Fellow Travelers (15 page)

“My god, but I hate you, I hate you both. What did I ever do to deserve such parents?” I towered above the old man, and I said what I had always wanted to say, what I had always thought about him from the moment I saw his pants down around his ankles, his bare backside bouncing on that woman on the examining table in his Bronx office. “You don't care about anybody, not even Mama Eva or Manny. I don't know how you can bear to look your victims in the face.” I could feel the tears beginning again and I fled, wailing and stumbling down the hall to our room, my room, drunker than I thought I was. I threw myself on the bed and passed out.

I awakened late the following morning, hungover and flushed. Somehow I got myself together, shaved and dressed, and tried to figure out what I was going to do, what I could do, after all this time. Manny still hadn't come home, Pop had gone out, and Mama Eva had shut the door to her sitting room against the world outside. I walked the mile or so to the office, down the cobblestone streets in the brisk air, trying to collect my thoughts, to soften my outrage. I had to keep my anger under control; anger was good for breaking things, but not for accomplishing things. Somehow I had to find a way to get Katya back. It was October and the trees had begun to turn, the leaves scattering in the gutters.

Manny was already at work, and from the moment I burst in on him he knew what I was going to say. He was on the phone, and he waved a hand at me, telling me to hold my horses. I said “I want to talk to right now,” and I would have yanked the phone from his hand, pulled its wires from the wall, except that he made some quick apology to whomever he was talking to and hung up, as I sank into the chair next to his desk.

“Well,” he said, putting the phone back in its cradle, “how was your trip?”

I could have killed him for that.

“Who gives a shit about the trip,” I said.

“I do,” he said.

“I did what I went there to do.”

He sat looking at me.

“Tell me what happened to Katya.”

He shrugged as casually as if he'd lost track of a memo or a file folder. “The GPU picked her up. I assume it was the GPU. I don't know that for a fact. I wasn't there.”

“I thought you knew everything.”

“I told you this was going to happen. I told you over and over again and you never would listen.”

“What would you have me do? Give her up? Throw her back into the streets where I found her?”

“That's what I would have done.”

“Would you?” I said. “Would you really if you felt the way I did about her?”

“What do you think?” he said.

“You're as bad as he is. You're worse. You don't even bother to pretend that you care.”

“I'm a realist, that's all. I know where I am and what I can do. I couldn't save Katya; nobody could have saved her.”

“So you knew they were going to come for her.”

“I couldn't have prevented it.”

“I thought you could manage everything.”

Manny there behind his desk, inspecting his fingernails for a hangnail or a ragged bit of cuticle, as if he had much better things to do.

“Do you know what happened to her? Will they hurt her? Will they send her away?”

“Somebody at the foreign office told me he assumed she'd been accused of counterrevolutionary activity. He didn't know and I didn't ask.”

“But what will they have done to her?”

“I suppose what they have done with other enemies of the people—ship her off somewhere beyond the Urals, where if she's lucky she'll go to work running a pastry shop, build a canal, a steel mill, or whatever needs to be done. She'll rehabilitate herself, and if she does maybe they'll let her come back.”

“Manny, help me. What can I do?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“Isn't there any legal recourse, anyone I can talk to?”

“No one at all. Katerina Ivanova doesn't exist anymore. Nobody knows anything. And even if they do they wouldn't ever tell you. They've got themselves to worry about. Forget about Katya. We have more important business at hand.”

“How can you talk like that?”

“I'm serious. While you were gone, the government decided to take over Faust American.”

“But they can't do that.”

“They can do anything they want. I told you this was going to happen. That's why I wanted you to transfer as much of our funds abroad as possible. Pop and I have spent most of the past two weeks trying to work out the transition and fashion some sort of alternative. We've got the mine, but that still barely pays for itself. Either we find something else to do or we might as well close up shop and go home. Look, Victor, what I'm telling you is if we don't do something else and quickly we'll both be out of a job.”

“Job? Who cares about something like that in a time like this?”

“You do. Of if you don't, you'd better start.”

“What am I going to do now?”

“The same thing you've been doing for the past two or three years. Whatever needs to be done.”

They had already won, I knew that. Or know it now, whatever I may have thought then. I had to pump myself up, to keep asking and looking when I had already recognized that there was nothing to be done. I had lived in Russia long enough to know that, but I kept pushing myself beyond the point where if I had still had any hope I might have given up. I managed to convince myself that Katya wasn't necessarily being held somewhere in Lubianka, Presnaya Polyana, or Buktyri, or one of the other prisons around the city. They had held her a few hours and let her go. She was in Moscow somewhere, too frightened to get in touch with me. Maybe she was trying to get out of the country.

I went looking for Saul Rubinovitz, my friend from the currency exchange. They had shut the currency market down soon after Lenin died, but I managed to find Rubinovitz anyway. He now ran the bank in the government-owned gambling casino on the Tverskaya. It wasn't all that much different from what he'd been doing except instead of changing rubles for dollars or marks or francs, he was changing rubles for chips. He remembered Katya, and he hadn't forgotten his promise to help her if she needed it, but he'd never heard from her. He didn't know she had been arrested, and maybe he shouldn't be seen talking with me.

I called an American newspaperman I knew, the Moscow correspondent for one of the big international wire services, a man who knew as much as anybody about how people got out of this godforsaken country, even if he never wrote about it but Katya had not been to see him either.

I tried to talk him into doing a story for his wire service about her disappearance, maybe put some pressure on whoever had carried her off, even though I knew as well as he did that such a story would never get past the censors and if it did he would probably be handed his walking papers the moment it appeared in print.

I made the long trek across town to the Khitrov Market and found the building where Katya had lived with her sister, but Varya had disappeared too and nobody seemed to know anything about her. Nobody wanted to be seen talking with me, they didn't remember any girls living on the fourth floor in the back, and they certainly weren't living there now. A Turkic couple with five children had settled into the space where Katya and her sister used to live. Nobody seemed to know how long the family had lived there or even to understand what I was asking.

In the end, I even turned to the person least likely to lend me a sympathetic ear: Tania. But why not? We were good friends if not, in the peculiar terms of our relationship, lovers. She was in the press section of the foreign ministry, and so in a position to know what was going on, and her father was a big cheese in the defense ministry, so that I could presumably make inquiries with impunity.

We had lunch at a café in the Arbat, once Moscow's Bohemian quarter, and I told her what had happened, how I was beside myself with worry and how I needed help from somebody.

“You poor boy,” she said, simultaneously putting me in my place and emphasizing her greater age and experience in these matters. She already knew everything; I did nothing but tell her what she already knew. “I thought Manny had warned you of the danger she was in.”

“But Katya didn't have a political thought in her head. I never heard her say anything against the regime, not even when she told me about how they had killed her father and taken his farm. She felt for people and what was happening to them, that's all.”

Tania smiled wryly. “I don't really know anybody who can help. And it's dangerous. You put her in jeopardy just by being involved with her. You are a foreigner and all foreigners are suspect. But for you, they might never have paid any attention to her.”

“You're saying it's all my fault?”

“I'm saying you may have had something to do with it.”

“But aren't you exposed yourself? Am I endangering you?”

“My connections are better than hers, and besides dealing with foreigners is my job. Viktor, I am so sorry.” She took my hand and held it against her face, kissing it and I completely lost control, blubbering like some adolescent there in that crowded café in front of everybody.

“I'm sorry. I have no control of myself. I have no control over myself these days,” I said.

“I don't promise anything,” she said, “but I'll try. Can you get me a photograph?”

“They took everything. No photographs, no letters, not even a strand of hair. They left no physical evidence that she had ever existed.”

Tania put me in touch with a commissar in the GPU and a detective in the homicide division of the Moscow police department. She had me marching up and down half the corridors of the government bureaucracy, but nobody had ever heard of Katerina Ivanovna Arkadyevna, nobody knew why anyone would want to abduct her, push her into a black van, and carry her off in the middle of the night. I knew even before I asked that nobody would know anything, and so did Tania.

“Did you report her disappearance to the police?” one man said. “Those men who took her away—they may not have been police at all. They may have been counterrevolutionaries masquerading as secret police. In fact I think that's likely. After all, the Fausts are people of some importance, and something like this doesn't happen unless some people in very high places in the government want it to happen.”

So I finally gave it up. I couldn't spend the rest of my life following every woman I saw on the street who had the same cut of hair or the same way of standing.

Manny, Pop, and Mama Eva decided to pretend nothing had ever happened. They never spoke of Katya again, never once, and within a week I resumed the full routine of my life, except there was no longer Katya to share it with. I had nowhere to go in the evening and no one to go anywhere with, nobody to share my bed. I would sit in my room in the dark drinking vodka and watching the moon come up over the courtyard. It fell in bright silver shadows across the rug. And eventually, out of exhaustion, I would finally fall asleep.

I got over it. Now fifty years later I can scarcely remember Katya and the love we had for each other, the joy we discovered. Was it really anything other than one of those mementos you summon out of your memory in old age to assure yourself that in the time of your life, yes, yes, you really had been alive?

III: Parallel Lives

Moscow, 1924–1929

i

You might think that converting our private trading company, Faust American, into a government agency would be as easy as changing a name, substituting new management for the old, and announcing that henceforward the American-Soviet Trading Organization (Amstorg) would handle all export-import matters between the Soviet Union and the United States. But it wasn't that simple.

The export-import trade, like most other businesses, is a matter of personal relationships. If you have any choice about it, you do business with people you know and trust, so over the next several months Manny and I and occasionally even Pop spent our time introducing our American clients—people at Ford, General Electric, and a fistful of other American corporations—to the government people they would be dealing with in the future. The names were now Bagdanov, Pliakov, and Klebnikov rather than Faust, Faust, and Faust, but the game would still be the same.

It was a delicate transition. Our American customers wanted to know what it all meant. Was foreign investment no longer welcome in the Soviet Union? Or were the Russians simply moving downstream into one of the most important areas of Soviet economic activity?

We dismissed the takeover as simply an organizational change, the way a U.S. manufacturing company might decide to replace an independent sales agency with one of its own. That's what the Foreign Affairs Department was saying to Manny, so we said it too. But we couldn't have been more wrong. As it turned it, it was the first of a series of maneuvers that over a period of several years would shut us—and most other foreign investors—out of the Soviet Union entirely.

The transition meetings with our clients were handled either by Faust American alone or jointly with Amstorg Trading. They took place over lunch at the Metropole Hotel, at receptions at Government House, at our offices in Koznetsky Most, or even at Red House. The talks went fairly smoothly, and we lost only one client—a Midwest farm equipment producer, who refused to deal directly with the Russian government.

For reasons I never understood, Tania was assigned by the press office to monitor these transition meetings. She always claimed she didn't know why the assignment had fallen to her. We spent more and more of our working days together, not just as friends but as colleagues, and somewhat to my surprise I enjoyed working with her a lot.

In those days Westerners liked making jokes about women in the Russian bureaucracy. They were humorless and repulsively unfeminine, they affected a mannish manner and style of dress that put most foreign visitors off. Garbo in
Ninotchka
, most memorably, and in a sense Tania fit easily into that mode.