Fellow Travelers (23 page)

I could get him to talk about the labor wars he had been involved in, the strikes, the confrontations, but he shied away from the violence. He didn't like to talk about what had happened to him, but didn't need to. The day we went to the baths together, with steam thick as mist in that tiled room, I could see it written all over his body—his back his chest, his arms. You pretended you didn't see but could imagine the rest—the scars where the broken bone had poked through when someone brought a piece of pipe down on his arm, deep scars on his back, like hens' scratches, where they had gone after him with a cat-o'-nine-tails.

You could see it in the way he walked, with his head bent forward, his eyes peering up from under his brows, elbows bent slightly, as if he expected at any moment to be attacked or to have to attack somebody. He had thrown rocks himself, worn brass knuckles, and carried a lead pipe. He had worked beside the gangsters they called in to fight off the gangsters the companies hired.

I listened and puzzled over who this man was, my brother only because his mother was my mother. Eddie cared about nothing except his work with the people and wanted to be like my father. He said it was Pop who made him the man he was. He had known him from the time he was six when Mama Eva moved out of that tenement on the lower east side and in with my father. For Eddie, Pop always seemed so big and so powerful. Listening to that six-year-old's view of my father I realized I didn't know the man he was talking about at all.

“Pop wasn't like the rest,” Eddie said. “He wasn't concerned about power, about grubbing for money. He was concerned about people and justice. He cared about bodies and minds, about suffering and misery, anguish and pain, and that was what the socialist movement was all about.”

I didn't know what to make of all this. This wasn't my father, not the father I ever knew.

“What was your real father like?”

“I don't remember,” he answered. “I didn't like him, that's all I remember. He used to hit her a lot and make her cry. I think I hated him.”

“But she loved him. She must have loved him at one time or other.”

“Not that I can remember. She was mad about your father. And so was I. I thought he was the greatest man who ever lived.”

After a month or more of meetings the day arrived on which the praesidium of the Communist International would rule on the issues of autonomy the American party had dared to force it to consider. The meetings were held in Red Hall on the ground floor of the Comintern building. The hearings were private, and none of us was permitted to attend, except Tania, the members of the press, and 150 to 200 members of the various national parties. I would not have wanted to go. That day I took the girls for a walk in the park under the walls of the Kremlin, and we fed the ducks in the Kremlin gardens. In the evening I sat around in the parlor listening to jazz records and reading a first novel by an American named Thomas Wolfe. At eleven, Tania hadn't come home, so I went to bed and fell quickly to sleep.

In the morning, just before daylight, I was awakened by the night porter. There was a man at the front gate claiming he was my brother and demanding to be let in. The porter didn't believe him. He knew my brother Manny, but this was somebody else, and the man was so insistent he decided he had better disturb me.

I followed the porter down the stairs. It was still dark out, but there was Eddie.

I was pleased to see him. We went upstairs to the parlor and without being asked he went to the table and poured himself a drink.

“Things didn't go well,” I said.

He shook his head. It took him a while to get going, but once he did, it began pouring forth in a torrent.

“They held the whole thing in this huge room,” he said. “There were red banners and spotlights and microphones everywhere. They talked and listened and talked some more and when they were done we lost everything. Absolutely everything. And then they rubbed our noses in it.”

“That's what everybody predicted would happen.”

“I guess some people kept hoping things would be different anyway.”

“Everybody else saw it coming,” I told him.

Even I could. A few days before, the praesidium had issued a paper denouncing the American leadership as right-wing deviationists, unprincipled opportunists, gross intriguers, slanderers of the Russian Communist Party, and on and on. The things they always said no matter what you'd done or who you were.

“We didn't take it lying down,” Eddie said. “The boys came up with a paper of their own—I mean Gitlow and Lovestone did. It wasn't very long, and all it said was we stuck by our right to make decisions on matters relevant to American conditions. You could tell nobody had ever dared to do anything like this before.

“Stalin was there on the platform, wearing black boots and a military uniform, smiling, stroking his moustache and puffing his pipe, and then he got up and went to the podium. He's a dark and very intimidating man, hulking, fierce, very oriental-looking. Yet when he began speaking, his voice was so soft you could hardly hear it, even the translators had trouble hearing, but what you did hear was enough to chill your blood, The more intense his words got, the softer they became, so that you could hardly hear more than three words out of five.

“It was a terrifying performance. He went right after Lovestone's claims that we represented the overwhelming majority of the party. ‘You have that majority,' Stalin said, ‘only because in the past you accepted the will of the Comintern. You reject that, and you have no support at all.' He wanted the praesidium to take an immediate vote affirming the Comintern's position and it did. The motion was adopted unanimously, except for one vote, Gitlow's for the American party.

“You could see that Stalin was outraged by Gitlow's resistance and he seized the podium demanding that each member of the American delegation announce his position, with working class members leading things off. He must have thought we wouldn't support the party's position. Everybody was scared. The room was very quiet, and you could feel that everybody else in the room was against you.

“The first two guys in our group stood up and held their ground. But the third broke with us. He had tears in his eyes; he was shaking, but he broke with us, and it was like being hit in the stomach. I thought for a moment it was all over. And then the fourth guy got up, but he didn't back off. He recited what had become the formula for us all: I oppose the Party's declaration as damaging to the interests of the party in the U.S. He sounded pretty feeble, but he didn't break. Then the machinist from Detroit got up and said the same thing, only he hollered it out, really hollered, and nobody had any doubt where he stood. It was like a tide rising. The next guy followed with a cry even louder, and you felt the sense of solidarity taking hold of us all. We were all as one on this issue, and our voices rose and soared in that hall, and you knew that this was what it was all about, joining together with the other guys to assert your right to justice and brotherhood, and when the last voice had died away, the hall was dead silent.

“Jay Lovestone got up then and said in a firm quiet voice that the Comintern's decision would greatly hurt the party in the U.S. Americans lived and worked in a society that had not descended from feudalism. They had no clearly defined class tradition and so needed special consideration from the international organization. The American party wasn't intransigent. If the decision was a matter of party discipline, if it was important that all of us stand together, he would accept it. I know that must sound gutless but it still took a lot of nerve. We stomped our feet in approval and cheered but the rest of the crowd quickly drowned us out.

“Bert Wolfe stood up and said the same thing, only his voice wavered a little; it sounded thin, almost defeated. He must have decided by then that we had already lost everything, that the party leadership should never have left its power base behind it in New York and come begging to Moscow. He rejected the party's position, he said, but as a matter of discipline, like Jay Lovestone, he would nonetheless support it if he had to. We again cheered him on, whistled wildly, and stomped our feet.

“And then Ben Gitlow got up, he who had announced the party's dissenting vote in the first place, and reaffirmed our position. He thought the Comintern declaration was damaging to the American party. But he didn't stop there. He gathered his voice to its full strength and shouted: ‘Not only do I vote against this decision, I will fight against it when I return to the U.S.'

“The room exploded with shock and outrage, and all of us just sat there. It was really all over this time, and we knew it. We didn't cheer or stomp our feet. We didn't do anything. We simply sat there looking straight ahead. We were all proud of Gitlow. He had redeemed us all.

“But Stalin was beside himself. He rushed to the platform and even before the crowd quieted down began talking. This time he had lost all control, shouting, his words coming in a flood. I have never heard anything like it in my life. The translator couldn't keep up with him. He went on and on, and began to chew out the international party, not just the Russian members but all the people who were there. Three of us got up and tried to leave, but the guards forced us back into our seats. I heard him say, ‘And you—who do you think you are? Trotsky defied me and where is he now? Bukharin defied me, and Zinoviev, and where are they all now? I destroyed them all and I shall destroy you. You will get back to America, but when you get there no comrade will greet you in the street and break bread with you or look upon your face. Only your women will be able to endure the sight of you, and not all of them.'

He started down the central aisle with all his bodyguards and secretaries trying to keep up with him. The entire auditorium got to its feet as he passed. When he got to our delegation, he put his hand out to one of the Negro members who stood on the aisle, but the man jerked his hand away, and said, ‘Why in hell is this bastard picking on me?' Stalin didn't know any English but you could tell from the man's voice, face, and gesture what he meant by it, and Stalin turned and barreled on up the aisle to the street.

“It was nearly four in the morning, and we all went out of the hall together in a group shoulder to shoulder, into a square. The rest of the crowd drew away from us, and somebody spat on the man who wouldn't shake Stalin's hand, but otherwise they left us alone. We didn't know what to do or where to go. There was a street peddler outside, and we bought oranges from him and ate them. They were sweet and juicy. Nobody could say anything. If we did we knew we would cry.

“I'm not sure it wasn't a mistake to come here,” Eddie said after a while. “Sometimes it's better to think that somewhere people are treated like human beings, rather than that there is no place on this earth where people can live free.”

In the end, Eddie fell asleep, and I put him to bed on the couch.

When Tania came home and saw him, she said, “Get that piece of garbage out of here.”

“He is my brother.”

“Not any more,” she said, “There are no brothers other than the party.”

“You're wrong, you don't understand.”

“Get that man out of here or you will destroy us all.”

“In the morning,” I said, “in the morning.”

And that night was the end of it.

IV: A Ticket to Leningrad

Moscow, 1929–1931

i

I told Eddie he didn't need to go back to the hotel, he could stay at Red House with us. We had plenty of spare room, and I didn't care whether Tania liked it or not. I had an obligation to this man who was my brother, who had become my brother in the weeks since he'd come here to Moscow. I felt closer to Eddie in fact than I ever had to Manny, and I was not going to turn my back on that.

Things had started to go wrong between Tania and me long before Eddie became an issue. When did the disaffection begin? I don't know. All I know is that I woke up one morning and realized that whatever we once had together had gone and, even worse, that Tania had realized this long before I did.

Maybe it had begun with the children. We had quarreled about them almost from the very beginning. Masha and Kasha were identical twins, same blond hair and blue eyes, same petulant mouth, each with a lock of hair on the foreheads though curling in opposite directions. I'd have thought you'd do everything you could to de-emphasize their common identity. But not Tania.

Which is how they got their names. Tania wanted rhyming names, Kasha and Masha, I lost that battle, though I held my own by calling one Maria and the other Katerina. I lost all the other battles that followed. Tania scrupulously dressed the two girls exactly alike, and if I tried to take them for a walk with sweaters or hats that didn't match, she would pursue me down the hall till things had been put right. The duplication was endless—the toys, same bedclothes, same food, and if Katerina or Maria should began to evidence some insidious individualistic behavior, she would ruthlessly curb it.

None of this was that important, of course, but it irritated me all the same, more acutely the older the girls got.

When the girls were two and a half, I began to be bothered that all they could speak was Russian, and I decided it was time they began to learn English. I tried talking to them in English but nothing I ever said seemed to make much of an impression. My Russian was not all that good, and I suppose I didn't spend enough time with them. I told Tania I thought we ought to get an English-speaking governess. One of these days we might be going back to the United States, I reminded her, and they were half American, after all.

“The American half doesn't count,” she had replied. “Here is where they live and breathe, here they will learn the language that will shape their minds and souls as Russians. Russian is good enough for me: it will be good enough for them. Besides, I can't imagine their ever wanting to go to a capitalist country. I saw enough of what capitalism is like when we lived in France. The cruelty, the exploitation, the heartlessness of everyone toward everyone else. I am Russian, they are Russian, and they are going to stay that way.”