Fellow Travelers (10 page)

I cannot remember anything anymore. What we did. What we said to each other, how we could spend those endless hours together in that room overlooking the river and the towers of the city. I remember bits and fragments—her hair in the sunlight on the pillowcase, the curve and swoop of her belly, the softness of the flesh of her inner thighs. But I cannot remember a single moment of love-making, though even now my flesh leaps up when I think about it. How could such joy be lost?

I can remember those who followed—Tanya, the heat and passion of her loins even now, her nails digging into my back, her fingertips at my groin, or Miranda, whom I wake to every morning, whose flesh is almost as familiar to me as my own. But Katya, Ekaterina Ivanovna Arkadyevna, Kasha my darling is lost to me, forever.

My eyes brim with tears when I think of what happened to her, how she had come to Moscow and met the American who would love her all the days of his life. I heard it in bits and pieces, in fragments, hidden allusion, and gradually I put it together.

In the beginning, she told me, they thought they were lucky. The Germans had burned the farms and villages both to the north and south of them, but their farm had escaped, and after Lenin made peace with the Germans they somehow escaped the civil war as well—reds, whites, right-wing socialists, communists, anarchists, all fighting over something or other, she never did understand what. It went on all around them but never came close. Then after the fighting subsided, a dozen men from town appeared in the courtyard one summer morning.

They were taking the farm, the house, farm goods, the animals, crops, everything Katya's father owned, and he and his family would have to move out. The farm had been collectivized: it was now the property of the local Soviet, and Katya's father and his family were criminals, enemies of the people. Her father had worked for other farmers in the area as a young man and managed to put aside enough to buy his own land, but he wasn't a big landowner, and he never exploited the peasants. All he had ever done was hire a few hands to help out at harvest time. But that didn't matter.

All you needed to do was to organize a collective and then announce you were taking over the farm, and when they came that morning her father ran into the house, got his gun from the kitchen, and began firing at the intruders. She knew them all, had known them most of her life. They had worked on her father's farm, gladly and without complaint, and now they had turned against the people who had treated them so generously all the years of their lives.

Her father didn't hit any of them, he didn't intend to, he wanted them to go away. But they moved in and overpowered him, stood her father up against the barn wall and shot him. The smell of blood appeared to have maddened them all, as if having committed one crime, all other crimes became possible, and they proceeded to herd the three women into the courtyard and set fire to the house. They would have attacked them as well except that the man who headed the group prevented them.

The three women fled into the fields and at night crept up to a neighbor's cottage asking for shelter. Their neighbors—an old woman and her son—took them in, fed them and gave them some food to take with them in the morning. They thanked them for their kindness and never expected to see them again. They had nothing, no clothes, no baggage. They took to the roads, trying to earn what little they could, as laborers, in the fields, in the kitchen, doing whatever they needed to do to get money, shelter, food, to survive. When their mother had a seizure of some sort and died, they buried her in a field by a roadside and moved on, heading in some undefined way toward Moscow and to me.

After everything that had been done to her, Katya nonetheless felt guilty. All her life she had thought her father was a good and honorable man, and now the whole world declared he had been an enemy of the people, declared her sister and dead mother were enemies as well. She tried to convince herself he'd been wrong, that it was unjust to hire those people, that he had exploited the peasants, but she could not believe it for long. She had grown up with the men who had evicted them, she had loved them, and she could not believe either that they were monsters or that her mother, father, sister, and all her relatives were as well. She knew she should believe it, and in the darkness of the night she would tell herself this, but she did not.

“They say these things are necessary in order to build tomorrow,” she said. “I don't know. I don't care about tomorrow. I only want to know today.”

Through those months—that summer and into the fall—Manny ran like a wry and sour note in the music of our lives. It was time for me to grow up, he kept saying, I wasn't a kid anymore. You're behaving like a lovesick boy. Grow up, for god's sake. Well, why should I? I was not twenty-one yet, and I had never fallen in love before. He said, “Just don't let that blind you to the realities of life. She's using you, she hasn't had it so good in years, she's got decent food and clothes and a place to stay, and she's using you for all you're worth. And my god, she's even beginning to get fat.”

“What do I care? Let her use me, just so she doesn't stop doing it.” And yet in a sense Manny was right.

Two or three times a week, Kasha spent the night at the rooms she shared with her sister in that tenement on the other side of the city. After they arrived in Moscow, they had gotten by as best they could. If you had a work card you automatically entered the workers' paradise. Everything that mattered was free—housing was free, dental and medical care, meals and clothing, even tickets to the Bolshoi or the soccer matches.

But Katya and her sister had no credentials, no papers, no claim on the benefits of the socialist society. Katya finally found work in the commissary, but what her sister did I never was told. I didn't want to know, Katya didn't need to tell me what she herself might have done on occasion to survive, but that didn't make her a streetwalker, as Manny liked to tell me. It made her a survivor.

I had to remind myself that things were different now. Men and women were easier with each other in Russia than they ever seemed to be at home. The culture was different, and I wondered later whether this didn't explain my father's casual affairs, or perhaps even my mother's. The revolution had transformed the relations between men and women, and women were free to choose their partners just as men were. Presumably it was no worse to be paid than it was to pay. I could never see it that way, but I had to believe it, because I knew that that was the way it was.

A few months after we met, a warm day in August when the leaves were beginning to shrivel, she took me home to that ancient four-story structure where she and her sister lived. It was built around a central rectangular court like something out of the Middle Ages. I have no idea what it must once have been, a manor house perhaps, a monastery. We passed through the shadowy gateway and into the courtyard, filled with debris, offal and garbage, abandoned implements, and other junk. Around the sides of the courtyard was a wooden passageway, roofed in, and every fifty feet or so a staircase rose to the floors and apartments above. I could scarcely manage to climb up. There was garbage all over the steps, and at each landing, a privy, only partially enclosed, reeking to high heaven in the morning sun. We circled round and round, climbing higher and higher, and finally she led me into a doorway, down a hall and into a room whose squalor I can scarcely bear to remember.

How can you live in a place like this? I found myself thinking. I knew she could only say, What other place can there be for me to live in? I could only begin to imagine the difficulty of maintaining any semblance of cleanliness in such circumstances; the primus stove in the middle of the room, the dresses and coats hanging from overhead pipes, the water stains on the ceiling, the fallen plaster, the scurry of rat's feet in the walls.

“That settles it,” I said. “You're going to move out of here.”

“I can't leave my sister, she can't afford the place by herself.”

“I'll pay for it myself,” I answered.

And I did.

But I had to get her by Manny, and Manny didn't approve.

“You can't do that;” Manny said. “Don't you know what she is? Don't you know she's little better than a whore? She's already been laid by half of Moscow. For the right price, I could lay her myself.”

I didn't smack him in the face, I kept myself in check. I thought, he's trying to bait me, he's trying to get the upper hand by forcing me into a fight. But I must have gone white because he said, “I'm sorry I said that. That was uncalled for.”

“So what difference does that make? Everybody screws everybody else in this country. Look at you, look at Pop. Look at Mama Eva. I love Kasha, and I think she loves me.”

But that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was she didn't have a work card, she wasn't a party member, she hadn't any important connections, she couldn't bring anything to our position in Moscow. No, it was worse than that.

“She's a nobody,” Manny said. “She doesn't know how to speak or behave, she's a bumpkin. Back home she'd be clerking in a dime store, or working in a shirtwaist factory.”

“She represents that most esteemed of classes, here in the Soviet Union, the proletariat,” I told him, “and that's not good enough?”

But in my heart I knew what he meant. I had thought the same things myself and decided they didn't matter. I couldn't bring her to any of the parties and receptions we were invited to in those days, occasions that were becoming increasingly essential to the business Manny was doing in Moscow. She couldn't stand or eat properly, she couldn't make small talk, and there was nothing we could do to teach her. She didn't want to be taught. It made her uncomfortable, even more uncomfortable I discovered than it was for me to have her with me. And why did she have to be with us? If there was reception we had to go to, I would just go without her. Manny didn't bring any of the women he got involved with to such affairs, and I didn't see why I had to either.

You would never have known Manny didn't approve of Katya. He treated her as if she were some sort of queen, he was courtly, flattering, solicitous, and for a time it was good for us to be living with him. He had gotten involved with a woman named Yelena, who was no party member either. She was a singer, someone he had met in a café, a striking and glamorous woman who played the balalaika and sang gypsy songs. Manny and I would go, sit in the darkness and listen to her sing. She was just beginning her career then, but you couldn't believe how good she was, what an exciting performer.

Yelena was one thing, Katya was something else.

“You take my advice” Manny kept saying, “Get rid of Katya. If you don't you'll live to regret it.”

But I wouldn't. My acting career I could let go. But not Katya. I had never been so happy in my life.

We spent a lot of time in bed, but up also wandering all over the city, to the museums, churches, monasteries, parks, the dance halls in the country, the food stores on the Okhotny Road, and the private ones on Hunters' Row. In the churches, she would always want to kneel down and pray but the curators had installed ropes to prevent the faithful from exercising such primitive behavior.

I was not enchanted with Moscow, however. It was a barbaric place, partaking of all the multitude of things that the Russian empire had absorbed. It was at least tolerable in the summer. The nights were only two or three hours long, but the weather was bearable. You could forgive the heat, the sultriness that came off the river, because of the explosion of greenery that filled every niche of the city from April on.

What Katya loved was the Rolls Manny bought, complete with chauffeur and built-in bar. She had never ridden in a car before, never mind a Rolls Royce, and the first time we went for a ride she was transported by the experience. She plumped herself back on the seat cushions, rolled down the windows, and waved at the people watching enviously outside. She had become one of the nobility, one of those women from the great estates at home riding down those dusty roads in Byelorussia. We drove all over Moscow and out into the country. If the car broke down or if the road proved impassable, we would abandon it and the chauffeur and find somebody else to take us back into town.

The Rolls always made me uneasy. It was somehow the symbol of all the things the revolution was supposed to sweep away, the image of privilege and power. But nobody else seemed to feel that way. Katya was delighted with it and the general populace was too enchanted by the automotive marvel to turn their envy into malice.

In winter, the city was eerie, hidden, hermetic, turning in on itself to escape the encompassing cold. Night came soon after noon, and everybody hurried to get inside. The sidewalks bustled with scurrying people and the streets with the whoosh of traffic moving on runners—miniature sleighs with plodding blowing arthritic horses. The wind tugged at your face, your hands, the cold went for your feet, your thighs, your shoulders, and you took on whatever armor you could—sweaters upon vests, jackets upon sweaters and vests, great coats upon jackets, furs and scarves and hats and mittens and gloves, leggings, boots, galoshes, and when nothing else served to keep you warm, you beat your hands against your chest and stomped your feet on the snow.

For Katya and me there was nonetheless joy and laughter. We would burst in out of the cold, tingling and red-faced, frosty-eyed, stiff, with hearty, uproarious laughter bubbling up from deep inside, as if two people who could endure all this could endure anything When you went inside, the heat struck you like a blow. The heat, the moisture, the smell. There was no ventilation anywhere, the doors were doubled and tripled against the cold and the windows taped shut. Even the Grand Hotel smelled of kerosene, stale cooking and bodies too long lacking warm water for a bath. The hotel's community toilets, little better than indoor latrines, sent their odors out past the potted palms in the lobby, where two enormous stuffed bears with trays on their uplifted paws invited you into the dining room. I remember cold beer and hot mushrooms at a café on Smolensky Street, a pitcher of warm vodka at Pegasus' Stable, with grated lemon peel floating on top like the pollen of sunflowers.