The Black Russian (10 page)

Little is known about what exactly he did during his first several years in Moscow. He later said that he began as a waiter in a small restaurant, but he also claimed that he worked as a valet and then as a head butler for a Russian nobleman. What is certain, however, is that shortly after arriving he made the momentous decision to start a family.

In 1901, Frederick was almost thirty, and what was left of his youth was fading. He met Hedwig Antonia Hähn early in 1901, about a year after he had settled in Moscow. They married on
September
11 at Saints Peter and Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church not far from the Kremlin. She was a twenty-five-year-old German, originally from Putzig, a small town in West Prussia on the shore of the Baltic, and came from a humble background—her father was a telegraph operator. Hedwig was no longer in the first blush of youth either. But she was pretty and thus a good match for Frederick—a bit tall for a woman at five feet eight, with dark brown hair and eyes, an oval face, a high forehead, a fair complexion, a straight nose, and a pointed chin. She was also no prude and did not resist intimacy
outside wedlock with the exotic-looking foreigner: their first baby, Olga, was born on February 12, 1902, five months after the wedding. Despite the fact that Frederick and Hedwig came from vastly
different
worlds, their love for each other proved genuine and she found fulfillment as his wife and as a mother. Olga would be followed in 1906 by a son, Mikhail, whose birth especially delighted Frederick, and then by another daughter, Irma, in 1909.

In their early years together, Frederick and Hedwig lived at 16 Chukhinsky Lane in what could be called a “middle-class,”
semi-suburban
neighborhood just outside the Sadovoye Koltso and a convenient twenty-minute walk from Triumphal Square. By then Frederick was earning enough for Hedwig to be able to occupy
herself
only with “home duties.” In contrast to more developed parts of the city on the inner side of the Sadovoye Koltso, the neighborhood where the Thomases lived had the feeling of a provincial town, like many other areas on Moscow’s outskirts in those days. There were still big empty lots interspersed with small and large ponds. Most of the houses were one or two stories high and built of wood; only some of the streets were paved with cobblestones while the rest were dirt; streetlights were scarce and used kerosene.

The church records pertaining to the wedding do not make any reference to Frederick’s race, but they do contain the surprising
revelation
that he identified himself as a Roman Catholic, which means that he chose not to attach himself to one of the Protestant churches in Europe that were closer to what he had known as a child. The
differences
between the Catholic and A.M.E. churches could hardly have been greater in terms of history, geography, power, architecture, art, music, and ritual. Overall, there is little evidence suggesting that any religious faith was important for Frederick. But his choosing
Catholicism
is nevertheless significant. By identifying with the most venerable and “highest” of the Old World churches he was taking another
decisive
step on his path of reinventing himself by abandoning American cultural markers for those of a cosmopolitan European.

It did not take long for Frederick to find a job commensurate with his skills and experience. In 1903, he began to work as a maître d’hôtel at Aquarium, an entertainment garden occupying several park-like acres just west of Triumphal Square, at what is now 16 Bolshaya Sadovaya Street. Aquarium was a focal point of Moscow’s lively nightlife for a clientele drawn from the more genteel and prosperous classes of society, especially those who were not put off by the frivolous nature of the garden’s entertainments. It retained its aquatic name even after the fountains, grottoes, and artificial streams flowing into a pond with goldfish that had existed there in 1898 were long forgotten.

Frederick’s employer, Charles Aumont, was a Frenchman. He had rebuilt the garden in a style intended to make visitors feel that they were arriving somewhere grand and magical: a giant white
colonnade
topped with sculptures greeted them at the entrance, and a marble staircase bathed in electric light led into the garden. A
magnificent
building decorated with carved cupolas, columns, and arches meant to evoke a Moorish palace housed a restaurant on the left. In the depths of the garden was a spacious concert stage. Bands in
pavilions
played fashionable tunes; people strolled along gravel walkways among trees strung with bright lights; vendors offered snacks and souvenirs from booths; barkers invited passersby to try their hand at bowling and other games. The garden provided a chance to get away from the noise and bustle of the city streets, to see and to be seen, to have some fun, perhaps to enjoy a brief flirtation or even a dalliance. A modest fee allowed a customer to enter the Aquarium grounds at dusk and to stay there until the garden closed in the early morning.

More expensive tickets gave entry to a large enclosed theater on the grounds that featured lavish productions of fashionable operettas and comedies imported directly from Vienna, Paris, London, and
Berlin
. The subjects were invariably lighthearted, the plots quick-paced,
and the humor often risqué. The theater’s private rooms were also available, curtained in a way that shielded those inside from public view but not from the stage. In the early 1900s, the most famous customer for these was the biggest name in Moscow—Grand Duke Sergey, the tsar’s uncle and the city’s governor-general. Younger grand dukes sat openly in first-row orchestra seats. After the performance at the enclosed theater was over, patrons could continue their
evening
by moving to the “café chantant.” This was a different, open-air theater that included a restaurant where customers would sit at small tables facing a stage and order food and drink while they watched, or ignored, a variety show of twenty or thirty acts in quick succession—everything from trained animals to acrobats to operatic singers.

Aumont was a very successful, talented, and ruthless
businessman
, and Frederick learned a great deal from him (including how not to behave). For owners of establishments like Aquarium, sales of food and especially of drink were major components of their income, and cynical observers of Moscow nightlife often complained that the variety shows were really just magnets for successful restaurants. The managers of the gardens certainly did what they could to link the two. Many of the song and dance acts featured attractive young women whose primary talent was projecting their allure to a largely male audience. But the enticements did not stop there. According to the norms of the time, a client seated in the restaurant who was particularly taken with a performer—and who had the money and the courage—could send her an invitation to join him at his table after she had taken her turn onstage.

The exploitation of chorus girls and other female performers was one area where Aumont sinned but Frederick did not. Frederick became personally involved in the fate of one such young woman in 1903. Natalia Trukhanova was a sweet-faced actress with dreamy eyes and a voluptuous figure who aspired to a career on the stage of the celebrated Moscow Art Theater, which had recently launched Chekhov’s plays and had become the center of a revolution in
Russian
theatrical practice. But she did not succeed, was in desperate need of money, and—following a friend’s advice—applied for a job at Aquarium. Aumont liked her and hired her on the spot to perform in light comedies. He also offered her a monthly salary that exceeded her wildest dreams and, glossing over some of the fine print, urged her to sign a contract at their first meeting.

She did not realize what she had gotten herself into until she finished her first performance and was preparing to go. Her costar ran into her dressing room and began to upbraid her in a loud, harsh tone for not knowing the ropes: “Have you lost your wits? They’re going to start asking for you in the private rooms any second! And you want to relax? You want to earn your bread without working? No, missy! That won’t work here! Please be so kind as to sit and wait in your dressing room until you’re called. One of the maîtres d’hôtel will fetch you.” A few minutes later, one of them did appear—“the negro Thomas” as Trukhanova referred to him. He announced very politely that a party was asking for her in private room 18 and that everyone there was entirely decent and sober. She obediently followed Frederick to the door, and thus began what she called her yearlong “path of sorrow,” working every night like a “real geisha.”

Her fate would have been worse were it not for Frederick and the other maîtres d’hôtel, who looked out for her like “tender
nursemaids
,” as she put it. Trukhanova described how, whenever she was entertaining customers in a private room, one of the maîtres d’hôtel would take care to place a bottle of her “personal” champagne in front of her. This was actually a rather foul-tasting mixture of mineral water colored with tea, but it looked like the real thing and allowed her to avoid drinking anything alcoholic. And if a client happened to pour some wine or liquor into her glass, the maître d’hôtel who was keeping an eye on the room would immediately swoop in and remove it. Trukhanova reciprocated and won the affection of the Aquarium’s restaurant staff by donating her commissions to the
general
pool for tips. Her distaste for her work was so strong that she
would also not keep anything that her clients bought for her and saw “every flower, every piece of fruit” as “defiled.” Frederick noticed this and remembered it in a way that touched her deeply. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1904, he presented her with an enormous bouquet from the grateful staff and began his speech by announcing: “Not a single one of these flowers comes from the restaurant, and the ribbon is … straight from Paris!”

The success that Frederick quickly achieved at Aquarium made it seem as if he had become master of his own fate by settling in Russia. But there were subterranean historical forces at work in his adopted country, even if they were initially hardly noticeable to people like him caught up in their daily lives. They erupted for the first time scarcely five years after he arrived and did so with a violence that would show the fragility of the life he had built for himself—indeed, the fragility of his whole surrounding world.

On the night of February 8, 1904 (N.S., that is, by the New Style calendar), the imperial Japanese navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific fleet lying at anchor in the outer harbor of Port Arthur in China, “thus accomplishing the original Pearl Harbor,” as an American historian put it. The two countries’ imperialistic
ambitions
in Manchuria had come into conflict, and the Japanese naval attack that launched the Russo-Japanese War proved to be only the first of the military disasters that the giant Russia would suffer at the hands of little Japan during the next year and a half. The Japanese besieged and eventually captured Port Arthur itself, then defeated the Russian army in Manchuria. Finally, between May 27 and 29, 1905, in the Battle of Tsushima Strait, the Japanese annihilated the antiquated Russian fleet, which had sailed for over half a year and had traveled nearly twenty thousand miles from the Baltic to the coast of Japan. The president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, brokered a peace conference between the belligerents in Portsmouth, New
Hampshire, in August 1905—none too soon for Russia. The country had already been experiencing revolutionary turmoil for months. The war that began six thousand miles to the east of St. Petersburg had initiated upheavals that shook the Russian Empire from top to bottom, leaving cracks that would help to bring it crashing down a dozen years later.

As an erstwhile American citizen, Frederick was in a strange
position
because of the war and the events that followed. Some decades earlier, during and after the American Civil War, Russian-American relations had been amicable; the United States was grateful for Russia’s support of the Union. There were also mutually profitable political and commercial relations between the two countries, including
Russia’s
momentous sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867. However, as the twentieth century approached, American public opinion began to turn against Russia for two dominant reasons—abhorrence of the tyrannical absolute monarchy and revulsion against Russia’s treatment of Jews. Indeed, during the Russo-Japanese War, the United States sympathized with Japan, and New York bankers made large loans to Japan in the hope that this would help to defeat Russia.

Frederick was thus making a life for himself in a country that was increasingly being vilified in the land of his birth. Another ironic twist was that not only were Jim Crow laws continuing unabated in the United States, but a newer animus had appeared against the Chinese, whose entry into the country and ability to acquire
citizenship
were blocked by explicitly racist federal laws. The Russians thus considered the Americans hypocritical, and vice versa. When
President
Roosevelt’s administration transmitted a petition to the Russian government protesting against widespread anti-Jewish pogroms, the Russian ambassador to Washington complained that it was “
unbecoming
for Americans to criticize” Russia when blacks were being lynched and Chinese beaten up on the streets of the United States.

The disastrous war with Japan could hardly have come at a worse time for the Russian Empire. As the twentieth century opened, waves
of turmoil had begun to spread across the country. Workers struck against onerous conditions in factories; students demonstrated for civil rights; peasants in the countryside tried to seize land from the nobles. Committees of citizens sprang up demanding broad-ranging reforms in political life, the economy, and education. The Socialist Revolutionary Party resurrected its “Combat Organization,” which carried out a series of spectacular assassinations—two ministers of the interior in 1902 and 1904, and then, in February 1905, Grand Duke Sergey, former governor-general of Moscow and visitor to Aquarium (where Frederick may well have met him), who was literally blown to bits inside the Kremlin.