Fellow Travelers (14 page)

My father's vitality and strength seemed to have been sapped. He had a pasty depleted quality, looking puckered somehow, as if he had spent too much time in hot water. His clothes no longer fit him and when he spoke he acted as if somebody was going to write it all down. There was a studied quality about his behavior, as if he thought someone was going to paint his portrait.

He seemed to me frozen, icy, fixed in wax, like the body of Lenin in Red Square. It was only years later that I decided that I had misread him completely, that these poses, images, pronouncements were the devices he had acquired over three years in jail that enabled him to retain his dignity under circumstances that would have crushed most people.

Clothed in such majesty, he assumed an honored place in the Soviet hierarchy—a merely honorific place, I always assumed, until years later I found out it was probably Pop who persuaded the Comintern to put up over $50,000 to finance the American Communist Party's 1924 run for the U.S. presidency. They had given him a post on some Comintern committee, which I eventually discovered was the central executive committee of the agency.

All I was aware of was that he seemed to have lost his force in the family. He had become a sort of a constitutional monarch, and Manny was his prime minister. It was Manny who assessed the present, forecast the future, and positioned us all to meet it. Manny still pretended that, though he might propose, in the end it was Pop who disposed, but I didn't believe it. Now I am no longer so sure.

Manny was growing increasingly uneasy over the way the political winds were blowing, and he decided it was essential for us to begin transferring funds, mainly gold, from our Petrograd bank into Revel in Estonia, now Talinnin, Riga. If necessary I could pack our cache of gold rubles into a suitcase, or a trunk, and physically carry it across the border beyond the reach of the government.

“Manny, have you ever tried to carry a suitcase full of gold, never mind a trunkful?” I asked

“Well, get a porter then, get a dolly, you'll manage something.”

I didn't want to go but in the end Manny prevailed on Pop to put the screws on, and he did.

You couldn't sell Russian gold in the West. The Western powers were still hoping they could boycott the revolution into change. But for every boycott, there's a loophole, and I had discovered you could launder Russian gold in Sweden. We would deposit it in a Swedish bank where they would have it melted down by the Swedish mint, stamped with the Swedish seal, and packaged for resale in the West as Swedish gold. Nobody was fooled, but nobody cared to make an issue of it.

I expected to be gone for three weeks, and it worried Katya. Except for that weekend in Yalta, it was the first time she and I had been apart. She was convinced I would cross the border and they would never let me back, and what would become of her then?

They would take care of her, I said, and I made Manny promise. I even gave her money against any emergency, American gold and some dollars, so she wouldn't feel totally dependent on Manny and Pop. I told her to look up Rabinovitz, a currency trader I knew in the black market, if she ever needed any help. I promised I'd come back.

We spent the night in each other's arms and bodies, more tender and loving than we had ever been before, and in the morning, she came with me to the Byelorus station. I carried a carpetbag and wore a fur hat. She was dressed in gray with a shawl tied over her golden head, and she carried a fur muff I had bought for her. I kissed her goodbye, and we clung together as if our hearts were breaking. I opened the compartment door and went inside. Katya stood there on the platform waving at me, her face streaming with tears, and pistons began to move, the steam snorted forth, the wheels moved, the train let out its wail of departure. I found myself remembering the end of
Anna Karenina
and I watched Katya until she was out of sight. Suddenly I was afraid. I never saw her again.

vii

I got back to Moscow almost three weeks to the day after I left. The train from Riga was five hours late, as most trains were in those days, and when I emerged into the gloom of the Byelorus station it was close to midnight. I was eager to get home, to tell Katya about all that had happened since I left her, how I had bamboozled the Latvians, hoodwinked the Swedes, and hornswoggled the border guards. It was late, but she'd still be up waiting, or sleeping lightly in the glow of the candle she kept by the ikon.

It was nearly one when I paid the cab driver in front of Red House, opened the great iron doors, and climbed the marble staircase to the second floor. Everyone else had already gone to bed, Pop, Mama Eva, Manny. We weren't the sort of people who stayed up to welcome each other home. But I already knew that something was wrong. There was a dim bulb burning in a sconce on the wall of the staircase, but the hall that led to our rooms was in darkness.

I was afraid, even before I put my hand on the door latch to go in. There was no slit of light under the door, no sound anywhere in the house, and when I pushed open the door, all I could see was the dim shapes of the French windows on the opposite wall. I didn't need to turn on the lights to know no one was there. When I did flick on the dim lights in the ceiling, I saw an empty room, as neat and trim as a hotel room when the maids have finished putting it all to rights.

I called out her name, but it came in a whisper. I was so panicky I could scarcely breathe, or stand. I staggered around the room. There was no sign of her anywhere, her clothes were gone from the closets, the nesting dolls, the toy animals she kept on the bureau had disappeared, as well as the ikon and the candle by the bed. I had always hated that candle. Burning candles always suggested the sick rooms of my childhood, bitter medicines, fevers, and stifling sweats. There was a faint wax stain on the marble top of the night table, but no other sign that a candle had ever been there. Katya was gone, disappeared, fled. I had known she would not be there, had known from the moment I left her behind me at the Byelorus station three weeks before.

I began searching the room for some remnant of her—a note, a letter, some clue to what had happened, where she had gone, but there was nothing—not on the desk near the window, the stand by the bed, or in the little drawer it contained, nothing in the pockets of my clothes hanging in the closet, or under the papers that lined the drawers, nothing stuck in the mirror. She had vanished without a trace.

All I could find was the gold coins I had given her if something should go wrong. I found them where we had hidden them, behind a panel beside the French windows.

And without knowing, I knew where Katya had gone, what had happened, who had come for her, but I refused to consider it and stormed out into the darkness of the hall, howling, calling out Manny's name. I found the door to his room in the dark and flicked the lights on and off, there was nobody there, the bed was not even disturbed. I went on down the hall to Pop and Mama Eva's room, fumbling in the dark for the door knob, disoriented, lost in the darkened hall, panicking, and found the door latch finally and threw open the door, turned on the lights, awakening my mother and father from their sleep.

They were naked both of them, in the heat of a connubial embrace, and sodden from vodka. I must have seemed like something out of a Russian melodrama, a Raskolnikov, a frazzled Trigorin. The two of them sat up in bed, my mother covering her ample breasts with the blanket, startled, distraught, as if I had burst in brandishing a pistol, or a dagger.

“Where has she gone?” I heard myself saying in a voice I scarcely recognized, “what have they done with her?”

“Now just quiet down,” my father said, slipping out of the bed. “Just quiet down.” His genitals swayed as he groped for his robe on the chair. It was the first time I had seen him naked since that afternoon I opened the door of his office and saw his bare rump bounding between Madame Onegin's outspread knees.

“What have you done with her, where has she gone?”

“Sit down,” my father said, pulled a silken robe about himself and staggered across the room. There was a vodka bottle on a stand by the window, and two empty glasses, and he poured me a slug in the glass as if it were water and brought it across the room.

“Mama Eva,” I heard myself saying, “where have they taken her? Why didn't you stop them? How could you let them do this to me?”

“Sit down,” Pop said, in his best bedside manner, “and get yourself under control.”

“I am under control,” I said, “it's this house that's out of control.”

“Drink, son,” Mama Eva said, “it'll make you feel better.” She wasn't dressed either, and she fumbled for a dressing gown on the floor and slipped into it behind the protection of the blankets.

“What happened,” I said.

And suddenly my grief swept over me like a flood, pouring down my face. I covered my face with my hands, trying to get myself under control.

“They took her away,” I heard Mama Eva say after a while. “We didn't know how to tell you.”

I sat there, bent over in that straight chair, my hands on my head, listening to the two of them talk, each filling out the details that the other might have neglected, as if they had an agenda of things that had to be reported.

The night after I left, they had been awakened at three in the morning by the bell in the lobby, a pounding on the front door, and the sounds of Sasha, the night porter, opening the gates and letting them in—a half dozen men in leather jackets and heavy boots, carrying rifles. They had pounded on the door with their rifle butts, scarring the wood. They'd left dents they'd never be able to sand away, Mama Eva complained, and it wasn't at all necessary.

“It was the secret police,” my father said, “the GPU. Sasha had let them in, and they charged up the marble staircase.”

“The noise was deafening.” Mama Eva said. “I can still hear it echoing in the foyer. There were a half dozen of them, all armed, with pistols at their hips, with rifles, some of them had electric torches in their hands, and they went down the hall in the dark and broke into your room. They seemed to know where they were going, who Katya was, exactly what room to look for her, where to find her. I was just terrified.”

“And then what?” I had myself under control again, more or less, walking dizzily on an emotional tightrope.

Neither of them knew what had happened. The men wouldn't let either Mama Eva or Pop come anywhere near, but they could hear Katya crying, and the men were telling her to get dressed and ransacking the room, turning things over, throwing things on the floor. “Tell us what you have done,” they kept shouting at her. “Tell us about your crime, who your collaborators were, whom you met with, whom you plotted with. Tell us what you've done.”

“She kept saying ‘nothing, nothing, I haven't done anything.'” Mama Eva said. “They called her whore and fascist pig, deviationist traitor. I couldn't hear what she answered. They brought her into the hall, and when she saw us, she cried out to us, ‘Help me, please help me,' but there was nothing we could do, and they dragged her between them, two of them did, down the stairs and into a van parked outside in the street.

“They wouldn't let us into your room, and we could hear them rummaging around inside there, drawers being pulled open, closet doors slamming, and a while later they came out with some large burlap bags and went downstairs to the street, leaving the lights burning behind them.” “I tried to find out what was going on,” Pop said, “but all they would tell me is that Katya had been identified as a traitor to the state, an enemy of the working class.”

“We could see them,” Mama Eva said, “from the big window over the main doorway, and they opened the back of the black van and threw the bags into it, started the engine, and disappeared down the street.”

Dead, gone, disappeared forever.

“What can I do,” I kept saying. “It's three weeks, I'll never be able to find her. Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you send me a telegram or a letter or call?”

“We couldn't have done that,” Pop said. “You were out of the country; there was no way we could have done anything.”

I poured myself more vodka and tried to keep myself from crying. I could imagine what they had done to her, and couldn't bear to think about it.

It was all Pop's fault; I could see that. I had a target now, someone to blame, and I began to get hold of myself. “But you didn't just leave it at that, did you?” I said. “You got in touch with your friends in the GPU. You must have done that, and asked them what they had done with her and when they were going to bring her back.”

“Don't be foolish.”

“You didn't say, this is my son Victor's girl, this is the woman my son Victor loves, the woman my son Victor is planning to marry, it's an outrage, an affront, didn't you tell them that?”

“You know I didn't. You're not at home, Victor my boy, you're in Moscow, there are some things you just don't ever do.”

“But you're not just anybody. You're a national treasure, one of the ikons of the world communist movement. They value you, they need you. Didn't you make any investigation?”

“We did all we could,” Mama Eva said. “I went in your room the next morning and straightened everything up. Threw out the things they had broken, the toy dogs, the ikon smashed to a million pieces, straightened the drawers and closets, replaced the slit mattresses and chair cushions, made everything nice for you when you got back.”

“You could at least have tried to tell me. Got somebody to bring me a letter. Done something.”

“I could have gone through the motions,” Pop said, “but it wouldn't have made any difference. There was nothing you could do here, and you had important things to take care of in Sweden.”

“How could you?” I asked. “How could you?” And my father just sat there in his chair by the window, beside the bed, the vodka at his elbow, his shaven head glistening in the light. Mama Eva sat on the edge of the bed, fussing with the gown she had thrown over herself, and they said nothing.