I am appalled by this revelation but say nothing aloud. My former mother-in-law, a bully and a loudmouth, was the main reason I divorced Katya’s father. And Josef? I ask with trepidation. What about my son?
According to Karpovsky, your son Josef is a doctor at one of the better clinics in Moscow.
This takes a moment to sink in.
What sort of doctor?
Some aspect of cardiology, is what I understood.
Is he married?
He was. But now divorced.
I shake my head in dismay. From the time he was small, I warned him not to marry young as I did.
Men who spend their lives peering at the stars are by nature optimists, I have found. And I see now that it pleases Roman to be able to deliver his news to a lady in emotional turmoil such as myself, so that he might comfort me. I do not blame him for this. It is how men are.
There’s more, my neighbor continues. Svetlana, according to this Karpovsky, your son Josef is a father. He has a four-year-old son.
Now I can only stare at him.
That’s what I wanted to tell you, my dear. You’re a grandmother.
29 September
A hole is growing in my backyard. More than a hole—a pit. And unlike those mass graves my father is now said by historians to have been so partial to, none of this minor suburban excavation, I can tell you, is to be found at Communist prices. The labor here, even Guatemalan or what-have-you, is certainly not cheap; the backhoe is not cheap. I am paying for my American swimming pool the good old-fashioned way—on the installment plan. This is how people do it here, the pool company salesman assures me. Of course he is corrupt, and Peter is apoplectic (for Peter, I mean) at my lack of financial sense, but why should Yasha not have a pool to swim in during these long hot New Jersey summers, when so many of his little classmates at the Morris School have theirs? Or their country clubs, which are not open to all people.
Nelson, head laborer of the three amiable fellows who now seem to live in my yard while destroying it, was born in Guatemala City, which he informs me rather shyly is a place best known for its high rate of murders. Well, he is here now, all five feet, four inches of him (information he volunteered with perhaps a dose of male hyperbole), a survivor and illegal immigrant to whom I am happy enough to give work. He brings his lunch in a metal pail and shares it with his equally small-statured compatriots at 11:00 sharp each morning, three fellows sitting on the curb out front with their feet on Wilson Road. A generous and satisfying lunch, from what I’ve seen; and so it pleases me to imagine that Nelson has a wife who loves him.
Meanwhile, I have stopped checking my bank account except when absolutely necessary. I must be honest with myself: I have allowed this installment situation to grow into a many-headed snake. I say nothing of the mortgage on the property as a whole, an eye-watering debt, which, I am constantly being told, is actually a sign of good financial health. No, the true Hydra begins with the lawnmower, the Maytag washer and dryer machines, the General Electric dishwasher. The Electrolux Swedish vacuum cleaner, known to be the best in the world for real shag carpeting. And now, pièce de résistance, the swimming pool with California blue bottom, which if it ever gets finished (and paid for) will require a pool boy to go with it all, some resident genius to manipulate the filters and heaters and such.
But what else did I expect? Is capitalism not what I aspired to? So much time spent going after things.
And I am no different: I desire these things too—perhaps more than they do. Each sparkling, never-before-needed thing with its price. Each price attached to its system of payment. Each system of payment waiting on wallet, checkbook, bankbook, membership, prayer, victory.
So if I’m winning the lottery and the whole damn show, as supposedly I am, why doesn’t it feel better?
That is no pool in my yard. That is a pit.
23 October
I met Max Kirschner, the journalist and professor, three weeks ago at George and Annalise Kennan’s. Oh, you’ll love Max, Annalise promised me before the other guests arrived, he’s a force of nature. And he knows all about Russia. And it was true, this I could see the moment he walked into the room that evening: a man of formidable years (seventy, according to Annalise) whose lifetime of experience in the world was a raging fire inside him still: tall and imposing, with a brow like a gorgeous ship, he strode right up to me and declared, You and I have a lot to talk about.
Yes? I replied, unable to take my eyes off him.
He was from Philadelphia, he told me, the son of Russian Jews. Crazy about the Revolution, as he described himself in his youth, he’d left to report from Moscow in the 1920s, married a Russian woman, and had two children there. But my father’s Great Terror had driven him out—first without his family, though eventually they were able to follow him to the States.
And where are they now? I asked. Your wife and children?
Here and there.
He went on to tell me about his work with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Malraux; biographies of Gandhi and Churchill.
You’ve read my Stalin book?
No.
I had a six-hour interview with him in 1927.
The year after I was born.
I know. Your father was “unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous, and irresistible.” I’m quoting from my book. But when he talked about you, he couldn’t stop smiling.
It is possible that the immediate impression made on me by Max was not entirely unlike his description of my father. He was seated next to me at dinner; we talked all evening. Dessert was still on the table when he leaned close and said, Shall I drop you home?
His fondness for women, his visceral physicality, was as much his calling card as the cataloging of his own brilliant adventures in my bed that night: this he wanted known, and I knew it; and I suppose I have fallen for him at least in part because of it.
26 October
Max stands at his kitchen-counter island, shoveling chicken chow mein directly from the container into his mouth with deftly wielded chopsticks, managing at the same time to refill our glasses from a bulbous jug of Chianti dressed in a straw basket.
So you see this as a new book?
He is referring to the pages of writing that, at his urging, I recently sent him for his opinion—pages now laid out on the counter between us, amid packets of duck sauce and hot Chinese mustard.
Trying not to sound too defensive, I reply that I don’t yet know what these pages will be—precisely why I asked him to read them in the first place.
Because to speak frankly, Svetlana, based on what I’ve read so far, I’d think twice before trying to publish this material in its present state.
I assure you, Max, I say crisply, I have thought more than twice.
It’s a figure of speech.
I am not allowed to criticize this country?
I didn’t say that.
Maybe you misunderstand my English.
In that case, maybe you should go back to writing in Russian.
Max, I am sick of Russian.
You might be sick of Russian, but it’s the Russian in you that people still want to hear about.
Give me back my pages.
Now don’t overreact. And suddenly Max is smiling, as if he’s just thought of the perfect gift to give me that will make everything better. Tell you what, he says. We’ll write a book together.
I eye him suspiciously. A book about what?
He puts down the carton of Chinese-American food and drains his glass of Italian red wine. He circles the counter in three confident steps and slides his arms around my waist, his warm breath pulsing against my ear.
Oh, I can think of a few things. Can’t you?
1 November
Last night, Max knocked on my door wearing—it took me a moment to understand—a Halloween costume.
&nbs
p; A long flowing beard, a wig of thick unkempt hair, and a peasant’s tunic.
I laughed, impressed. Tolstoy?
He looked hurt. Rasputin.
Ah…
And who are you?
Akhmatova, I answered, as though it were obvious.
Later, at the Halloween party he brought me to, we were able to laugh together at the fact that no one present was able to successfully identify either of the characters we were playing. There was a Pocahontas, a Lincoln, a Theodore Roosevelt, an Elvis in attendance, but no Russians.
As the evening wore on, though, and this was unexpected, I found the idea of impersonating one of my own people, especially one I revered, even in such surface fashion, to be a disturbingly alienating experience; I began, in the midst of all those adults playing make-believe like children, to feel homesick.
After only an hour or so, I found Max across the room talking to two women dressed like flappers from the 1920s, or some such. I told him that I wanted to leave.
Have a drink, he said, frowning.
I’ve had a drink.
Anna Akhmatova, he introduced me to his two companions, meet Louise Brooks and Mae West.
Max, I want to go. Please take me home.
His jaw clenched and he sighed loudly through his nose. Be back soon, ladies, he said to them.
The ten-minute ride to Wilson Road was tense between us.
I felt myself sinking. I said quietly, Leaving my children in Russia was an unforgivable mistake.
For God’s sake, Svetlana. It was just a fucking party.
We reached my street. He pulled over in front of my house, but kept the engine running.
I’m heading back to the festivities.
His voice held no warmth. Perfunctory as an afterthought, he leaned across the seat to give me a quick kiss goodbye.
His lips would have brushed my cheek, but I was no longer in the car.
EDITOR’S NOTE
November. The month of her mother’s suicide. The month which all her life will arrive like a cuckoo clock of despair, calling, You are alone, you are alone, you are alone. This year no better, maybe even a bit worse: she has told me (under the rubric of lawyer-client privilege, I assume) of her recent all-too-brief affair with the journalist Max Kirschner and how it ended. Kirschner is already rumored to be sleeping with his new research assistant, a grad student a third his age.
And Peter Horvath, Esquire? Kind of you to ask. No such romantic entanglements for him. Behold him in early middle age, tucked away in his Park Avenue office, sticking diligently to the professional script as it once was written for young men like himself in the vaunted halls of the nation’s finest law schools. His mentor, Lucas Wardlow, is semiretired and rarely in the building anymore. And without the famous attorney’s worldly encouragement and sophisticated bonhomie to guide his fortunes, it is fair to say that almost the entirety of Horvath’s more civic-minded (i.e., pro bono) practice at Wardlow Jenks has gradually been squeezed aside by routine corporate work, financial contracts, negotiations, and the like, which pay the firm’s and his own hefty bills well enough, but leave him somewhat less than proud.
Among his many clients, however, there remains one notable exception to this rule of widgets and monotony. (Hint: she is Russian.)
She is the client—the only one—whom he regularly telephones during nonoffice hours (and always on a private line, with the door closed), simply to “check in.” The client whose roller-coaster moods he has come to be able to read with the nuance of an expert seismologist. The client whose always undiluted opinions about people, places, nations, politics he has begun—much to his surprise, alarm, and, yes, occasional amusement—to absorb as his own. The client whose level of emotional energy has become the barometer that tells him the atmospheric pressure of his day. The client whose memories of her traumatic past—whether in fact she herself perceives how traumatic—have increasingly come to weigh on him too, as if (though he knows this is fantasy) he were not a relatively recent addition to her life but rather an old and intimate conspirator, someone who had been at her side from the beginning, in a country far from his own, inseparable from the joys and hurts of her foreign, inconceivable life.
And yet for all this, a neutral observer, if such a person existed, might have remarked how during these crucial weeks of our story Peter Horvath himself, ever the professional, continued to conduct his public life without the appearance of any major disturbance of the heart.
But hold on a minute: yes, out there, a wind is beginning to blow.
* * *
—
Thus we arrive at the Thursday before Thanksgiving, 1974. The phone buzzes and my secretary, Beverly, informs me that Mrs. Evans is on the line.
“Put her through.”
“Peter, is that you?”
“I have it, Beverly, thanks. I’m here, Svetlana. Everything all right?”
“Peter, do you have special recipe for cooking turkey?”
A surprising urgency to her question, as if I’m being asked for the nuclear launch codes. “You mean for Thanksgiving?”
“Of course Thanksgiving, what else? I am talking real American turkey.”
“Hmm. Sort of outside my field of expertise. I could ask Martha, if you’d like.”
“Never mind. I can see you have no idea.”
“You’re right,” I quickly agree, relieved to drop the matter.
“Fine, then.” She actually sounds put out that I don’t have a turkey recipe up my sleeve. “Peter?”
“What?”
“You know Bonhoeffer?”
“Bon-who?”
“Bonhoeffer. Theologian. German, but against Nazis. My new friend Dottie lends him to me. His book calls what is happening to me a crisis of faith. Temptation of the spirit, he says. The kind of alone you only feel when God has left.”
“God hasn’t left you, Svetlana. If He was with you before, He’s with you now. God knows I’m no expert on God or Bon-what’s-his-name, but I know that’s how it works. Most of all, I know you.”
A sudden crack on the other end of the line, followed by a buzzing wisp of static. And oddly, as if I were at her side, I can picture in my mind exactly what’s happened: the telephone receiver has fallen out of her hand and landed on the linoleum. I can picture where she’s standing in her kitchen, the twisted length of phone cord. And now I hear what can only be the unscrewing of a certain kind of bottle cap—Smirnoff’s—followed by the unmistakable sound of liquor being poured over cubes of ice.
According to the silver clock on my desk (from Martha, Tiffany’s, engraved for our tenth wedding anniversary), it’s a quarter past three. “Svetlana, are you drinking? It’s the afternoon. Look, maybe it’s none of my business—”
“Why not, if it makes me feel better?” she snaps. (There’s my girl: daughter of the vozhd.)
“For Yasha’s sake,” I remind her. “And because you know as well as I do that drinking’s not going to make you feel better. It’s going to make you feel worse.”
“What the hell do you know? I’m a bad mother. I never learn.”
“You’re not a bad mother. You’re just having a rough time.”
She blows her nose.
“You’re crying.”
“No.”
“Listen, I’ll stop over and see you this evening. Okay? From the station. I don’t know how I’ll work it out, but I will.”
“You’ll check on me,” she accuses me bitterly. “My Park Avenue lawyer.”
“Did it ever occur to you that if I check on you, as you call it, maybe it’s because I actually—”
“Sure. Jenks Wardlow. One hundred seventy-five bucks an hour and all-you-can-eat buffet.”
“It’s Wardlow Jenks, not Jenks Wardlow. And fuck you.” Enraged, without thinking, I hang up on her. (Sixteen y
ears practicing law, and she’s the first client I have ever hung up on.) Pulse still racing, I stare dumbly at the black phone on my desk.
Scared out of my wits, because I’d been about to say that I loved her.
A minute later, the phone buzzes. “Mr. Horvath, Mrs. Evans is on the line again.”
“Tell her I’ve left for the day.”
* * *
—
The holidays pass with no word from her. Has she fired me? Relieved me of my obligations to her, professional and otherwise? The prospect, the silence, the darkness have a paralyzing effect, making me outwardly quiet and dull, a dead man walking in my own home. Carving a fifteen-pound bird at the sideboard in our dining room, Martha’s parents and unmarried sister at the table discussing Watergate and how to get tickets to the Broadway revival of Gypsy, I let my mind drift to wondering what sort of turkey Svetlana ended up cooking after all, and for whom.
“Peter.”
I come to: Martha beside me, holding a stack of plates.
“What’s wrong with you? I’ve been standing here for about a minute.”
“Sorry.”
She hands me the top plate and stares at me a few moments longer—as if reading my mind—before saying, “Remember, Mother prefers dark meat.”
And now it’s Christmas. Jean no longer likes Carly Simon, she likes Led Zeppelin. It is New Year’s. Nineteen seventy-five, the year the Vietnam war will finally end and my daughter will turn fourteen and I, her father, will turn forty-two.
Svetlana will be forty-nine.
February 6, 1975
Dear Mr. Horvath,
My husband and I are giving a small birthday dinner for our friend Lana Evans on the 28th of the month. When I asked Lana which guests she would like me to invite, the only people she specifically mentioned were you and your wife. Would you come? I’m sure it would make her happy. The evening will be a simple affair, as my husband, Thomas, and I—he is Assistant Minister at All Saints’ Church here in town, you may have heard—are not fancy people. But it would be our pleasure to meet you and your wife, and to welcome you to our home.
The Red Daughter Page 16