Fellow Travelers (24 page)

“Even so, if we were to go the United States, you wouldn't want them not to speak the language, would you?”

“I think that's all theoretical.”

I didn't think there was anything theoretical about it, but that was another argument I didn't think I had a chance of winning, so I let it go.

Without telling Tania, I hired an English-speaking woman from the university to come in and spend an hour playing with the children in English every day. Who could possibly object to that? Tania and I were away at work, and it couldn't hurt to broaden their horizons. But when Masha told her mother what was going on, Tania accused me of plotting against her behind her back and sent the woman away.

I had never seen Tania like this before. She was a woman possessed. She stalked around our rooms, her voice low but on the edge of a scream, her lips stretched against her teeth, her sharp fingernails flashing.

“I want you to understand, Viktor, they're my children, I gave them birth, I brought them out of my body in more pain and anguish than you can possibly imagine.”

“Nonetheless, they are my children as well,” I replied. “My children as much as yours.”

“Your children!” she cried out. “Look at their faces, pure Russian faces, look at their hair and eyes, do you see any sign of you in their blood? When did the Fausts ever have blondes? They are mine, the fruit of my body, the effusion of my soul, and I want to be sure you understand that.”

I let it go.

I asked Mama Eva to spend more time with the girls, speaking English to them, but when Tania discovered her mother-in-law was coming down the hall to see them, she told her to please stay away. Mama Eva had never been a great lover of children, her own or anyone else's, and was glad of the excuse to desist. I don't want to come between husband and wife, she said.

I was astonished myself at the claim the two girls had on my heart. My chest ached when I thought of them; my eyes watered. It wasn't at all what I had expected being a father. I had always wanted to have children, but abstractly. All young things are delightful—puppies, fledgling birds. They are so new, ungainly, and adventurous, so undaunted, imaginative, and vulnerable. Our girls were all this and more. They were beautiful, intelligent, and graceful.

And yet, as with so much from those days, I can't quite remember them. The outline is there, but the emotion I felt remains invisible. All that comes back is the weight and heft of their bodies, cradled in the nook of either arm, then a sort of warm moistness rising from their clothes, compounded of heat, sweat, and urine, and then the viselike grip they would exert on your finger, or the gurgle of delight—the burbling laughter—when you tossed them in the air. And the tug in your heart when they hurt themselves playing and came to you grief-stricken and inconsolable.

I have a few photographs from that time, but I can't recapture how my heart swelled with love and gratitude, watching them crawl across the floor or hold themselves up by the arm of a chair, knowing that they were there for me to protect and nurture and love. I can't re-experience that. After forty years, the memory has almost vanished entirely, a few faded images on brittle pieces of photographic paper.

But why should I remember? I never did see that much of them. When I came home from the office, they were usually asleep, and in the morning they were preempted by their nurse getting them dressed and fed. On our days off, when we all might have been together as a family, Tania really never wanted them with us, not when we walked in the park by the river or had dinner together at home, even sitting around in the evening talking. She saw them only as an adjunct of herself, toys in the playroom for her occasional diversion and delight. She wanted to dress them up and show them off, march them out on display when guests arrived, and then put them back in their boxes until the next time opportunity arose.

On the surface nothing seemed to have changed between Tania and me, and yet everything had. Living with someone is always a matter of accommodation—cultivating the pleasures of living together, ignoring the irritations—and for a long while we had stopped doing that. When did it begin? Was it the day I found myself getting irritated that she wouldn't pick up the newspaper when she was done with it or put the breakfast tray outside the door for the housemaid? Or the night I began getting impatient because she took so long getting dressed to go out? Or the day she spanked one of the girls, and I thought I saw something cruel and satisfied in her face? Or the morning I reached for her in bed and heard her sigh before she turned onto her back to submit. Or was it the night when we came home and I touched my lips to her bare shoulder, and she reached to take off her earrings, saying, “Really, Viktor, why don't you get yourself a mistress, I'm much too tired tonight.” Tonight, any night.

After that she was almost always too tired. She didn't like to be touched anymore. She shrugged off my embrace when I greeted her, and turned away from me in bed, slid away when I tried to align myself against her back, rest my hand on her hip. And when she did not, it wasn't herself she offered, her warmth, her comfort, her affection. She reduced herself to her anatomical essentials. It's not that my demands were excessive. We saw all too little of each other for that. She worked late at the ministry, and I was often away.

I ought to have found myself a mistress, the way Pop had, or Manny. But I didn't want one. I wanted a wife, someone to share my life with and bring up our children with, to experience the joys, comedies, and even tragedies of life. So I didn't get a mistress. I did a lot of reading, drinking, and listening to the jazz records our New York office sent me.

I know people make much too much of sex these days, but Tania turned off the sexual charge between us as casually as she'd turn off a light. I'm not really talking about passion, sexual fulfillment, orgasm, I'm talking about sexual togetherness, the continuing bond sex forges between two people throughout their lives, ever renewed, a kind of pervasive music underlying everything, a river flowing through their lives even when they are apart, life-producing. Break the bond and what's left lacks focus, direction, and heart. And Tania and I somehow had lost it somewhere along the way.

If I was hoping to trigger a confrontation with her that morning I invited Eddie to stay with us in Red House, I was rapidly disappointed. I needn't have worried, because for Eddie it would have been unthinkable to abandon his fellow delegates and move out of the hotel. He had obligations of his own, and after what he and his comrades had been through in the Comintern hearings, he wasn't about to turn his back on them. And so that morning after Tania delivered her ultimatum, Eddie cleaned himself up, dosed himself with lots of black tea, and took himself back to the Bristol.

Once the Comintern proceedings were over, all anyone wanted to do was go home. Everybody had had enough of politics and politicking. The trip to Moscow was all for nothing. The decision against the American delegation had been made long before they left New York.

Except for Eddie's involvement, I couldn't have cared less about the principles at stake. If you were going to commit your mind to somebody else's dictation, I couldn't see that it much mattered whether that dictation came from Moscow or the party headquarters on East 13th Street. Either way, you had given up all that mattered about yourself, just as a medieval serf did in pledging fealty to his lord, or as some hooded monk, or bare-skinned savage did in bowing to his omnipotent god.

But at least the lord was your own, Eddie explained to me, one you had chosen to serve, not one imposed on you from outside. So you all had to stick together, even if you weren't in perfect agreement on everything. I suppose I saw his point, except that if you're building a heaven on earth, I'd have thought that you'd start by ensuring the freedom of every person to think for himself.

Sure, you want everybody to have the minimal necessities of life—enough to eat, a decent place to live and raise children, education, health care, and all that. But beyond that, what? There's the consolation of god's grace, of course, the streets paved with gold, and harps to play for your amusement. But it sounds pretty boring. The Muslims at least offer a paradise of unending sensual delight—nubile loveliness in diaphanous bloomers—slim limbs and lissome loins, rosebud breasts and languorous eyes—the promise of unending orgasm. Whether that's heaven for women I wouldn't have any idea, but for most men I would guess even perpetual foreplay and orgasm could lose its appeal after a while. And once people set about engineering heaven on earth, utopia has a way of turning into nightmare—regimentation, beautifully organized prison systems in which men and women are made happy by decree, like it or not. If life is anything, it has to be more than that.

Until the morning after that last Comintern session, I doubt if any of the American delegates realized they were captives of the Soviet government. They had done what they had come to Moscow to do, but having done that, they couldn't just get on the next train for Berlin and go home. You came to Russia, you surrendered your passport to the government, and once you'd done that, you couldn't leave until the government gave it back.

You might think that retrieving a passport would be as simple as picking it up from the desk of your hotel, but the Soviet bureaucracy was notoriously, if not deliberately, inefficient, and it could sometimes take months and even years to locate a passport, process it, and issue an exit visa. So Eddie and his colleagues began what became a daily ritual. Walk down to the passport office, wait for an hour or two in the corridor before making the trip to the desk and asking in English or fumbling Russian for the missing passport, and then, after waiting for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, be told that the agency had still not been able to locate it, come back tomorrow.

I tried to find out what was going on from Tania, but all she would tell me was that as far as she was concerned these people no longer existed. What did they have to complain about? she wanted to know. The government gave them a weekly stipend, more than most Russians earned in a year, that enabled them to live lavishly in the fleshpots if they chose, in the bars and coffee shops, the theatres and cabarets. They could even investigate some of Moscow's unprecedented cultural achievements—its museums, opera, ballet, its universities and institutes—but she knew that Americans were such barbarians they would be incapable of appreciating them.

But most of the delegates hadn't come to Russia as tourists. They were in Moscow to make a political and philosophical point. Having done that they had nothing to do with themselves except wait—and make the daily visit to the passport control office.

In another country they could have gotten a new passport at the American embassy, but there was no American embassy in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia. The U.S. had broken off diplomatic relations during the revolution and never restored them, and so if an American citizen ran into problems he had no place to turn. Sometimes he could get help from the embassies of countries friendly to the U.S.—the British, the Dutch, the Danes—but often they could do nothing and he would have to begin investigating ways of slipping over the border and throwing himself on the mercy of the Poles, Germans, Swedes, or Finns.

I learned later that the government's passport control operations had become part of a counterfeiting operation run by the secret police. Passports would he copied, supplied with different photographs, and used by communist agents elsewhere in the world on matters of high importance. Sometimes you got back the original passport you had surrendered and sometimes a skillful counterfeit.

And so, while the American delegates waited for their passports, they didn't know what to do with themselves. Eddie had begun hanging out in the all-night bar at the Lux. Everybody drank too much, sang too many songs, all those Wobbly songs that had stirred the hearts of an earlier generation, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” “Hallelujah, I'm a bum,” and so on. Eddie was no longer the man who had come to dinner that first night at Red House, the man who drank nothing stronger than water. I suppose he had become the labor organizer again, assuming the open-hearted character that was his when he came to some backwater town and lifted a few with the boys.

I was always amazed at the ease with which people involved with the party changed their names and identities to reflect the needs of the moment, as if they had no identity other than what the party invested them with. Some say it's a hangover from the days when the party was underground, a secret society as cabalistic as any religious or fraternal organization. I don't doubt that's true, but I think it also comes from some basic need peculiar to people caught up in the party to release themselves to some transcendent force, the way nuns or brothers change their names when they join the orders of the church. The practice applied to everybody, pervaded the entire organization. Look at Lenin, little Vladimir Ulyanov, or Trotsky, the firebrand Jacob Bronstein, or the Georgian seminary student who transformed himself from Joseph Dzhugasvili into Koba and finally into Steel, dictator of the proletariat and all others who would worship him: the president of the Soviet Republic, Joseph Stalin.

Eddie and I saw each other a couple of times after the Comintern meeting was over, once at the office after the staff had gone home, another time in a coffee bar in the Arbat, and a third in the library at Red House. Eddie was seeing the city and the country with what to me were fresh eyes. Unlike him, I had discovered Moscow and Russia by living there and gradually becoming a part of it—whereas Eddie had this new world suddenly dumped upon him, and it came like an electric shock. I don't know how he could have spent most of his adult life amid so much violence and pain without losing his sense that it was possible to create something better but he had, and now he awoke to reality.