Fellow Travelers (20 page)

It was as if he had been hit with an electric shock. His body jerked, and he peered into the blaze of light, twitching, transfixed, immobilized like a deer caught in your headlights.

The room was thrown into an uproar. Skorutto's wife was quickly removed from the hall and the session abruptly suspended. A moment later, the guards carried Skorutto away, hanging limply between their arms, his feet dangling behind him on the floor.

When the tribunal resumed an hour or so later, Skorutto was himself again. His head held high and his voice steady, he retracted his earlier confession. He had always been a loyal Russian, loyal to his country, to his fellow workers, to the ideals of the party. He had been afraid, he said, he felt threatened, intimidated, but he was mistaken.

The judge began to question him, and as he did Skorutto began to shrink before our very eyes. No, he had not been mistreated, no, nobody had hurt him, nobody had done him any bodily harm, but you didn't believe him. Not with that haunted look on his face, those distracted eyes, and he finally broke into uncontrollable tears. The guards escorted him out of the hearing room again.

They rushed him back to Lubianka prison, that medieval eight-story building off Red Square where the GPU had its headquarters. The following day Skorutto was back, once again calm, self-possessed, and in a dead listless voice he delivered a long list of the crimes he had committed, as if he had never claimed anything else, and the state was finally content.

I was not there for his final confessions. I heard about it from Tania. They sentenced him to death.

After that I decided I would never attend such a trial again and Tatiana did not attempt to dissuade me. But that would not have been necessary in any case. All the later trials were held behind closed doors, hidden from the public and the shocked conscience of the world.

There are some things too terrible to look upon, and I had seen enough not to want to see more. That winter I spent in the mountains, I used to take a sleigh every once in a while and drive five miles or so down a logging road through the woods to a bluff overlooking the river Tura. Most of the year, the river was broad, silvery, almost soundless, but in the spring it became a rushing torrent, and you could hear it even before you came out of the woods onto the bluff.

A quarter of a mile way, there was a village that had been abandoned some time before, a casualty of the revolution or the civil war, I didn't know which. The log houses with their elaborately carved window frames were tumbling down, the roofs gaping under the weight of the snow, the animal pens and barns empty and desolate, and the picket fences that once surrounded the gardens beginning to fall down. The snow-capped chimneys were still intact, but the huge stacks of firewood had already begun to decay. In the treetops, there were always crows nesting, cawing, waiting, waiting for something.

The last time I went there, it was late spring, and the river was in flood. The muddy water swirled and twisted at the base of the bluff, and there were shapes in the water, humpy ones, that bobbed and floated in the turgid stream, swirled, twisted, changed direction. I couldn't tell what they were.

When I got to the village, the roar of the water was hushed, the way it is when it floods, turning swift-rushing and oily. I crossed the village square to the waterside. The stream had eaten away at the bank, and I looked down and saw death everywhere—the remnants of human bodies, bones, flesh, shapes under tunics anid coats and boots, human remains, scattered, stacked like logs in the mud.

You knew at once what must have happened, the trench driven into the soft earth by the river bank, the villagers lined up, maybe in rows, maybe singly, and shot, killed, so that they fell into the trench. It was an image that was to haunt an entire generation in another country, another place, but I first looked on it there, beyond the mountains at the heart of the northern world. There were more bodies in the riverbank, and the stream kept tugging at them, trying to carry them away.

I didn't know what to do. You felt you ought to do something, and I who believed in nothing found myself asking what gods there might be to have mercy on the monsters who had done such a thing.

I never went there again.

Nobody in the mining camp remembered what had happened except Issakai, our guide when we climbed the mountains. “It was during the civil war,” he said. “Some of the villages at the foot of the mountains supported the Reds, some the Whites, arid I heard that horsemen rode into the village one day and rounded up all the people who lived there, men, women and children, sick, old and blind. Everybody was killed. They lined them up at the far end of the village square and shot them.”

“And who dug the trench they were buried in?”

“They dug it themselves. They bought themselves a few more minutes or hours of life, and then it was over. There were some villagers who escaped. They supported the horsemen.”

“Helped them slaughter the rest of the villagers, you mean, bury the dead.”

“People did what they had to,” he said.

“And who did this?” I asked. “The Red Guards?”

“How would I know?” he said. “I was not there. The same thing happened in a dozen villages along the river, sometimes by one side, sometimes by another. It was a terrible time. You heard the stories of horsemen strangling the villagers with their bare hands to save bullets. But I would never do such a thing. There's not enough strength in these hands to do such a thing. I would not. Never.”

I didn't like to think about it. But I did. Sometimes, whenever I thought of Katya, or an aging tribesman strangling his neighbors to save bullets, or listened to a son betray his father or accuse himself of treason. It's one memory I would gladly never recover.

iv

That spring, Tania spent most of her time on preparations for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, coming up in July. The Comintern was the umbrella group for the fifty or sixty national communist parties around the world, and a small army of people began arriving in April, not only delegates, but aides, assistants, and hangers-on. Tania was put in charge of managing the American contingent.

She had her hands full with the Americans. “You know how they are,” she said. “They won't do anything they're told. They don't go to meetings when they're supposed to, they don't show up for breakfast when they're told do, and they're up all night boozing in the café bar at the Lux.”

At the time, everyone in Moscow behaved as if the fate of the world depended on what the Comintern decided about a whole raft of measures, none of which matter any more, if they ever did. Stalin was taking command of the communist movement worldwide, and the meeting was designed in part to make that clear to everyone everywhere. The Russian Communist Party and its interests were now the central concern of all the other parties around the world, even if those interests seemed contrary to those of the workers in the individual countries involved.

We threw a reception at Red House for the U.S. delegation, and invited everybody we knew of any consequence in the foreign press and the diplomatic corps, along with a handful of the more agreeable bureaucrats. The Americans were a very nervous group. Stalin had got Bukharin and Kamenev to join with him in ousting Trotsky and Zinoviev, the revolution's founding fathers, from the party. Now he was preparing to chuck out Bukharin himself. But he played a cat-and-mouse game, first kicking Bukharin out of the party and then reinstalling him as chairman of the Comintern's executive committee. The American party headed by Ben Gitlow, Jay Lovestone, and Bert Wolfe had always supported Bukharin in the past, and so Stalin had approached Bill Foster, who headed a rival faction of the party, for help in getting Bukharin out of the way. The cat was conceivably playing with all kinds of mice.

The American delegates seemed stunned that in Moscow party politics were at least as Byzantine as they were in New York and that power, not the interests of the working classes, was all that really mattered to anybody. I have no idea why they were surprised. Power was all that had ever really mattered in New York as well.

It wasn't Russian politics that mesmerized most of the delegates, however, but the manner in which the communist elite lived and conducted their lives—the limousines that carried them around Moscow, the luxurious apartments and mansions they housed themselves in, and the imperial style they assumed in carrying out party matters. Characteristically, they were especially shocked when they were offered for their sexual diversion not party members but prostitutes.

I remember standing in the ballroom at Red House listening to Ben Gitlow, the party's executive secretary, going on about all the stuff Pop had collected over the years. The house was crammed with his treasures—every blank wall, every flat surface—paintings and artifacts, ikons and religious objects, silver and Fabergé eggs, and on and on. I could only look at him aghast when he said, “Have you ever been to our offices on Union Square? They're the pits.”

I knew what he was thinking; that the Fausts were no better than all these Russians. Gitlow seemed to realize what he'd implied and tried to take some of the sting out of it. “The party never has had any money,” he went on, “and if it weren't for people like your father, I don't think we'd have survived all these years. He bought us our headquarters on 12th Street and only last year an office building on Union Square. He came up with the bail a few years ago when they tried to keep me in jail.”

I never liked defending my father against anyone, but I found myself trying to defend him against charges Gitlow had never made.

“Pop's not one of your parlor socialists,” I told him. “When he was young, he worked in a steel mill, and that's where he developed his political attitudes. He was outraged by how the company exploited the men who worked there, and he always tried to get them to assert their rights. But I don't think he ever thought it wasn't right for somebody to hold onto the things he had earned for himself.”

Gitlow said he certainly didn't either.

Sure.

I was glad when they were gone.

Until then, I had never really thought of it, but Pop was a compulsive collector. He had started out cluttering up our house in the Bronx with antique medical instruments, things like forceps, scalpels, and syringes, and moved on into drugstore paraphernalia—even those tear-drop containers of colored water that used to hang outside the stores. In Moscow he had graduated to works of art—Renaissance nudes, antique statuary, even ikons and ecclesiastical garments, and wound up with Fabergé eggs, fans and hand mirrors, jewelry, silver.

I've always thrown away anything I no longer have any use for. I don't keep old records, letters, or photographs—if I did, my recollections would be more detailed and probably a lot more accurate. My office is as spare as a monastic cell. I've always thought of myself as somebody who likes to travel through life light, disturbing as little of the world around me as I possibly can. Maybe if you start out in life without anything, you like to surround yourself with reminders of how far you've been able to go.

In October, after the Comintern meeting came to an end, Manny got a call one morning from the General, Tania's father, Boris Churnuchin, suggesting we all have dinner that evening at the Grand Hotel. Even Manny didn't know what was going on. “Something's happening,” he said, “I don't know what, but something.” There was a note in his voice, alarm, apprehension, reticence, and I didn't like it.

Oddest of all, the General had invited all three of us—not only Manny and Pop but me. I'd never been a part of the group. I saw the General at family affairs, either at Red House or the Churnuchin mansion, with Tania, Yelena, and Mama Eva, but I wasn't a director of the aspirin company and never attended the meetings at which my father, brother, and the General discussed its affairs. Something was wrong, and being invited didn't mean I was moving up in the world.

And so that evening, as if nothing out of the way were happening, the four of us gathered together in a private room in the Grand Hotel. The hotel outdid itself with hors d'oeuvres and sandwiches, caviar and salmon patés, Westphalian ham, raw pork and sausages, cognac, vodka, Champagne. We sat in those plush overstuffed chairs before the large-paned windows overlooking the street, nibbling the appetizers, drinking vodka, and talking politics, mainly the overriding news of the day: Stalin's success in consolidating his control of the Communist International.

The mood was unexpectedly pleasant—lethargic, relaxed, companionable. In the distance, you could hear the ragged American-style orchestra playing jazz in the main dining room, and every time a waiter would enter or leave, the notes of the latest jazz hit of the day would swell through the open door and then fade away again.

Hallelujah, come on get happy

Hallelujah, come on get gay
.

The General began telling his latest dirty jokes. They were often difficult for me to grasp, depending as they did on puns or ambiguities my Russian was too infirm to grasp. But not Pop and Manny. They laughed uproariously at everything the General had to say. There was one, though, I still remember after all these years—about the French, German, and Italian soldiers offering a Russian girl money to look up her skirts. Each paid the girl what they thought the gander was worth, with each soldier paying more than the one before. Then a Russian soldier came along, took one look under her dress, and tossed her a kopek, the very smallest coin in the Russian currency. Where others had seen her knee, her thigh, all the Russian had seen was Lenin's beard.

A lot of these jokes were perilously close to being subversive, the way jokes always are. The General would break off whenever one of the waiters came into the room. Everybody believed that they were informants for the secret police, reporting whatever transpired in their presence, including “Did you ever hear the one about …?” It occurred to me that that may have been why the General had picked the Grand for his dinner meeting. He wanted to ensure the discretion of his announcement and the propriety of our response.