by James Cook
Fellow Travelers
A Novel
James Cook
New York
For the trinity of my life
Claire
Karen Cassandra
To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.… Ideology is what gives evildoing its long-sought justifications, gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination and makes his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes.
—Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Contents
I. An American Family: New York, 1922
II. Spring’s Awakening: Platinumgrad, Moscow, 1922–1924
III. Parallel Lives: Moscow, 1924–1929
IV. A Ticket to Leningrad: Moscow, 1929–1931
V. Fausts in America: New York, 1931–1976
I. An American Family
New York, 1922
i
What I always remember first when I think back on that time so long ago, nearly sixty years now, is the mountains, rising like a wall above the valley. They were capped in snow all year round. The rock underneath—schist, granite, how would I know what it was—never broke clear. In summer, the snows receded somewhat, shrank like frost on a windowpane, and then spread back again as summer moved into fall and winter. Lower down, the gray rock emerged in sheets and drops and terraces, unbroken by trees or shrubs or anything else. The air was too cold, the cliffs too steep, for anything to flourish other than lichen or an occasional flowering plant caught in a crevice of the rock.
And then came the trees, on the lower slopes, pine trees, stunted and gray, that clung there in the winds off the Arctic. At the bottom, five thousand, six thousand feet maybe more, there was the valley itself, rocky and dry, paved with pebbles, cobbles, and boulders, and covered with dust as fine as talc. In winter, the wind uprooted the brushy plants that grew there and sent them rolling along the valley floor like tumbleweeds in one of those old western movies.
The houses where all of us lived—Manny and I, the men who worked in the mine and their women, our women if we wanted them—clung along the side of the creek, veered and leaned in the wind, thrown together out of whatever wood or corrugated iron you could find here at the end of the world. Most of them were barracks-like log cabins, but, their scale aside, they didn’t look at all like the ones I remembered from books like From Log Cabin to White House (that wasn’t Abe Lincoln, as I remember, but Garfield). The logs were slabbed and vertical rather than horizontal, and the cracks were filled with clay. Besides these, there were a number of shelters thrown up by the Mongols in the mine crew, structures called yurts with broad overhanging roofs strung with animal skins.
A rocky road ran through the valley, burrowed through what we talked about as the town, and linked the railroad terminal ten miles to the south to the mine a half a mile or more up the slopes of the mountain. But you never used the road except when you had to. We stockpiled the output from the mine in spring and summer, and then moved it by sledge over the deep snows to the railroad in winter. The mine was the reason for everything. Without it, none of the 736 people who lived there—miners, families, ourselves—would have had any reason to stay.
It was a forbidding place, freezing in winter, mosquito-infested in summer, hot, intolerable and seductive only in spring when for a few weeks the rains turned the floor of the valley into a carpet of flowers. I didn’t recognize any of them. I may have come from a city halfway around the world—4,500 miles away, farther than that if you went the wrong way—but I had spent five years living in the country, and I knew enough to be able to tell a sore-eye daisy from a devil’s paintbrush, a dogtooth violet from a yellow cowslip.
I lived there in that place under the mountain for less than a year, from the late summer of 1922 to the spring of 1923, and if this was supposed to be the great adventure of my life, at the time I would happily have done without it. For eight months there was nothing but misery—stifling heat, dust, then bone-aching cold, discomfort, and boredom—and I could hardly wait to escape that town—that country, that world. Now I am no longer sure. Would I have wanted to round out my life without ever having experienced it? I don’t think so. I had gone to the end of the earth, I had dwelt in the mountains of the moon, and now after all these years I tingle a little with excitement just thinking about it.
My brother Manny had gone to Russia the year before, the summer after Pop went to jail. The idea was to see the world and collect some money the Soviet government owed us for medical supplies like codeine, camphor, morphine, quinine, and gauze. Manny didn’t get the money, but he wound up with a platinum concession instead; a mine, town and workforce beyond the Urals in Siberia. The government wasn’t making any money on the venture and couldn’t figure out why. Manny and I went there to see if we couldn’t get the thing running profitably again. The government had taken over the mine in the early days of the revolution, and it had gone downhill ever since. You didn’t have to be a managerial genius to figure what had gone wrong. The price of platinum had collapsed at the end of the war, and if you had any hope of making money at current levels you had to find a way to cut back your costs correspondingly.
We were there on our own. The year before, Pop had exhausted all his legal appeals and gone off to prison. He’d been charged with performing an illegal abortion on a patient of his—Pop claimed the abortion was therapeutic of course—but the woman subsequently died, and her husband complained. They charged Pop with manslaughter, found him guilty, and sentenced him to three years in Sing Sing. That was the summer of the Palmer Raids, when the U.S. Attorney General rounded up 3,000 pro-Communist subversives and got two or three hundred deported. We all said he’d been railroaded, and a bungled abortion, if that’s what it was, was as good a reason as any to put away a man for three years if you wanted to be rid of him. I have my own ideas of what happened, but nobody ever asked me, and I see no reason to tell anyone now.
The district attorney described Pop as one of the country’s most dangerous radicals. At the time, the U.S. and much of the world seemed on the verge of revolution, so that in itself was enough to prejudice any jury. We saw the whole thing as a cause célèbre but looking back on it now, I realize that nobody paid much attention except us and a few of Pop’s friends, patients, and supporters. Pop was there during Richard E. Lawes’ 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, but he never made enough of an impression to make even a footnote in the book.
Pop went to jail the spring before Manny graduated from Columbia—Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, that is—almost twenty years to the day after Pop had gotten his own medical degree. Manny was supposed to start his internship at Bellevue the following January, but he didn’t like being at loose ends, so instead of hanging around New York he went to Russia. We never talked about why, but I think he was so ashamed and humiliated that they had put Pop in jail that he couldn’t bear to stay in New York and face the people he knew. Not just his fellow students, but everyone else. I sometimes thought he knew anybody who was anybody in New York, especially if they were young and adventurous and ready to give life a whirl.
I had enrolled at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, the previous fall, with the idea of majoring in fine arts. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a museum curator or an art dealer, but the visual arts—painting and sculpture and what not—had always intrigued me, and when other kids were off raising hell in Hell’s Kitchen or the Five Points, I was finding my way into New York’s art scene. I was too young for earthshaking events like the 1912 Armory Show (and probably wouldn’t have liked it if I had), but I went to the Steiglitz gallery a few times before it closed, and I began hanging around the new theatres that were springing up in Greenwich Village and elsewhere in the c
ity.
In the circumstances maybe a fine arts major made sense. But there may have been more to it than that. Maybe I wanted to dissociate myself completely from Pop and from politics, from the Left Wing Socialists and what people were beginning to call the Communist Party, and a fine arts major was as decisive a break as I could think of at the time.
Pop was not one of your garden-variety radicals. His hair wasn’t long, or his eyes fiery; he didn’t throw bombs or start riots in the street. He was as subdued and sedate as a university professor. He looked like one and even sounded like one. And yet he was one of the principal organizers of the Socialist Labor Party. I grew up with all the cant of the movement ringing in my ears—worker exploitation, class warfare, worker solidarity, capitalist greed, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, but none of it much interested me. To this day I don’t know much more than any educated reader could have learned from reading Walter Duranty in The New York Times. Duranty was one of my brother Manny’s dearest friends and as close to being a communist sympathizer as you could get without actually joining the party and carrying a card.
In those days, the socialist movement was far less homogeneous than it later became. It encompassed not only Marxists and Russian revolutionaries, but anarchists, Quakers, pacifists, and god knows what else. But the whole world had its eyes on what was happening in Russia those days. Lenin had usurped the leadership of the revolution, taken Russia out of the war with Germany and the Central Powers, and begun rebuilding the country from top to bottom.
The people who moved in my father’s circles in those days were not necessarily radicals. They were political activists like Norman Thomas and Bert Wolfe and Bill Foster, intellectuals like Scott Nearing and Jane Addams, or bureaucrats like Boris Reinstein, a socialist party organizer who later became one of Lenin’s principal advisers. More often than not, they were the movers and shakers of New York society, people with intellectual aspirations who were caught up in the antiwar movement that gave the socialist movement its momentum.
I was just out of high school when Madame Onegin died on my father’s examining table, and though I certainly knew that manslaughter was a more serious charge than disturbing the peace or illegal assembly, I must have decided Pop’s problems were his business, not mine, and proceeded to ignore them. Once they indicted him, Pop folded his practice in the Bronx, and we all moved into a huge eighth floor apartment in the Ansonia Hotel on upper Broadway in Manhattan, and for a year or so, whenever I came home from school, that was my base for exploring the city—with my old high school friends initially and more and more with the new friends I began making down in the Village.
I was away at Lafayette during Pop’s trial, and I had no inclination to come sit in some dingy courtroom downtown in a show of family solidarity the way Manny did. It’s not that I didn’t care. I just never believed they would ever convict him. Pop knew everybody who mattered in New York, in everything from the medical association to the Chamber of Commerce, and he had never hesitated to use his influence to get what he wanted.
And then, when they found him guilty, I didn’t waste much emotional energy on what was happening to him. I had never seen that much of him anyway, and they said he’d be out in less than three years; that was nowhere near as long as the five years I had spent farmed out in Westchester County when I was a kid.
At Lafayette, nobody had ever heard of the notorious John Faust, murderer, abortionist, flaming-eyed revolutionary and probably wouldn’t have cared much if they had. So I focused my attention on college and what I was going to do with my life. I never even gave a thought to the economic repercussions of his going to jail, how we were going to live, who was going to keep the family going, and I was right not to worry. Somehow the money was there.
Sixty years later, it seems to me rather ironic that the son of one of America’s most notorious radicals should be going to a liberal arts college in the mountains of Pennsylvania, a class institution we would have called it then, an elitist one I suppose these days, and Lafayette was just over the mountains from the great steel mills of Bethlehem, which were the focus of my father’s outrage for as long as I could remember.
Pop’s mother and father had come here from Russia when he was two and wound up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where his father got a job selling insurance. He sold it the rest of his life. But Pop was meant for other things. At fifteen or sixteen, he went to work for a local iron foundry, the Bullard Co., a stocky, barrel-chested young man with a trace of his parents’ Russian still on his breath. Working at Bullard changed his life. Pop started organizing the Bullard workers to get them a better deal but he didn’t get very far. This was around the time of the great Homestead steel strike, when the local militias mowed down the workers like dogs, and Pop would have taken his men out in a sympathy strike but most of the men wouldn’t go. My father always knew he was going to escape from the mill, but most of his coworkers did not, so he got nowhere. The people who worked in the mill put in fourteen hours a day, sometimes more, seven days a week, and got paid what was barely a living wage, not much more than the $1 a week Pop gave each of us as an allowance all during high school. But there I was twenty years later, going to Lafayette, having a hell of a time and not feeling the slightest bit guilty about it.
I’m all for everybody’s getting the best deal out of life that he can, but I feel now—I have no idea what I felt then—that most of us make do with the lives life has dealt us. If you’re born poor, you manage to salvage at least a modicum of joy out of your life, just as you do if you’re born rich, and there’s nothing that says you’re going to stay that way forever. I’m not sure most people felt that in Europe and Russia but I think that’s what most of the people felt in those days in the United States.
This is not a counsel to complacency. It is a recognition that life in itself is a precious gift and most of us find ways of exploiting the miracle, and we’re often a lot better off accepting our condition than goading ourselves to discontent with everything. Pop wouldn’t have agreed with that, and neither would my half-brother Eddie. I saw more than my share of the unhappiness Pop and Eddie provoked by forcing people to brood on their misery.
Eddie and Pop, after all, had other objectives in mind. I don’t think that they were ever really interested in bettering people’s lot. They were only interested in undoing the injustices that permeate any society, the class structure, what they liked to call privilege. I have no less difficulty in justifying starving to death three million serfs in the famine of 1923 than I have in justifying the execution of twelve million Jews, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and whomever else you wanted to get rid of in Germany back in the Thirties. I don’t care if the famine was supposed to cleanse Soviet society for a broad social purpose. Given the way people sentimentalize the crimes of the socialist experiment, I should probably explain that I couldn’t justify the execution of any of these people, anywhere, for whatever reason.
ii
That year I spent at Lafayette was for me the time when my life began—when I began to have some sense of who I was, what I wanted to be, and what I was going to become. It didn’t happen in quite the way a liberal arts education is supposed to open you up to the world. But then I decided I wanted to be an actor, not the normal career choice for a liberal arts candidate.
I had always liked being in school pageants and theatricals—I had played an ill child in a tableau re-creation of Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, a demented monk in a homemade dramatization of some popular children’s book, and, in high school, Algernon in Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. But when I got involved in the theatre group at Lafayette, I finally discovered myself. I liked the distillation of one’s entire being into the spill of a spotlight, discovering one’s character, one’s mannerisms, movements, posture, dreams, aspirations, disappointments, in the outline of some playwright’s imagining, not simply given but made, borrowed, assumed from the lives and characters of people around me. That’s not as odd as it
seems. It’s one of those schemes in which the plan of your life is already determined and you spend your life establishing what it is foreordained that you are going to he.
I was in those days a fairly good-looking fellow—tall, gangling, and awkward I admit, with maybe too large a mouth, too narrow a head, but good-looking all the same, and in time I outgrew the awkwardness. When they decided to do Seventeen, one of Booth Tarkington’s foolishly-engaging middle-class comedies, I tried out and somehow got the lead role, the part of a muddle-headed adolescent named Willie Baxter. I was transformed into someone or something I had never been. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed. I never realized it until I got to Lafayette, but I spoke with a Bronx accent—flat, nasal, assertive—and I set about eliminating every trace of it from my voice. I had a roommate from Syracuse and I spent that fall catching the sound of his voice, his tones, his intonations and gradually got that Bronx accent out of my mouth.
From the time I saw Peg O’ My Heart, when I was ten, I had always gone to the theatre whenever I could. I didn’t care what I saw. Theatre was still a populist art in those days. You could sit in the second balcony for twenty-five cents, and people flocked to do so. But once I got bitten at Lafayette, I began hanging out in the places in New York where theatre people congregated—theatrical bars down Fourteenth Street from Tony Pastor’s and the Academy of Music—met a few actors and learned something of the business, and some of them even told me they’d arrange an audition with producers they knew.
But that never happened. Manny came back from Russia that summer and announced that I was going back to the Soviet Union with him. To hell with his medical ambitions, he was going to be an import-export agent dealing in Russian commodities, and he needed someone he could trust, to handle the details of the business for him, keep the books, write the letters, be nice to the commissars or whatever, someone he could rely on, and that was the end of my theatrical career. It didn’t happen quite as easily as that, but it was just as inevitable.
