Fellow Travelers (16 page)

But on her such mannish costumes seemed anything but masculine. They brought out her femininity, her seductiveness. Tania had more in common with the androgynous or bisexual modes that were fashionable in Berlin in those days, and in a less straitlaced society she would probably have started wearing pants the way female revolutionaries did in Europe from the time of George Sand.

Tania considered herself one of the Soviet Union's new women, a pioneer in shaping a society where female roles had always been far more submissive than they were anywhere else in the West. Listening to her, you might sometimes have thought Russian socialism was a revolution in sexual mores rather than in class and economic structures. Tania considered herself the equal of any man, and in every respect that mattered to her—though not necessarily to me—she most certainly was. Women should be as free to dispose of their bodies as men were. She dismissed marriage and the traditional family as bourgeois institutions designed to keep women enslaved to men. All that mattered was the human family; children were the offspring and the responsibility of the entire community rather than of any biological forebears.

I used to listen to her preaching her doctrines to the American engineers and sales representatives. I am not sure she realized how titillating it was to staid American engineers from Schenectady or Detroit to hear a glamorous woman talking about the right of women to take casual lovers, practice birth control and abortion, or bear children out of wedlock.

They got a charge out of talking with her, however, teasing her about her ideas, and a few of them even offered to take her out for a night on the town. Tania would send them packing. She may have liberated her thinking, but her behavior was as enslaved as ever, and she regularly slapped down those American pursuers who imagined she was ready to practice what she preached.

But such encounters were only the half of it. Tania was also expected to squire various English-speaking notables around Moscow to see the future at work, and she decided the company of a resident American made the Moscow experience less forbidding. So if the visitor was Will Rogers, John Dewey, Gene Tunney, W.E.B.DuBois, Julian Huxley or H. G. Wells, it was Tania and I who invited him to meet Maxim Gorki, Michael Shokolov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pavlov, Kondratiev, or Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Stanislavski, and Eisenstein.

Tania and I might not have found each other anywhere near so congenial if I had had any interest in politics, but I didn't take politics any more seriously in Moscow than I had in New York. Politics was power, I was not interested in power, and I wasn't interested in the high-flown rhetoric used to exercise it. I wasn't sure what I was interested in; maybe the simple pleasures of the groin that Tania extended to me whenever the mood struck her.

Once Pop, Mama Eva, Manny, and I got ourselves settled in at Red House, we began throwing a series of receptions and dinners that in fairly short order made Red House a meeting place for Moscow's expatriate community, not the ideologues who had come to live in the Promised Land but the working people whose jobs required them to be in Moscow, Americans mostly, journalists, businessmen, sales representatives, even embassy employees, trade representatives, and diplomats. The Red House receptions became a sort of information exchange for what was going on in Moscow and the country at large, the kind of social gatherings you would expect a foreign embassy to foster and that the Soviet Foreign Office itself hoped to foster at the receptions they sponsored at their big house, Spudenoska.

The difference was that in the informal atmosphere of Red House information could flow more freely than it could in the context of any government sponsor, Russian or foreign. Years later, Manny told me the GPU had subsidized Red House, but if so I wasn't aware of it, and as far as I know neither was anyone else. I kept the company's books, not the household accounts, and Pop and Mama Eva managed Red House from a special fund whose contents I never examined.

I was never comfortable with my part in Tania's international escort service. Manny had no qualms about serving as a government apologist, justifying its ways to outsiders, but I had plenty of them. I wasn't good at making excuses for things I couldn't excuse, and my complicity on at least one such occasion involved me in matters I would much rather not have been involved in.

One afternoon, the summer after Katya disappeared, Tania and I were invited to a garden party the Foreign Affairs Ministry threw in the Kremlin for an influential British Socialist and his aristocratic mistress. Maxim Litvinov, Commissar of Foreign Affairs, was there, along with a number of other notables, and in the middle of an aimless and frivolous afternoon, the minister's mistress presented Litvinov with a petition on behalf of a Russian-born American university professor, one Aleksandr Pavlovich, asking for help in arranging the emigration of his wife and three children.

It was a difficult case to make. Russian citizens were almost never permitted to take their families with them when they went abroad, and Professor Pavlovich hadn't made his position any easier when a year or so after he left the country the Soviet government ordered him to return home and he refused to comply, for what were probably very good reasons. The professor had gotten nowhere trying to retrieve his family through normal channels and so in desperation, he turned to his British friends to short-circuit the procedure.

Emigration policy was not Litvinov's responsibility, and he considered the petition a shocking violation of protocol, but the strategy worked. Litvinov ordered Tania to do what she could to arrange the family's emigration, and before the British socialist and his lady friend had gone home to England, they had received government promises that permission would be granted.

I thought that was the end of it and then a month or two later I got a frantic personal appeal from the American professor asking for my help. Ever since his British friends had interceded on his behalf, he had lost all contact with his wife and children. He had been in touch with both the Russian government and the British embassy, but his wife and children no longer lived at their former address and nobody could find out what had happened to them. The professor's British friends suggested he contact me, so I decided to do what I could.

Manny told me to mind my own business, I would only get myself into trouble, as well as Pop, him, and the Faust enterprises. Tania refused to have anything more to do with the matter. The government had authorized the family's departure, she was sure of that, but beyond that she knew nothing. And after all, the government hadn't made any promises about ensuring the family's speedy departure. It looked to her as if the professor's wife hadn't wanted to go and decided to go under cover.

“You have to know better than that,” I said.

“Well,” she answered, “how else do you expect the government to act, especially after those English had made such an embarrassing public issue of it? The man refused to come home, and now he expects us to deliver his wife and child to his doorstep. You have to understand, Viktor. We are a government under siege. The rest of the world is determined to undo everything we have done here, undermine our good name in the world community. And you ask us to sit back?”

I listened to her, and I listened to Manny repeat the same arguments in a more judicious manner, but I wasn't reconciled. There were human beings at stake, and you couldn't dismiss their anguish so easily. I went to the house where the professor and his family had lived, but none of the neighbors seemed to remember them. I let it go at that. I could see in their frightened faces the memory of that black van that had pulled up at the curb outside and taken the family away.

In the end I wrote the professor explaining that I hadn't been able to help him. Years later, I ran into the professor at a reception in New York. He had never heard from his family again.

With Tania and me working so closely together, one thing led to another, and we soon began spending more and more of our spare time together as well. My Russian was getting to be fluent enough so that I could at last go to the theatre with Tania without missing too much, not much more than I lose now in English, fifty years later, when my hearing is no longer what it once was.

Tania knew some of the actors, and we began inviting them to the parties at Red House. I was astonished and dazzled by their proficiency and thoroughness, the scholarship they devoted to their roles, their willingness to devote a year or more to the preparation of a performance. It was something the commercial theatre in New York had no interest in doing and even the Moscow Art Theatre inspired groups in New York, later on, never cared to imitate. As one actor once confessed to me in a drunken moment, “You get so bored after a while you could scream.”

I loved hearing the mythology of the company—the student who won a nonspeaking part in
The Three Sisters—
as a servant who answers the doorbell, and spent months working the role, how everyone really took seriously Stanislavki's great dictum, There are no small parts, only small actors, or the accounts of the great man's demonstrations of how occupation, language, nationality, and lifestyle transformed personality and character.

But the more I learned about the company, the less certain I was that I wanted to become an actor myself. I just didn't have that kind of interest or commitment, and any thought I had of enrolling there as a student, part-time or otherwise, went up in smoke. I'm not even sure I agreed with its theory. What mattered, I thought, was not your ability to find personal equivalents to the experiences and motivations of your characters, but the trick was to work on the imagination of the audience so that your performance would produce the responses you wanted them to have—pity, fear, anxiety, exhilaration, laughter, joy. The truth is that Stanislavski never contended that all this soul-searching was the thing in itself, but a means to a larger end. “To be really creative,” I remember him saying, “you have to find your own way, create a method of your own.”

I began to realize finally that what I had ambitions of becoming was not an actor but a performer, an entertainer. I was interested less in exploring the intricacies of the human soul than in getting up on a stage and saying, “Look at me, everybody, look at me!” And one of the ironies of my life, I suppose, is that nobody ever did. At heart, I was always simply a dilettante or, to put it more tactfully, a connoisseur.

And yet, if I wasn't going to become an actor, what was I going to be? The question was a little ridiculous. More and more it was becoming clear that what really interested me was the businesses we were running, the people I dealt with, the transactions, the mathematics, the economics. And why not? Here I was going on twenty-six, and I was effectively running a $5 million-a-year business. However, although I was the one who could get things done, I was never the one who conceived of the ideas and brought them to realization. It was Manny who did that, and Pop. Together they shut me out almost entirely.

What else did I expect? They never explained what they were doing or what was going on. And why should they? Pop and I had never been very close and if anything our relations had grown even cooler since he settled in Moscow. And Manny—Manny I suppose exercised an older brother's prerogative to keep his concerns to himself. So I would think, To hell with them both, and focus my attention on my own affairs, the negotiations with Amstorg, my relationship with Tania, my fading grief over Katya.

Today it's hard to believe that I was ever that young, unaware, or self-absorbed but I must have been. Or perhaps just so bitter and resentful that I was indifferent to what would happen to us all. The truth is that even if I had worried about what might happen, I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.

Our exposure was not simply financial. The political climate in the U.S. was if anything less congenial than it had been when we left, especially for those who were coming to be known as fellow travelers, and Pop, after all, was much more than that. He was still a member in good standing of what now frankly called itself the Communist Party.

This was bad enough, but, though I didn't know it at the time, Pop, as a naturalized citizen, had put his U.S. citizenship in jeopardy when he left the U.S. for a country the U.S. considered an international pariah. If our Russian ventures collapsed, he might not be permitted to go home, even if he wanted to.

Manny had gone out of his way to maintain Faust American as a strictly business enterprise. He and I were publicly apolitical, and Pop was not even listed as an officer of the company and that rankled. Pop had the feeling he had been relegated to the sidelines by his sons, as in a sense he had, and he did not always accept the situation with good grace.

I never took seriously the threat the Amstorg takeover posed to our family interests, yet it was real enough. We still had the platinum mine, it is true, but it never made enough money to keep the Fausts living in Moscow, at least not as we chose to live. Though Manny had finagled some other natural resource concessions in Siberia in timber, copper, asbestos, and the like, they had not come to much. In the circumstances, it's no wonder that ever since the government announced the Amstorg takeover, Manny had been beating the bushes for alternatives.

In the end, it was he, of course, not Pop, who kept the Faust enterprises going in Russia and came up with the idea that would prove even more important and lucrative than our old trading venture: a monopoly, an out-and-out monopoly in the most unlikely substance I could have imagined—aspirin.

Manny would sometimes maintain that I had given him the idea. After Katya disappeared, I had begun taking aspirin like candy. There was the flu, and I was also drinking fairly heavily—not by Russian standards necessarily, but by my own. I would get up in the morning, my head throbbing, and take a few papers of aspirin to help me confront the day.