Fellow Travelers (28 page)

If you didn't know better, you might have thought he was somebody's pretty boy, ineffectual and epicene, but he was anything but that. He had been married three times, fathering a child with each of his wives, and then abandoning them as indifferently as he abandoned their beds. But his wives never abandoned him, adoring him ever after, considering themselves blessed to have been among his lovers.

He went out of his way to become the Peck's Bad Boy of Soviet literature. He drank heavily, even by Russian standards, and he liked to pick fights with people twice his size and make them regret they'd accepted his challenge. What he lacked in heft and power, he made up for in speed, spirit and aggressiveness. If he sometimes looked a little dissolute, that only added to his charm. The party politicians loved him, he mauled and manhandled their wives, and somehow they were flattered by his attention. He lived from hand to mouth, scrounging from the government, from his cabaret audiences, or from the women he got involved with.

Valentin didn't give a damn about politics and wrote poems about the peasant experience, nature, and love. Translated from Russian into English, he always sounded like Edgar Guest to me—“it takes a heap of livin' to make a house a home,” that sort of thing. I never claimed to have any ear for poetry, but he captivated virtually everyone he ever ran into. The more literary types would say, Pushkin thought in verse, Mayakovsky makes love in verse, but Nikitin lives his whole life in verse. I never knew what they meant by that until someone explained they were really saying Nikitin wrote with his prick the way Titian or Renoir painted with his. I don't know about Titian, but I never thought Nikitin had that much to work with.

In the end, I decided that it wasn't Nikitin himself that interested Tania. He had become her chosen instrument, the means whereby she would tell me that everything was over between us.

We had decided to wind up the Faust family's affairs by the end of the year, when the aspirin concession finally expired, and Manny began shuttling back and forth between New York and Moscow, making arrangements for where we would live. He still had his house in Greenwich Village, and he found one for me in Chelsea, down the block from the Episcopal Theological Seminary and for Mama Eva and Pop, a place in the Bronx not far from where we used to live.

Now that I'd lost Tania, the girls seemed more precious to me than ever. I went out of my way to stop in the nursery every night when I came home to play with them. I would take them out to the amusement parks by the river, to the zoo and the botanical garden, and for rides in the country. I would teach them English nursery rhymes. The more I saw of them, the more they meant to me, and the more determined I was that I was going to take them with me when we went back to New York.

I tried to persuade Tania to get a divorce. In Moscow in those days, getting a divorce was almost as easy as getting married. All you had to do was appear together at the registry office and announce that the marriage was at an end. But the decision had to be mutual, and Tania didn't want a divorce. She had nothing to gain by it. She preferred to be Mrs. Faust. It gave her a lot more freedom of action in her job and everywhere else than she would have if she were single again. More important perhaps, if we were divorced, I would have guardianship of the girls as the sole head of the family, and they could travel with me on my passport. But so long as our marriage endured, Tania and I and our daughters were bound together.

I got passports for the twins from the American embassy in Berlin, but in order to take them out of the Soviet Union, I needed visas from the Soviet government and that turned out to be a nightmare. I went from agency to bureaucrat, ricocheting from one end of Moscow to another.

Before I was through, I must have shaken every strand of the bureaucratic web in the government. I would get encouraging responses but I got nowhere. I should have known that sooner or later Tania would discover what I was up to.

One afternoon I came home to discover that the children were gone, all their toys and clothing, their nurse and tutor, and so were all of Tania's things, coats and dresses, jewelry, cosmetics, even her combs and mirrors, leaving not a trace of her behind. Tania left word with the porter that she had gone to her father's house, a few blocks away, and I began the complicated business of trying to win custody of the children.

I was still determined to take them back to the United States, but Tania had no intention of letting that happen. She would permit me to visit them in the precincts of her parents' house, but nothing beyond that, so I began to plot to get them away from her. I even thought of kidnapping them and smuggling them out of Russia somehow, but I couldn't do that to them, or to Tania, or myself.

I went to Tania and begged her to let them go.

“You can't have them, Viktor, everything, anything else, but not them. You gave them to me and for that I shall always be grateful, but they are mine. They are my body, my flesh, my life, I will not relinquish them.”

“But you knew that I wanted to have children.”

“Stay here and you have them. Things can be as they always have been. But I will never let you take them away from me.”

And she never did.

We left behind us one of the enduring legends of literary Moscow. One afternoon Valentin Nikitin appeared at our offices in Koznetsky Most and demanded to see me. He looked as if he hadn't slept in days, and was ashen and shaken. He had been drinking, his glasses were askew on his nose, and he dropped to his knees on the oriental carpet by my desk and begged my forgiveness. “I am worthless,” he told me “I am not fit to live. To abuse children is the cardinal sin, a crime against life and the future. It is unforgivable and I can never atone for such a crime. She was their mother, as you are their father, and I have destroyed them.”

I told him I doubted that they had been severely damaged, and assured him I forgave him for whatever transgressions he may have committed.

But that was unthinkable: how could a man like me forgive an artist like him?

After he left he went back his rooms and wrote one more poem. He had humiliated and shamed the woman he loved most of all, shamed her and her children beyond redemption, and in such circumstances he could not endure to live. He had run out of ink so he cut his wrist enough to draw blood, copied the poem out carefully with it. With that accomplished, he went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, forced his way past the guards at the entryway, rushed up the staircase to Tania's office on the third floor, presented her with his apology and the holograph copy of his poem, pulled out a gun and put a bullet through his head.

iv

One evening that September, the last September we spent in Moscow, I was walking home along the Tverskaya when I saw a face in the crowd, a face remembered from somewhere, a dark-haired, heavily made-up young woman, one of the whores that patrolled the streets beyond the casino. A face like a half-forgotten song, a fragrance carried on the wind from nowhere. A moment later I realized who it was. Varya, Katya's sister.

I hurried on down the street in the direction she had gone and tried to find her. I had never realized how many women there were for sale in Moscow, young women, old women, ugly women, beautiful women, women of all ages and sizes for all tastes and inclinations. But I couldn't find Varya anywhere. I went out looking for her the next night and for some weeks to come. The faces of the women became so familiar that I found myself stopping them to ask if they knew where I could find her, Varya, Varina Ivanovna Arkadyevna.

But none of them knew her name, or recognized my description. Then, when I was about ready to give up, I caught her reflection in a shop window not far from the Pushkin monument, and followed her down the street, pushing my way through the crowds, calling her name. The faster I moved, the faster she moved, and finally she turned off the Petrovka into an alleyway and I had her cornered. “Leave me alone,” she said, “What are you trying to do, destroy me too?”

“I want to know about Katya.”

“There's nothing to know. She's gone. She doesn't exist anymore.”

“But why?”

“I don't know why.”

“Tell me,” I said, “what do you know.”

“The secret police took her away. It was a long time ago now.”

“But you don't know what happened to her?”

“Somebody told me once—a GPU man I think it was, one of my customers—that she had been sent to Magnitogorsk, or was it Irkutsk. I don't remember anymore. But what does it matter. She's gone. So, please, leave me alone. I'm afraid to be seen with you.”

“You think I'm responsible?”

“Who cares anymore? It happens to hundreds of people every day. Please let me go, Viktor. This isn't the greatest way to earn a living, but it's better than others I can think of.”

“But you don't know anything?”

“I know nothing. I told her not to get involved with you, but she never would listen. She loved you a little. Maybe more than a little. She thought you'd be able to protect her, but you didn't, or couldn't, or didn't care enough.”

“Couldn't,” I said.

“If you say so. You made her happy for a little while, and maybe that will be enough to last her the rest of her life.”

“Oh, Varya,” I said, taking her into my arms, trying to comfort her and myself, but she broke away from me, saying, “Please leave me alone. I'm afraid.”

I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn't take it. She gave me a professional smile, and laughed. “I never accept charity, I work for a living. If there's anything in that line I can do for you.”

“I've got to get back to work,” she said and then kissed me and ran down the alley into the street.

There was a storm coming. Every now and then there were faint flashes of light in the sky above the rooftops. The wind had started to blow, the streets were wet from an earlier shower, and the light from the streetlamps glinted on the trolley tracks. It was a mild night, surprisingly mild for that time of year. The last of the autumn leaves clung to the trees and rustled in the wind.

I was almost unbearably depressed, my body heavy, my head, leaden. Every step was exhausting, every thought. I was not even mourning Katya any more. It was as if Varya had simply confirmed what I had known long ago—that Katya was dead—and the knowledge no longer touched me. I felt used, manipulated, betrayed. I was in mourning for my life, for all I was and all that had ever happened to me.

Except for a light in the entryway, Red House was dark. The porter hadn't locked the gate yet, and I pulled open the door, went inside, and climbed the stairs to our rooms. You could almost hear the place echo. Everything was empty, as antiseptic as a hotel room.

Through the window I could see the silhouettes of the shapes in the courtyard, the huge tree that occupied its center, a squat and massive maple with arms that reached out from the central trunk like a candelabra. In these rooms we had shared for nearly three years I could find no trace of Tania anywhere, nothing except a smudged fingerprint on the edge of the hand mirror. Nothing at all.

I opened the doors to the nursery and there was nothing there either. The children's beds were still there, but the mattresses had been stripped. The cupboards were empty, toys had been taken away.

I flicked out the light on the ruins of my life. My wife gone, my children taken away, as irrecoverably as Katya had been. I knew I would never get them back, though I would go through the motions for as long as I stayed in Moscow, ever after if I could. I lit a cigarette and smoked a while, sitting upright in the dark in a chair by the window of the bedroom, across the room from that immaculately made bed, and belligerently flicked the ashes on the floor. Every time I drew in a breath, I could verify that I still existed, the smoke reaching deep into my chest, seeping into the blood, quickening the pulse. I didn't care about anything anymore, and when I had drawn the cigarette down to a stub, I ground it out on the floor.

I was twenty-eight, and I felt as if I had reached the end of my life. What was I going to do with the rest of it? Everything I had loved in Moscow had vanished. I wanted to get away, to go home.

I was too depressed to sleep, too agitated. I wanted to cry on somebody's shoulder but there was nobody anywhere in Moscow I could turn to, no one who would care enough to listen to me. I wandered down the dark corridor toward Manny and Yelena's apartment. There was a line of light under the door, but I was sure Manny wasn't there, and I couldn't face Yelena.

I started back down the corridor, and as I turned the corner I heard the door open behind me and saw a spill of light. A woman's voice cried out, Is somebody there? I stood motionless and waited until Yelena shut the door again before going on down the hall. There was no sign of light under Mama Eva's door, but I couldn't have faced her if she had been up. She would be either too sodden to respond or too falsely solicitous to be borne. So I turned my back and headed down the marble staircase to the lobby and through the narrow passage to the courtyard.

There was a rush of wind when I opened the door, and I could hear Cerberus coming, Pop's beloved wolfhound, running silent as an express train, and I slammed the door shut upon him, trembling. A moment later Pop was there, coming out of the darkness somewhere, and he said, “Oh, it's you,” and opened the door and let the dog in. The dog was perfectly agreeable now. Unthreatening. He waited beneath Pop's fingertips, panting softly.

“Let's have a drink,” I said. “I think I feel like a drink.” I felt suddenly dangerous, like a bomb about to explode, waiting to go off. I wanted to throw things, smash them, pull the whole world down around me. “Why not?” Pop said, and the three of us went down the darkened corridor and into the library. It was a large room with floor-to-ceiling shelves on all sides filled not with books but with art objects that Pop and Mama Eva had picked up over the years. There were large French windows looking out on the courtyard, but when Pop turned on a table lamp by the window, all you could see was the gloomy reflection of the room. Our shapes caught eerily in the glass.