by James Cook
My mother, on the other hand, was a rather large, amply-built woman who would never have seemed stylish anywhere in the world except Moscow. There her American clothes had a distinctly exotic flair—colored prints in summer, tailored coats in winter. For Svetlana Churnuchin, Mama Eva must have exhibited all the glamour, corruption, and decadence of the capitalist world. For Mama Eva, Svetlana Churnuchin provided access to all those womanly concerns she had ignored most of her life. She began worrying about her sons and their wives, spent time overseeing the keeping of the house, planning receptions, and the happiness and comfort of her family.
Pop and the General hit it off from the start. They were both in their early fifties, still virile and vigorous. They may not have settled next to the parlor samovar as their wives did, but they got drunk together, smashed innumerable vodka glasses into the fireplace, sat in the cafés talking until midnight, went to the soccer and hockey games, and frequented the casino on the Tverskaya and other places of masculine entertainment that continued to flourish underground even in the time of the Bolsheviks.
The Churnuchins attended the receptions Faust American threw at Red House, and we went to the parties they gave at their mansion, on Petrovsky Pereulok. When our spirits began to sag in the tail-end of the Russian winter, the result of too many months in the dark, as Manny used to maintain, and too little fresh fruit and vegetables, we would all take off together for weekends in the Crimea or in Georgia, including Manny, if he happened to be in town, with Yelena or some other lady of his choice.
But these were public occasions. Privately Pop and Mama Eva drifted further and further apart. Whatever he did for Faust American, Pop did out of an office he set up in Red House. He hired himself a secretary to take care of his needs, an abundant and oppressively competent woman named Olga Platunov. Soon afterward, Olga claimed she had been evicted from her lodgings, and out of compassion Pop installed her in a room down the hall in our wing of the house. I would run into him sometimes in the hall in the middle of the night, and he would complain that he was restless and couldn’t sleep. But otherwise he scarcely bothered to pretend about his secretary. Mama Eva didn’t like it. She could not have failed to know of Pop’s affairs in the past, but he had never before settled his mistress in her house.
Now Mama Eva began sitting in her bedroom most of the day, reading or writing, sipping vodka from a tall glass. She didn’t know where Pop had gone and didn’t care. They led different lives and I suppose because I could not bear the notion of their ruttish passion with each other I decided that her problems resulted from her inactivity. In Moscow, women’s rights were a dead issue, there were no pickets to organize or marches to lead. Still, sometimes in the night I would hear their voices echoing angrily down the hall. Other times, to judge from the sounds coming from their bedroom, they nonetheless continued to be sexually involved with each other, bound by a compulsion that nothing could break.
We led parallel lives, each of us, existing in the same plane and continuum, but rarely touching, too self-absorbed to ever really approach one another. We were like fixed planets in some vast solar constellation, doomed to track one another but never to touch.
For Manny and me, the momentum was set by the aspirin venture, a natural extension of the Faust pharmaceutical business. Back in New York, we had distributed aspirin in bulk to pharmacists for packaging into philters for sale to the public. In Russia we were one of the principal importers of aspirin from Germany. There was a time when we had more furs and caviar than we knew what to do with and so we had worked out a deal with Bayer to swap them for aspirin. I had handled some of the negotiations myself. We already knew something about the business and the people who ran it at Farbenfabriken Bayer, so we had little trouble persuading a half dozen high-minded Bayer employees to help us set up a new manufacturing venture in the workers’ paradise.
Aspirin is an intriguing product. It is named after spirea, a flowering shrub that contains large quantities of acetalsalycilate, or ASA, which is what aspirin consists of. I have always loved knowing such useless information. Things are much more meaningful if you know why they are as they are.
Manny had conceived the whole operation in a flash. We would set up our own manufacturing facilities, produce aspirin for the local market, and sell it through the same government channels we had been using to distribute the Bayer aspirin we got from our barter arrangement. Because we would have a government monopoly, we ought to be able to charge ten or twelve times the cost of ingredients and make a great deal of money—enough to pay the government a handsome royalty, ourselves a handsomer profit, and have enough left over for Pop to support some of the causes that absorbed his attention both in Russia and in the United States. To insure the product’s ideological acceptability, Manny emblazoned the product with a proletarian clenched fist and workman’s mallet that back in the U.S. would have meant baking soda.
He managed to turn the manufacture of aspirin into both a lucrative business and an ambitious utopian experiment. At its headquarters in the Ruhr, Bayer had built a town for its workers that provided everything the downtrodden could want—housing, public services, amusement parks, formal gardens, sports facilities, clubs, libraries. Manny was determined to duplicate Bayer’s achievement on the outskirts of Moscow. In Germany, the town was considered an outrageous bribe Bayer offered its workers to reconcile them to their lot. In Russian it would seem a model socialist community.
As usual Manny left it to me to figure out how to carry out his plan, how to set up an aspirin monopoly when no one knew anything about the business. I found an old soap factory in the suburbs of Moscow, at Krasnaya Presneye, and when I discovered that the core of the aspirin manufacturing process was a vessel made of a precious metal like gold, silver, or platinum, I arranged to kill two birds with one stone by using platinum acquired at cost from our own mine. I got tableting machines from Germany, packaging machines from Sweden, and hired the work force, as many as 1,500 at one time, and installed the piecework principles that had made our platinum mine inordinately cost-effective.
Inside of a year we had our plant up and running. Faust’s aspirin was becoming a household word, and we made so much money for ourselves and the government that we paid off the cost of the plant within eighteen months. The model community took a little longer, but Manny found ways of making the government fork over most of the money for that.
Though Manny and Pop conferred on every decision, whatever vision filled my father’s mind in those days wasn’t the Faust enterprises. There was a brooding and pervasive darkness about my father. I think that he had begun to take seriously that American Lenin label they applied to him before he went to Sing Sing. Like Lenin, he had spent his time in jail and now had gone into exile—not to Zurich as Lenin had, but to Moscow. Every time there was a May Day demonstration in New York, a strike in Passaic, Pittsburgh, or Provo, Utah, he would wait for word that the revolution had broken out and it was time to time board the train for the mainland and return to take charge of the movement he was destined to head. In those days, everybody on the left believed that revolution was imminent everywhere in the world. Though the forces of revolution were turned back in Germany, France, Italy, Hungary and elsewhere, Moscow continued to believe.
My father maintained a serene and Olympian stance toward the disputes that back in the U.S. split the communists off from the socialists and now splintered the communists themselves into a handful of warring factions that divided, combined, and recombined to reflect not the political realities of American conditions but the changing political fantasies of the Soviet Union and the Communist International. I think now that, by keeping himself remote and aloof, by unofficially advising the Comintern on American policy, by supplying funds to this cause and that, he was preparing himself for the day when he would be called in to ride the whirlwind of the second American revolution. Am I imagining this? I don’t know, but the truth is I believe it.
That was the winter that Pop got himself a do
g, a Russian wolfhound that he named Cerberus. He was a wild and terrifying beast, large and lithe and murderous. He came in varying shades of gray, with long limbs and slashing teeth that were frightening to behold. When he jumped up to place his paws on my father’s shoulders, he was taller than Pop himself. He loved only my father. Pop fed the dog himself took him on long winter walks through the driving wind and freezing cold of Moscow’s streets. To my father, Cerberus was docile and devoted, but to others he was menacing, always snarling and fixing his quarry with a glittering eye. Before retiring at night, Pop unleashed him to patrol the inner courtyard against intruders, most of whom turned out to be the homeless and dispossessed who wandered the dark alleys and hidden courts of the workers’ paradise.
iii
Those two or three years after Tania and I were married were some of the happiest in my life. We had moved into three large rooms in the east wing of Red House, a bedroom, sitting room, and living room with a small dining room next door, where we could hold private parties or just hang out with our friends. It was a comfortable life.
Your perception of everything changes when you find yourself living in rooms fourteen-feet high, under glittering chandeliers in front of Venetian mirrors. I loved waking up in the morning in that large ornate bed and seeing Tania sitting before the mirror at the dressing table, her long honey-colored hair spread across her shoulders, skillfully plaiting it into braids and twisting them into a coil at the back of her head. I can remember the feel of her hair in my hands, silken satiny, and how I stood behind her in candlelight at that dressing table, withdrawing the pins from the knot and unplaiting the braids so that her hair fell cascading across her naked shoulders and my naked loins.
Marriage didn’t change the way we were with each other, not right away. She and I still liked being together and in some ways even better than before. Because I wasn’t interested in politics she didn’t have to worry about the correctness of what she did or said. And though we weren’t as intoxicated with each other as it seemed to me Katya and I had been, we were easy and comfortable together. I could imagine spending the rest of my life amid a growing family, in a house of our own. I was a traitor to my class I know and held deep in my heart all those bourgeois values of home and family that everyone in Moscow and leftist New York publicly discounted, Tania included.
Within a year after Tania and I were married, Manny married Yelena. She had acquired an old townhouse in the Arbat theatrical district, a low-slung ramshackle sort of place, and she and Manny settled into a comfortable, companionable coexistence that left me a little bemused. Neither of them had any of my bourgeois commitment to monogamy, so if some exciting new actor, dancer, or entertainer emerged at the Art Theatre or the Bolshoi, neither Manny nor Yelena offered any objection if the other settled in for a time with somebody else.
In those days, it wasn’t only the theatre that enjoyed a miraculous explosion of creative vitality in Moscow. There was a similar explosion in the city’s cabarets, not on a par with Berlin maybe, but similar. Nightclubs sprang up everywhere, and each one had its own cadre of stars—singers, dancers, comedians, entertainers of all sorts, and as a singer of gypsy songs Yelena was the most renowned of them all.
It was Yelena’s Gypsy music that always embodied Russia for me. I had first heard it in the barracks at the mine in Platinumgrad, and it never ceased to arouse me ever after. I remember the first time I saw Yelena. Manny had taken me out to dinner, and we sat at the edge of the stage. Suddenly this exotic music began to ring out of the dark, strumming, wildly joyful, and the curtains opened. There in the spotlight, sitting on a half bench, half cushion, was this woman with a cascading sweep of auburn hair, a low-cut peasant blouse, and long beautiful legs that broke from the uncertain confinement of her billowing skirts. She cradled a balalaika in her lap and tossed her head back as she began to sing.
I had heard some of the songs before, though never performed with such fire, and I had never heard the words—some of them were not even Russian—but I didn’t need to know them, the music spoke for itself. I was more stirred by that music than any other. With its jangling chords and pulsating rhythms, it seemed to me barbaric.
I never did know where Yelena came by her knowledge of Gypsy music. She would claim she had learned the balalaika and the songs from the servants on her father’s estate, and maybe she had. But although there were gypsies all over Russia, they were a strange and alien people. They kept to themselves, and by and large didn’t function as servants.
I was thrilled by Yelena from the very beginning. But she always made me uneasy. I don’t mean that she ever made any advances, but I couldn’t have helped responding if she had. I was certain if I ever accepted such an invitation she would devour me.
Yelena claimed to be descended from Russian nobility. but half the women in Russia claimed that. If the nobility had as many descendants as such claims suggested, there wouldn’t have been enough people to mount the revolution. Indeed, in Paris and later on in New York, I hardly ever met a woman who had not been a lady-in-waiting at the tsar’s court or some nobleman’s mistress. It was the women who made such claims of noble connections, almost never the men. Except for the gigolos, the professional escorts, the men were content to be what they were.
In many ways Yelena was the perfect woman for Manny—though I wouldn’t have predicted he would marry her. The Follies girls he used to squire around New York were too trivial for him, physically as well as intellectually. Yelena was alluring, sophisticated, and wicked, voluptuous, earthy, and depraved. Manny turned his charms upon her and she succumbed, or perhaps he succumbed, because Yelena was every bit as aggressive as he was.
In a way, Yelena and Tania were two of a kind, sisters under the skin, two extremely strong, sexually manipulative women. It has always interested me that Manny and I had chosen to marry two women so different and yet so alike. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Yelena and Tania didn’t like each other, but they had taken each other’s measure and were wary.
So, though we saw each other, we were never exactly close. When we went to the Crimea together, Manny and Yelena went their separate ways, leaving us to ourselves. Yelena drew Manny into that landscape of glamour and celebrity which he hungered after all of his life. She put him in touch with that world of theatre and make-believe which had always enchanted him far more than it did me, even though I had wanted to be an actor. Yelana provided the stage, and, actorlike, Manny proceeded to invent himself.
By the time they married, Tatiana was pregnant and under the watchful eye of her mother and Mama Eva. Unlike many women, she had never focused her life on the inevitability of motherhood. She agreed to be my wife and to have my children—our children, that is—but she had so little enthusiasm over the prospect that I couldn’t be sure that if she got pregnant she wouldn’t decide to abort the child whether I liked it or not. Instead, she greeted her pregnancy with considerable curiosity and even anticipation. She refused to be a victim of her biology. In having a child, she would be doing her duty to me, the party and the Soviet people. I decided I didn’t care what her motives were so long as she achieved the desired result.
By then Yelena was pregnant herself. But where for Tania having a child was a matter of civic if not wifely duty, for Yelena it was a never-ending irritation and annoyance. She complained because it inhibited her social and love life, and she complained even more that it was ruining her career. Who wanted to come hear someone caterwauling about love and longing when she looked like a besotted cow? About as many as ever, as it turned out. But Yelena would hear none of it. She saw only dwindling audiences and a mounting constriction on her ability to control her breath when she sang. “It’s the end of my life,” she would wail, “and worst of all I’ll probably die in childbirth.”
Yelena survived somehow, and in the end a son was given unto them. Though Manny always scorned the joys of fatherhood, he nonetheless named the boy after himself—Carl Philip Immanuel Faust—and called him, with
just a hint of fatherly pride, Little Manny in those rare moments when you could persuade him to say anything at all.
In acquiring Red House, Manny and Pop had only partly renovated the property. In the back. beyond the 200-year-old oak that spread across the terrace like an umbrella, beyond the swimming pool, the gardens, and the tennis court were the old servants’ quarters, a ramshackle collection of buildings that looked as if they had stood there long before Red House itself was built, since the days of the boyars, even earlier. A number of outsiders lived there, some squatters, dating back from the time of the revolution. The house itself supposedly had 44 rooms—but we couldn’t use that many and a number were completely shut off.
Next to the bedroom Tania and I shared was a large rectangular room, and with Tania’s delivery a few months away, we decided to cut a door through the wall and use the room as a nursery. It was a bright sunny place, with high ceilings and tall windows, and it had apparently once been a children’s playroom. Around the room was a frieze ten or twelve inches in height made up of children’s faces. As you began studying it, you realized that the children were all the same, two girls and one boy, perhaps two years apart in age. The first faces in the frieze were painted when the children were very young, the next a few years later, and then moved on around the room as they got older. The frieze was never completed, and the series broke off in the middle of one wall. Tania decided that they should be painted over, along with the rest of the room.
So we cut a new doorway into the wall and installed a large double door. One night not long after, we were awakened by the sounds of someone sobbing. There was a sliver of light under the new door and when I pulled it open, I found an old woman standing in front of one wall, her back to me, a shawl around her shoulders and a candle in her hand. She was so startled, she dropped the candle plunging the room into darkness.
