Fellow Travelers (17 page)

As Manny liked to tell it, he was in my room one morning, and I said to him, “Look at this, the same Bayer aspirin powders we used back home. That's what's wrong with this entire country. They buy things from other countries they could be producing themselves.”

But what was for me a casual observation, for Manny became an obsessive idea. Aspirin, he decided, couldn't be that difficult to make. It was only some ground-up chemical or other.

Later on, however, he appropriated the credit himself and gave the aspirin monopoly the force and momentum of history. He remembered how on that first trip to Moscow he had broached the idea to Lenin himself, arguing that as both a physician and a pharmaceutical supplier he could attest to the great balm aspirin would bring to the Russian people. Lenin, who always immediately saw the merit in Manny's ideas, gave him his prompt and unmitigated approval. He even put it in writing in a letter to Manny that mysteriously disappeared. The original never did come to light, but years later, Manny managed to produce a copy in which Lenin gave the Fausts his blessing for their aspirin monopoly.

Manny's aspirin venture was inspired. In an increasingly repressive state, what could do more to soothe the raveled cares of an anxious population than a universal anodyne? You might not be able to do anything about Russia's mounting political problems but you could dull the resulting stress (along with the suffering of arthritis, headaches, and hangover) by taking a substance even Kafka maintained was the only way to ease the unbearable pain of being.

It is on such simple-minded concepts that great enterprises and fortunes are built. Manny had seen the potential in the idea, and I of course had not. That is why in the end Manny became what he became and I, all my life, remained—nobody.

Of course, my life wasn't like Manny's, with its succession of public gestures, bold moves, and dramatic undertakings. I would seem to drift when actually I was merely gathering the momentum to make myself what I would ultimately become. With me, everything took place underground. Nothing might seem to be happening on the surface, and then one day the earth would tremble and everything would change.

There was that Thursday, maybe a year after Katya had disappeared, when Tania and I took a trolley to the vast Kiev station with its soaring clock tower and glassed-in roof and boarded a train heading southeast for a place called Tsaritsino. We were both tired and fed up, sick of American sales agents and foreign dignitaries, and a day in the country seemed the perfect answer, better even than aspirin.

The revolution had abolished the day of rest as it had abolished the god who rested on the seventh day after creating heaven and earth, but people still needed a respite from their labors, and so within a decade the six-day workweek was back, only just when your day of rest fell depended on what you did for a living. So Tania and I had that Thursday off.

She was excited about the junket. Her grandfather used to take her to Tsaritsino when she was a little girl. For him, the place was a sort of socialist object lesson. For her it was the most beautiful place in the world. A park, a monument, a revelation.

Just remember, her grandfather would tell her, this place was built on the backs of the Russian peasants, the same peasants who, having built it, had to tear it down. He saw the place as a memorial to the iniquity of the Tsarist regime, but a great treasure all the same.

As Tania recounted the story, Catharine the Great was responsible. She had ordered a lavish imperial residence to be built on the edge of Moscow, a dallying place for her and whoever happened to be her lover at the time. And so, the architects had built a vast pleasure dome. A splendid palace in a park, with woods, grottos, ravines, arches and galleries, bridges and lawns, pavilions, and promenades.

But when Tsaritsino was finally finished, Catharine visited the palace and found it wanting. Ugly beyond ugliness, she announced, an abomination, an insult to the greatest monarch in the world, and ordered it promptly razed to the ground. She piled herself and all her goods and chattels into the royal coach and left for Moscow never to return again.

So the peasants began tearing Tsaritsino down, stone by stone, reducing ballrooms into rubble, throne rooms into quarries, and then Catharine died. The demolition was halted by her successor. Tsaritsino was turned into a park, nobody knew why, but certainly not, as Tania's grandfather maintained, to demonstrate the folly of absolute rulers, the perniciousness, perfidy, and fickleness of power.

We left the train at Tsaritsino station and took a coach through the long avenue of trees that led to the park. It was a golden September day, and the park was deserted. The trees had lost most of their leaves, oak, aspen and larches, and the leaves on the lawns were golden. We walked into a landscape of scattered trees and great lawns, a chain of ponds and brooks and bridges. We inspected the ruins, watched the carp swim in the ponds, and heard the migrating birds flutter in the trees. We walked down endless winding paths, the sounds of dry leaves whispering with every movement we made.

I had never found Tania so intoxicating. I was ravaged by the sun on her long honey-gold hair, the dancing light in her eyes, the tilt of her mouth, the flash of her ankles among the leaves, and with my loins afire we walked hand in hand like the lovers that we could not be.

I don't know what we talked about that day, except they were serious things, fraught with the weight of the world and our great concern for its future. I found myself looking at her, marveling at how beautiful she seemed, and in a pause in the conversation, I found myself saying what I had thought of saying for a long, long time.

“I think we ought to be together like this always.”

She laughed, but she didn't bother to argue.

“I think we ought to move in together. I think we ought to be married.”

She would never do that she said, deriding the very suggestion. She wanted to be in control of her life, and she wasn't going to give that up. Men used the women they lived with or married until something better came along, then they took off.

I told her I wasn't like that.

“It's the way all the Faust men are.”

“Maybe Manny, but not me.”

“It's in the blood, she said. Like father, like son. Your father is even unfaithful to his mistress. He's got another woman who works in the GPU.”

“I'm not like that. I haven't got a mistress. I haven't been with a woman except you since Katya disappeared, and I'm not sure that what happened with you in the beginning really counts.”

“Lenin seems to think it did,” she said.

“He hasn't got a brain in his head. Getting married would make a lot of sense; we spend most of our time together.” I tried to put it matter-of-factly, no bourgeois romanticism, no flattery, or verbal seduction. I had grown enormously fond of her, I liked being with her, listening to her, I liked her jokes, the way she laughed, and teased, the way she talked about Lenin, and the night she had unbuttoned my pants and held him in her hand.

“And besides,” I said, “the time is appropriate. I'm twenty-five now, and you're twenty-nine.”

“Twenty-eight,” she said. “Please don't exaggerate.”

“I want you.” I had never wanted anyone so much in my life and burned with my eagerness for her.

We were leaning against the railing in a little pavilion built in the middle of a pond. The whole world was golden. The golden lawns doubled in the water. The lawns, the pavilion, the two of us.

I said, “It's time, I want to have children, a family. And why not with you?”

“I suppose you'll say next you love me.”

“Madly, desperately, with all the heat and fire of my blood.” Russian was a wonderful language, I thought. I could say things that in English would reduce even me to laughter.

“I'm not sure how my father would feel about it. Or your father.”

“This is the Soviet Union,” I said. “We are all of us free here. You've lost your chains.”

“I will think about it,” she said, dour as a housewife deciding whether to buy some insurance.

We wandered on through those rustling leaves and there on the sheltered side of a hill, with the sun golden on our skin, and the heat bursting in my flesh, I imagined us finally coming together. I would touch her for the first time, put my hand on her belly and open her legs. But that's not the way it happened. I could not find the way inside.

“Help me,” I said. “I don't know where to go.”

“I'm not sure,” I could hear her saying, “I've never done this before,” and suddenly there was the passage, the heat, the wetness, and I would thrust forward and we were together at last. She began thrashing beneath me, ground and twisted, and I came like a great cry in the mountain. Suddenly she threw me off her, rolled away, I heard her crying, “I hate it, I really hate it,” and I pretended I didn't hear.

When I came to myself, we were sitting on a stone wall overlooking one of the ponds, and she was looking at me oddly as if she had read my mind.

“Shall we go back to the train?” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

The next day we were married. We went down to the registry office, in the Bureau of Civil Acts, waited in line for a half hour, and when our time came, signed our names in the big registry book the clerk spread out on the counter, paid three rubles, and got an official document mimeographed on a piece of brown wrapping paper that certified we were legally man and wife—or were until such time as the two us paid three more rubles at an office in the Bureau of Civil Acts and got a divorce.

Mr. and Mrs. Victor Faust. How was that for a monicker? Tatiana and Victor Faust. Tania and Vic. I liked it.

ii

You don't just marry the girl, Mama Eva liked to say when I was growing up, you marry the whole family. How much truth there may be to that proposition I am still in no position to say, despite two marriages in my too-long life, two sets of in-laws and two sets of collateral relatives, but it certainly held for Tania and me after we informed the Bureau of Civil Acts that day in September, 1926, that we considered ourselves man and wife.

Mama Eva's dictum clearly didn't apply to Pop and Mama Eva, for neither of them had any family to marry. They both left their relatives back in Russia when they came to the United States thirty or forty years before, and they never saw them again. As far as I know, they never wanted to, not even after we all came back to Russia and presumably could have got in touch with them somehow. I sometimes got the impression they'd been disowned because of their political opinions, but I never thought to ask and now it's too late.

I think sometimes that having no other relatives to turn to may have had a considerable effect on the way we Fausts behaved with one another. We may not always have gotten along; we certainly didn't love one another in the sentimentalist sense, but we were a family all the same.

To my surprise, everybody was enthusiastic about my decision to marry Tatiana Churnuchin. Manny was impressed by her political connections, Pop by her politics (if nothing else), and Mama Eva—well, I suppose she was just maternally content to see her youngest son settled. Except for Tania, there had been no one since Katya disappeared, and this seemed so anomalous that even Mama Eva suggested there was something inadequate about my libido. At one time, I'd thought that Tania was Manny's big chance to make something of himself in this country, I told him he'd never get anywhere following cabaret singers around. But Mama Eva explained that Manny's reputation as a womanizer would make him unacceptable to a family like the Churnuchins, so I looked like a better bet.

I always found it hard to believe that my hardheaded mother would have been taken with someone like Tania. She could never have been dismissed as a shopgirl as Katya had been, but though she was as strong, unyielding, and single-minded as Mama Eva herself, in other respects she was everything that Mama Eva was not, thin, fragile and delicate-seeming, an aristocrat to the bone.

Afterward I would come to think the whole thing had been arranged by Manny, who had brought us together in the first place, by Mama Eva, who constantly told me what a wonderful wife Tania would make for some lucky boy, and even by Pop, who emphasized how useful it would be for us to be related to the war ministry. I came to think that even Tania had not been as disinterested in getting married as she seemed. Remembering that day in the park, I felt a certain amount of unease, but that was foolishness, I decided. Whatever problems we had, we'd work out.

The Faust and the Churnuchin families were finally conjoined. It wasn't fashionable to make public displays at weddings, but there was an enormous banquet nonetheless for the two families at the Churnuchin mansion, with all those wonderful Russian delicacies, marinated, smoked, and spiced salmon, three kinds of caviar, foie gras, blackened bass with artichokes and roast vegetables, loin of venison on red cabbage, créme brûlee, lemon tart, take your pick—and unbelievable quantities of vodka. Before it was over, Manny, Pop, and Tania's father were staggering arm in arm through the garden talking business, while I sat with Mama Eva, Tania, and Madame Churnuchin in the parlor.

Tania always claimed it was her father who got us the aspirin monopoly. Armed with testimonials from medical bodies all over the world, the General persuaded the government that aspirin was a strategic medical material and consequently vital to the maintenance of Soviet national interests. For this service—and because he was now family—the General went on the board of directors of Faust aspirin and received an honorarium every quarter to comfort him for his pains, an analgesic that worked even in the Soviet Union.

During our later years in Moscow—close to four altogether—the Fausts and the Churnuchins were not only in-laws and relatives, but friends, or what passed for friends in a country where nobody any longer dared to trust anyone else. Maybe nobody ever did. It's not every country after all that boasts a proverb as trenchant as ‘A man's family are his enemies.'