, creative spirits more deeply engaged than ever. Of course, raising funds for our great work remains a constant challenge. And yet, out of all this, there is only one thing that disappoints. Do you know what it is? I’m quite serious. You must stop slandering me to the public. Immediately.
You are the ones telling lies to the press, not me.
Oh, I think you know the truth. She takes another step forward, her face now so close to mine I can see the crevices in her forehead, which no paint can fill. Listen to me carefully, Svetlana. We come from the same part of the world, you and I. Of all the people you will meet in this country, I am the one who knows what you really are. In the end, you’re just a murderer’s daughter, aren’t you?
I raise my hand to strike her. I would crush that face, those brown eyes streaked with yellow. She does not flinch because she knows I lack the conviction to go through with it; she has poisoned me with my own doubt. Behind her the handsome fellow who does or does not know he’s a lackey has leapt from the car, prepared to take the threatened blow instead of his dominatrix, while the personal physician, secure in his seat, doesn’t move a muscle.
The gift is for the boy, the Widow hisses like a Gypsy curse. She turns stiffly and signals the young man. Help me down these stairs!
Once they’re gone, I tear off the exquisite wrapping and open the box. Inside, on a bed of cotton, is a framed photograph of the Widow and the Architect—an image captured, one could fairly say, during their glory years. Across the bottom of the photograph, written in oil pencil, an inscription: For Jacob—Truth Against the World.
I return to my kitchen. Seeing it now for what it truly is. I have lived here no time at all. To call this home is to not know what home is. Only my son’s clothes on the table, light as they are, have any reality, any heft. I put my hand on the jumbled pile and feel how the warmth has left them. If you do not catch innocence as it happens, can it be said to ever have existed? My father loved me once, I know he did. I think of him forever having Kuntsevo torn down and rebuilt again around the single room he lived and worked in, the one room he never allowed to be changed. He must have guessed that it was the only room where what little that was human in him still resided, and known that if he ever destroyed that too, there would be nothing left.
14 April
My marriage to Sid is over.
I should not have gone to see him tonight. It was weak of me, but I needed to know. I could not continue existing in this limbo between our polar realities, ignored into inconsequence as if I’d never happened to him at all. As if our child had never happened. As if I had made it all up in my own head.
I asked Pam if she would watch Yasha for an hour or two. When she hesitated—it was her night off and she was dressed to go out to dinner with friends—I said I’d pay her double her usual salary. It was crude and thoughtless of me, and it offended her; after months of working for us, she has come to feel like part of our little family. Still, she agreed, hugging me as if I were the wounded one. Of course, she said. Do whatever you need to. I’ll stay with Yasha. And I grabbed the car keys and went out.
Twenty minutes later, I was turning the Dodge off the highway, hearing the fenders scraping and grating over the unwelcoming rocks of Taliesin road. The moon high and full, its cold light throwing the cacti into long shadows. I parked on the side of the road and stepped out. The stars were quilted overhead. From my daily peregrinations with Yasha I was familiar with every hillock and shrub of this landscape, none of it as strange as the life I’d led here. I began to walk. There was no one about at this hour, and my footsteps were muted.
Our apartment overlooked the road through a sliding glass door. At certain times I’d hated that door—groups of tourists constantly peering in from the outside as if we were apes in a zoo. Other times, though, I came to feel that the desert view the door afforded was the anchoring point of my sanity: as long as I could apprehend it, it must be real; and if it was real, then I must be real as well.
While I was having these thoughts, my foot painfully struck something on the ground: a rock about the size of my hand. For no reason I was aware of, I picked it up and continued walking. Soon our apartment came into view, its one illuminated room and that glass door staring back at me like the lens of some giant camera. In the dark, outside, I could get close enough to observe intimate details of the life going on within.
Sid had changed nothing about the place since I’d left. (In truth, he’d changed little after I’d first arrived.) Hanging on the wall among an assortment of antique weapons was the sword he’d been given by the Iranian government in gratitude for his work there, a string of dried flowers dangling from its curved blade. His collection of rock crystals and geologic nodules (a word he taught me) were still arranged on shelves, along with his library of art and architecture books.
He was sitting with his back to me. Wearing a dressing gown, his feet bare, watching some show on television.
He must have heard the glass door slide open, must have known it was me, but he did not turn his head. He did not move. For some time we remained like that—I standing just inside the door, he facing the television as if I weren’t there; the show’s mindless, fake laughter. And then, slowly, I moved closer, until I was close enough to touch him. And still he did not turn his head.
Sid, I said. I had begun to weep, but quietly. I put my hand on his shoulder from behind. And still he did not respond.
Sid, I’m leaving. I’m taking Yasha to Princeton. I will divorce you, if that’s what you want.
His head sank—perhaps a nod, perhaps a surrender. And still without looking at me, he reached back for my hand on his shoulder.
I left my desert rock on a table on my way out. For his collection.
EDITOR’S NOTE
She decides she wants her old house in Princeton back, the little white house on Wilson Road. The familiar, some sense of a place she’s already been in a country she no longer knows, if she ever did. Lucky for her the married academics she sold her Cape Cod to eighteen months earlier, soon to retire to Key West, are only too happy to sell it back to her at a modest markup. The down payment further depletes what’s left of her savings after the paying off of Sid’s exorbitant debts in their divorce settlement, but Svetlana doesn’t think twice about the money. She wants to be American. Isn’t owning one’s home and castle the essence of the American dream? And why should such a life, the very antithesis of the Soviet plan, be any less manifest for her than for anyone else? Within a single month, in 1972, she signs contracts for the sale of her Arizona property (occupied but a few months) and the repurchase of 50 Wilson Road. Though I am not a real estate attorney, I counsel her on the transactions as best I can. Meaning that I offer some advice and say a few factual things in discreet tones, and then she goes ahead and does what she’s going to do anyway.
Perhaps unavoidably, her relocation to town is noted by the local newspaper, The Princeton Packet, the last week of May, if only as a rather cheeky addendum to its lead article on Nixon and Brezhnev’s historic signing of the ABM Treaty. You have to navigate the “continued on p. A-5” before finding, in the piece’s final paragraph, the following digestif:
In other, more local affairs relating to the Soviet U
nion, Lana Evans, formerly known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, and, previously and more notoriously, as Svetlana Stalin, only daughter of Joseph Stalin the deceased Soviet tyrant, is reported to have moved back to Princeton following her separation from architect Sidney L. Evans, with whom she has a one-year-old son. Mrs. Evans, who defected to the United States in 1967, spent the previous two years living with her husband at the Taliesin Fellowship, the alternative-minded architectural school established by Frank Lloyd Wright in Wisconsin and Arizona, where Mr. Evans is currently Chief Architect. According to Mrs. Evans’s attorney, local resident Peter Horvath, the timing of her return to the East Coast “obviously has no connection whatever” to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and her native country.
Yes, thank heavens for good old Peter Horvath: always around to set the record straight.
Svetlana moves back into her former home. But somehow the place, the longed-for domestic comfort, is not quite as she remembers it. The interim residents made certain alterations, added on a screened porch and a two-car garage, ruining symmetry, spatially impinging on her beloved backyard. The neighbors have built an “aggressive” fence. Other additions and subtractions as well, too obscure for me to register. At least her beloved dogwood tree is still standing: she can see it from her bedroom window. Taller, fuller than before. Symbol of memory and hope.
* * *
—
Unopened boxes are still in evidence in her new/old house as Yasha approaches his second birthday. “Don’t worry, Peter,” she assures me, “we celebrate. Nothing grandiose. We are simple people, Yasha and I, and he’s only two. As his godfather, of course you are with us.” Godfather? This is news to me. But yes, I am with them. And over the phone the handsome architect-cowboy Sid Evans tells her that he plans to fly in, of course he will, just needs to straighten out a knot in his work schedule. Right up until the morning of the event, in fact, she believes that Sid will magically appear so they might celebrate their son’s birthday together. When instead of her ex-husband, however, a delivery boy from Princeton’s most expensive children’s-wear shop, bearing a wrapped and beribboned box, rings her doorbell on the big day, Svetlana finally understands that Sid is not going to come.
Inside the gift box is a beautiful, toddler-size sweater, robin’s egg blue. And a card from the shop describing the tiny Scottish isle on which, in some craggy, windswept cottage, a very old Scotswoman knit this garment from wool sheared off her very own sheep. And so forth. Happy Birthday, Jacob, from your proud father…
“Sid always has beautiful taste,” Svetlana says, voice as bleak as the Siberian steppe.
She gets vodka from the freezer and pours small glasses for us both. Sticks a birthday candle in a blue-frosted cupcake from the Acme market and places it on the plastic tray of the high chair where Yasha sits eating apple slices, lights the candle with a match from a book that says PEKING PALACE, and begins to sing “Happy Birthday” to her son, her Russian accent stronger than ever. I join her, our voices not quite synchronizing. She gently orders Yasha to make a wish, but he is not speaking yet, and the notion of a wish is too abstract for him anyway, so his mother closes her eyes and silently invokes one on his behalf. (I have often wondered what it was.) With a blunt Russian breath, she blows out his candle. We down our vodka shots, which she immediately refills. And she looks at me, unbowed, as if to say: You see, Peter? American birthday. I am learning.
That summer I see her rarely. On each occasion I observe her acting out the role of American woman, mother, homeowner happy with her situation. And while this unlikely self-representation ought to alert me to its own lie, for various reasons I am feeling somewhat caged and awkward in my own life and so perhaps not looking closely enough. Martha too, as it happens, is a loyal reader of The Princeton Packet. And my wife has suddenly decided that this is the summer we are going to renovate—at our own expense, though we are renters—the guest room in our Block Island cottage. Meaning that, unlike Svetlana’s first American summer, we will be unable to have guests stay with us during our monthlong vacation.
Back in town, second weekend of September, Svetlana throws an “open welcome party,” as she advertises it, for her friends and neighbors. I have never enjoyed such forced community endeavors, but uncertain how many friends she still has left in Princeton—the fact is, with her well-earned reputation for being a fascinating but at times “challenging” woman, many of her former crowd no longer invite her to their dinners or barbecues—or who her neighbors are, I feel compelled, on protective grounds, to attend. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, Martha is struck down with a last-minute migraine, and Jean has a sleepover at a friend’s. So I venture over to Wilson Road by myself.
Six o’clock on a balmy, end-of-summer evening. She’s mowed her yard with her brand-new lawnmower, bought full price from friendly Mrs. Urken at Urken Hardware; wisps of cut grass clinging to the edges of the bluestone walkway and the tips of my loafers, the cooling air pearled green with it. She always leaves the door to her house unlocked “on principle,” she has told me, “so why not anybody—the washing woman, you understand, Peter, the man who cleans the chimney, college professors, a Negro from Chicago, all of them, they can walk into my house as they like and find me where I am.”
This is part of what I love about her, I realize, this relentless democratic dreaming expressed in her own particular American idiom. The daughter of a monster, okay, but she refuses to be held back, this forty-seven-year-old single mother of a baby boy, in a foreign country, by the bridge that can’t be built, the door that can’t be opened.
“Peter!” she greets me with warm cheek kisses as I enter her living room, where a small group of guests—two old Christian Science biddies; a Polish astrophysicist; a Native American garage mechanic; a couple of academic types; and, yes, a black man from Chicago—stand uneasily mingling under what feels like a general cloud of diminished social expectation. “Here you are. What again, no Martha? Another headache? Well, never mind. Come and have some punch. I got recipe out of stupid ladies’ magazine, but actually it’s not so bad.”
I go in. And she is right about the punch. And soon I find myself smiling like a teenager, because I have missed her.
1974
12 June
Princeton
I have a new friend. Dottie, wife of the new assistant minister at All Saints’ Church, where, when the mood strikes, Yasha and I may be found in attendance, fifth pew on the right, nearest the aisle. I always bring a box of raisins for Yasha to snack on when he starts getting restless. (He enjoys the music too.) Dottie’s bony, balding, ministerial husband has a soothing voice and prominent front teeth. During his maiden sermon to the congregation, he spoke about the decade that he and his wife and two children spent as missionaries in Uganda before coming to Princeton (no wonder he looks so underfed, poor man), and how the experience of being an outsider in life, that is, a person without community who must seek community in all its flavors, is in its way a gift from God. At that moment, I glanced at the side pew by the pulpit and discovered a slight woman with bright eyes and a flange of dark springy hair corralled into a bun staring back through the seated faces directly at me—a welcoming nod of the head from her, which I was unsure what to do with, before she turned her attention back to the speaker. Yasha required another raisin then, and I did not think about the woman again until I found her approaching me on the lawn outside the church after the service was over.
My husband was a bit nervous today were her disarming first words.
The minister is your husband?
Assistant minister, I should say. She extended her hand. Dottie Carpenter. Like you, Mrs. Evans, we are not from here.
You know my name? My voice perhaps suspicious, though I shook her hand.
Oh, I know more than your name. I’ve read your book. What an extraordinary life you’ve led. May I ask how long you�
�ve been worshipping at All Saints’?
I told her—honest about my irregular church attendance, but declining to give the reason: that I consider the physical place of worship irrelevant, be it All Saints’ or no saints; for God, at least as I understand Him at this moment, is the same everywhere, He is no demagogue. Just as all religions are equal, none above the other.
Yasha, pulling at my skirt, wanted more raisins. I gave him some.
And this must be your son, Dottie Carpenter said, bending down to get eye level with him.
Yes, this is my Yasha.
Hello, Yasha. Did you enjoy the music?
A shy paroxysm, then Yasha handed the odd church lady one of his precious raisins.
Why, thank you. Aren’t you a polite boy. And handsome too, with those big black eyes.
Yasha emitted a reply that, while full of meaning, was nothing like speech. He wandered a few feet away to pick a tiny butter flower that somehow had escaped the lawnmower’s guillotine.
My son doesn’t speak yet, I said. Never intending to make such a confession, let alone to a stranger; but once it was out, I tasted bittersweet relief in my mouth.
The assistant minister’s wife placed her hand on my arm. You mustn’t worry. Think of Einstein—not a word till he was three, then all at once whole paragraphs bubbling out of his mouth. I’m sure your son will start speaking soon, Mrs. Evans. He looks like he has a lot to say.
And I did: I thought of Einstein. We were in Princeton, after all. Then I came back to earth.
The Red Daughter Page 14