The Red Daughter

by John Burnham Schwartz

  22 December 1984

  Comrade A, curator of the Stalin museum, phones today to tell me how much she regrets that I declined to attend yesterday’s ceremony for the 106th anniversary of my father’s birth. It was unquestionably a triumph, she says. Did I know that over one million people visited the exhibitions this year alone?

  The people, the comrade concludes proudly, almost hysterically, cannot get enough.

  I make no comment with regard to who and what might be enough. Instead, I spontaneously decide to tell her the little anecdote that amused my father more than any other.

  Do you happen to know, I say to the curator, what my grandmother’s last words were to my father, her son, before she died?

  Last words? The curator’s tone initially skeptical, now fading into hesitancy, as if sensing a trick. No, I…

  She said to him, “But what a pity you never became a priest.”

  What? Impossible!

  Not at all. My father loved it. No story I ever heard him tell made him laugh so hard.

  2 February 1985

  I have been to Gori and seen the monstrous, three-ring hagiography they have manufactured there after his death. The Greek-columned shrine enveloping the two-room hovel where a boy named Josef Dzhugashvili and his family slept like miserable farm animals, a single pot on a karasinka their only way to cook what little food they had. And nearby, the marbled entrance and monumental staircase that leads one into the museum bearing his later surname of Stalin. Inside, enough statues and likenesses of the vozhd to fill the Parthenon. A room displaying a dozen copies of his death mask. A glass case containing his military greatcoat, boots, cap. On and on.

  One object alone evokes genuine emotion: a fragile pair of spectacles that belonged to his mother.

  10 February 1985

  Today, as most Sundays, I make Yasha go with me to Sioni Cathedral, standing high above the Mtkvari River. We listen to the choir intoning the Georgian Orthodox liturgy (allowed by the State) and singing hymns, raising its voice as one to the true power under which no individual of any name stands different or apart. In this embrace, for entire stretches of timeless time I feel the peaceful beauty of being no one and nothing in a land where this has never been, never will be, possible. At some point as we sing (from his relentless tutoring, Yasha’s Russian has improved, and even his Georgian is coming along surprisingly well), I reach out and take my younger son’s hand. Horrified with teenage embarrassment, he pulls it back. But I take it again, forcefully pressing it between my own so he might feel the fury of my love at this moment, not just for him but for the infinite universe of which we are but the smallest particles, the simplest words in a story that has no ending.

  Then it’s over. Believers rise to their feet and begin to file out. Crosses everywhere one looks: Tbilisi a city of crosses. I sense eyes on me again from all quarters and know that if we linger even a minute inside this holy house, inhibitions will be discharged and people will start approaching, driven by their obsessions with that other Him, the vozhd, compelled to tell us how he was the greatest of all men, the one, the only, the true, for he was Georgian was he not, yes from Georgia he sprang fully formed (and robbed and killed, one might add, and then left). Though he spoke perfect Russian, he kept his Tbilisi accent all his life! Embraces will follow—kisses, hugs, invitations to feasts.

  But it is a fleeting, thorny love: for if Yasha and I do not rush to add superlatives of our own to their burning pyre of horseshit, there and then will we be called traitors to our own blood.

  26 February 1985

  I have not heard from Josef since we left Moscow, and all my letters to Katya have come back unopened.

  I met with the church Patriarch, a private audience he granted me because of my name. He told me that I must write only words of love to your children, for they have forgotten what is love and forgiveness.

  2 March 1985

  Terrible fight with Yasha. Terrible. My hands still shaking.

  I hate this place!

  Why the fuck did you bring me here? Do you even know?

  You’ll be sorry when I run away!

  I’ll find Dad and live with him!

  You’ll never fucking see me again!

  Maybe then you’ll be happy!

  I hate you!

  You’re the worst mother in the world!

  6 March 1985

  Jora steers the Lada slowly through the village of Akhalsopeli. A village that looks much like any other in the vicinity of Tbilisi. He pulls up in front of a ramshackle gate decorated with a little gold bust of my father.

  I’ll come in with you.

  No, thank you, Jora.

  You know this guy?

  A friend of my cousin’s. He’s spent years building an “homage” to my father, and has asked me to do him the honor of visiting. It will offend my cousin if I don’t go. I won’t be long.

  He could be a nutjob.

  We’re all nutjobs, Jora.

  Jora smiles. Because even though I know he’s spying on me, we both occasionally appreciate the absurdity of this pervasive madness that has made even once-familiar absurdities surprising.

  Just inside the gate, I am met effusively by a bearded Georgian with deep-set dark eyes and a nose that would not be out of place on a Romanian count. His first words to me, in Georgian-accented Russian: I love Stalin!

  Whatever he is building, single-handedly by the look of it (I notice a smattering of paint on the sleeve of his coat), it will clearly take years, decades to complete. Everywhere around the premises of the sprawling property are buckets of plaster, bags of cement, heaps of colored glass shards to be used in constructing further mosaics, busts, statues, effigies, mausoleums, dreamscapes in honor of our hero, the greatest man ever to come from our great country of Georgia, to say nothing of the world! He apologizes that the museum space itself is not ready; he’s still in the process of gathering necessary materials. There are also to be a Stalin fountain and an electric dawn-to-dusk Stalin mechanical elaboration, along with three secret Stalin gardens, though none of these exhibits, unfortunately, along with so much else, is anywhere near ready for viewing.

  One display, however, has already been finished. This took five years to achieve. Into it he poured all the love he has for my father, the pride in his existence. Would I care to see it?

  A bit annoyed now, wishing I had brought Jora with me, I tell this maniac that I would be happy to see whatever he has to show me, though my driver is waiting and I really don’t have much time.

  He bows formally. Please, follow me.

  Through unkempt hedges with openings hacked into them, and little Stalin grottoes in nascent rough-hewn form, we make our way down through an overgrown garden to an entrance covered by a moldy blanket of earth-colored felt. My host holds aside this rotting cloth, switches on an old flashlight, and points its watery yellow beam into the darkness beyond.

  This is what you will wish to see.

  I enter the cave. The light extends along the floor until, a meter in front of me, it unexpectedly reveals a wall thickly textured with some dark substance that gives off its own waxy glow.

  I shy back, trembling uncontrollably. For what he has brought me to see, I understand, is a ghoulish effigy of my dead father.

  The vozhd’s face distorted and ruined as it had been at the very moment of death. His mouth lipsticked, his mustache dusted with obscene cosmetics. His once-powerful body trapped forever in the hell of an open coffin. His sunken chest piled with filthy plastic flowers.

  What have you done? I whisper in horror.

  Isn’t it wonderful? my host says proudly. Now he will truly live forever.

  18 March 1985

  Chernenko is dead. So Gorbachev will take his turn. They say he’s liberal; we will see. A cunning look to his face, this one, with the enigmatic punctuation on his bare scalp.
He is convinced that the USSR has become a retrograde nation of raging alcoholics, and promises that his first act will be a massive crackdown on vodka. Perhaps he’s smarter than I gave him credit for. Or perhaps they will kill him for trying.

  I will write and ask his permission for us to leave. Beg him if I have to. Prostrate myself, kiss his cunning feet. Somehow I must extricate Yasha from this calamity I have made, that is all I know.

  This is no place for a child. It never was.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  “Pete, I thought you should know,” Dick Thompson began as soon as our drinks had been served in the Irish bar near Penn Station that we used to frequent and that now, under new management, appeared to have a Spanish theme, “that yesterday 11:17 A.M. Moscow time, our Russian friend was taken into custody by the Soviets outside the American Embassy.”

  “What? I thought she and Yasha were in Tbilisi.”

  It was almost exactly a year after Svetlana had written in her journal about Gorbachev and his “cunning feet”—though of course I had no knowledge of such a personal record at the time. I had not heard from her in eighteen months.

  “They took her to the Kremlin,” Dick said. “Our sources report a meeting with Foreign Ministry officials. Best guess is that the sit-down was her goal all along, since she would have known that as a Soviet citizen—which she is again—she’d be barred from all foreign embassies.”

  “So what do you think she’s trying to do?”

  “Get her and her kid the hell out of the USSR. She’s been hounding Gorbachev with letters to that effect all this past year. Poor Gorby’s smack in the middle of his first Party Conference as General Secretary, and ten to one, he’s ready to let her leave the country without a fight.”

  “Where are she and Yasha now?”

  Dick paused. “That’s another thing I wanted to tell you personally, Pete, so you wouldn’t hear it from somebody else. It seems that hours after leaving the Kremlin, Svetlana suffered some kind of cardiac incident.”

  “You mean a heart attack?”

  “She’s alive—we would’ve heard if she wasn’t. But she’s in Kremlin Hospital right now.”

  * * *

  —

  “You saw Dick Thompson today.”

  Martha and I were in the kitchen of our house that evening, finishing what, until now, had been an uneventful dinner of broiled salmon and potatoes. I had removed my tie and suit jacket; Martha was wearing her gray cashmere cardigan and her mother’s pearls; she always took pains to look nice at home, even when it was just the two of us.

  When I refused to take the bait, Martha confirmed my suspicion about her source: “Beverly told me.”

  “Beverly should know to keep her mouth shut about things that don’t concern her.”

  “What did Dick have to say? We both know he never appears unless he’s got news of some kind. Usually about your ‘Russian friend.’ ”

  I stared hard at my wife. “Svetlana had a heart attack.”

  My announcement had its desired effect: briefly stunned, Martha sat back in her chair, perfectly still. “Is she dead?”

  “No, she’s not dead. She’s in a hospital in Moscow.”

  “Well, I hope she has another heart attack and this time it kills her.”

  My wife took a moment to compose herself, and then she began to clear the dishes.

  1986

  5 April

  Kremlin Hospital

  I should be gone by now, or dead. Where I should not be is this high-security prison run by apparatchiks where the nurses are iron maidens and the doctors all spies. A guard attempting not to look like a guard stands outside my door day and night. Not the state of my heart they are worried about, but my death-defying name and the loudness of my voice.

  Visiting hours come and go. Yasha brings me the Akhmatova book I asked for, sits by my bed holding my hand for a quarter of an hour. I tell him that physically I will be fine, he must believe me, I just need to get the hell out of this hellhole.

  Mom, he says in a small voice just past cracking, you really scared me this time.

  Then I must have fallen asleep under these Gulag lights, because when I next open my eyes Yasha is gone and it is my other son sitting in a chair a meter away. Josef, whom I have not seen in some fifteen months, appears even older and more unhealthy than last time.

  We stare at each other.

  I should have come back for you and your sister, I tell him. I’m sorry.

  I have spoken with your doctors and looked at your chart myself, my older son addresses me in the voice of a state-appointed medical functionary. What you suffered was not technically cardiac arrest, rather a cardiovascular spasm caused by extreme stress. It didn’t kill you this time, but you must find a way to calm down or it will kill you soon.

  You wish I was dead, I can’t stop myself from accusing him.

  I did not come here to fight with you, Mother.

  Then why come at all, if you despise me so much?

  His furious, pained, defeated eyes boring into mine, my son rises to his feet.

  I am here, he says, because you gave birth to me. I am here because to not come would be to make more of a statement about you than I care to make. I am here because soon you’ll get your wish and be gone again and I will still be left wondering what I ever did to you, what any of us ever did to you, to make you treat us, your own flesh and blood, like your most hated enemies.

  Oh, Bunny, please don’t…

  No, Mother. It’s too late to act as if you never did what you did. It’s way too late.

  13 April

  Hotel Sovietsky

  A week out of hospital. Yasha and I still waiting for decisions about our future to find their way from Gorbachev to Ligachev and the Central Committee to the embassies and various shadows on the ground. Gatekeepers and gates. Waiting for passports and passage. Yasha’s term at the Friends’ School begins in a week, so perhaps they will let him leave first.

  If I could give him anything I would give him this: let him go free not only from this country of poisoned families and broken manifestos but from me. Let him, for once, live his own mistakes instead of his mother’s.

  I have been the ruin of too many children already.

  A minute ago, I heard him stirring with unhappy restlessness in the maid’s cot on the other side of our room. I went and stood by him, tugging the edge of the blanket to cover his exposed feet.

  Telling myself: He is not a man yet, thank God. There are things he cannot understand. My time on this earth may be measured now only in memories, but he is still the unwritten future.

  Mom?

  His eyes have opened and found me standing over him like a watchdog.

  My darling.

  What if they never let us leave?

  Don’t be silly. Go back to sleep.

  But what if they don’t?

  Listen to me, my love. Are you listening? If I have to, I will call George Kennan, the CIA, the New York Fucking Times, Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s mother—I will call everyone there is on the planet, and I will make such a scene that in the end they will beg, beg us to leave their miserable country and never come back. Do you believe me?

  Yasha’s smile is slow and sleepy. I believe you, Mom.

  Good. Now go back to sleep. When you wake up, we’ll be in another country.

  LETTER

  16 April 1986

  Zurich London

  Dear Peter,

  I write you today like a god, ten thousand meters in the sky, flying at a speed that would make gods weep. But if I’m a god this incarnation is a tragic absurdity, for I am traveling backwards, not forwards, in my life; blind, not all-seeing; humbled, not proud.

  Any hour now—with datelines and deadlines I have lost track—Yasha, five feet, seven inches tall and a month
before his fifteenth birthday, will arrive at his beloved Friends’ School in Saffron Walden, which has offered its former student a very generous scholarship for the remainder of his studies there. It was insisted by the Soviets that he travel ahead of me, bearing his brand-new American passport and exit visa procured at the U.S. Embassy following my meeting with Comrade Ligachev of the Central Committee. (“The Motherland will survive without you,” he told me. “The question is: Will you survive without the Motherland?”)

  I am going to live in London this time. My old Cambridge neighbor Fiona Driscoll, lover of Irish breakfast tea and action films, has kindly arranged for me to stay in a North Kensington charity home for “distressed gentlefolk and indigent people,” where I will have a single room and shared kitchen and also a shared bathroom with other distressed and indigent residents. Furniture will come from a charity truck, not the biggest humiliation of my life. This English society, funded by a nice man with a “Sir” to his name, will pay sixty pounds a week to cover my lodging, food, and so on. Fiona cheerily reports, with her ability to smell roses in winter, that my fellow boarders include “a Chinese cook, a reformed alcoholic, and a gay man of twenty-four.”

  I will meet them all. I am not afraid. But it is all a black mirror somehow, what is happening. This stopover in Zurich. This Swiss plane. This long look down, once again, through a small window.