Fellow Travelers (6 page)

I told him I would think about it, but I had already thought. What did I want to do that for? That wasn't where my talents lay. I wasn't sure in those days just what my talents were, but I knew they weren't there.

But Manny wouldn't leave me alone. “I've been looking into things,” he said, “and there are some courses you should take, in typing, shorthand, and accounting, so you can handle a lot of the paperwork that will need to be done.”

“Typing and shorthand? You want me to be a secretary?” Think again, Manny.

“Look, Victor,” he told me, and I could tell by the tone what was coming. “I talked to Pop about this, and he wants you to do it. He wants us to do it. He says it's important for the party and the cause.”

“Why didn't he say that to me?”

“We had a lot of other things to talk about.”

“Well, I don't think I want to do it.”

“Now look, I don't mean to play the big brother, but when Pop went to jail, he told me to look after you. He told me I was to make all the important decisions for the family, and I've decided.”

“Well, you better decide again.”

“I'm in charge here, and you're going to do it, Do you hear what I'm saying? You're going to do it, or you're out on the street.”

“Screw you” I said, “so I'm out on the street.”

“Have you ever been out on the street? Well just take a look at what goes on around you the next time you're there. Where do you think all your money comes from, the clothes on your back, the money for your theatre tickets and your fancy friends from Princeton, and the money that keeps you in school—it comes from me.”

“It doesn't,” I said, “it comes from Pop.”

“Pop doesn't have a cent. When he went to jail, he turned over everything to me. It was my money anyway. I made it. I'm the one who's been paying all our bills the last two or three years.”

I couldn't believe it.

“Find out what it's like to be out on the street. You'll change your tune.”

“I'll get a job. I'll go to work.”

“Doing what? You can't do anything. You can't even get an acting job.”

We went on and on like that, and I wouldn't give in.

But suddenly the money wasn't there. I had to get the money from Mama Eva to get to the Village on the subway.

Mama Eva told me times were rough, with Pop in jail she couldn't spare any more. She told me I would have to get a job to supplement our income.

But I knew better.

“Pop doesn't have anything. Maybe you could get some money from your brother,” she said.

“I'd sooner die,” I answered.

And then she began telling me how much Manny depended on me to support the family, how much he was going to need me to keep the business going in Russia, and it wasn't just like getting a job, it was doing something for the cause of human solidarity.

I didn't listen.

I went out and tried to get a job, and nothing I found paid anything.

Then Manny began talking about the Moscow Art Theatre and Stanislavky. He had connections, he announced, he could arrange for me to study acting in Russia. It wouldn't be all typing and shorthand. Everybody in the business was talking about Stanislavsky in those days. Josh Logan was saying he was even going to go to Russia to study, and I began to see that maybe Manny's proposition wasn't as foolish as it seemed. I could be in at the beginning of a bold new era in the theatre.

I was nineteen. In the end I told him I would do what he wanted.

“Fine,” he said, “You can start taking courses at the Miller School of Typing and Shorthand on Monday.”

Two months later I was on my way—to Russia and the rest of my life.

II: Spring's Awakening

Platinumgrad, Moscow, 1922–1924

i

We left New York together on August 3, Manny and I, on the Aquitania bound for Southampton, Antwerp, and Bremen. The skies were sunny as we passed through the Narrows and into the open sea, but then the sun faded, the skies turned gray, and it began to rain, a drizzle, a steady downpour, and finally a gale.

On the second day the sea began to mount, the water tilting outside the porthole, tossing and tilting beyond the deck rail, the ship bucking and rolling, and you planted your feet wide and rolled with it. When you stood at the bow, you could see the ship rear up in the driving rain, catch like a held breath, and crash back into the trough of the sea. One by one, most of our fellow passengers disappeared into their staterooms, and for a while I beheld their discomfort with amusement, but then on the third evening, I sat with Manny at dinner in the near-empty dining room watching the floor-length drapes swing and sway at the large picture window, sway and swing like a giant pendulum, sway and tilt, tilt and slide, and my whole inner self began swinging with them, and I fled to my stateroom and stayed there moaning and retching until we reached Southampton.

I thought I was going to die. I was too sick even to imagine myself laid out in my coffin, my hair slicked back, a handkerchief in my breast pocket and my waxen hand resting on my stomach. And in a way I did die on that voyage, at least to the life I had led in New York. I could never go back to it. And not just to the life, to myself. As it seems to me now, the person I was had died and I was only beginning to discover the person I was going to be.

Manny, of course, made the trip without a qualm. He stayed abroad on two stable feet the whole time, shaking hands and making friends with the few people who remained upright: a politician from South London, a banker from Hamburg, a pickpocket from Marseilles. When they left the boat Manny had their names, their addresses, and their affection, and he would hold on to them ever after.

We stayed aboard ship at Southampton. A year earlier, when Manny first went to Europe, he had gone ashore and been detained by the British as an enemy agent, which I suppose in a way he was, and so we decided not to take any risks and stayed aboard ship until we reached Bremen a day or so later. From Bremen, we took the train to Berlin, rolling through the lush low countryside, where the harvest was just beginning to come in, and we tried to look as if we really belonged there.

In those days, Berlin was the gateway to Russia. None of the other western countries maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, but the Germans had won the war on the Eastern front, so why shouldn't they go on dealing with their vanquished enemy. Lenin had not only sued for peace, he had relinquished all the neighboring territories Russia had absorbed over three centuries from Estonia to the Ukraine. When the Germans were themselves defeated by the Western powers, the Russians got them all back again. The Germans embraced pacifism and socialist idealism, leaving the U.S. and Britain to undertake those military misadventures at Murmansk and Vladivostok that were supposed to turn back the tide of history.

Before we went on to Moscow, we spent two or three days exploring Berlin, that most beautiful and corrupt of capitals. Manny saw to it we took in the Eldorado, the city's most glamorous and notorious nightclub. A dim cavernous establishment, Eldorado had a telephone on every table, and you dialed someone who attracted you at one of the other tables and arranged your pleasures for the evening. The prospects were little more than children—young girls and a smattering of boys—schooled in satisfying the most jaded tastes in Europe. Another night I called the tune, and we visited the nightclubs and cabarets where newcomers like Brecht, Eisler, and Hilda Wangel were laying the ground for a new kind of theatre. And then, our flesh and spirit sated, we went to the Soviet embassy and picked up our Soviet visas.

To Manny's delight, the visas were waiting for us, just as they were supposed to be, and this proved, Manny said, that the Russians had finally accepted his status as a friend of the Soviet Union. The year before, they had kept him waiting nearly a month. He'd had a letter of introduction from the Soviet trade mission in New York and a letter from Pop to Lenin himself, but nobody had paid any attention, so in the end he was forced to give up on Berlin, take a boat for Riga, and make his way to Moscow through the back door.

This time they knew who he was, who we were, and what we were prepared to do for the socialist cause. Within hours we had boarded the long blue-and-yellow train that would carry us across Poland, through Byelorussia, and on into the ancient city of the Mocovites itself. What we were doing was completely against the law. U.S. citizens were prohibited from going to Russia, but nobody seemed to care.

It took us three days to get to Moscow. At Scolpce on the Polish border you had to change trains. All the other railroads in Europe were four-feet, eight-inches wide, but the Russians wanted greater stability and carrying capacity and so built their railroads to a six-foot gauge. You achieved a lot more efficiency apparently, but you lost what you'd gained because you had to change equipment and transfer traffic to get from one system to another, and that cost time and money. Even worse, you added one more protective barrier between Russia and the rest of the world, shutting out influences that might otherwise contaminate the inward, self-absorbed purity of the Russian soul.

The train was crowded and ill-equipped, there were no dining cars, and you brought you own food and drink or scrounged it from fellow passengers. At night there were not even any lights to guide you to the primitive toilet facilities. The railroads had been taken over by the government after the revolution, and anybody who wanted to could travel free of charge anywhere in the country, and everyone did. All Russia seemed to be on the move. Half the country was still engaged in a civil war and another quarter was starving to death. Everybody seemed to have decided that things had to be better somewhere else and determined to go there.

With its narrow streets, towering walls, and low-slung ramshackle buildings, Moscow was a strange and hectic place. But I never had time to orient myself to it, to figure out where the river was in relation to Red Square, and where the Square was in relation to the seedy, unbelievably squalid hotel Manny and I had settled in. We spent only two days there, long enough for Manny to check in at the Ministry of Natural Resources, and then we were gone again, heading for the Faust platinum mine at Platinumgrad on the far side of the Urals.

This time we traveled by private railroad car; that was part of the deal Manny made when he agreed to take the platinum mining operation off the government's hands. We didn't ask for a mining concession, you understand, we weren't exploiting the people's natural wealth. We were taking it off their hands for a time and developing it, enabling them to do what they would not otherwise have been able to do for themselves.

On the fourth day we arrived in Ekaterinenberg, or Sverdlovsk as they later renamed it in honor of the Soviet Union's first president. This was the place where the tsar and his family had been executed, and the guides the government sent along with us insisted we go see the House of Special Purpose, as they called it, the house where the shooting had taken place. So why not? They held the train for us a few hours, and we traveled across town to a handsome if fairly modest two-story villa built in the side of a hill. There was a tall fence separating it from the street and behind it a carefully tended garden. An ancient white-haired caretaker escorted us through the rooms, a crone, a seeress, who recounted what had happened that day less than four years before, talking as if the event had transpired a century ago and she was the remaining witness.

The tsar and his family had fled there for safety, but the forces of justice finally caught up with them and a few months later they were killed in a room in the basement of the house. There were chair rails along the walls and wire grills over the windows, but the room was otherwise empty. You could still see the bullet holes in the walls, the broken plaster, the blood stains. The floorboards were scratched and scarred from the bayonets that finished what the rifles had failed to accomplish, and if you let your imagination run riot you could sense the terror in the room, the sweat, the trembling, the cries of despair as the rifles rang out, the dark shapes on the floor, the bayonets, the riflebutts, the blood, the bone, the silence.

They shunted our train onto a branch line, and we headed north, a hundred miles to Alapayevsk, the asbestos capital, and then two hundred more beyond that to Platinumgrad, where I would spend the next eight months of my life. It was a godforsaken place, a hodgepodge of huts and shanties beneath the towering snow-capped peaks of the Urals. I renamed it Nekudagrad the first time I saw it, Nowheresville, the city at the end of the world.

ii

At daybreak, the mountaintops always looked as if they had caught fire. A rim of gold would break along the edges of the peaks, spread and deepen across the snowfields beneath them, and suddenly burst into flame, sometimes in great streaks and streams of fire, flashing and flaring against the morning like the manes of maddened horses. The winds caught the snow on the mountaintops, I suppose, and sent it whirling into the rising sun. I always thought the dawn of creation must have been like this—when the world was new, when life was just beginning to stir in the primeval ooze, and all things still seemed possible.

Below the mountains, the world was still gritty with night. You could see it beginning to emerge from the dark, the steeps and drifts of the mountains, the cliffs, the jumbled buildings of the town, the fences, the standing animals, the road that climbed to the mine. In the winter, it grew light around eight and by then the workers had trudged up the slope to the mine, and I was already at my desk. The temperature was still forty degrees below zero or lower. The winds roared out of the Arctic north, and when you went outside you froze; your face, your nose, the very fluid of your eyes ached; and you covered yourself in wool, skins, and furs. You hid your face, hands, and feet, hurrying to get inside again. Even indoors you never really got warm.