Fellow Travelers (21 page)

The waiters rolled in dinner on a cart, and we settled down at the large round table in the corner. We'd all had too much to drink by then, but you'd never have known it. Everyone suddenly seemed rigidly controlled. Edgy. Careful. We spoke a little too rapidly, picked up the terms of the conversation a little too quickly.

We had moved through the soup,. the paté de foie gras, the veal with mushrooms and sour cream, the truffles. Finally after the dessert had been taken away, we settled in for our farewell brandies and cordials.

I had been waiting for Pop or Manny to turn to the General and say, Get to the point, Boris. You didn't just invite us here for the pleasure of our company.

But they didn't get a chance.

The General put down his glass, wiped his large droopy moustache with his napkin, and flashed a mechanical smile.

“I invited you here this evening to inform you of a conversation I had last evening with Minister Litvinov.”

“At last, the main course,” Pop said, with an equally quick smile. “I thought you were never going to get around to it.”

“It is not easy for me, Johannes. We have been together for so long, we have been such warm friends, and I hope what I have to say will not imperil that friendship.”

“Only unfriendly acts can do that,” Pop said, his eyes glowing with unaccustomed brightness.

The General poured himself another snifter of brandy and elaborately inhaled its fragrance.

“Last evening I was directed by Minister Litvinov to inform you that as of January 1 of next year the government will take over the Faust aspirin combine.”

You could practically see the blood drain from Manny's face.

“Just like that,” Pop said.

“Just like that.”

“Even though we have authority from Lenin himself to undertake such a venture?” Pop said.

“Lenin is no longer with us.”

Pop considered that, drew in his breath like a sigh, and said, “And what kind of quid pro quo can we expect?”

“None,” the General answered.

“That's unacceptable. We will insist on some alternative concession.”

“There will be no alternative concession. You understand, Johannes, this is none of my doing. It's a matter of government policy. The government intends over time to eliminate any and all foreign holdings in Soviet Russia. Averell Harriman has already given up his manganese mining venture, and the British have relinquished their Lena Goldfields project. Even the Hammer pencil concession has been nationalized. So it's not just the aspirin business that is being taken over. The government is reasserting its rights to the Soviet people's heritage whatever it may be.”

“Trotsky goes out the front door, and his economic policies come in the back,” Manny said.

“I wouldn't quarrel with that,” Boris replied, breaking off when the waiter came in to begin clearing the table.

Hallelujah. come on get happy

We're waiting for the judgement day
.

“I have done some service to the Soviet people,” Pop said when the waiters had gone, “and the government cannot simply ignore all I have done. We will want an alternative concession.” Pop's shaven head was bathed in sweat.

“There will be none. I've already told you that.”

“Bullshit,” Manny shouted.

“That's enough,” Pop said.

“I'm only beginning,” and Manny went right on. “Faust aspirin has been an enormous success, not only for us but for the government. Litvinov can't possibly think it was the government's role that was responsible. What will the government gain by throwing it away?”

“I would hope,” the General replied, “that the enterprise is sturdy enough to survive on its own. Otherwise we might be forced to raise charges of industrial sabotage.”

“We will want some compensation,” Manny protested doggedly.

“There will be none. The government has no resources for such a thing.”

“Then take them out of the profits,” Manny said. “I never heard of such bullshit.”

Pop clenched his teeth, a muscle in his cheek jumped. “We must at least be permitted to withdraw our assets from the country.”

“In that area, things are perhaps negotiable. We will have to see.”

“And who will take over the operation of the aspirin monopoly?” Manny asked.

“That decision has not yet been reached, but the probability is that it will be someone with some knowledge of the operation.”

“In short, yourself,” Manny said.

“I have some such expectations, I admit. But that is not the point, my friends. This is not some scheme on my part to take over the enterprise you have so ably developed, this is a matter of government policy at the highest level and if I seek to advance my own interests in these circumstances, you must not conclude that I maneuvered to bring it about. I am, after all, exposed to considerable risk myself.”

“I accept that,” Pop said.

“I don't,” Manny retorted. “You have an obligation to see that we come out of this situation whole. We're not just friends and business associates. We're bound together by bonds of marriage and family.”

The General inspected his fingernails and reached for his brandy.

“I do not intend to sit back,” Manny went on, “and let us be stripped of everything we have built here. We're not finished with this so quickly.”

“Later then,” Pop said.

The General poured himself a tumbler of vodka and raising his glass into the light, “I would like to offer a final toast to Jack Faust, his beautiful wife, and his two admirable sons, to myself and my daughter and my wife: The advancement of our mutual self-interest in these most difficult of times.”

We all drank to that and smashed our glasses against the hearth in the time-honored Russian fashion.

It was an exhausting farewell. We had just been robbed of everything we had, and we had to sit and smile as if we had all enjoyed it.

The General saw us into a cab in front of the hotel.

“We will work something out.” the General said to my father, and closed the door of the cab upon us.

It was like all the air going out of a balloon, and the effects of all that vodka began catching up with me.

“That sonofabitch,” Manny said. “That lousy sonofabitch.”

“A little compassion, Manny,” Pop cautioned.

“Compassion! When I think it was my idea to bring him onto the board. It wouldn't hurt to have a General in the family, it'll be a protection against the present and a bulwark against the future. Some bulwark.”

Pop didn't say anything for a long moment. And then “What if we've been a bulwark for each other? Without us there may not be anyone or anything to protect the General anymore.”

“Against what?” I heard myself saying.

“Whatever may happen,” my father said softly.

Tania had known all along. I tried to tell her the next morning, over breakfast, but there was nothing to tell. I was drugged, hungover from too much vodka and too many cigarettes, and I found myself getting unreasonably irritated with her.

“You must have known it couldn't last forever,” she said.

“I don't know why not.”

“Don't you ever pay any attention to what is going on in this country? Times change.”

“I pay as much attention as I need to.”

“Well it's not enough for you to know which side of the street the traffic moves on. Stalin is gradually taking over everything, and we're going back to the way things were just after the revolution. He's taking the country back for us, from all the speculators and small businessmen who have been running it since the days of Lenin's New Economic Policy. It's time we put a stop to it. You'd know that if you ever bothered to read the newspapers.”

“I've been aware that was happening. I'm not that obtuse. But it never occurred to me that anyone named Faust could ever be counted among Russia's enemies.”

“I'd guess it never occurred to anyone named Faust either. Viktor, you can't help yourself. It's in your blood and heart and mind, in the way you look at the world. You Fausts are not Russians, you are not really communists, and anyone who is not one or the other is our enemy.”

“Including some Russian communists” I asked.

“Some people don't deserve to be called either Russian or communist. Mayakovsky had it right:
He who sings not with us today—is against us
.

Sunlight was pouring in through the windows overlooking the courtyard. It made her eyes dance and her hair gleam like gold. I couldn't believe this was happening. We were sitting there in our room and talking as if we were strangers.

“You knew this was going to happen and you never told us.”

“I told you a thousand times. I didn't know when it would happen. I told you when the Hammer pencil concession was taken over that this was the beginning of a change of policy. But you didn't listen. You never even heard me.”

“I just can't understand why you never said it outright. It's part of our life, Tania, not just mine, part of ours.”

“It's your life, not mine, and always has been.”

“My god,” I said, “don't you understand anything. It's what we all live off of.”

“You live off it, not me. I'm no parasite. I work for the press office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That's what I live off of. I don't care what happens to the Faust businesses, all those other things you spend your life worrying about. I don't care about any of it.”

“Your father's no better than we are. He's the one who'll be running the company when we're gone.”

“My father is even worse. You can't help yourself, you're foreigners. But my father's Russian, he's got no excuse.”

“We mustn't talk like this to each other,” I told her. “You know Manny, Pop, and Boris, invited me to dinner with them last night, I can't figure out why.”

“But that's obvious,” Tania said. “They want you to do the work. I can't talk anymore now, Viktor. I'm already late, it's almost seven, and I've got a meeting at the ministry at seven-thirty.”

Tania was right. Pop and Manny put me in charge of the negotiations with the government over the takeover of the Faust aspirin business. I spent most of my time trying to find ways and means of shoring up our position against the oncoming disaster, trying to discover what assets I could remove from the aspirin company without detection, what funds I could move out of the country or into tangibles. But there wasn't much, and it was now a state crime to attempt to move gold out of the country.

To my surprise, Pop assumed the commanding role in all these matters. Manny proposed, but it was Pop who disposed. However outraged we might be, Pop made it clear that publicly the split must seem to be entirely cordial. We didn't want to suggest to the outside world that the Soviet government was becoming unfriendly toward foreign investment. The country still needed it, at least when there was no alternative.

The announcement I concocted for the press corps provided a neat and I hoped plausible explanation of what had happened. In order to maintain the business, Faust Aspirin needed large infusions of capital, which was true, and the Faust interests just didn't have the capital to provide it. Which was only partly false. So, in the interest of both the corporation and the government, Faust Aspirin was gladly ceding control of the operation to the Soviet government.

But not right away, and not without plenty of negotiating. I spent weeks going over the details of the operation with the government's representatives, a team of three bureaucrats from the Ministry of Commerce, settling the value of every paper clip and tableting machine, every supply contract and distribution agreement, so that the government would know precisely what they were getting and Faust American would have a basis for making claims for compensation.

The aspirin business had been yielding over $2 million a year—net—close to two thirds of which we kept for ourselves. I won't deny that I had always done everything I could to protect our share from the government. For me, maximizing the returns from the venture was simply my job. For Pop, it was a means of supporting the causes he wanted to support. And for Manny, it was simply our right: we had worked hard to create the business and deserved to be rewarded for what we had done. That was the implicit agreement we had made, and Manny was determined to make sure the government recognized that.

This time I was worried myself. I had a wife and two children now, as I had not when we lost the trading business and if we were forced to go back to the United States—especially without the businesses we had cultivated over nearly a decade—I wasn't at all sure what would happen to us. I wasn't sure it hadn't already happened.

Tania didn't want any more children. We had reproduced ourselves, and that was enough. I had given her all she ever wanted of me, and she didn't want anything more. Even more unnerving, she made it increasingly clear that she considered the children her children, not ours, hers to shape and rear and mold to her prescription, as if I had had nothing to do with their creation.

And that really worried me.

Time had begun running out, not only for Tania and me, but for all of us. One morning over breakfast Pop told us that Eddie was coming to Moscow in a few weeks for a special meeting of the Comintern.

“But why?” I said. “Why after all these years has he decided to come here?”

“He misses us all.” Mama Eva said.

“Because they think he's a model of everything an American labor organizer should be,” Pop answered.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“I'm not sure I do either,” Pop replied, and dropped the subject.

v

In April, The American delegation came back to Moscow to argue the case for domestic autonomy before a special session of the Comintern. Only this time the delegation was made up not only of Lovestone, Gitlow, and Wolfe but eight or ten representatives of the American proletariat—auto machinists, coal miners, steelworkers, two Negro workers, and a labor organizer, my half-brother Eddie. The idea was to demonstrate that the American delegation had America's working classes on its side.