Authors: James Cook
Fellow Travelers (34 page)
“My father was a socialist,” he liked to explain, “and the socialists have always been peacemongers. I never wanted to be a businessman or a millionaire. But the opportunity was there and I went for it. I wanted to be a doctor, the way my father was a doctor, but I had a flair for business. I am a capitalist and always have been but capitalism involves taking risks and sometimes you lose your shirt.”
And everybody believed him.
He set out to dissolve the bonds that separated commerce from politics and counted among his friends every president since Hoover, every Russian president since Stalin. Those friendships sometimes never went much beyond a chat in a White House reception line or a quick handshake in an airport corridor. You never knew when Manny Faust's money or his backing might come in handy.
I continued to live in his reflected glory. Journalists liked to call me for the lowdown on how Manny got where he was, and on at least one occasion Manny returned the favor. “My brother Victor?” he told one television interviewer. “I've taken care of him all his life. Victor's a sweet man. and I love him dearly but without me he'd be out on the street. The truth is he never did anything on his own in his life.”
Truth, I suppose, is where you find it.
And Genevieve, his beloved wife of the past twenty years? In the beginning she went with him everywhere around the world, to the ends of the earth, but in the end she tired of all that traveling and, for all I know, got tired of Manny. His private self had long since disappeared in an unending whirl of diplomatic missions, corporate shenanigans, and media flashbulbs, and there wasn't much of anything left over. Manny went off on his own with a series of secretaries, Hollywood stars and starlets, while Genevieve developed a crippling arthritis, took to a wheelchair at her estate in Houston, and never got up again. Manny probably couldn't have cared less.
Miranda and I traveled with him to Russia a few times on his private jet, but I didn't enjoy going back. I hated the new mood of Moscow, all the more so because all the blemishes had been patched up and repaired, the slums removed and the streets widened, whole blocks reduced to rubble and anonymous housing, the entire city renewed and redesigned, so that the settlement that had nestled there on the river for nearly a thousand years no longer existed.
As Manny's star rose in the world of oil, his connections with the gallery became closer and closer. He began arranging a series of exhibitions of Russian art, of paintings from Russian collections that had not been seen in New York or in the West since before the revolution. But the past had lost its resonance for me; these people did not summon up a time that had vanished.
Which may be why a year or so back I began putting these recollections down. I had no idea of what I was going to do with them, and still haven't. Give them to my daughters, perhaps, as a record of the world they came from. Leave them for the scavengers to dispose of along with everything else when they move in to clean out what remains of me after my death. I suppose nobody wants to disappear into the dark without leaving a trace, however light he prefers to travel.
They are curious things, these memories. Sometimes they come rushing back as fresh as the time they encompass, at other times they seem to have been lost entirely, then begin creeping back out of the dark bit by bit so that I seem to remember this, or it must have happened that way, and I even hired a part-time researcher to provide the details my memory lost long ago. More often than not I've discovered that the historical record is wrong and my memory is truer than the history that's been left behind.
As always, in thinking of those days, I come back to the mountains towering over that place in the Urals like some primeval force. That May morning when I took the sledge to Sverdlovsk to catch the train to Moscow, the sky was gray and overcast. You looked up to where the mountain-tops should be, and there was nothing, only those smothering clouds hanging low over the valley. But you knew the mountains were there. They would always be there. You could never escape them. They remained with you all the rest of your life, threatening, overpoweringâlike something out of a dream or nightmare from which, struggle as you might, you would never again awake.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by James Cook
ISBN: 978-1-5040-1246-1
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