And there is my Josef. A handsome grown man with beautiful sad eyes—his father Grigori’s eyes—holding his Soviet passport up to the camera.
The question, I’m afraid, Dick says, is whether the letter’s real author isn’t this supposed American journalist, whoever he is, or your son, but rather Yuri Andropov and the KGB.
I stare at my CIA minder as if he has just spit on my shoes. Or if it’s true and my son is desperate to join me as he says?
This one’s a hard nut to crack, Svetlana. But think how the Soviets could be playing this: Stalin’s daughter, already a pawn of American intelligence and now trying to recruit her son as well. Which, think about it, it allows them to turn the tables on us by having your own son—Stalin’s grandson, no less—expose you for the traitor they say you really are.
Dick, Peter says in a low voice, I think you’ve made your point.
You’re right. I apologize. I simply wanted to make sure that our friend here sees the bigger picture.
She more than sees it—she’s living it.
But they are both mistaken. The only picture I am seeing and living at this moment is the small black-and-white photograph in my hand.
My son has grown a mustache, I observe to no one in particular. And then I start to cry.
1 May
The last Americans have left Saigon. And so the Vietnam disaster ends like most disasters: a foolish nightmare whose terrors continue to haunt the survivors long after waking.
13 May
I am growing almost cruel with Peter. Sometimes I think he knows that some deep part of me perhaps wants to punish him for reasons that are no real fault of his own, may in fact have nothing to do with him. Yet it is this very part that now and again he seems to need to batter himself against like a wave crashing against a rocky shore. The other day, after taking the early train home from work so we can steal eighteen minutes in my bed while across the hall Yasha watches yet another rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies, Peter, like some misplaced Romantic poet, declares he doesn’t give a fuck what happens now, he simply wants to feel alive because all around us the world is dying. He rolls off me—the clock ticking, always ticking, Martha and little Jean any minute starting dinner without him and The Beverly Hillbillies about to end—and sits at the edge of my bed, sits there naked with his head in his hands, either more or less like himself than at any time in his known history, it’s hard to say, and tells me that he is thinking about leaving his marriage. And when I just lie there, naked like him and unresponsive, he turns and looks at me with desperate, unhappy eyes. And in a tired voice I say, So you are asking me to tell you what you must do? Which I believe is what he knew he would get from me, and I believe in this case even wanted.
We have been twice more in the afternoon to the Edison Hotel, with its lovers and latkes and old Jews in hats. Peter Horvath, Esquire, has played hooky from his demanding, highly remunerative legal job to take me hiking and make love to me in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. And he has given me a copy of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime inscribed with love, Peter. In the novel, which I read with admiration, the rich husband of a former chorus girl and American cultural sensation murders his wife’s rich lover. I don’t know what to make of this, I must say. But then perhaps a patience with historical metaphors is not in my blood.
Or patience, period.
So I could be more loving to him, yes. Which in turn makes me feel cruel. Which in turn reminds me of familial/historical connections that naturally I harbor but he does not, cannot, connections he thinks he has begun to fathom and would like somehow to share with me, as if to take some of their weight from my heart. Because he is a good man. And I love him for this, yes I do.
No, it is not Peter’s fault that the letter about my Josef was sent to him rather than to me. It is not Peter’s fault that in order to protect my son in case the letter is real, I have been forced to act as though it is false. It is not Peter’s fault, therefore, that I have done nothing to respond to my son’s entreaties for love and attention from the mother who abandoned him and his sister. It is not Peter’s fault that with each succeeding year since my defection, I have had to face the nauseating probability that the dreamed epiphany about my children’s futures that came to me while I was in India—the rationale I offered myself for abandoning them—was far more dream than epiphany. Nor is it Peter’s fault that so much of what energy I possess anymore—no longer what it was even when I was forty—has been redirected away from my abandoned first two children, spent elsewhere in my attempt (failed) to be a wife again and now the mother, the only mother, that Yasha needs. No, none of these things could possibly be Peter’s fault.
And yet aside from loving him for who he is, which I do because he is a good man and closer to me than anyone else, I confess to blaming him more than a little for these same things that are not his fault and that he has not done. And yes, sometimes perhaps I wish to punish him, because I have not the fucking courage to punish myself as I should be punished.
22 May
Today, Josef’s thirtieth birthday, I no longer felt able to control myself. I picked up the telephone and called him.
When he was very young, tiny I mean, just a scrap of human belief, I called my firstborn Bunny. It was a name he loved, I am certain, for every single time I used it his face would light into a smile.
I can no longer remember when or for what reason I stopped calling him Bunny. Only that I did.
* * *
—
Seventy-five hundred kilometers away, I heard the familiar double click of the line connecting:
Who is it?
Bunny, is that really you?
I heard my son pause and think. Then I heard him make his choice, biting down hard on each word with his teeth:
It has been eight years. Do you think you sound the same?
And the line went dead.
EDITOR’S NOTE
“Your mother?”
My father’s language, like his limbs at this late stage of illness, hardly functions anymore. Even when healthy, he was a reticent man. Now he exists on the cusp of a permanent silence that, frankly, is sometimes a guilty relief to us both.
“She said she had a meeting in town,” I tell him. “She’ll be home late.”
He looks at me as if he would say something more if he had the energy. He is forty-four years old. The eyes staring out at me appear twice that.
“Can you take a little more broth?” I say, to move him off the subject. My mother has had a lot of “meetings” lately, that is just a fact.
With my hand supporting the back of his head, I tip him forward until his mouth reaches the straw I’ve offered. He makes a halfhearted suck, my mother’s homemade chicken stock darkening the waxed paper tube like urine. Then his eyes close, our signal for “no more.” I ease him back on the pillow. His helpless exhaustion a familiar specter, afterimage of himself that none of us will ever be able to edit out of the negative that was once his life.
I am at the door of his sickroom off the parlor, where he has lived these last six months, about to switch off the light, when I hear him murmur something.
“What, Dad?”
“Your mother,” he gasps.
“What about her?”
“I understand.”
I am thirteen years old. I do not ask what it is he understands about her. I say good night and turn out the lamp and leave him there in the darkness.
* * *
—
It is not long afterward—in my memory the same night, but that must be wrong—that I wake in my room on the second floor of the house to find my mother quietly weeping at the foot of my bed.
“Mom, what is it? Is Dad dead?”
She shakes her head, which she’s holding in her hands. “No. But I wish I was.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why the
hell not, if it’s true?”
“Are you drunk?”
“Listen to me, Peter. Are you listening? This might be the most important thing I’m ever going to tell you about myself.”
In the light from the hallway, I see that her mascara has started to run under her left eye. She has painted her nails, which she almost never does; they are gleaming faintly at the tips of her fingers like the carapaces of ten beetles. She has done her hair too, and the smell of her perfume, which she rarely wears, is in the room with us, and all of it is strange.
“You should go to sleep,” I say, as though I were the parent.
“No. Listen to me. I felt…”
“Mom, I don’t want to know.”
“Peter, listen to me now. I ended it tonight. But I need you to understand. If I didn’t get some love, just a little bit of love in my life, I felt I would die.”
* * *
—
I recall a Senate hearing that was aired live on television not so long ago. They seem to occur almost weekly now, these staged gladiatorial inquests, there are so many channels to fill with “content” so many hours of the day, and God knows I have time to watch. The issue being investigated on this particular morning was some gross malfeasance on the part of powerful government officials toward those weaker and more vulnerable citizens they were duty bound to protect. (There’s a surprise.) I do not recall the details of the case or the names of the two men called to testify that day. What I recall are their voices, their faces, and their manners.
The first official had his lawyer sitting beside him; every so often they would incline their heads toward each other and confer in tones too low to be caught by the microphones. It was like witnessing lovers, almost, or a rabbinical confession exposed to the public. After which, and so counseled, in every case the man testifying went on to reply to the question without actually answering it.
The afternoon session found a different official in the chair facing the senators. This second man had a lawyer beside him too. Yet at no point during his two and a half hours before the committee did he consult his legal counsel, or even glance in his direction. He met each question with his shoulders squared and his gaze direct on the speaker. He never once looked away. He took responsibility for his actions while at the same time calling on other responsible parties to do the same. It was his opinion, he stated, that in this particular tragedy there were no innocent parties. And from listening to his voice, watching his face, this is what I remember, wherever you happened to be or whatever you happened to be doing, through electrical wires, silicon chips, the warping mysteries of radio waves, it was impossible not to understand that here before you was a person speaking the truth. And if this person were speaking the truth, which he was, then that first man, that government official with the lawyer in his pocket, could not have been speaking the truth.
* * *
—
My mother ended her affair. Whoever he was. Whatever it was, love or something like it, someone’s touch, that kept her alive while my father was slowly dying in the room off the parlor. After that night, we never spoke about it again. She had ended it, and yet she went on. How else to describe it? We all went on, except my father, who died that spring. And the following spring, in our same house where love had died but we had gone on, inexplicably, my mother and I were having breakfast early one morning before I went to school. I was studying at the table, an American history textbook open next to my plate of toast. My mother was reading the local paper with a mug of black coffee and a cigarette. Actually, I remember, it was yesterday’s newspaper, we always got it a day late because it was cheaper that way.
“I’m going to lie down,” she announced quite suddenly. And I saw that there were tears in her eyes. Before I could ask what had happened, she got up and left the kitchen. Left behind her cigarette, still burning in the ashtray, and the newspaper, still open to the page she’d been looking at.
My mother had been reading a wedding announcement—the type of news item I could not recall her ever paying the slightest attention to before.
Local dentist Carl Drummond, a thirty-eight-year-old widower, had married twenty-six-year-old Frieda Shepherd, who managed a flower shop. The bride had met her husband just three months earlier, when she’d gone in to have a cracked molar repaired. It was, she declared, “literally love at first sight.”
The photograph of Carl Drummond with his arm around his new wife made him seem a handsome man who could not believe his good fortune.
* * *
—
“Anything you want to tell me?” Dick Thompson opened our conversation once the waitress (Mexican, wearing what looked like some sort of Irish Renaissance costume, with fitted bodice and puffed sleeves) had left us our drinks and gone away.
“You called me,” I pointed out.
“Come on, Peter. This is what I do for a living, remember.”
“Irish bars with Mexican waitresses?”
Dick smiled enigmatically. “Secrets.”
“Ah.”
“I’m going to level with you. Our Russian friend’s looking increasingly unstable. I’m telling you, Pete, if you’re not careful you’re going to end up inside her head, seeing the world the way she does.”
I was silent.
“Think of Martha and Jean, at least,” Dick said.
“You think I don’t?”
“Don’t get testy. I’m trying to help.”
“I never asked her to leave her country, Dick. Or to come to this one. It wasn’t my idea. I never wanted to get involved in any of it.”
“History doesn’t happen because we ask for it, Peter. It just fucking happens. We all deal with it as best we can.”
* * *
—
Before I left for Penn Station, Dick handed me an unmarked envelope. “For the train,” he said, patting me sympathetically on the shoulder. “Do me a favor and burn it all when you get home.”
Every seat on the 7:49 to Princeton was full; to find any privacy I had to go stand in the clattering vestibule between cars. The envelope I’d been given contained copies of four classified documents relating to Josef Alliluyev, thirty-year-old son of Svetlana Alliluyeva and her first husband, Grigori Morozov, and his repeated but thus far failed attempts over the previous two years to open channels of communication with his mother in the United States through the intermediation of someone named Krimsky—the same “American journalist” who’d written the note I’d received at my office concerning Josef’s desire to visit his mother in America, and whom Dick Thompson deemed likely to be in the employ of the KGB. According to the very brief note I was now reading on the New Jersey Transit train as it rattled away from Manhattan, also from Krimsky, “Josef Alliluyev has lately been expressing deep concern, even panic, about possible punishments befalling him if he does not cease all attempts to visit his mother immediately.”
The second document was a copied translation of an undated memo to the Central Committee of the Communist Party by KGB head Yuri Andropov:
In a letter that we intercepted, Josef Alliluev [sic] complains about his loneliness after the divorce from his wife, about how he misses his mother, wants to see her. It is established that he has intentions to go abroad. In the past years, Josef Alliluev developed irritation, lost interest in social life, abuses alcoholic beverages. It seems rational for the Ministry of Health of the USSR to offer him more attention as a young doctor and for the Ministry of Health of the USSR to exchange his apartment for a better one.
The third document was a copy of an internal CIA memo confirming another, more recently intercepted note from Krimsky stating that Josef Alliluyev not only had broken off all contact with him (Krimsky) and was no longer seeking to reunite with his mother but had just moved into a new apartment, significantly nicer than his previous residence, made available to him by the Soviet government.<
br />
Affixed to this third document by a paper clip was a fourth—a plain white index card on which Dick Thompson had written:
“So Krimsky not on other team after all. JA staying put. Preferable for you to be one to tell S.”
* * *
—
She greeted me at the front door of her house with a long vodka kiss, ice cubes rattling in the tall glass she was holding.
“Peter, what a nice surprise. Drink?”
“Maybe in a minute.”
She put her hand under my suit jacket, flat against my chest, then tilted her head back and gave me a long look; for an unpleasant moment, I thought she’d somehow guessed why I’d come. But no, it was just the vodka shining through, and as I followed her into her living room I felt the gratifying reprieve of wanting her all over again.
“How long can you stay?”
“I’m not in a hurry.”
“We can watch Dick Cavett together.” A sly, booze-lit smile. “Maybe try some other things too.”
Downing the last of her drink, she turned and kissed me again, the vodka metallic and cool in the heat of her mouth. Her movements looser from the alcohol, I could feel it, her temperature warmer. And the truth was that, as Dick Thompson’s documents burned a hole in my briefcase, her buzz excited me while giving me an uneasy pause of foreboding. I wanted to hold her and make love to her. But I also knew that however happy she was to see me right now, however passionate and loving, the moment she recollected that Dick and I had told her to act as if Josef’s intentions to see her weren’t genuine, forcing her to turn her back on his pleas, the very intensity of her emotional high would turn on itself, and something darker and raging would appear in her heart.
“You like this Barry Manilow?”
The Red Daughter Page 19