The Red Daughter

by John Burnham Schwartz

  My children knew Brajesh, I hear myself telling Rajesh/Rog, before correcting my mistake. My first two children, I mean. In the Soviet Union.

  As it happens, I have an old picture of Josef in my purse (the one of him holding his Soviet passport), and this I pull out now to show the Indian boy in the English pub that I am no mere lunatic woman or liar, saying, This is my eldest. My Josef. A doctor in Moscow, you see? Yasha—I mean Jacob—has never met his brother, but one day I hope he will. And his dear sister, Katya, too.

  And poor little Rajesh/Rog with his brown skin and serious brown eyes, probably already dreaming of the long Christmas break when his parents or someone, anyone, might come and fetch him from this Orwellian Quaker nightmare, Rajesh nods—what else can he do?—and continues to stare at my son’s photograph until finally I slip it back into my purse, releasing him.

  India, I announce to Rajesh, and perhaps I sound a bit angry now, I can no longer tell, is where I changed my life forever.

  Can we go? demands Yasha with furious embarrassment, looking not at me but out the window to the gray English street.

  Of course, I agree. Forgive me for remembering.

  I pay the bill, counting out the pounds and shillings. In my head I still do math in Russian.

  3 November

  I miss Peter. He is the one, the only one, who knows all the characters of my story and takes them to heart. Who might fight for and against them as I would, as real people instead of tilted windmills. Times, I confess, often late in the evening with Yasha away at school, when some nagging, pitiful one-sided conversation insinuates itself into my thoughts and remains there like a thread crying out to be pulled—and before I know it I find myself with phone in hand, ready to call out to the only man in the world who might tell me once again, selflessly and with absolute conviction, not to yank like a frightened child on the very thing that will be my undoing.

  But I don’t call. Because each time there comes at the last second a flash of lightning in my storming brain that is a picture of him sitting in his lawyer’s office calmly offering his paid counsel over the phone to someone else, another client who is not me, and Beverly just outside the door eavesdropping on every word. And each time the recognition of this other, formal existence of his hurls me first into panic—if he is hiding in there behind his cold professional walls, every client equal and the same, then where and who am I?—and finally into anger—how dare he treat me like this?—until I slam down the phone without calling.

  Which leaves me alone and without him. And so it has been for a long time now.

  Too often like this: two dangerous seas colliding in my head.

  I don’t know why.

  22 November

  Yesterday there was a screening of Oblomov (with subtitles) organized by the Cambridge University Russian Society. I was not specially invited—almost no one in this city knows my real identity—but rather attended as the guest of my downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Fiona Driscoll, retired librarian originally from the county of Cork, Ireland. Fiona occasionally invites me down for tea while Yasha is away at school. She makes a strong cuppa, as they say, which she serves with thick tea biscuits, good for not being too sweet. Her gas fire gives off precious little heat, but at least she has one.

  Fiona knows who my father was. I told her myself after confirming that (a) she is quite a solitary person and not prone to gossip; and (b) she isn’t inclined to relish the information for any lurid historical aspect, but rather as a curious fact of the kind she regularly had access to during her decades of service in the Cambridge University Library and that, now as a pensioner, she often employs in solving the crossword puzzles that are her primary source of entertainment.

  She had no particular interest in Oblomov but assumed, because it was Russian, that I might. Still, she was surprised on our walk to the screening venue when I told her that I was acquainted from my college days with both the director, Mikhalkov, and the star, Tabakov.

  You know them?

  Mikhalkov had a run-in with the Soviet censors, I explained to her. He managed to continue making films only by telling stories about the seasons with no people in them and virtually no dialogue.

  Stories about the seasons? cried Fiona, horrified. Not a whiff of dialogue or people, you say? Dear me, what have I gotten us into?

  We persevered. The cinema rather makeshift, more academic than social. It was only about half-full, something I would be grateful for later.

  Some English don with an eggplant nose stood up and delivered a few words about Oblomov and the nineteenth-century Russian literary idea of the Superfluous Man; about Mikhalkov and the current state of Soviet cinema. I wasn’t really listening. And then, before I was quite expecting it, the man sat down, the room darkened, and the screen filled with light.

  * * *

  —

  A flashback in time.

  A beautiful little boy with reddish curls in a linen nightshirt wakes alone in his big cozy bed. It is Oblomov as a child, one knows instantly.

  And now he is running down a long hallway.

  And now being bathed in a round wooden tub by his dear old nurse.

  And now she touches him with such ancient tenderness.

  And now, and now…

  He is running out, out, alive and smiling, into an endless green meadow.

  * * *

  —

  Lana? Lana, are you all right?

  Fiona much concerned, ancient librarian’s hand light as a feather on my back, though tactile through the wool of my coat, which I never did take off, for I am always cold in this bloody country where it never has the guts to snow; yes, I am cold.

  Lana, tell me what I should do.

  But this I cannot tell her, because I do not know.

  The film is over. It ended, I suddenly remember, with me so overwhelmed by emotion that I was hyperventilating, unable to rise from my seat. I am breathing a bit easier now, it seems, but we are the last two people in the theater.

  That little boy, I gasp.

  The wee child at the beginning? He’s but a dream, Fiona assures me. Oblo—how d’you pronounce his name again? Well, he’s only dreaming about himself back when he was a boy. Quite tender, really. His old governess tells him his mother’s just back from her long trip and whatever he does, he’d best not wake her.

  Yes, it’s coming back now: he is a good boy and does not wake her. Neither in his dream at the beginning, nor in his dream at the end. Good little Oblomov, before he grows up and becomes the Superfluous Man. And so returned to him but unwoken, his mother never does appear in the film. She is the dream that refuses to take shape, the fiction that will not rectify itself into reality. She remains forever the pure product of his anticipation, his aching desire to be reunited with her, his agony and joy, which, equally, are the exact dimensions of the hole scythed in his heart by her absence.

  * * *

  —

  Back in my ever-chilly flat, Fiona soon begs off. I remain alone in my kitchen, coat still buttoned, staring at the clock on the wall the way earlier I stared at young Oblomov.

  Nine P.M. in Cambridge. Eleven P.M. in Moscow.

  I pour myself a drink, just the one, and sit down by the heavy black telephone to wait for the dream to end.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  December 10, 1983

  Dear S—

  Since I haven’t heard from you in many months, I’m sending this to the last address I have for you in Cambridge.

  Paper boat in an ocean.

  At least I’m not your lawyer anymore. (The one letter of yours that reached me, thanks.) So we don’t have to argue about that.

  The meter’s no longer running. There’s no “conflict of interest.” No bills to send or pay. Not Wardlow, not Jenks: just Horvath.

  I’m in my office now, the door closed.


  I don’t think this feeling is ever going away. I’m tired of trying to understand it.

  Write me sometime, will you? Or call. Tell me what to do.

  Love,

  Peter

  It was Vera Dubov, the translator of Svetlana’s journals, who, twenty-nine years after it was written, delivered this letter back to me. She was perhaps six months into her challenging translation task, so at the time we were rarely in contact; she was doing her work and I was doing mine (though in fact, being retired, I had nothing special to do). It must have been after 5:00 that day, because I was fixing myself a martini when my doorbell rang.

  “Professor Dubov,” I said, surprised. “Did we have an appointment?”

  She shook her head, clearly uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Mr. Horvath. I should have called first.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I have found something I think may belong to you.”

  Reaching into her shoulder bag, she produced a letter, sans envelope. I immediately recognized the old Wardlow Jenks stationery: bone-white weave, Tiffany watermark, and—visible in reverse through the backside of the folded single sheet—the firm’s name in the fourteen-point Garamond type that Lucas Wardlow always preferred.

  “Where did you get that?”

  My voice sharper than intended; I saw color rise in Slavic cheeks. The hair at Vera Dubov’s temples lately starting to gray, I noticed. Six months living inside Svetlana’s head could do that to you.

  “It was stuck between the pages of one of her journals,” she said. “Like this, no envelope.”

  I took the letter from her hand, but didn’t bother unfolding it.

  “You’re not going to look at it?” Whatever melodrama she’d been expecting, she couldn’t hide her disappointment.

  “Not necessary, thanks. I know what it is.”

  “Mr. Horvath, I want you to know that I stopped reading the instant I realized you might be the author. That the letter was…intimate.”

  I let the depiction hang. From where I was standing I had a clear view past my visitor to the dogwood tree in my yard: late fall, branches shorn of decoration. Stab of grief so sharp behind my eyes I had to bite down on the inside of my lip to keep back the tears.

  “Mr. Horvath, are you okay?”

  “It was a long time ago,” I managed to say.

  The Russia scholar looked me straight in the eye then. How much more interesting I was to her now than I’d been before she’d found the letter. Before she’d read the letter; I was sure she’d read the entire thing. I know I certainly would have, had I been in her place.

  “Have a good night, Miss Dubov,” I said, before she could say anything more. “And thank you.”

  1984: ENGLAND

  7 January

  Most days are not to be remembered. Believed, yes, but not remembered.

  Then there are days like today. Days like unicorns, not to be believed with one’s own eyes. Days of radical incredulity. Days that could not have happened. And so it is as though they never happened.

  These are the days one never forgets.

  * * *

  —

  A pot of my barley soup simmering on the stove. A cooking glove—no, oven mitt—on one hand as I bend to take a tray of heat-and-serve rolls out of the oven. Yasha still home for Christmas holiday, now upstairs dilly-dallying (his new most popular word other than shit cock fuck), and these are his favorite rolls, served with loads of English butter. The phone rings, but I’m not expecting anything—the day thus far I mean, while perfectly nice, has been of the credible and forgettable kind, and so I finish removing the rolls from the oven and even give the soup a couple of stirs with my long wooden spoon before walking over to the phone table and answering.

  Hello, yes?

  Mother?

  In his grown man’s Russian the word is still a sound before it is a word. The way my boy was once a spirit in my womb before ever he was a boy.

  Mother, it’s me.

  Josef…? In my breast, my own heart is eating me alive.

  Mother, I’m writing a paper for a medical journal and there’s a study I can’t get hold of because it was done in England. Cambridge University. It would be very helpful for what I’m writing—for my position, you understand? Do you think you might be able to find a copy and send it to me?

  His tone astonishingly routine, as if we’d been speaking just the other week, rather than the other decade. As if we’d been in the middle of some pleasant conversation only he remembered.

  All right, I…Some kind of medical study, you say?

  Yes. Thanks, Mother. Do you have a pen? I’ll give you the details.

  * * *

  —

  I wrote them down. Good thing, because only a few hours later I can’t remember any distinct fact about his urgent paper. On the liver? The kidney? The heart? What I remember is the sound of my son’s Russian voice speaking to me as a son would speak to his mother—just that. And then, once the call was over, breaking out in sobs there in the kitchen, with my oven mitt still on.

  Because of a set of instructions.

  No. Because he is still my son.

  11 January

  Somehow Yasha’s idea of Christmas break does not include hours spent deep in the intestines of Cambridge University Library, haranguing one librarian’s assistant after another until finally, just in time for tea, the obscure yet much-desired study of some kind of plaque-eating microbe comes wheeling toward us on a cart. A drab little thing, after all that. Then a long line for the copy machine before we can escape to open air. By now the post office is closed; Josef’s mailing instructions, in any case, are too complicated for me to maneuver in a single day. As recompense for his frustration, I take Yasha to a tea shop for a cuppa and a splurge on clotted cream and thrice-baked scones. I don’t tell him—not today, anyway—how low the money is running, even with his scholarship.

  Of course, he has questions about these siblings he’s never met and practically never heard about. And fortunately I have a bit more to tell him. For yesterday a letter from Josef arrived in my postbox—for it to follow so quick on the heels of his phone call, I assume but would never risk saying aloud, he must have received official sanction to reopen contact with me—in which he preemptively offered answers to certain basic wonderings I had not yet had occasion to share with him myself. My grandson, Ilya, for example, whose existence until now I’ve heard about only from my stargazing Princeton neighbor Roman Smoluchowski, is today thirteen and living, it concerns me to learn, not with Josef and his new wife, Lyuda (whoever she is), but rather with his ex-wife, Elena (whoever she was).

  And speaking of depressing news, Josef wrote that he would tell me what he could about our beloved Katya, though this would not amount to very much, for he regretted to say that he and his sister were no longer in touch. Some time ago, her work as a geophysicist had taken her to some rancid Siberian outpost called Kamchatka. He did not know what she did there exactly, but he thought it had something to do with volcanic gases. How reassuring. Katya is married and has a daughter, my granddaughter, whose name Josef did not supply perhaps because he does not know, or does not care to know, the name of his only niece.

  And reading my son’s letter, I thought of my infant daughter in her hospital incubator only hours after her birth, the size of my hand and already struggling to insist herself on the world. That those days of miraculous survival should have led, after so much frightened love, to these decades of profound absence and familial dislocation feels now, I tell you, like nothing less than a crime against humanity, the true guilt for which can be laid at the feet of only one person. And that person is me.

  The photo of himself that Josef chose to include with his letter presented its own documentary case for the effects of unhappy living (or perhaps the unhappy effects of living). My first na
useating impression was that I was looking at a photograph of my alcoholic brother Vasily in the months after his return from prison. But this middle-aged man, my Josef, rather, for all his mournful, balding dissolution, gave off none of Vasily’s desperate insubordination. My boy looked ill and weary and sad.

  I could not help myself. If I could not save my Russian daughter, I could still save my Russian son. I went straight to the phone. He’d given me his number and I dialed it with clumsy fingers. The Soviet tone: four, five times resounding and with each one the bloody KGB pounding on your door, then the double click—

  Hello?

  Josef, you stop your drinking!

  Mother?

  You stop it, Bunny! Do you hear me? Now pull yourself together. You’ll die if you keep on like this. I can see it in your face.

  Mother, it’s the middle of the night.

  So it was.

  * * *

  —

  So the three of us, we’ve all got different dads, Yasha observes in faux Cockney, trying to scoop the last of the thrice-baked crumbs off his tea plate and into his mouth.