Fellow Travelers (19 page)

In many ways Yelena was the perfect woman for Manny—though I wouldn't have predicted he would marry her. The Follies girls he used to squire around New York were too trivial for him, physically as well as intellectually. Yelena was alluring, sophisticated, and wicked, voluptuous, earthy, and depraved. Manny turned his charms upon her and she succumbed, or perhaps he succumbed, because Yelena was every bit as aggressive as he was.

In a way, Yelena and Tania were two of a kind, sisters under the skin, two extremely strong, sexually manipulative women. It has always interested me that Manny and I had chosen to marry two women so different and yet so alike. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Yelena and Tania didn't like each other, but they had taken each other's measure and were wary.

So, though we saw each other, we were never exactly close. When we went to the Crimea together, Manny and Yelena went their separate ways, leaving us to ourselves. Yelena drew Manny into that landscape of glamour and celebrity which he hungered after all of his life. She put him in touch with that world of theatre and make-believe which had always enchanted him far more than it did me, even though I had wanted to be an actor. Yelana provided the stage, and, actorlike, Manny proceeded to invent himself.

By the time they married, Tatiana was pregnant and under the watchful eye of her mother and Mama Eva. Unlike many women, she had never focused her life on the inevitability of motherhood. She agreed to be my wife and to have my children—our children, that is—but she had so little enthusiasm over the prospect that I couldn't be sure that if she got pregnant she wouldn't decide to abort the child whether I liked it or not. Instead, she greeted her pregnancy with considerable curiosity and even anticipation. She refused to be a victim of her biology. In having a child, she would be doing her duty to me, the party and the Soviet people. I decided I didn't care what her motives were so long as she achieved the desired result.

By then Yelena was pregnant herself. But where for Tania having a child was a matter of civic if not wifely duty, for Yelena it was a never-ending irritation and annoyance. She complained because it inhibited her social and love life, and she complained even more that it was ruining her career. Who wanted to come hear someone caterwauling about love and longing when she looked like a besotted cow? About as many as ever, as it turned out. But Yelena would hear none of it. She saw only dwindling audiences and a mounting constriction on her ability to control her breath when she sang. “It's the end of my life,” she would wail, “and worst of all I'll probably die in childbirth.”

Yelena survived somehow, and in the end a son was given unto them. Though Manny always scorned the joys of fatherhood, he nonetheless named the boy after himself—Carl Philip Immanuel Faust—and called him, with just a hint of fatherly pride, Little Manny in those rare moments when you could persuade him to say anything at all.

In acquiring Red House, Manny and Pop had only partly renovated the property. In the back. beyond the 200-year-old oak that spread across the terrace like an umbrella, beyond the swimming pool, the gardens, and the tennis court were the old servants' quarters, a ramshackle collection of buildings that looked as if they had stood there long before Red House itself was built, since the days of the boyars, even earlier. A number of outsiders lived there, some squatters, dating back from the time of the revolution. The house itself supposedly had 44 rooms—but we couldn't use that many and a number were completely shut off.

Next to the bedroom Tania and I shared was a large rectangular room, and with Tania's delivery a few months away, we decided to cut a door through the wall and use the room as a nursery. It was a bright sunny place, with high ceilings and tall windows, and it had apparently once been a children's playroom. Around the room was a frieze ten or twelve inches in height made up of children's faces. As you began studying it, you realized that the children were all the same, two girls and one boy, perhaps two years apart in age. The first faces in the frieze were painted when the children were very young, the next a few years later, and then moved on around the room as they got older. The frieze was never completed, and the series broke off in the middle of one wall. Tania decided that they should be painted over, along with the rest of the room.

So we cut a new doorway into the wall and installed a large double door. One night not long after, we were awakened by the sounds of someone sobbing. There was a sliver of light under the new door and when I pulled it open, I found an old woman standing in front of one wall, her back to me, a shawl around her shoulders and a candle in her hand. She was so startled, she dropped the candle plunging the room into darkness.

I flicked on the overhead light, and she stood there, picking at her shawl, and refusing to look at me. I said, “Who are you? Don't be afraid, we won't hurt you.”

“What are you doing here?” Tania said, appearing in the doorway behind me. “You have no right. This is government property. You're in violation of the law just being here.”

The old woman tottered and swayed, and I thought she was going to fall.

I said again, “Don't be afraid, we won't hurt you.”

“I had to come back before they were all gone,” she replied.

“I don't understand.”

“The children—you cut through the children. I had to come back one more time.”

Tania wanted to call the night porter or the police and get rid of her, but I calmed Tania down and helped the old woman to a chair.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Vera Ostrovsky, Citizen Faust. I was the mistress of this house. We built it, my husband and I, and lived here for forty years bringing up our family.”

“Get rid of her,” Tania kept saying. “There's no reason we have to put up with her.”

“I want to hear,” I said. “Go back to bed.”

The woman's alarm had passed. “Those are my children,” she said. “Andrei, Nina, and Aleksandra. This was their playroom, and every year we had their faces painted on the wall. You can see them growing up before your eyes. And then the revolution broke out, and we lost everything. My son was killed in the civil war, and my daughters—I don't know what happened to them. We sent them to our place in the country, but it burned, and we never saw them again. I came here to take one last look.”

I was about to suggest that we could leave the pictures, but Tania said, “I'm sick of all this, I'm going to bed.” I told the old woman she could come back and look at them again. She disappeared down the curving staircase and, as far as I know, never came back.

We got into an argument about that, Tania and I. The woman deserved whatever she got, Tania said. She was part of the system that had oppressed the Russian people for a thousand years. The privileged classes. Capitalist oppressors.

“Maybe so. But you can believe that and still feel for her loss.”

“When did she ever feel for the working people who were being ground to death by the system?”

“I haven't any idea. She didn't tell me, and I didn't ask, but she may have.”

I was tired of hearing it all again, at three o'clock in the morning, and I turned away from her and went to sleep.

When we first knew each other, I had always thought that Tania's ideological commitment had more to do with her own insecurity than with any intellectual conviction. Her grandparents after all had been members of the nobility, and though her father and grandfather had been involved in both the 1905 revolution and the Bolshevik movement the past no longer offered much protection for anyone. Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev were already in exile, and within a decade most of the remaining founders of the revolution would be dead, including Tania's father, the general, Boris Churnuchin. But over the years, Tania changed, or if she did not, my comprehension of her did.

During the last months of her pregnancy, we were apart far more often than we normally were. Getting the aspirin business up and running occupied much of my time, took me into parts of Russia that were alien to her, and put me in contact with people she didn't want to know, so our social engagements tended to be purely social. I was happy enough about that.

Tania had no more intention of taking on herself the dog work involved in maintaining our daily life than she had of sitting around with other women of her age and condition. In those days, it cost virtually nothing to hire people to work for you if you had the money. You hired somebody to stand in line to buy food, clothing, and other necessities and we hired people who were going to see Tania through her delivery and take care of the child after its birth.

I was never comfortable with such people as I have never been comfortable with servants. You could not delude yourself into thinking you were loved. The mass of people hated us for the special privileges we enjoyed, hated us even when they thought we were Russian, hated us even more when they discovered we were foreigners.

I remember one late summer afternoon we had gone off in the Rolls with Manny and Yelena for a spin in the countryside. It was an open car, long, sleek, with leather upholstery and wide running boards. We found ourselves on a muddy back road, driving behind a peasant in a large four-wheeled oxcart. The cart was filled with manure, the odor was rank, stifling, and Manny began blowing his horn, yelling to the driver to pull out of the way.

The peasant was a large burly man. He sat on a high seat at the front of the cart, and every once in a while would flick his whip at the animals to urge them onward. There was no place to turn off, but that didn't stop Manny from sounding the horn, shouting, and driving forward so that the bumper just touched the turning wheels of the cart. Yelena and Tania viewed the whole thing with a great deal of laughter.

The cart reached a passing point in the road finally, and the peasant pulled over. Manny gunned the car, pulled ahead, and as we passed I sensed that the farmer was on his feet in the cart. Suddenly something landed in the car, in Yelena's lap—a fork full of manure. Yelena shrieked, and when Manny realized what had happened, he slammed on the brakes, leaped out, and began tearing back down the road, screaming at the farmer, threatening to have him shot, to call the secret police. I ran after him, pulling him back into the car, and we drove on. Somehow I persuaded Manny to forget the whole thing.

That was the day that Tania's water broke, and the following morning our twin daughters were born, Katerina and Maria. Tania had never looked more beautiful, and my heart welled up with an unspeakable joy.

The following summer the government held the first of what would become known around the world as the demonstration trials. Stalin was continuing to consolidate his power, and decided to demonstrate that the nation was beset by an organized network of spies and saboteurs and to make an example of a group of forty or fifty managers in the coal industry. Though they had apparently done nothing especially reprehensible other than try to operate with a minimum of interference from the central government, they were nonetheless charged with a long list of high crimes and misdemeanors, as we would have put it back in the U.S.—funneling funds to the former owners of the mines, sabotaging mining machinery in order to disrupt the nation's fuel supply, wasting the industry's capital on defective machinery, and preparing to deliver the mines into enemy hands in the event of war.

Tania wanted me to attend the trials so that I could help her interpret what was going on for our journalist friends, Barnes of the
Herald Tribune
, Chamberlin of the
Monitor
, Gene Lyons of the
United Press
, and I suppose even Walter Duranty of the
New York Times
. These trials were not the sort we were used to back home. Innocence and guilt had already been decided. They were public exhibitions, confessions of high crimes against the state to alert the people to the dangers that threatened them on all sides.

The trials were held in the Hall of Nobles in Trades Union House—the place where Lenin had lain in state. It was a setting befitting the gravity of the proceedings. There were columns lining the perimeter of the room, immense crystal chandeliers dropping like tears from the ceiling and at the front of the room behind the podium a great swirl of red banners and the gold seal of the hammer and sickle. Red guards stood with their bayonets at the ready around the room, and the judges, three of them, clad in black business suits like American undertakers, sat on a raised dais behind the witness box.

The trials made me sick. Day after day one hapless manager after another would confess the crimes he had committed against the state and go on to accuse his fellow workers of even greater ones. It got even worse than that. I would never claim that the Fausts were a warm loving family, but I was chilled by the handsome young boy who mounted the podium into a blaze of light and began testifying against his father. I can still hear his voice ringing in the room: “I denounce my father as a traitor. I accuse him of being an enemy of the Soviet people. I demand the severest penalty for his crimes. I reject him and the name he bears forever and henceforth shall no longer call myself by his name.”

Such denunciations became familiar later on, in Germany as well as Russia, but in those days they were a shocking violation of all that the human family has ever held dear.

I stopped attending the trials after the appearance of a mining engineer named Constantine Skorutto. He had been accused of conspiring with enemy agents to undermine the Soviet Union, but unlike most of the others he had, from the beginning, insisted on his innocence. He had never betrayed his country or the Soviet people. He had never conspired with his coworkers. But that morning when he settled into the witness box, peering behind thick glasses into the dazzling spotlight, he began confessing his guilt, reciting a rambling litany of his crimes of thought and deed, association and conspiracy. Suddenly a voice rang out in the chamber, a woman's voice, his wife's, crying out, “Kolya darling, you promised not to lie. Don't lie. You know you are innocent.”