The Red Daughter

by John Burnham Schwartz

  * * *

  —

  Is the Kremlin treating her like a celebrity? Or a puppet?

  Both, of course.

  Does she realize this herself?

  From such great distance, helpless and stupid as I am, there is no honest way—other than the faintly trembling actor’s script in her hands and the artificial eddies of her voice—to tell.

  Because for all that is said at this charade of a press event, it’s what she doesn’t say that will keep me awake this night and others, and that more than once in the latest, darkest hours will send me back to the kitchen for another dose of alcohol.

  * * *

  —

  She and Yasha had actually arrived in the USSR two weeks earlier. (Dick Thompson confirmed this for me.) Yes, two profoundly awful, Kremlin-authored, sequestered weeks spent in the Hotel Sovietsky in Moscow. Enough time, certainly, to realize that her entire maternal re-defection dream was a terrible mistake.

  She would have felt it from the plane window as they circled Sheremetyevo before landing: snow suffocating the land. In no homecoming fantasy she’d ever had, had it ever been winter. But it was winter now, what they call a Russian autumn. Fur-collared overcoats on the officials waiting for her by the terminal’s VIP entrance. Bouquet handed to her by the female comrade (“Welcome home!” without a smile, as if smiles cost rubles), the flowers already wilting under the invisible weight of ice crystals in the air. The route into the city, kilometer after kilometer of apartment blocks like hideous, gargantuan prisons built by Khrushchev and the others. She did not recognize any of it—yet she did (Lubyanka Lubyanka Lubyanka). The recognition lay in her heart, which at this much-anticipated moment of historic reentry felt nothing at all, and which only now did she understand she had confused with some different, untreatable longing in herself.

  Still, she refused to give up hope for a better beginning. She’d told Josef not to meet her at the airport—too much pressure and publicity—but she was certain that he and his family would be waiting for them at the hotel.

  In the back of the Chaika limousine, heat blasting over her knees, she glanced at Yasha. He was staring out the window at the unwinding line of massive, identical “fortresses of the people” and concrete plazas blanketed with soiled snow.

  “Josef and his family will be waiting to greet us,” she said, as much to soothe herself as to reassure him.

  He ignored her.

  “You have been assigned a luxury two-bedroom suite,” said the official perched tensely on the jump seat across from her. “Hotel Sovietsky is the finest, most expensive hotel in Moscow.”

  He was speaking Russian, which Yasha would not be able to understand. And the American teenager who was her son did not turn his head, or seem to have any interest in what he could not understand. As if all that lay behind, rather than ahead of him. As if he were not in this Chaika limo in real time, but still on the incoming Aeroflot jet, circling and circling over white empty fields of a foreign country that he’d never wanted to see, never given a shit about, in the first place.

  And that was when it hit her, his mother, with a certainty that left her breathless: now that they were here, they would never be allowed to leave.

  * * *

  —

  (I am speculating, I know; how very unlawyer-like of me. But please, if you will, allow me this moment—just this once—to go now where I could not go then.)

  * * *

  —

  The lobby of the Hotel Sovietsky was constructed entirely of white marble. Even the potted trees were albino. Svetlana had seen an American TV program once about a man dressed as God—well, it must have been a joke because he was playing the Almighty wearing a white jumpsuit and white disco shoes and lightly tinted aviator sunglasses, jumping around and lip-synching to a song called “You Make Me Feel Like Dancing”—but not even that Disco Jehovah had been as sad and shocking to her as the sight, in the grand white lobby of the Sovietsky, of this bald, pouchy, drained-looking, thirty-nine-year-old man staring at her from across the room.

  The last time she’d seen Josef was eighteen years ago in the departures lounge at Sheremetyevo. Slim as a poet then, and still with the possibility of a smile behind his eyes. Calm enough in his heart because he’d believed he would be seeing his mother again in two weeks. She would spread Brajesh Singh’s ashes, visit with his people, and then return to her own children, bringing them presents from India.

  Josef was not waving now. Katya had never got her hand-dyed sari, nor he his miraculously preserved black mamba. It had all been a ruse of the most obscene cruelty. Added to her elder son’s frozen aspect in the grand lobby, his mother observed with a shiver of her own, was his visible mortification that whatever she should be after all these years of abandonment, however she should appear on this day of all days, it must not be like this. Fifty-eight? How could she be fifty-eight? And foreign? Why wasn’t she dead? No. It was against propriety; a final broken promise.

  1984–1985: MOSCOW/TBILISI

  19 November 1984

  Hotel Sovietsky

  Katya’s response to my letter asking if I might see her:

  If I call you a traitor to the Motherland, this is not a figure of speech. I mean the words as they were designed.

  Understand me clearly: The moment you left the Motherland eighteen years ago, I became an orphan. The Motherland adopted me. I do her bidding now, as a daughter would, if I do anyone’s.

  Do not contact me again.

  I do not forgive you for what you did. I will never forgive you. And under no circumstances will I allow you to see your granddaughter.

  This in its entirety, written in scientifically compacted handwriting on a stained postcard (Siberian postage stamp) showing a mud yurt with a funny bear-shaped weather vane sticking out of its roof. Location: somewhere at the end of the earth.

  I try to place the daughter I used to have in this extreme, antihuman landscape, but fail. And fail again. Sound of the oven door groaning. Her sniffles as she cried in my arms the day she accidentally tore the cover of the notebook I’d just bought her at GUM.

  Her husband, the former son-in-law I never met, I have been informed by people who know, died the other year of a self-inflicted rifle shot. A fatality officially registered as an accident.

  I look now at Josef, my eldest, where he sits on an overstuffed hotel chair with gold-leaf arms, Katya’s postcard on the glass table between us. Only his third visit since our arrival, none of them pleasant. If we were to listen together at this moment, we might overhear Yasha and his government-provided tutor engaging in their Russian language lessons in the other room. But Josef, I can see, could care less about his little brother, whom he has completely ignored since our arrival. Nor does he seem at all occupied with his sister’s categorical rejection of her blood family. Rather, he shifts on his chair and sighs harshly, wishing to signal as yet unspoken grievances on his own account (though many have already been spoken, beginning with outrage over the Greek trinkets, as he dismissed them, that Yasha and I brought him and his family from our stopover in Athens), yes, grievances he has stored up across the years, while preparing me for never-ending acts of maternal recompense to come. In the spiked grating of his sigh I hear the second wife, Lyuda’s ventriloquist efforts. Perhaps Josef does as well, because he picks up the vodka bottle that he charged to the hotel suite without asking, pours himself a drink, and swallows it down. Not his first. It is eleven in the morning. His eyes have a yellowed tint, the skin beneath them waxy and darkened from fatigue and a liver under perpetual assault. By comparison, I am almost a good bet for longevity. A thought that sickens me, because I am his mother, and it was I who stole their youth from these two children and crippled their futures.

  23 November 1984

  My dear nurse found me crying one day because I’d just finished reading Pushkin’s The Tale of the
Dead Princess and the Seven Knights and had loved it so much I could not stand to believe it was over. This was the first true heartbreak I can recall before losing my mother.

  Alexandra Andreevna dried my eyes with the hem of her apron. Then she picked up the beautifully illustrated picture book, which in my anguish and disappointment I had thrown on the floor, placed it back in my hands, and said, Now, silly, there’s no reason for tears. Don’t you know that a good book never ends? It just runs out of pages.

  You see, my nurse imagined that all the characters in the books she loved were real people who had actually done and experienced all the things she’d read about. The author too, she believed, was a real person posing as a character, someone simply telling a true if perhaps miraculous adventure that had actually happened, a storyteller like the storytellers of old, before there were books or paper or implements to write with, when all we had to be known in the world were our voices and our memories.

  Yesterday, I went to see my beloved nurse’s grave in Novodevichy Cemetery, where, after her death at the age of seventy in 1956, I had her buried beside my mother.

  I brought Yasha, irritable and oppressed by the hours of Russian study with the tutor who he complains is so much stricter than the Quakers, and by the harrying persistence of the reporters who’d pursued us from hotel to cemetery and were now spying on us through their Soviet cameras at a distance. From our special cordoned-off section of the graveyard the snow had been cleared, leaving a damp, freezing chessboard of white and brown, on which we were the only foreign pieces. Yasha stood off by himself, kicking angrily at a mound of gray ice with the toe of his British hiking boot. He does not like Russia. And it was clear that the two women buried here—the two most important women of my life—were no more real to him than characters in a story, decidedly not for children, that he had not chosen to read himself but rather was forced to listen to by me. He does not possess my nurse’s unshakable rustic faith in the literal verities of the myths that we choose to comfort ourselves with because, without them, we know that we are naked before the cruelties of fate. My son, in other words, is American. Where I am not. And yet, whatever I am, whatever I was, whatever I may have come from, is no longer to be found here, buried in this graveyard under mud and ice.

  25 November 1984

  This morning, because I cannot seem to get enough of this masochism show the Americans love to call memory lane, I go to see Fyodor V, whom I recall, at least until today’s visit, as an eminent physicist, intellectual, and true friend in the years after my father’s death. There were not many such people, and among them Fyodor stood apart for his human understanding that what I had come from was perhaps not all that I was. Late one night over dinner at my apartment, after the other guests had gone, he took my hand and said, My dear, if you ever choose to write about this history you were born into and must now grow out of, I hope you will do me the honor of writing it to me. That way you can remain as private as you need to, and protect your children, and at the same time you may feel that there is a friend sitting across the table from you, late at night and just like this, listening with compassion.

  I did not forget. It was to Fyodor, however unnamed, that I wrote the twenty “letters” of my memoir, describing in that intimate epistolary form aspects of my relationship with my family and upbringing that no contemporary had cared to understand. I wrote about my father as only I knew him and believed he was; my mother to what degree I could remember; my brothers, Yakov and Vasily; my aunts, uncles, grandparents, so many of them gone.

  And then, in the summer of 1963, I finished that book of letters (Don’t you know that a good book never ends? It just runs out of pages.) and never showed it to Fyodor, never showed it to anyone, and three years later, never quite comprehending what I was doing, took it with me in my luggage, packed beside the ashes of Brajesh Singh, to India.

  Fyodor does not care about any of this now. He does not wish to know. Sick and dying, his wife gone, his once abundant hair in shreds across a sun-pocked scalp, with matted gray beard smelling of week-old borscht, he greets me at the door to his apartment with the resentful question, Why have you returned? He means, as he wishes to elaborate at bitter length over tea, that I have allowed myself to become a tool for state propaganda, nothing more. For what purpose? To save your children? You delude yourself. They do not need this kind of saving, it only brings them trouble and pain. Now you are truly powerless, a stupid puppet acting out the role written for you.

  Not tea, then, but a bloodletting. My cup still undrunk, I get to my feet and thank him ironically for his former friendship. Did you know, Fyodor, I can’t resist adding, that book—you remember, those letters to you that you encouraged me to write—turned into a million-dollar blockbuster in America? Every word became a dollar that I spent. And all thanks to you.

  I leave the great man sunken in his chair. He won’t last till spring. And later, after a bath salted with my own regret, I sit in one of these two luxury rooms paid for by the State, my American son in the other repeating God knows what phrases in Russian, with my semi-reconstituted name (my father once again the military genius who won the war and saved the nation), writing these words with the irrefutable knowledge that my soul is in peril. Yes, my very soul. Who am I to speak? To have left my children unprotected, not once but countless times—this not even my father did to me, only my mother, and only after putting a bullet in her heart.

  * * *

  —

  I may not be able to leave this country again. But some way—any way, God forgive me—I must get Yasha out of this loveless prison of a city before it is too late.

  5 December 1984

  Tbilisi

  And so, mirabile dictu, it turns out that little Housekeeper still has it in her to write a certain kind of letter to a certain rank of Soviet official. Who would’ve guessed? Though not so wondrous, perhaps: the fact is they don’t want me here, any more than I want to be here. All I needed to say was that it was of the utmost urgency that my son and I be removed from these ceaseless attacks by the Western Press, so destabilizing to our resettlement process in Moscow. That I still hold fondest memories of occasional visits with my father to Georgia, where Yasha and I have relatives…Perhaps Tbilisi, then, might be a place where we could live in peace and quiet? Because to lie low is all that I wish at this stage of my life, now that I am home again. Of course, once in Georgia, I would communicate regularly with the local authorities while steering clear of the foreign press…

  The response was astonishingly swift: our relocation was permissible. In fact, it was a good deal more than that. Everyone knows the government is less than stable these days. One feels tectonic cracks in the streets and food lines. And how many old men, dare one ask, can lead the Party in a row, literally dying at their desks, without the inevitable necrosis of the whole animal? Nor, indeed, am I turning out to be the high-end political product they thought they’d purchased at international auction, in this land where buyer’s remorse insurance policies do not exist.

  And so, within a week, very quietly, Yasha and I were extricated from the Hotel Sovietsky and put on a plane to Tbilisi.

  Never in my life had I seen snow in Georgia. Palm trees yes, but not snow. On the few trips my father ever invited me on, however chilled the company, the southern climate was always temperate and balmy, even, once, as late as November. But it was December now, and looking down through the tiny windows as the plane passed high over the Caucasus Mountains, Yasha and I were struck nearly blind by a fierce white glare, like a massive, disorienting lake of fluorescent milk, reflecting off the snowy peaks and troughs of the land, until, finally, we had to shade our eyes and look away.

  11 December 1984

  Our driver’s name is Jora. He knows Tbilisi—all Georgia, he claims, probably truthfully—with the exaggerated passion of a lover rather than a husband. Yasha says Jora is awesome, Mom (the faux-Cockney accent seemingly gone
overnight, I’m relieved to find), while I appreciate our driver’s sometimes poetic powers of description, if not his discretion. For there is no doubt that Jora, with his full Georgian lips and powerful sloping shoulders, is the mighty Shevardnadze’s pocket man, reporting on our every whim and sneeze. Just as it can be no coincidence that the modern-style apartment complex in which the State is housing us, luxurious though it is, is located not in the beautiful, teeming center of the old capital, but on its less populated outskirts, where it is easier, as Dick Thompson might have said, to more closely monitor our individual needs.

  The apartment complex is as over-the-top in its way as the Hotel Sovietsky, all marble and glass, and as stuffed with visiting dignitaries and Party members on their regional tours. Yasha immediately began calling it, with apparent sincerity, the palace, and I have not had the heart to point out to him that palace and prison both begin with the same letter of the alphabet.

  There is only one thing here that soothes me. On the grounds of the complex is a reindeer farm. We have been in Tbilisi nine days, and on every one I have been to see the reindeer, none of whom have ever heard of Stalin, or the vozhd, or Koba, or Soso, or Soselo, or Ivanov, or any of his other names. I make my visits alone, since Yasha, with his thirteen-year-old’s erratic hormones and quick fuse, won’t be bothered. Because it is a working farm and not a zoo, there are no plaques offering information about these large antlered mammals who never seem to do very much except stand and eat and shit and, oh so subtly, comfort lost women like myself. So it is only by my own memory that I recall, as Peter told me one December afternoon when we were in the Lord & Taylor department store shopping for a Christmas blouse for me and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” began playing over the loudspeakers, that in North America reindeer are sometimes called caribou. A silly, pointless fact which nonetheless makes me miss Peter so much at this moment that I can hardly bear to write his name.