Fellow Travelers (11 page)

If I close my eyes, I can almost recover my memory. I can summon up tones of her face, the light in her eyes, and the sounds of her laughter. But never herself. She has gone, lost in my memory, along with the rest of me.

For a time she left me her Russian speech. By the end of that year we spent together, I still couldn't read with ease, but I could speak Russian fluently, even if sometimes I sounded like a peasant from a farm near the border of Poland in Byelorussia. And now, after all these years, even the speech she put on my tongue has lost its way for lack of exercise.

v

That was the winter that Lenin died. He'd had a stroke the previous spring, but by summer everybody thought he had fully recovered. He spoke at one of the party congresses, building support for his new economic policy, and appeared several times on the balcony of the Kremlin, demonstrating to the multitudes that he still had the revolution completely under control.

The crowds were enraptured by him. I could never understand why. He was not a very prepossessing man, short, wiry, with an almost academic manner, and he made his mark on history not through the electricity of his personality but through the patience of his fury, the intensity of his commitment, and the single-mindedness of his ferocity.

All summer long and into the fall, I heard rumors of power struggles in the upper echelons of the party—Zinoviev against Bukharin, Bukharin and Kamenev against Stalin, and Trotsky against them all. I probably haven't got that sequence right. I didn't care then, and I certainly don't care now. But Manny diligently cultivated his connections with the great and powerful in the capital, not only the bureaucrats and party members, but newspaper people like Walter Duranty, the
New York Times
Moscow correspondent, and financiers like Averill Harriman and Harry Sinclair. It seemed to me in those days that Manny knew everything and everybody, and time and again events would confirm what he had already told me was happening.

All during those final months of his life, Lenin continued to lend his support to Manny and the Faust enterprises, to Manny really, or so I thought then, and, as I later came to think, to Pop. He wrote a letter or two, a handful of memos, and, years after Lenin's death, Manny combed the Lenin archives and found a dozen or more documents asking this bureaucrat or that party member to ease the way for our projects, reiterating how important what we were doing was to the long-term goals of the revolution and to the security of the Russian people. He called Manny Comrade Faust, which I thought was odd because you used Comrade to party members, and Manny had never had any intention of joining the party.

The Faust enterprises were flourishing. We had been guaranteed a minimum of $2.5 million in business a year, and we had exceeded that in the first six months. Manny and I divided the work more or less evenly. Manny handled the sales and marketing, setting up satellite operations in London and Paris, while I made sure the Moscow office ran like clockwork, or as close to it as possible in a country that had lost all sense of time, or perhaps had never had one. I made sure we made our deliveries as promised, that we collected what the government owed us, whether in goods or in currency, and that the proceeds made their way out of the country and into the Faust accounts scattered around the world.

However much Manny might sympathize with the socialist cause, he could not fund it endlessly out of the Faust family resources, and so I had to find ways to circumvent the currency restrictions that prevented us from getting any money out of the country. I arranged for the sale of various bartered goods Manny managed to develop in payment—furs and caviar, platinum and asbestos, and increasingly, as time went on, oil. Manny used to claim we realized as much or more than we bargained for on our barter business, and though we often didn't do badly we didn't do quite as well as all that.

I never did get the half of the business Manny had promised me in New York, not then and not later. I lived out of the cash flow of the business, drawing as much as I wanted for my needs, but I never got any proprietary interest in any of the businesses we undertook, Manny saw to that, and whenever I would raise the issue, he would tell me, “Take whatever you need. Give yourself a raise.” And change the subject.

I have never been so busy as I was in those days. Katya absorbed so much of my life I can't believe I had time for anything else. But I did, though my body ached and flushed, burned and throbbed with the thought of her even as I was arranging a letter of credit with a Finnish bank or holding a consultation with a client. My body, my flesh remembered, dreamed, anticipated, readied itself. I think now I was as much in love with my intoxication with her as I was with Katya herself.

Manny's infatuation with Yelena had also reached fever pitch, and though he didn't move in with her, he might as well have. She was so popular in the Moscow cafés she got all sorts of special privileges from the government and probably gave as many as she got, but though Manny might claim to have lost his heart to her, that didn't keep him from being obsessed with Faust American as well. And he had reason.

I saw Lenin speak to a group of bureaucrats the other day, he would say, and I don't like the way he looks, so thin and drawn, and he seems to have trouble keeping his thoughts in tow. It worries me. If anything happens to him, we'd be in the soup. I don't mean Russia. Nothing can turn back what's happened here. I mean for us. They're a group of wild animals, those people he's got around him, and if they begin to squabble over who's going to take over when he's gone, we could both get it in the neck.

Manny developed as many contacts as he could, played as many sides of as many streets as he could find, went to government functions every evening, to official meetings. He threw parties and receptions, developed what seemed to me an extraordinary capacity for vodka, made friends and influenced people everywhere in the city, and he generally expected me to be with him, there at his side, with the solution to any problem that might arise. How can we finance the delivery of a shipment of steel to Sverdlovsk, some wheat combines to Riga, how can we plough around the embargo on medical supplies? I was there, and I prided myself on being able to find a solution, if not then, later. I sat through those interminable luncheons and dinners in which toast followed toast and vodka after vodka was tossed into the smarting throat. Hardly anyone ever was able to leave without staggering. I never could, and I could scarcely keep myself from running off and diving into bed with Kasha, but when I did, all too often I quickly passed out.

When Lenin died, it was as if Russia itself had died. I have never witnessed anything comparable—not the death of John Kennedy certainly and not even the death of Franklin Roosevelt. It was as if the heart of the people stopped, the breath stilled, the head reeled, as if an almost physical collapse had beset the country. Russia had been through a decade of war and famine, governmental and economic collapse, revolution and civil war. And what would come now? The revolution was only seven years old, and nobody had any idea of what might happen to the country when its leader, the implacable dictator of the proletariat, died. It was a disaster, a national catastrophe, and the country waited to see how great a one it was.

The government concocted a state funeral the like of which Moscow had not seen since the death of—who?—I don't know, Ivan the Terrible maybe. It would be a Russian funeral, an imperial Russian funeral, a barbaric outburst of that emotionalism, excess, and opulence which possesses the Russian soul: the imprecations of churchmen and politicians, the pomp and ceremony, choirs, incense, the lamentations of the people.

Lenin had died at his country place in Nizhni Novgorod—Gorki they call it these days—thirty miles away from the city, and they brought his body back to the capital in a funeral train, the people lining the trackside, weeping, rending their clothes, groaning, the way I guess they brought Abraham Lincoln back to Illinois after his assassination. The coffin was brought to a station five miles from the city center, but though the plan was to load the coffin onto an artillery gun carriage, instead his closest colleagues in the Politburo took the coffin on their shoulders and carried it in relays through the streets to Red Square.

They disemboweled him, dissolved formaldehyde in his veins, and put him on display in the great columned hall of Trade Union House on the edge of Red Square. They draped the entire front of the building in black, searchlights proclaimed the catastrophe to the lowering heavens, and the crowds came, hundreds of thousands. They lined up as they had for a thousands years at the death of a tsar, peasants and bureaucrats, Mongols, Kazaks Turkics, Chinese, Bashkies, Jews, stretching and curving, snaking around the square, all those exotic nationalities the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union itself absorbed into its borders, if not its soul.

Kasha and I spent six hours in the February wind, our faces reddening, our fingers ready to snap off, our feet turning to wood on those frozen stones of the square, hearing the dirges across the square in the cathedral, listening to the winds whip across the dead universe. There were huge bonfires every hundred yards along the route, the flames roaring in the wind, the smoke billowing, and then finally we made our way up the wooden steps and inside; there he lay, on his bier, clad in black, his reddish beard carefully trimmed, his eyes closed, as if they feared to behold the newly created world he had left behind him.

For Katya this was a milestone in history, and as a Russian she was determined to be a part of it, as if this man whom she now greeted with such reverence and awe had not launched the forces that destroyed everything she valued, killed her mother and father, burned their home, and left herself and her sister with nothing but their wits to protect them.

I had always been indifferent to Lenin, as I had been to most other politicians—to Wilson and Lloyd George and in those days to Calvin Coolidge—but I was awed, overwhelmed, looking at that figure surrounded in the glow of a spotlight with soldiers with fixed bayonets standing at each corner of the bier. We left and went out into the gray dreary cold making our way back to the earthly delights of our room.

Meanwhile, the American Lenin was headed for Moscow—Jack Faust, cofounder of the American communist party, our father, and his consort, his mistress, his wife, Mama Eva. He was planning to leave New York in March and arrive in Moscow by spring. I heard this at second hand, as I heard everything else dealing with Pop and with Mama Eva. As the older brother and nominal head of Faust Enterprises, Manny heard from Pop fairly frequently, talked with him on the phone, received all the letters and telegrams. I don't know that he ever asked about me. I took down Manny's replies, in shorthand, transcribed them, and promptly sent them off to New York.

Pop had been paroled in October after serving two and a half years of his fifteen-year sentence. For good behavior, I suppose, or maybe because he'd set up some sort of education program for the inmates, taught them to read and write and, no doubt, to recognize the iniquities and inequalities of the class structure. They were not merely perpetrators of the crimes of which they had been convicted, they were themselves the victims of a class structure that doomed them to crime and prevented them from realizing themselves, their human potential, their dignity as human beings. To hear Manny tell it, Pop had wound up as Sing Sing's own Jane Addams or Jacob Riis.

With the news of his arrival, everything began to change for us. The government suddenly found room for Manny and me in Government House, the guest house for visiting dignitaries, and in December, a month before Lenin died, as Moscow prepared to celebrate Christmas (whether the government approved or not), we moved out of the flea-bitten Excelsior Hotel forever.

Manny didn't give me much warning. Friday afternoon he came back to the office after some luncheon or other, plunked himself down on the other side of my desk, and said briskly, “We're moving on Monday to Government House.”

“It's high time,” I said.

But Manny wasn't at all relaxed. He put one bony ankle on the opposite knee and begin jiggling his foot as if that wasn't the end to it.

“We'll have everything ready, a few suitcases, a box of books.”

I left it at that, so he said it, “Katya can't come, of course.”

I just looked at him a minute or two.

“Of course she can come.”

“You don't have any choice about it.”

“Who says? You? The ministry of foreign affairs?”

Manny just shrugged.

“If Katya doesn't come, than I don't come.”

“So I guess you won't come,” he replied.

“That settles it then,” I said. And after a moment: “Manny, be reasonable.”

“You can't bring a person like her into Government House. I'm not even sure they'll let her stay here after we leave. They may well throw her out in the street.”

“Then they can throw me out.”

Manny's foot began jiggling again.

“You've got to understand, Ekaterina Ivanovna isn't just somebody I'm shacking up with. I've fallen in love with her.”

“Oh, for god's sake,” Manny said.

Should I tell him I was thinking of marrying her, having kids, starting a family? I decided that wouldn't help.

Manny made one of those big brotherly faces of his. “Well, you have no choice about it, you'll do as I say.”

“In a pig's eye.”

“Wherever,” he said

“And what about Yelena? Don't tell me you're making other arrangements for her.”

“That's different. They're not watching her. And we're not living together.”

“Who's not watching.”

“The secret police, the Cheka. They've had their eye on Katya ever since she moved in with you. Where do you think you are—in Westchester County? They think she's a counterrevolutionary whore, she sympathizes with the whites, she's a deviationist, she's with anybody who happens to be out of favor at the moment.”