by James Cook
Lenin had died at his country place in Nizhni Novgorod—Gorki they call it these days—thirty miles away from the city, and they brought his body back to the capital in a funeral train, the people lining the trackside, weeping, rending their clothes, groaning, the way I guess they brought Abraham Lincoln back to Illinois after his assassination. The coffin was brought to a station five miles from the city center, but though the plan was to load the coffin onto an artillery gun carriage, instead his closest colleagues in the Politburo took the coffin on their shoulders and carried it in relays through the streets to Red Square.
They disemboweled him, dissolved formaldehyde in his veins, and put him on display in the great columned hall of Trade Union House on the edge of Red Square. They draped the entire front of the building in black, searchlights proclaimed the catastrophe to the lowering heavens, and the crowds came, hundreds of thousands. They lined up as they had for a thousands years at the death of a tsar, peasants and bureaucrats, Mongols, Kazaks Turkics, Chinese, Bashkies, Jews, stretching and curving, snaking around the square, all those exotic nationalities the Russian empire and later the Soviet Union itself absorbed into its borders, if not its soul.
Kasha and I spent six hours in the February wind, our faces reddening, our fingers ready to snap off, our feet turning to wood on those frozen stones of the square, hearing the dirges across the square in the cathedral, listening to the winds whip across the dead universe. There were huge bonfires every hundred yards along the route, the flames roaring in the wind, the smoke billowing, and then finally we made our way up the wooden steps and inside; there he lay, on his bier, clad in black, his reddish beard carefully trimmed, his eyes closed, as if they feared to behold the newly created world he had left behind him.
For Katya this was a milestone in history, and as a Russian she was determined to be a part of it, as if this man whom she now greeted with such reverence and awe had not launched the forces that destroyed everything she valued, killed her mother and father, burned their home, and left herself and her sister with nothing but their wits to protect them.
I had always been indifferent to Lenin, as I had been to most other politicians—to Wilson and Lloyd George and in those days to Calvin Coolidge—but I was awed, overwhelmed, looking at that figure surrounded in the glow of a spotlight with soldiers with fixed bayonets standing at each corner of the bier. We left and went out into the gray dreary cold making our way back to the earthly delights of our room.
Meanwhile, the American Lenin was headed for Moscow—Jack Faust, cofounder of the American communist party, our father, and his consort, his mistress, his wife, Mama Eva. He was planning to leave New York in March and arrive in Moscow by spring. I heard this at second hand, as I heard everything else dealing with Pop and with Mama Eva. As the older brother and nominal head of Faust Enterprises, Manny heard from Pop fairly frequently, talked with him on the phone, received all the letters and telegrams. I don’t know that he ever asked about me. I took down Manny’s replies, in shorthand, transcribed them, and promptly sent them off to New York.
Pop had been paroled in October after serving two and a half years of his fifteen-year sentence. For good behavior, I suppose, or maybe because he’d set up some sort of education program for the inmates, taught them to read and write and, no doubt, to recognize the iniquities and inequalities of the class structure. They were not merely perpetrators of the crimes of which they had been convicted, they were themselves the victims of a class structure that doomed them to crime and prevented them from realizing themselves, their human potential, their dignity as human beings. To hear Manny tell it, Pop had wound up as Sing Sing’s own Jane Addams or Jacob Riis.
With the news of his arrival, everything began to change for us. The government suddenly found room for Manny and me in Government House, the guest house for visiting dignitaries, and in December, a month before Lenin died, as Moscow prepared to celebrate Christmas (whether the government approved or not), we moved out of the flea-bitten Excelsior Hotel forever.
Manny didn’t give me much warning. Friday afternoon he came back to the office after some luncheon or other, plunked himself down on the other side of my desk, and said briskly, “We’re moving on Monday to Government House.”
“It’s high time,” I said.
But Manny wasn’t at all relaxed. He put one bony ankle on the opposite knee and begin jiggling his foot as if that wasn’t the end to it.
“We’ll have everything ready, a few suitcases, a box of books.”
I left it at that, so he said it, “Katya can’t come, of course.”
I just looked at him a minute or two.
“Of course she can come.”
“You don’t have any choice about it.”
“Who says? You? The ministry of foreign affairs?”
Manny just shrugged.
“If Katya doesn’t come, than I don’t come.”
“So I guess you won’t come,” he replied.
“That settles it then,” I said. And after a moment: “Manny, be reasonable.”
“You can’t bring a person like her into Government House. I’m not even sure they’ll let her stay here after we leave. They may well throw her out in the street.”
“Then they can throw me out.”
Manny’s foot began jiggling again.
“You’ve got to understand, Ekaterina Ivanovna isn’t just somebody I’m shacking up with. I’ve fallen in love with her.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Manny said.
Should I tell him I was thinking of marrying her, having kids, starting a family? I decided that wouldn’t help.
Manny made one of those big brotherly faces of his. “Well, you have no choice about it, you’ll do as I say.”
“In a pig’s eye.”
“Wherever,” he said
“And what about Yelena? Don’t tell me you’re making other arrangements for her.”
“That’s different. They’re not watching her. And we’re not living together.”
“Who’s not watching.”
“The secret police, the Cheka. They’ve had their eye on Katya ever since she moved in with you. Where do you think you are—in Westchester County? They think she’s a counterrevolutionary whore, she sympathizes with the whites, she’s a deviationist, she’s with anybody who happens to be out of favor at the moment.”
“She hasn’t got a political thought in her head.”
“Her father was a landowner, that’s enough.”
“I don’t care what he was.”
“But they do.”
“If Katya isn’t acceptable, then maybe I’m not acceptable either.”
“That’s the point,” Manny said. “That’s why you can’t bring her with you. We’ve got the business to think of.”
“Well, I’m tired of this godforsaken country. I’ll leave. I’ll get out of the country and take Katya with me.”
“They might not let you do that.” Manny sighed. He stopped jiggling his foot and put both feet on the floor. And I knew I had won.
“I’ll see what I can do, but you’ll be sorry. Better now than later. Don’t you see that you’re putting her in danger? If it hadn’t been for you, they would never have paid any attention to her.”
“I’m not worried about that, and I don’t think Katya is either.”
“Well, you should be,” he answered.
But Manny did what he had to. He bribed a half dozen people to overlook Katya’s presence in an establishment designed only for foreign visitors—bureaucrats in the ministry, staff members at Government House. He managed to pull it off.
The move to Government House was an astonishing change, and for Kasha a breathtaking one. She had never known such luxury before—a large clean comfortable room—half bedroom, half sitting room—a large bathroom with hot and cold water. Room service. French wines. She had never seen such furniture, such rugs and draperies, never before been so warm in winter, never eaten such food at any time of the year, never
been served by servants, or treated with such respect.
But I didn’t quite trust the situation, and I began trying to find ways to protect us against I didn’t know what. I started taking more money from the firm, building up a supply of gold rubles that were negotiable anywhere, began talking with people about how you got out of the country if you didn’t want to go through formal emigration channels. People who dealt in black-market currency would deal in black-market anything, and I began gathering information on border checkpoints in Finland and fishing boats in Estonia.
But though we didn’t discuss Katya again, Manny didn’t withdraw in defeat. He set about trying to solve the Katya problem by other means, or that’s the way I eventually saw it. At one of his luncheons, he had run into a woman named Tatiana Ogilvana Churnuchin, and though she had a regular job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he hired her on some informal basis to work for us. She and her contacts, he’d decided, would be useful in advancing the interests of the firm. Since Katya had proved socially incompetent, Tania’s duties included accompanying me to various formal functions I was required to attend.
Tania was a couple of years older than I, a paper-thin aristocrat named for the Tsar’s daughter, Tatiana, but somehow Tania’s father had been able to rise above his origins and establish his proletarian credentials. He was now a general, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Defense. Tania was a party functionary though not actually a party member. She was, I thought, hard and angular where she should have been soft and undulant—as Katya was. Her heavily made-up face looked artificial to me—bright lips, dark lashes, a touch of rouge on the cheeks. It didn’t take any genius to see what Manny was up to, and I disliked her intensely. She had the soul of an emery board, I was fond of saying, and I made it clear even to her that our relationship was strictly business.
Tania and I went to Lenin’s funeral together. The proceedings began before dawn. I was awakened by the sounds of guns shooting, in intervals, in volleys, in sequence, and as the day began breaking there were heavy guns in the distance, cannons, the finale of the 1812 Overture maybe, and then the parades began, the endless column of marching men and women, the choirs, the band music, Red Army units, trade unions, the Petrograd Soviet, the Ekaterinenberg Soviet, communist delegates from Germany and Poland, Bulgaria and Greece, the military equipment rolling endlessly, and party officials on their platforms, raising their gloved hands in salute, the icy wind blowing.
At four in the afternoon, the soldiers raised their rifles and fired three volleys in salute, and the members of the Poliburo carried the body to a wooden mausoleum they’d flung together across the Square by the Kremlin Wall, with his name in huge black letters on the face: L E N I N. All the followers were there, and we sat for hours on the lower levels of the bleachers set up in Red Square, listening to the chorus from the cathedral, the oratory of the politicians.
Already the winds of change were blowing. Trotsky was there, with his white beard blowing in the wind, acting as if he were Lenin’s chosen successor, and so was everyone else who mattered—Kamenev, Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Stalin. In a few years all but one of them would be dead or banished, flattened by Stalin’s steamroller. Even then Trotsky was whispering that Lenin had been murdered, and murdered by Stalin. He was a tart-tongued impulsive man, and Manny detested him. He had stayed at our house once in the Bronx, but when he wrote about his American visit later, he never once mentioned either Pop or the Left Wing of the party. Instead he blathered on about the rich American capitalists who lived in luxury and dreamed proletarian dreams of revolution. I always wondered what he did to Manny to produce such a violent dislike.
When the funeral was over, we went back to the Rolls where the chauffeur, a man named Bunin, was waiting for us. It was cold in the car, even under the lap robe, and the driver began the long trip through the crowded streets back to the Garden Circle, where Tania lived with her mother and father in a big house that had once belonged to some nobleman.
The car didn’t warm up, and we warmed ourselves with a supply of vodka Manny kept in the back, Tania and I huddled together against the cold, and I found myself fooling around, brushing her cheek with my lips, touching her breast with my hand, and suddenly I felt her ripping open the buttons on my pants, grabbing me with her cold bony hands. She began telling me how well endowed she thought I was and how much she liked touching me. I shall call him Lenin, she said, with such ideological certainty that it took me a moment or two to figure out what she was talking about.
She knew I thought I didn’t like her, she said, but the real me did, dear Lenin did, you could tell how men and women really felt about each other, and she was going to make me like her somehow, as much as she liked me herself. Suddenly she buried her head under the blanket; I was too surprised to resist, nor did I really want to. It was different from anything I had ever experienced before. I found myself fighting it, but not for long, and as I came with a warm gush I found myself thinking I maybe did like her a bit more than I thought. Or at least Lenin did.
I suppose we were all pretty straightlaced in those days. But there were compensations. We didn’t have zippers or jockey shorts. We had buttons on our pants and our parts were accessible at the thrust of a hand. Did I think of myself as unfaithful to Katya? Not really. No more unfaithful than if I had eased myself off with my hand.
But I kissed Tania goodnight when the car pulled up at her father’s front door, and then told the driver to take me home, back to Government House, where Katya was waiting for me.
vi
I got back to Government House that night after midnight, drunken and staggering, and roused the night porter to get in. I remember him helping me swing back the large iron doors to the foyer and then standing in the dim light, watching me stumble across the marble lobby and up the curving staircase to my room on the second floor.
Katya was already asleep. She had taken to lighting a candle next to the ikon she kept by the bed, and I tottered across the room in the dim light, barely keeping my balance, throwing off jacket, tie, pants and shirt, in disarray on the floor, and falling onto our bed. She stirred uneasily at the impact, but didn’t wake up, and I stared drunkenly into her lovely face, kissed her slobberingly, flung myself flat on my back and fell dead asleep, half uncovered, even in all that cold.
When I awakened, she had already gone, the candle beside the bed was blown out, and the room was ablaze with sunlight. She had hung my pants and jacket over a chair, draped my drawers over the edge of another, my shirt above them over the back, as if I was sitting there, with the lipstick on the tail of my shirt and a red smear on my drawers dazzling as blood.
Oh, my god.
The tableau was as vivid as any note of outrage she could have left behind.
It was late—after nine in the morning, and Moscow went to work at six, seven, or eight—so I went straight to the office without stopping for breakfast at the shop where she worked. I sat at my desk, pored over the invoices from London and New York, and tried to convert my despair into anger and outrage.
What right did she have to accuse me of anything? What right? I had taken her off the street and given her love and affection, a place to stay and plenty to eat, and she couldn’t possibly think that I owed her anything more than that. What happened with Tania had nothing to do with her. It was a reflex of the flesh, as involuntary as breath or life, and I was appalled by her presumption, her arrogance, her ingratitude. By the time the afternoon rolled around, I had thoroughly convinced myself that she was totally in the wrong, and if anyone was owed any apologies, it was me.
And then when I saw her that evening, standing on the street corner outside the big glass window of the shop, waiting for me to meet her, my heart swung into reverse, and I was ready to confess everything, and beg her forgiveness, ask her to take me in her arms and love me as I never deserved to be loved, and would not be ever again if life had any justice.
But I said none of these things. I took her to dinner at the Elite
, an elegant, still fashionable relic of the old Tsarist days on the Tverskaya, and we sat by candlelight looking at each other, barely speaking. She had no appetite for anything, no delicacy or savory I could persuade the waiter to bring. She had built a wall around herself, and I could not breech it. She didn’t laugh at my jokes, she didn’t talk about what had happened at work, she sat there, her eyes glistening in the light, picking at her food, and she put her napkin down suddenly, and said, “I want to go home.”
“Whatever you say,” I said, and we walked hand in hand through the dimly lighted streets, along the promenade in front of the Kremlin and across the bridge onto Polyanka Street and back to Government House and our room.
She took off her coat, crossed herself in front of the ikon of the virgin, and threw herself onto the bed. I asked, fumbling for an excuse to say anything, “Why do you do that, crossing yourself like that?” and she said, “Because I feel like it,” and I replied, “I thought you didn’t believe in all that anymore,” and she said, “It doesn’t matter whether I believe or not, there are things you do whether or not you believe, because otherwise nothing is right,” and she buried her head in the pillow. I sat beside her on the bed, touching her hair and shoulders, and tried to kiss her. “I’m sorry, it’s not what you think it is.”
“What else could it be?” she said, turning around to face me, propping herself up on her elbows. Lipstick on your shirttail, lipstick on your underwear. How could you?”
“But I swear, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Between us everything means something.”
“It’s something that happened. I didn’t want it to. I swear, it had nothing to do with us.”
“You’re lying to me, Viktor, you promised you’d never lie to me. I may be a peasant, the daughter of peasants, but you can’t think I’m that stupid.”
“Well, all right,” I answered, reversing gears again, swinging between dejection and outrage. “Whatever went on between Tania and me is none of your business.”
