The Red Daughter

by John Burnham Schwartz

  His school recommended a speech therapist. You know the Morris School? After what I have seen, Mrs. Carpenter, I refuse to send my child to state education. State anything.

  I can imagine.

  You agree about the speech therapist? It’s a good idea?

  I believe the best idea of all is God’s love, Mrs. Evans, Dottie Carpenter observed with a calm smile. But I’m sure the rest can’t hurt.

  24 June

  In the speech therapist’s waiting room, Yasha amuses himself on the floor with a toy fire engine and a lollipop with its wrapper still on. We are the only patients. A receptionist of the Woodstock generation—complete absence of brassiere support and hoops for earrings that might fit around my wrists—coolly buffs her nails, ignoring us as I sit struggling with the parental questionnaire, five pages long and full of intimate invasions:

  Subject’s parents’ ages?

  Any family history of mental illness?

  Any family history of alcoholism or drug addiction?

  Any particular stresses in the child’s home life?

  Answers to which have taken me a lifetime. And yet here I am supposed to regurgitate them on command, like some mother seagull being pecked at by her chick? For a doctor’s exorbitant fee, no less. Well, I do my best. The thought of there being something wrong with Yasha, some tainted packet of his grandfather that I have brought with me across the ocean, nauseates me to the core. I look over, find him watching me, my little human questionnaire, and muster a smile from nowhere.

  The doctor will see you now, says the receptionist in the Janis Joplin Halloween costume. I hand her the paperwork and gather Yasha by the hand, and we follow her into a room that is like Dr. N’s psychiatric office in Scottsdale, minus golf clubs and life-threatening cactus, but with the addition of a paper-covered examination table.

  The speech doctor himself is hardly much older than Janis, bearded and wearing an ill-fitting half-length lab coat over brown corduroy trousers. No wonder he has no other patients. After a carefully enunciated greeting, he disappears into my questionnaire as if it were some paperback bodice ripper. I pull the wrapper off Yasha’s lollipop and pop it into his eager, speechless mouth. He starts sucking this way and that, registering the pleasant rush of sweetness, then pulling the candy out again to inspect its properties.

  Grape, I whisper to my son, hopefully. Guh-rape. He smiles as if Mommy has made a funny joke.

  The speech doctor lowers the questionnaire and wheels his medical stool over to where we sit on the examination table. His manner now uneasy, jettisoning his default certitude that he can solve our problems.

  So, Mrs. Evans, what exactly is it that has brought you and your son to see me?

  Yasha is doing fine at the Morris School, I explain. You know it, yes? Top school, very expensive. His teachers praise his intelligence and quickness for his age, his remarkable vitality.

  This is all true, even if the doctor’s mouth currently inhabits a knife’s edge between encouragement and skepticism.

  But I am worried, Doctor. Yasha doesn’t speak. Not at school or home. All the other children are speaking, yelling with words, but not him.

  I see. The doctor scans the questionnaire again. And I glimpse the dirty evidence of my family history in his hands:

  Subject’s parents: biologically OLD.

  Subject’s grandfather on mother’s side: _____­_____­.

  Subject’s grandmother on mother’s side: nervous breakdown, followed by eventual gunshot suicide.

  Subject’s half uncle on mother’s side: died German concentration camp, technical suicide, though wartime conditions, etc., must be taken into consideration.

  Subject’s uncle on mother’s side: died alcoholism age 41 following time in prison for manic insubordination after father’s death.

  Subject’s mother: separated from subject’s father, not unfamiliar herself with alcohol, but rather not specify at present time.

  Home life stresses: normal for situations described above, plus other complications.

  The speech doctor’s expression by now a death mask of Hippocratic concern. If indeed he knows who my father was, he is a most malicious stage actor. He turns to my little boy and says, So, young fellow, I hear you’re very bright…And thus begins his investigation. While my thoughts catalyze and ricochet between electric points of dread, backward, forward, but always backward, to a stone hovel in Gori where a drunken cobbler beats his son to within an inch of his life, to a Tbilisi alleyway where the son shoots his first victim in the name of revolution, to my mother’s life bleeding into the mattress through the hole she shot in her heart, to Zubalovo, to Kuntsevo, to Sochi, Beria with his gleaming pince-nez, the Kremlin, Lubyanka Lubyanka Lubyanka, to Vorkuta, to Inta, and Aunt Anna and Uncle Stanislav, We don’t have exile. We just disappear, and my father’s blunt palm slapping my face, I am sixteen, Look at you! You look like a whore! Who would want you, anyway—

  Mrs. Evans?

  The speech doctor speaking to me.

  I asked if you’ve had your son’s hearing checked. It’s something we’ll want to rule out first.

  I tell him my son’s hearing is one hundred percent fine, I do not need a doctor to know this.

  The speech doctor stares at me in confusion, perhaps alarm. And I realize that I have just spoken to him in Russian.

  17 July

  Peter telephones from Block Island, where they have been on their annual holiday since the beginning of the month. I tell him I can’t talk long, I have a friend over for a visit—Dottie right now in my living room perusing the American volume of Akhmatova that I pressed on her after she ignorantly attempted to praise Tsvetayeva as the greater poet—and he rather defensively says, I was just checking in, as if the call is nothing but an extension of his job, billed by the hour. Even as I hear a door closing on his end and know he must be calling from the phone in his and Martha’s upstairs bedroom, where he is attempting to seclude himself for a few minutes of private talk, forgetting that the walls of their island cottage are as thin as those of any Soviet building designed for eavesdropping by the hidden powers of the State.

  What did the doctor say about Yasha?

  He said there is nothing “definitive” and the situation is worth “monitoring.”

  Well, at least that’s better than you feared, right?

  Perhaps my son will speak and perhaps he will not—either way, one hundred and twenty-five bucks cash, thank you very much.

  You sound pretty angry.

  No, Peter, this is simply my new American voice.

  Come on now, Svetlana.

  It’s a long hot summer, Peter. At least here, where we do not have the luxury of the Atlantic Ocean and the odd Russian émigré living in the blue bloods’ house.

  Okay, I’ll let you go.

  I’m sorry. You know I don’t mean anything. How is Jean?

  Jean’s fine. Tell me what’s going on with you. That’s why I called. You sound upset about something.

  I have a friend here.

  Okay, I’ll get off then.

  No, Peter, wait…

  What?

  Nothing.

  I’ll call again soon.

  Peter? Thank you.

  No need to thank me. I like talking to you, it’s not a job. In case you don’t know that by now.

  He hangs up.

  Back in the living room, I find Dottie on the couch, Akhmatova on her lap and a mug of Lipton on the coffee table. Perhaps she observes complications in my face, but she does not inquire. The woman spent ten years in war-torn Uganda and knows how to be discreet with other people’s sentiments.

  Do you know Akhmatova’s Requiem? I ask her.

  As if fearing I’m about to give her an exam on the subject, Dotti
e Carpenter replies meekly, Not really.

  During the Great Terror—yes, my father’s—Akhmatova’s only son, Lev, was arrested for counterrevolutionary activities. They sent him first to Leningrad prison. Every day for seventeen months his mother lines up outside the prison walls along with the other sufferers—mothers, wives, daughters—hoping to deliver packages of food and clothes to their men. This poem, this requiem, begins on the day when an old woman standing in line next to Akhmatova tugs on her coat sleeve and whispers: “Can you describe this?” And Akhmatova, just another mother among thousands, looks back at the old woman and says, “Yes, I can.” And so it begins:

  Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

  for you to come home.

  Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.

  My terror, oh my son.

  And I can’t understand.

  Now all’s eternal confusion.

  Who’s beast, and who’s man?

  How long till execution?

  I am crying now, I can’t help it. And clearly moved herself, Dottie asks, Does she get her son back?

  I stare at my new Princeton friend, wife of the assistant minister of the All Saints’ Church. A compassionate lady, doubtless. Uganda, et cetera. And still, how does one…If you are not a poet. If you never stood in line.

  Her son, Lev, spent nineteen years in the Gulag. He was not released until 1956.

  Relief softens Dottie’s thin face, brightens her eyes to a fever of hope again. But he was released. Eventually she got her son back. The poem worked.

  No, I correct her, perhaps too severely. Poems don’t work or not work. They either survive or they don’t—like Russians. When Lev finally returned from the camps, he felt only great bitterness toward his mother. He felt she should have been doing more to save him instead of writing poetry all those years. He never forgave her.

  How terribly unfair.

  Maybe.

  I can see that my new friend is ready to leave. I lead her outside with promises for another visit soon, then walk upstairs to Yasha’s room, where he has been down for a nap. Thinking now not about my little boy but about my half brother Yakov—the earlier Yasha—and his wife, Yulia. Yakov was captured by the Nazis in July 1941. In August of that year, our father issued Order 270, declaring that all Soviet soldiers who surrendered to the enemy or were captured were traitors to the Motherland. Wives of these traitor soldiers were not exempt—they too would be treated as traitors and arrested. No exceptions would be made, not even for the vozhd’s son and daughter-in-law.

  For eighteen months Yulia was kept in solitary confinement in Lubyanka, and later, with the Germans pressing deeper into Russia, she was transferred to a prison in Engels, on the Volga. Then, in the spring of ’43, for no reason that was ever explained to her, she was allowed to walk free. She made her way back home, where her and Yakov’s daughter, Gulia, now five years old, did not recognize her.

  It was that same spring, the ghosts tell us, after the unmitigated carnage of Stalingrad, that my father refused the prisoner exchange that would have brought his firstborn son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, home. A month later, my dearest brother was dead.

  Now Yasha murmurs something, opens sleep-glazed eyes.

  Hello, my darling. Mama’s here. Did you have a nice nap?

  Apple juice.

  I stare at him, doubting my own ears. Say that again?

  Apple. Juice. Mama.

  9 August

  President Nixon has resigned. On TV in my living room, drinking Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers, to help me through the proceedings, I watch the President of the United States of America declare that he is quitting, though he isn’t a quitter. Good to know. Seated in the Oval Office, the disgraced leader informs us that he is confident he is leaving the world a safer place for the people of all nations. Of course, no mention of what mischief he got up to with FBI, CIA, Internal Revenue Service during his time as Leader of the Free World.

  A bit later, Vice President Ford speaks from in front of what must be his charming private home purchased with his own significant wealth. He seems an alarmingly mild fellow. He will become president now. And I say good luck to him.

  27 August

  After eleven o’clock at night and still a good eighty degrees hot outside, humidity so thick you could drink the air if you were desperate enough. Which I might be, if not for the vodka and beer that I keep always too well stocked in case I start brooding about Josef and Katya again. Once more tonight, after Yasha was down to sleep, I carried my drink over to the chair by the television and planted myself for the duration. A habit I must stop. I feel it in my physical heart sometimes—drink, sitting, stupidity, thickening me like goulash. Watching this Archie Bunker, who is all mouth. Mary Tyler Moore, who would not survive a single day in Minsk. Some child-man called the Fonz. I am just about to beg for mercy when my cultural savior Dick Cavett appears with his ironic delivery and intellectual programming, helping me to remember that I am not a transplanted idiot.

  A wonderful lineup of guests on tonight’s show: that magnificent boxer Muhammad Ali, most beautiful Negro the world has ever seen; some impressive woman who performs what she calls political vaudeville theater (now a redundant art form); and finally, Jerzy Kosinski, dashing and slim in European sport jacket and silk foulard tie, yet still looking, with his cunning pained smile and seagull’s nose, like a count in permanent search of his lost castle. There is talk out there—I have heard it myself recently from Dick Thompson, who always knows more than he says—that Jerzy did not actually write his famous book The Painted Bird himself, or that at the very least the horrors he said he endured as a Jewish boy passing as Christian during the war in Poland did not happen to him, or that perhaps he is not even Jerzy Kosinski at all. Cavett, of course, does not bring up these accusations—this is a friendly interview, not like the kind I get nowadays, when they happen at all—though skepticism can be heard humming in the televised atmosphere, giving the moment its satisfying undertow of tension.

  I find I can’t take my eyes off this charming literary refugee with the coal-black eyes, the intoxicating impression he gives of a doomed man standing in front of a closed curtain, daring us to look behind it. Naturally I regret the humiliating letter I wrote him after we met that time at Edmund Wilson’s three or four years ago. But the conversation had flowed so freely between us, felt so light-footed and intelligent, we felt so close in spirit, that I suppose I can forgive myself for believing more lay underneath. Not the first time I have been disappointed by someone who turned out to be less than he seemed and whose story was not his own.

  But what is the point of thinking about all this now? I must not drink so much. It’s because Peter is not here.

  Where is he? He promised he would come see me after his return from Block Island, but he has not come, damn him, he has not come but instead has left me with this helpless feeling that I have always hated of waiting for a man who does not and will not relieve me of my vulnerability of needing him. A man who wields his absence as a power, whether he knows it or not, a man self-satisfied in his own family castle, father and husband, while I sit here with television and sweating glass and little boy upstairs and this restless fucking desire that has nowhere to go.

  Something is wrong with the electric fan—blade tick-ticking against its metal cage as if trying to escape. I yank the plug from the wall…And through half-open window blinds see my neighbor, distinguished astrophysicist Roman Smoluchowski, walking his dog down my street. One of those little black tailless creatures bred to live on barges in Dutch canals. Smoluchowski gazing straight up at the heavens as he goes—all the way to the stars, I presume, in their infinite mystery.

  14 September

  I am buying my New York Times at the kiosk in town when Smoluchowski waves to me from across the street. He is alone today, in houndstooth sport jacket and olive green fedora, with
no little dog on a leash.

  Svetlana, he says rather conspiratorially, closing the distance between us in a few strides, I have been looking for you.

  Looking for me? I regard him. On the whole, I think Smoluchowski a gentleman and an intellectual, with his fine Slavic forehead, trimmed silver beard, and quite good posture for someone his age.

  I am right here, Roman. Buying my newspaper as usual. How is your dog?

  Bruno is healthy for his years, thank you. Listen, I want to talk to you about something important. Can we go somewhere for coffee?

  With Yasha in school until noon, I am unoccupied. Roman and I go to the café on the next block, settle into a booth, and order two coffees, black. He leans forward, his manner scientific yet human.

  I am just back from an astrophysics conference in Moscow, he says. At this conference, one day I was approached over lunch by a colleague I had never met. A Russian named Karpovsky. You know him?

  I do not.

  The man was aware that I teach at Princeton. And he’d heard that the daughter of Stalin is again living here as well. He asked—quietly—if I happen to know you personally. In which case, will I agree to pass on to you some news about your children?

  My children? I grab my good neighbor’s wrist where it lies on the table between us—with more strength than is feminine, perhaps, because I see him flinch. Roman, you must tell me now. Are my children safe?

  They are safe. Feeling suddenly light-headed, I release his wrist. Now the waitress interrupts with our coffees, and Roman waits until she leaves before adding, According to this man Karpovsky, your daughter—

  My daughter, Katya?

  Your daughter received her degree in geophysics from Moscow University. Now she is teaching, also geophysics.

  Katya was always smart. Is she married?

  No. Apparently, she lives with her grandmother.