Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  After everything that had been done to her, Katya nonetheless felt guilty. All her life she had thought her father was a good and honorable man, and now the whole world declared he had been an enemy of the people, declared her sister and dead mother were enemies as well. She tried to convince herself he’d been wrong, that it was unjust to hire those people, that he had exploited the peasants, but she could not believe it for long. She had grown up with the men who had evicted them, she had loved them, and she could not believe either that they were monsters or that her mother, father, sister, and all her relatives were as well. She knew she should believe it, and in the darkness of the night she would tell herself this, but she did not.

  “They say these things are necessary in order to build tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t care about tomorrow. I only want to know today.”

  Through those months—that summer and into the fall—Manny ran like a wry and sour note in the music of our lives. It was time for me to grow up, he kept saying, I wasn’t a kid anymore. You’re behaving like a lovesick boy. Grow up, for god’s sake. Well, why should I? I was not twenty-one yet, and I had never fallen in love before. He said, “Just don’t let that blind you to the realities of life. She’s using you, she hasn’t had it so good in years, she’s got decent food and clothes and a place to stay, and she’s using you for all you’re worth. And my god, she’s even beginning to get fat.”

  “What do I care? Let her use me, just so she doesn’t stop doing it.” And yet in a sense Manny was right.

  Two or three times a week, Kasha spent the night at the rooms she shared with her sister in that tenement on the other side of the city. After they arrived in Moscow, they had gotten by as best they could. If you had a work card you automatically entered the workers’ paradise. Everything that mattered was free—housing was free, dental and medical care, meals and clothing, even tickets to the Bolshoi or the soccer matches.

  But Katya and her sister had no credentials, no papers, no claim on the benefits of the socialist society. Katya finally found work in the commissary, but what her sister did I never was told. I didn’t want to know, Katya didn’t need to tell me what she herself might have done on occasion to survive, but that didn’t make her a streetwalker, as Manny liked to tell me. It made her a survivor.

  I had to remind myself that things were different now. Men and women were easier with each other in Russia than they ever seemed to be at home. The culture was different, and I wondered later whether this didn’t explain my father’s casual affairs, or perhaps even my mother’s. The revolution had transformed the relations between men and women, and women were free to choose their partners just as men were. Presumably it was no worse to be paid than it was to pay. I could never see it that way, but I had to believe it, because I knew that that was the way it was.

  A few months after we met, a warm day in August when the leaves were beginning to shrivel, she took me home to that ancient four-story structure where she and her sister lived. It was built around a central rectangular court like something out of the Middle Ages. I have no idea what it must once have been, a manor house perhaps, a monastery. We passed through the shadowy gateway and into the courtyard, filled with debris, offal and garbage, abandoned implements, and other junk. Around the sides of the courtyard was a wooden passageway, roofed in, and every fifty feet or so a staircase rose to the floors and apartments above. I could scarcely manage to climb up. There was garbage all over the steps, and at each landing, a privy, only partially enclosed, reeking to high heaven in the morning sun. We circled round and round, climbing higher and higher, and finally she led me into a doorway, down a hall and into a room whose squalor I can scarcely bear to remember.

  How can you live in a place like this? I found myself thinking. I knew she could only say, What other place can there be for me to live in? I could only begin to imagine the difficulty of maintaining any semblance of cleanliness in such circumstances; the primus stove in the middle of the room, the dresses and coats hanging from overhead pipes, the water stains on the ceiling, the fallen plaster, the scurry of rat’s feet in the walls.

  “That settles it,” I said. “You’re going to move out of here.”

  “I can’t leave my sister, she can’t afford the place by herself.”

  “I’ll pay for it myself,” I answered.

  And I did.

  But I had to get her by Manny, and Manny didn’t approve.

  “You can’t do that;” Manny said. “Don’t you know what she is? Don’t you know she’s little better than a whore? She’s already been laid by half of Moscow. For the right price, I could lay her myself.”

  I didn’t smack him in the face, I kept myself in check. I thought, he’s trying to bait me, he’s trying to get the upper hand by forcing me into a fight. But I must have gone white because he said, “I’m sorry I said that. That was uncalled for.”

  “So what difference does that make? Everybody screws everybody else in this country. Look at you, look at Pop. Look at Mama Eva. I love Kasha, and I think she loves me.”

  But that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was she didn’t have a work card, she wasn’t a party member, she hadn’t any important connections, she couldn’t bring anything to our position in Moscow. No, it was worse than that.

  “She’s a nobody,” Manny said. “She doesn’t know how to speak or behave, she’s a bumpkin. Back home she’d be clerking in a dime store, or working in a shirtwaist factory.”

  “She represents that most esteemed of classes, here in the Soviet Union, the proletariat,” I told him, “and that’s not good enough?”

  But in my heart I knew what he meant. I had thought the same things myself and decided they didn’t matter. I couldn’t bring her to any of the parties and receptions we were invited to in those days, occasions that were becoming increasingly essential to the business Manny was doing in Moscow. She couldn’t stand or eat properly, she couldn’t make small talk, and there was nothing we could do to teach her. She didn’t want to be taught. It made her uncomfortable, even more uncomfortable I discovered than it was for me to have her with me. And why did she have to be with us? If there was reception we had to go to, I would just go without her. Manny didn’t bring any of the women he got involved with to such affairs, and I didn’t see why I had to either.

  You would never have known Manny didn’t approve of Katya. He treated her as if she were some sort of queen, he was courtly, flattering, solicitous, and for a time it was good for us to be living with him. He had gotten involved with a woman named Yelena, who was no party member either. She was a singer, someone he had met in a café, a striking and glamorous woman who played the balalaika and sang gypsy songs. Manny and I would go, sit in the darkness and listen to her sing. She was just beginning her career then, but you couldn’t believe how good she was, what an exciting performer.

  Yelena was one thing, Katya was something else.

  “You take my advice” Manny kept saying, “Get rid of Katya. If you don’t you’ll live to regret it.”

  But I wouldn’t. My acting career I could let go. But not Katya. I had never been so happy in my life.

  We spent a lot of time in bed, but up also wandering all over the city, to the museums, churches, monasteries, parks, the dance halls in the country, the food stores on the Okhotny Road, and the private ones on Hunters’ Row. In the churches, she would always want to kneel down and pray but the curators had installed ropes to prevent the faithful from exercising such primitive behavior.

  I was not enchanted with Moscow, however. It was a barbaric place, partaking of all the multitude of things that the Russian empire had absorbed. It was at least tolerable in the summer. The nights were only two or three hours long, but the weather was bearable. You could forgive the heat, the sultriness that came off the river, because of the explosion of greenery that filled every niche of the city from April on.

  What Katya loved was the Rolls Manny bought, complete with chauffeur and built-in bar. Sh
e had never ridden in a car before, never mind a Rolls Royce, and the first time we went for a ride she was transported by the experience. She plumped herself back on the seat cushions, rolled down the windows, and waved at the people watching enviously outside. She had become one of the nobility, one of those women from the great estates at home riding down those dusty roads in Byelorussia. We drove all over Moscow and out into the country. If the car broke down or if the road proved impassable, we would abandon it and the chauffeur and find somebody else to take us back into town.

  The Rolls always made me uneasy. It was somehow the symbol of all the things the revolution was supposed to sweep away, the image of privilege and power. But nobody else seemed to feel that way. Katya was delighted with it and the general populace was too enchanted by the automotive marvel to turn their envy into malice.

  In winter, the city was eerie, hidden, hermetic, turning in on itself to escape the encompassing cold. Night came soon after noon, and everybody hurried to get inside. The sidewalks bustled with scurrying people and the streets with the whoosh of traffic moving on runners—miniature sleighs with plodding blowing arthritic horses. The wind tugged at your face, your hands, the cold went for your feet, your thighs, your shoulders, and you took on whatever armor you could—sweaters upon vests, jackets upon sweaters and vests, great coats upon jackets, furs and scarves and hats and mittens and gloves, leggings, boots, galoshes, and when nothing else served to keep you warm, you beat your hands against your chest and stomped your feet on the snow.

  For Katya and me there was nonetheless joy and laughter. We would burst in out of the cold, tingling and red-faced, frosty-eyed, stiff, with hearty, uproarious laughter bubbling up from deep inside, as if two people who could endure all this could endure anything When you went inside, the heat struck you like a blow. The heat, the moisture, the smell. There was no ventilation anywhere, the doors were doubled and tripled against the cold and the windows taped shut. Even the Grand Hotel smelled of kerosene, stale cooking and bodies too long lacking warm water for a bath. The hotel’s community toilets, little better than indoor latrines, sent their odors out past the potted palms in the lobby, where two enormous stuffed bears with trays on their uplifted paws invited you into the dining room. I remember cold beer and hot mushrooms at a café on Smolensky Street, a pitcher of warm vodka at Pegasus’ Stable, with grated lemon peel floating on top like the pollen of sunflowers.

  If I close my eyes, I can almost recover my memory. I can summon up tones of her face, the light in her eyes, and the sounds of her laughter. But never herself. She has gone, lost in my memory, along with the rest of me.

  For a time she left me her Russian speech. By the end of that year we spent together, I still couldn’t read with ease, but I could speak Russian fluently, even if sometimes I sounded like a peasant from a farm near the border of Poland in Byelorussia. And now, after all these years, even the speech she put on my tongue has lost its way for lack of exercise.

  v

  That was the winter that Lenin died. He’d had a stroke the previous spring, but by summer everybody thought he had fully recovered. He spoke at one of the party congresses, building support for his new economic policy, and appeared several times on the balcony of the Kremlin, demonstrating to the multitudes that he still had the revolution completely under control.

  The crowds were enraptured by him. I could never understand why. He was not a very prepossessing man, short, wiry, with an almost academic manner, and he made his mark on history not through the electricity of his personality but through the patience of his fury, the intensity of his commitment, and the single-mindedness of his ferocity.

  All summer long and into the fall, I heard rumors of power struggles in the upper echelons of the party—Zinoviev against Bukharin, Bukharin and Kamenev against Stalin, and Trotsky against them all. I probably haven’t got that sequence right. I didn’t care then, and I certainly don’t care now. But Manny diligently cultivated his connections with the great and powerful in the capital, not only the bureaucrats and party members, but newspaper people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent, and financiers like Averill Harriman and Harry Sinclair. It seemed to me in those days that Manny knew everything and everybody, and time and again events would confirm what he had already told me was happening.

  All during those final months of his life, Lenin continued to lend his support to Manny and the Faust enterprises, to Manny really, or so I thought then, and, as I later came to think, to Pop. He wrote a letter or two, a handful of memos, and, years after Lenin’s death, Manny combed the Lenin archives and found a dozen or more documents asking this bureaucrat or that party member to ease the way for our projects, reiterating how important what we were doing was to the long-term goals of the revolution and to the security of the Russian people. He called Manny Comrade Faust, which I thought was odd because you used Comrade to party members, and Manny had never had any intention of joining the party.

  The Faust enterprises were flourishing. We had been guaranteed a minimum of $2.5 million in business a year, and we had exceeded that in the first six months. Manny and I divided the work more or less evenly. Manny handled the sales and marketing, setting up satellite operations in London and Paris, while I made sure the Moscow office ran like clockwork, or as close to it as possible in a country that had lost all sense of time, or perhaps had never had one. I made sure we made our deliveries as promised, that we collected what the government owed us, whether in goods or in currency, and that the proceeds made their way out of the country and into the Faust accounts scattered around the world.

  However much Manny might sympathize with the socialist cause, he could not fund it endlessly out of the Faust family resources, and so I had to find ways to circumvent the currency restrictions that prevented us from getting any money out of the country. I arranged for the sale of various bartered goods Manny managed to develop in payment—furs and caviar, platinum and asbestos, and increasingly, as time went on, oil. Manny used to claim we realized as much or more than we bargained for on our barter business, and though we often didn’t do badly we didn’t do quite as well as all that.

  I never did get the half of the business Manny had promised me in New York, not then and not later. I lived out of the cash flow of the business, drawing as much as I wanted for my needs, but I never got any proprietary interest in any of the businesses we undertook, Manny saw to that, and whenever I would raise the issue, he would tell me, “Take whatever you need. Give yourself a raise.” And change the subject.

  I have never been so busy as I was in those days. Katya absorbed so much of my life I can’t believe I had time for anything else. But I did, though my body ached and flushed, burned and throbbed with the thought of her even as I was arranging a letter of credit with a Finnish bank or holding a consultation with a client. My body, my flesh remembered, dreamed, anticipated, readied itself. I think now I was as much in love with my intoxication with her as I was with Katya herself.

  Manny’s infatuation with Yelena had also reached fever pitch, and though he didn’t move in with her, he might as well have. She was so popular in the Moscow cafés she got all sorts of special privileges from the government and probably gave as many as she got, but though Manny might claim to have lost his heart to her, that didn’t keep him from being obsessed with Faust American as well. And he had reason.

  I saw Lenin speak to a group of bureaucrats the other day, he would say, and I don’t like the way he looks, so thin and drawn, and he seems to have trouble keeping his thoughts in tow. It worries me. If anything happens to him, we’d be in the soup. I don’t mean Russia. Nothing can turn back what’s happened here. I mean for us. They’re a group of wild animals, those people he’s got around him, and if they begin to squabble over who’s going to take over when he’s gone, we could both get it in the neck.

  Manny developed as many contacts as he could, played as many sides of as many streets as he could find, went to government functions ever
y evening, to official meetings. He threw parties and receptions, developed what seemed to me an extraordinary capacity for vodka, made friends and influenced people everywhere in the city, and he generally expected me to be with him, there at his side, with the solution to any problem that might arise. How can we finance the delivery of a shipment of steel to Sverdlovsk, some wheat combines to Riga, how can we plough around the embargo on medical supplies? I was there, and I prided myself on being able to find a solution, if not then, later. I sat through those interminable luncheons and dinners in which toast followed toast and vodka after vodka was tossed into the smarting throat. Hardly anyone ever was able to leave without staggering. I never could, and I could scarcely keep myself from running off and diving into bed with Kasha, but when I did, all too often I quickly passed out.

  When Lenin died, it was as if Russia itself had died. I have never witnessed anything comparable—not the death of John Kennedy certainly and not even the death of Franklin Roosevelt. It was as if the heart of the people stopped, the breath stilled, the head reeled, as if an almost physical collapse had beset the country. Russia had been through a decade of war and famine, governmental and economic collapse, revolution and civil war. And what would come now? The revolution was only seven years old, and nobody had any idea of what might happen to the country when its leader, the implacable dictator of the proletariat, died. It was a disaster, a national catastrophe, and the country waited to see how great a one it was.

  The government concocted a state funeral the like of which Moscow had not seen since the death of—who?—I don’t know, Ivan the Terrible maybe. It would be a Russian funeral, an imperial Russian funeral, a barbaric outburst of that emotionalism, excess, and opulence which possesses the Russian soul: the imprecations of churchmen and politicians, the pomp and ceremony, choirs, incense, the lamentations of the people.