The gates of November (9 page)

Solomon and Fanya Slepak and their little daughter, Rosa, returned to Moscow, where, on October 29, 1927, Fanya gave birth to a healthy boy, without the aid of forceps. They named the child Vladimir, after Vladimir Lenin, and called him Volodya.

Two months later, on December 27, 1927, the Fifteenth All-Union Congress of the Communist Party, meeting in Moscow, condemned deviation from the party line and removed Trotsky and his supporters from positions of importance—its way of acknowledging the power of a unified party and stifling all opposition to Stalin. Stalin’s rivals quickly recanted.

Solomon Slepak, living in Moscow at the time of the Fifteenth Congress and still working as a correspondent for Rosta, attended the sessions and witnessed Stalin’s ascent to power.

Some while later he was reassigned to China, again as a foreign correspondent. In mid-January 1928 the Slepak family boarded a train for the long journey from Moscow to Peking. And during that trip, little Volodya, two and a half months old, saved their lives.

It was a journey of nearly five thousand miles along the sweep of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, running from Moscow to Vladivostok. South of Chita the railway branched into two lines. Travelers could continue north and east through Russian territory to the city of Khabarovsk and then south on the single-track railbed to Vladivostok, or take the Russian-run Eastern Chinese Railroad through Manchuria east to Harbin and south to Peking.

Solomon and Fanya Slepak, with their little daughter and infant son, were taking the train through thousands of miles of snow-covered wasteland and winter forests and isolated villages to Harbin and Peking.

Harbin lay in the midst of vast swamps and grasslands—a grant of Manchurian land ceded by the Chinese to the Russians in 1896. Many who lived there had come from Russia to work on the railroad. Its population increased after the Revolution and in the twenties numbered about one hundred thousand. Relations between the Kremlin and Chiang Kai-shek were bad. Russian Whites and Chinese bands roamed the steppes, looting Soviet trains.

The train in which the Slepaks were riding came to a sudden stop some miles before Harbin. Armed Whites went through the cars, ordering everyone off. The passengers—Russians, Europeans, Chinese—stood in the cold, waiting for their papers to be checked. Bolsheviks and Jews were told to stand aside. Solomon Slepak, traveling under the name of Semion Ignatievich and carrying a Soviet passport and Tass credentials, was informed by the officer in command that he was a filthy Bolshevik whose party had brought ruin to Russia and was now trying to destroy China. The commander then ordered a young officer to take this Bolshevik filth and his family a distance from the train and shoot them.

The Slepaks began to move past the crowd of passengers, followed by the officer. The infant Volodya started crying. Fanya held him to her, keeping him warm, but his crying grew shrill, piercing. Some of the women among the passengers murmured at the officer. What sort of human being was he, killing an infant in the arms of its mother? Would such an inhuman act advance their cause and the nationalist cause of China? The murmurings grew louder, as did the shrill screams of the infant. The officer, some distance now from his commander, looked distraught. Somewhere weapons were fired: executions, no doubt. Near the Slepak family the crowd was turning restless, its murmurings louder, menacing. Abruptly the officer holstered his weapon, pushed Solomon Slepak and his wife and children into the crowd, and walked away. The crowd swallowed them, and soon they were back aboard the train and traveled without further incident to Harbin and Peking.

In Peking they lived in a brick cottage behind the brick walls of the Soviet compound, a large parklike area of private houses and office buildings set among trees and bushes. Near their cottage was a pavilion with Ping-Pong tables, a short distance behind the pavilion lay the tennis court, and not far from the front of the cottage were the gates to the compound. At the far end of the compound near the wall opposite those gates stood the main building containing the embassy offices and the apartments of the ambassador and other diplomats.

Front stairs brought one up to the veranda of the Slepak home; it in turn led to the living room into which opened the bedroom of Solomon and Fanya, as well as Solomons study. Each of the children had a private bedroom, and their two nannies slept in a room nearby. The staff, all Chinese, consisted of a cook, a maid, Solomons secretary-translator, whose Russian was perfect, and a courier. The courier rode a bicycle to deliver press releases from Solomon to Chinese and foreign press bureaus and to pick up newspapers and releases for Solomon. A stairway led from the rear hallway off the living room down to the basement, where there were storage rooms, the kitchen, and a room that contained a rotary press.

The apparent serenity inside the Soviet compound was a false mirror of events outside. China was experiencing its own savage civil war. Sun Yatsen had died in 1925, his dream of a united and Westernized China unfulfilled. Chiang Kai-shek, appointed by Sun to head the new Whampoa Military Academy set up to train the officer corps of the Kuomintang army, was now commander in chief of a military force that had begun to move north from Canton, subduing the countryside and predatory private armies. Chiang’s initial goals were the reunification of China and the birth of a new Western-oriented government led by the Kuomintang Party, which was at the time still dominated by Chinese Communists whose instructions issued from agents of the Comintern—Borodin and Dalin, among others.

Early in April 1927, about ten months before the arrival of the Slepak family, police had forcibly entered the Soviet Embassy in Peking and discovered documents that revealed the degree of Soviet infiltration into Chinese affairs under Borodin’s direction. Arrested on the premises were nineteen Chinese Communists, all of them later strangled to death for treason.

Some days later Chiang Kai-shek set out to break the hold of the Chinese Communists on the Kuomintang Party through a series of anti-Communist actions in many cities and a coup in Shanghai, where the first revolutionary Marxist cell—the nucleus of the future Chinese Communist Party—had been organized in May 1920. Chiang’s loyalties lay not with the Kremlin but with the bankers, merchants, and landlord families whose loans and revenue he needed. Communist unions and organizations were outlawed, hundreds of Chinese Communist leaders executed.

Among the Kremlin’s Chinese followers shot during this period of purging was Solomon Slepak’s personal secretary, the husband of Volodya’s nanny. That nanny saved Volodya from serious injury—indeed may have saved his life.

That is Volodya Slepak’s earliest memory: his life being saved. He is not quite three years old. His nanny is walking down the wooden stairs from the veranda of the cottage with little Volodya in her arms, he prattling in Chinese, when one of the steps suddenly gives way beneath her feet. She begins to tumble forward. Instinctively she raises the child over her head and plunges her foot deep into the splintering wood to steady herself and keep the child from falling headlong down the stairs to the ground. Her leg snaps.

His very first clear memory: swaying precariously in the air over the head of his Chinese nanny, and her muted cry.

The fabric of the years that follow is woven from little clues, from flashes of remembrance. Soon after the incident on the veranda, the family moved to the city of Mukden, some 350 miles northeast of Peking, where they lived in a large house with a flat roof inside a walled compound amid an expanse of flowers and trees. There were many servants. And Volodya’s nanny had come with them from Peking.

A community of Jews, dating from the twelfth century and made up mostly of merchants from Iran, had once existed in the Chinese city of K’ai-feng. The Chinese, lacking Christendoms perception of the Jew as the killer of Christ and the servant of Satan, lived on cordial terms with the Jews of K’ai-feng, whom they regarded as belonging to “the religion that extracts the sinews”—an allusion to one of the Jewish dietary laws which requires the removal of the network of blood vessels from the thigh of an animal before its meat may be eaten. Jews served in the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties as physicians, officials, and army officers, but in time they vanished, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were virtually none in China save for the small community in Shanghai led by the prosperous Sassoon and Hardoon and Kadoorie families, who made fortunes in transportation, construction, and banking. Then a new migration commenced after the 1904-1905 Russo-Japanese War. Many Jewish soldiers mustering out of the Russian Army chose to live in Harbin rather than return to tsarist Russia. The Chinese Eastern Railroad, built by the Russians, brought to Harbin European and Russian Jews as well as Jews from Siberia who had engaged in dairy production and cattle raising.

About ten thousand Jews lived in Harbin after 1917, and there were significant numbers of Jews in Tientsin, Mukden, and Shanghai. In photographs, we can see the staff of Bernstein and Sons in Tientsin, a company which exported furs from China to Europe and the United States; and teachers and students in the Skidelsky Talmud Torah in Harbin: skullcapped children, bearded elders, and on the blackboard, in Hebrew, the words “The study of Torah is good when accompanied by civility.”

The kindergarten Volodya attended in Mukden had probably been established by Russian Jews who had fled pogroms and the Revolution. Volodya recalls a Purim party he attended; the holiday celebrates the foiling of an ancient persecution of Jews planned by a Persian minister of state. An intriguing image: a Bolshevik sending his son to a Jewish kindergartens Purim revelry. Hadn’t Solomon Slepak left religion behind in Dubrovno and Kopys when he fled from home nearly thirty years before? Perhaps it was simply a good school for little children, and he regarded Purim as emblematic of his Bolshevik vision of universal equality and the end to bigotry.

One day in Mukden, Fanya Slepak and her children climbed to the roof of their house and stood looking out over the city. For a long time the streets were eerily silent and empty. Suddenly khaki-uniformed troops appeared everywhere and military police were directing army vehicles. In the distance a shell exploded, and there came the firecracker sounds of shooting. Bullets whistled past their heads. Fanya scooped up the children and ran with them down into the cellar of the house.

It was September 1931. On the pretext of protecting the tracks of their South Manchurian Railroad, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and seized Mukden. They proclaimed the new state of Manchukuo in February 1932, and one month later, Solomon Slepak traveled to Harbin as a correspondent for Tass to attend the installation, as regent, of the last remaining member of the Manchu dynasty, Henry Pu Yi, a puppet of the Japanese. And that December, Solomon returned to Moscow to make his required two-year report to his chiefs. He visited his mother and remained in Russia through the following summer while his family enjoyed the beach at Pey-Tay-Ho near Port Arthur. The fair-skinned little Volodya came down with a bad case of sun poisoning. When Solomon returned to Mukden after the summer, he told the children he had been away so long because his mother had been ill and died and he had attended her funeral. Shortly after his return he and his family were ordered back to Peking, where they moved into the same house they had lived in before. At that time the Communists in China were being relentlessly rooted out and exterminated by Chiang Kai-shek. Young Volodya, attentive to his surroundings now, was aware of odd goings-on in the house: night meetings in his father’s study; doors and windows closed; hushed voices.

His nanny taught him Chinese songs. His sister, three years older than he, with curly brown hair and brown eyes, had her own circle of friends and saw little of her brother. He had a tricycle. In the pavilion were tables, chairs, a pool table, and he would watch the adults play. There were mulberry trees in the compound, and he would gather the berries and eat them. How his mother scolded him once when he smeared his shirt blue with berries! One day a wildcat got into the garden, and that evening he and his sister, while strolling through the compound, suddenly spotted it and watched with spine-tingling fear its swift leapings and glidings through the shadows. They raced back into the house. A wildcat in their garden! The thrill and dread of sharing a frightful secret.

His father enrolled Volodya in the American school for the children of diplomats, which his sister attended. There were some Chinese students in the school, but most were American. It was a good school, his father said. The best.

Volodya, who spoke Chinese as well as Russian, now began to learn English. And arithmetic. In school all morning. Home for lunch. More school in the afternoon. Classes, sports. Happy days.

In the spring of 1934 he suddenly fell ill. The doctors in the German hospital in Peking diagnosed the illness as amoebic dysentery. A swastika flew from the hospital flagpole, and a picture of Adolf Hitler hung on the wall behind the desk of the head nurse. The doctors spoke German.

Frightened by the hospital, Volodya told his father, “I don’t want to be here with fascists!”

His father said it was the best hospital in China.

That summer Solomon Slepak returned to Moscow. Volodya was in and out of the hospital, the German doctors unable to cure him. One of the doctors, Professor Krieg, a tall, grayish-blond man, with blue eyes behind gilded-frame glasses, told Fanya there was something in the food or water that was affecting the boy. He said he did not think the child would live and suggested that they consider leaving China.

In his hospital room, the seven-year-old Volodya lay very ill: diarrhea, blood and mucus in his feces, exhaustion. His nanny slept next to him on a narrow bed.

Fanya Slepak cabled her husband to inform him of Professor Kriegs advice. After a few days, Solomon cabled back: They were being transferred to Moscow.

Fanya cabled that she would not travel by train alone with the children through China. Solomon cabled that they were to go by boat to Kobe in Japan and from there by train to Tsuruga. A boat would then take them to Vladivostok, where they were to take the train to Moscow. The train traveled only through Russian territory. He would meet them when they arrived in Moscow.