I look at him. Is he bitter? Perhaps not yet, but that is no guarantee of anything. Hungry, yes. Growing so fast he will have tree rings inside his legs.
You already know this, I say as gently as I can, in fact not sure whether I have been clear about the countless things that I have tried to hide from him for his own protection.
My youngest child shakes his head in frustration.
What do I tell him? What do I tell any of my children?
3 April
The thing that I feared has happened.
On Friday my phone rang early in the morning while I was still drinking my coffee and trying to get warm. A male voice with a pub accent on the other end of the line.
Am I speaking with Svetlana Stalin?
Who is this? For a moment, the bizarre half hope that I was enduring an April Fools’ prank. But then the voice continued:
Svetlana Alliluyeva? The blistering idiot pronounced my mother’s family name like hallelujah.
Whoever you are, you are mistaken, I insisted. My name is Lana Evans. I am an American citizen living in Britain. Call the embassy if you have questions. But do not call this number again!
I slammed down the phone receiver. But the call had shaken me. The next day I was planning to take the train to Saffron Walden to fetch Yasha for his Easter break. I decided I would not set foot outside my building until then.
Like the feeling one gets when one looks up in a barren landscape and finds a crow flying close overhead. The ominous creature has no business being there, is all one knows. One shudders, and for good reason.
* * *
—
I spotted the first reporter on the street in front of my building just past seven the next morning. I pulled the shade down over my kitchen window and went directly out of my flat and downstairs to ring Fiona’s buzzer.
It took her a minute to open the door. Heavy Irish cardigan thrown over her shoulders, smelling of old sheep, her thin gray hair out of sorts.
Lana, she said, clearly surprised. So early? Everything all right?
Fiona, you must not speak to anyone.
Oh, I wouldn’t. I don’t usually see many people as it is. What’s this about, dear?
No one outside. No one with the press.
The press? Lord, no. Why would I? No one with the press has any interest in me, that’s for sure.
Satisfied, I went back upstairs and dialed Yasha’s school. The line rang and rang. On my third frantic try a receptionist answered. I told her I must speak with Mrs. Channing, it was an emergency.
However, I was too late. Mrs. Channing came on the line already talking:
Mrs. Evans, I was just about to ring you. I’m afraid a most unfortunate situation has arisen.
* * *
—
Not expecting me to pick him up until later that day, Yasha was naturally alarmed when his Latin teacher, Mr. Logan, appeared in his room before breakfast and announced that there’d been a change of plans: I would not be coming and instead he, Mr. Logan, would be driving Yasha to Cambridge. My son was confused. (All this recounted to me once he was home.) Had he done something wrong? This was the start of Easter break, classes were out, and he’d handed in his last assignment as expected. Yet here in his room was old Mr. Logan, a Scottish Quaker, this morning especially taciturn, urgent, and pale-faced.
When are we going? asked Yasha.
Right this minute, replied the teacher.
The Latin man placed Yasha’s small suitcase in his rusticated Volkswagen Golf. Once Yasha had climbed into the backseat, he was told, Now lie down and spread that blanket over yourself.
The seat fabric of Logan’s car, Yasha noted from under the heavy woolen blanket, smelled faintly of dead fish.
Stay down, Logan ordered, as the car passed through the gates of the school and between the clamoring crowd of paparazzi gathered there—adding under his breath, Bloody parasite reporters.
The drive to Cambridge took an hour and a half. Once they were safe beyond Saffron Walden, Yasha was told he could take off the blanket and sit up. He found the English sky as usual depressive and damp, yet glaring. When twice during the journey he asked his teacher what was going on, each time the reply was a muttered quote in Greek from Marcus Aurelius:
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Finally, they reached Cambridge. Time to hit the deck again, Jacob, Mr. Logan instructed. Don’t forget the blanket.
Another phalanx of paparazzi, this one outside our home at number 12b Chaucer Road, where they’d been agitating since dawn. Wielding history textbooks as much as cameras and pens, stalking my son with their flashbulbs and their shouted questions—no, not questions, indictments:
—Jacob, what do you think of your grandfather?
—Would you call him a mass murderer? Worse than Hitler?
—Why’d you and your mother change your names?
—Tell your mum to come out and speak to us!
—Have you ever been to the Soviet Union?
—Are you a Communist?
—Jacob, over here!
By this time I’d emerged on the sidewalk myself and was struggling through hostile bodies to reach Yasha, still trapped inside the car parked at the curb. A man with a large Nikon jumped in my face and I shoved him back with both hands, harder than either of us expected, in the process knocking his expensive camera to the ground.
Cunt! he growled. I’ll get you fuckin’ deported for that.
I leave when I want! I screamed at him, cursing him in Russian, suddenly so enraged I could no longer claim to be right in my own head.
And here was Logan, master of dead languages, leaping from his fishy car. Mrs. Evans, for God’s sake get him in the house quickly!
Yanking open the rear door, he hauled Yasha out. I could see immediately how frightened my son was.
Mom, what’s going on?
There was no time to answer him, and how could I anyway? Taking him by the hand, I fought our way through the shouting mob that stood between him and that priceless freedom to be a child that will never again be his.
4 April
That, I say nervously, touching the black-and-white photograph, was your grandfather.
Who was he? Yasha wants to know, at once curious and perhaps already faintly, though still unconsciously, troubled. For the image I have just handed him, while famous the world over as a document of history, is to him wholly unfamiliar: Stalin, Churchill, and Truman at the Potsdam Conference, circa late July 1945.
Your grandfather was the leader of the Soviet Union all through my childhood, until his death in 1953.
Only when I do not speak the name and get away with it, at least for the moment, does it become fully confirmed in my mind that my son has never actually heard his grandfather’s name, does not know it or connect himself with it, still considers it, as it were, an unknown fiction, that historical asterisk of a name that even children in Cameroon and farthest Indonesia and the highest mountain reaches of Nepal know to despise.
The leader? Like the president?
You could say that. But the differences are important.
That’s Churchill next to him?
Yes, Winston Churchill. Prime Minister of Britain during the war. I met him when I was just a few years older than you.
You met Winston Churchill?
Only for a minute. He told me that before he went bald his hair was red like mine used to be. And that man there—
That’s Harry Truman.
Yes.
So these are the leaders who beat Hitler and won World War II.
You’r
e right, I say to my son.
And he was my grandfather? That’s pretty cool. I can’t believe you never told me any of this.
Yasha, listen to me. There is only one thing you need to know. You are American. Your father is American, and so are you. I am now an American citizen. But you, you were American from the second you were born.
I get it, Mom. I’m American.
Of course, he did not get it, not yet, because I had spent his entire life to that point making sure never to give it to him to get. Had kept him growing always in the dark, as a hypocrite farmer, congratulating himself for being humane, might keep his prize hog locked in the barn before the slaughter.
But now, thanks to the supposed journalist Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge (friendly enough to me when I first landed, but whom Fiona says she heard last evening gossiping disgracefully about me and my father on BBC Radio) and his tribe of Fleet Street arsonists, my son’s last vestige of innocence will be consumed by their flames in a matter of days, if not hours. And there is nothing I can do to stop it. And there is nowhere for us to go.
13 June
Today a letter from Josef. The Soviet government will allow him to travel to Helsinki, where he and I can meet.
I write this miraculous news again, to show myself it is real: The Soviet government will allow my son to travel to Helsinki, where he and I can meet.
Helsinki, Finland.
I could copy the words a hundred times and still not truly believe. He promises another letter as soon as he has more details. Okay. I can wait, knowing I will see him soon.
My firstborn. My son.
The time has come.
* * *
—
I wrote that at one in the morning. Now it is three and I have begun to doubt. Familiar disease, blowing under my closed door. I have not slept. Because I know the people in charge there. Oh, some of them have died, some have changed; but I know them. And they think they know me. They think they understand a mother’s love.
They have no idea what I’m willing to do for my children.
I have the most recent photo of Josef propped on my knees so I can look at his face and see the painful and unhealthy life I abandoned him to. See that if there was ever a boy who needed his mother, it is this boy. This man. My Josef.
* * *
—
Daylight. Fell asleep just before dawn and dreamed of a place called Helsinki. Winter, clean and cold and harshly bright, so blinding I can’t look without shading my eyes with my hands and squinting.
And now through this hellish glare I see what looms ahead of me:
An entirely empty airport.
29 June
I give you the curse of believing. The curse of fucking Helsinki. The curse of a photograph of my son that is not my son. For even in that photograph he looked sick and old before his time, a son in need of his mother.
Being examined by experts, he writes. Medically unable to work…Unable to travel.
So disappointed…Wanted to see you so much.
I drop his letter on the kitchen floor—spotless for once because I have recently cleaned it, imagining as I pushed the mop here and there of being in Helsinki with my son, bringing him home with me. But there is no Helsinki. Helsinki was a curse. So there is no home. There is only this letter on my clean floor as I dial his Moscow phone number and let it ring and ring. No answer in the USSR. I hang up, dial again, it’s the bloody same, and I go on like this dialing, listening, hanging up, dialing, until finally I hear the double click I have been praying for, followed by the voice of a dying patient.
Mother?
Bunny, I cry, I’m coming to take care of you!
* * *
—
And the moment I speak them, I know these words are the very truth that I have carried and planned for since my unforgivable mistake all those years ago, abandoning my children for what I assured myself was their own good. For never in his life—never in his life—has Josef needed me more than he needs me now.
I am his mother. And I must find a way to go to him, whatever the consequences.
LETTER
17 October 1984
Chaucer Road, Cambridge
Dear Peter,
You will be home by now. Will you have told Martha, after all, that you came to see me during your business trip to England? I wonder. But then you are probably regretting in any case that the visit was not as you hoped. I am sorry that after the joys of seeing each other again after so long; after getting to hold you again as I often imagined but never expected; after physical and emotional honesties between us—that all this should have ended, stupidly, in an argument at the very last minute.
I did not mean what I said. You must know this. You are not a spy or enemy; you could never be that to me. I am under increasing amounts of stress, and anger sometimes is the result. You once told me, back at the beginning, that you have a terror of feeling trapped. Well, it is the same for me. I am good and trapped now, Peter. I have tried my hardest to make certain things possible in this part of the world for myself and Yasha, you know I have, and you have seen with your own eyes how it has not worked out. And when one is older, you also know, one’s mistakes become magnified within one’s history; they are easily made catastrophic. And so I realize my situation to be now. The sacrifices I have made for Yasha’s schooling have had some beneficial effects—you witness how he has grown in body and mind—but they also I think created the illusion that there was a chance to outrun my father’s ghost and establish some permanent life of peace for myself and my son. And this was a lie. It cannot happen in the West, I finally see that; too many betrayals have occurred, with only more to come. (I don’t mean you.) The illusion is over. Perhaps just as well. You asked me—you were angry—what the hell was I going to do now that I was determined to “burn every last bridge” in my life. I told you that I didn’t know. But I do know, Peter. And when you learn what it is, you will want nothing to do with me ever again. And that, for me, you must believe, is a terrible cost to pay. But what else can I do? I have made mistakes no mother should make.
Whatever you may hear or read about me in the coming weeks, please please do not dwell on the argument we had in my kitchen, with the taxi waiting outside and your suitcase packed by the door. Think instead of the night we spent together in my creaky bed, holding each other with tenderness and passion. That was me too. When I was young, people were always leaving without explanation. Most never returned. I have forever hated the sound of closing doors and the view of people’s backs. Perhaps I can’t be counted on, but I can be trusted; I hope you can see the difference. So trust my heart, Peter, and forget what comes out of my mouth. Remember how we held and touched each other. Leave if you must, but I beg you, don’t ever abandon me.
Your loving
Svetlana
EDITOR’S NOTE
On November 16, 1984, flanked by officials from the Soviet Foreign Ministry, Svetlana Alliluyeva appeared as the surprise star of an international press conference at the Moscow offices of the Soviet Women’s National Committee, gripping her prepared remarks with both hands in an unsuccessful effort to keep them from shaking.
And thirty-two hours later, across the globe in Princeton, New Jersey, Martha Horvath is well asleep by the time that Nightline—the late-night news program on which video footage of this “historic Soviet news event” first airs in America—comes on. The television in our house is located in the “family room” on the ground floor; and it is in there alone, with a drink in his hand, that Peter Horvath struggles to absorb the reality of what the woman he loves is saying, and what, in fact, she has gone and done.
The Kremlin has provided its prized propaganda trophy with an official translator—a poor, cowed woman in a female-comrade necktie is visible at the right of the screen—the better to control the Party’s Cold War message. Svet
lana, however, has apparently decided to stage-manage her self-destruction in her own fashion. And so she delivers her remarks first in Russian, and then, in a strangely forced and emotionally unstable voice that seesaws between defiance and uncertainty, as if she both despises the lies she’s spouting and dares the world to call her on them, she reads them aloud herself in English:
“I, Svetlana Alliluyeva, and my son Yakov Evans, voluntarily renounce our American citizenship in order to live permanently in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We are doing this in order to rejoin my two older children to live, finally, as a unified family, all my children together, as we should, free from corrupt influences of lawyers, businessmen, publishers, politicians, and intelligence agents who, during my unhappy and regretful years in the West, attempted to turn my name and the name of my father into nothing more than a sensational commodity. My children need me, and now I am here.”
The experience of watching this scene unfold (only vaguely aware that it took place yesterday and is already history) is such a shock to my system that even after downing the rest of my drink, I find I am able to understand what’s happening on the television screen only in discrete units of perception. First is Svetlana’s physical appearance, so changed from the woman I made love to just weeks ago in her drafty bedroom in Cambridge that for several moments my brain refuses to accept that this is the same person. But it is the same person—that is a fact. The transformation begins with her hair, which, while still mostly rusty red, is chopped mannishly short and worn now parted to the side in the manner of the good Party soldier she is warring with herself to be. An effect deepened by a new pair of wide-framed steel eyeglasses of a distinctly sexless, Politburo style, and a heavy, brown wool suit. Her feet aren’t visible to the camera—she is seated behind a table on a dais, flanked by the unused translator and an unidentified Party member—but it is no difficulty to imagine her sporting a pair of thick-soled Soviet clunkers. Her face too (or perhaps this owes more to the Communist decor and institutional lighting) is paler and fleshier than I remember, with a rote, mechanical quality to her expression that seems to willfully deny the vitality, intelligence, and passion of the complex woman I believed I knew.
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