Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  We had seen a lot of the Lyonses over the past couple of years. They had a little girl, so we had that in common, and of course we were all Americans together in Moscow, and that drove even the most incompatible expatriates together.

  Gene had written a feature on Eddie for United Press, the kind of warm and admiring story you’d expect from a kid who grew up in Brooklyn, went to City College, and dreamed of a socialist future. He saw Eddie as a hero of the proletariat, as I did, a fighter for justice and the downtrodden, and I thought the piece was very well done. Gene went out of his way to make clear that Eddie was not a political ideologue, that he was simply a man with a mission—to help other working people. Given the disillusion Gene detailed later in his book on his years in Moscow, I think he was trying to contrast Eddie with the committed communists who were interested only in power.

  The night of Eddie’s party, everyone tried very hard to be funny, exuberant and playful, but it was not a very joyous occasion. I was depressed at the prospect of Eddie’s leaving, Tania had other things on her mind, and the old people, as we thought of them then, Boris and Svetlana, Pop and Mama Eva, sat at opposite ends of the table, beyond conversational reach. This was the first time we had all been together since the government was taking over our aspirin concession, and the first time since the government had announced publicly that Boris Chumuchin would be heading up its new aspirin monopoly.

  Everybody wanted to know what Eddie’s plans were and he didn’t seem to know. “I’m going to rethink the rest of life. I’m getting on a steamer back to the United States in Odessa on Thursday and I’m going to sit on a deck in the sun for a month and watch the seagulls plunge after garbage. I’m nearly forty, I’m getting a little old for the kind of thing I’ve been doing. Maybe I’ll get myself an office job somewhere and write party propaganda.”

  We tried to be very Russian about Eddie’s farewell, with a series of toasts, each more effusive and idiotic than the last, the bottle passing up and down the table, the men drinking vodka or gin, the women wine, the flush rising in our faces as the evening progressed.

  I had a sense of undercurrents everywhere. Yelena had never recovered her usual high spirits after her son was born, and though she was as beautiful as ever, she often seemed distracted, disgruntled, and depressed. That evening she seemed more detached than usual. There was a skittish, birdlike quality about her that made me uneasy.

  Eddie seemed like an uninvited guest at his own party. He drank only sparingly and seemed to be elsewhere. I knew that I was going to miss him a lot. I made a toast to that effect and told him he was the man we aimed to be.

  Toward the end of the evening, Manny stood up, whacked his wine glass with a spoon and waited for us to all quiet down, as if he had an important announcement to make.

  “You’re going to tell us that the government has given us the aspirin concession back,” I said.

  “Nothing like that.”

  “They’ve nominated you as Soviet representative to the League of Nations.”

  “You’re getting warmer. No, my news is even more momentous than that. Yelena and I are going to move into Red House for a while.”

  “We’ve decided to sacrifice ourselves in the interests of the working classes.” Yelena said maunderingly, “to make a small heartfelt but ignoble contribution to the realization of a new and greater socialist reality: my house.”

  I could tell that Pop already knew, but it came as a surprise to Mama Eva and the Churnuchins, and a stunning surprise to me. Was I wrong in thinking that Manny ought at least to have had the decency to tell me?

  “It’s a sacrifice we are all happy to make,” Manny went on. “The government desperately needs the space. What with the shortage of available offices, the finance ministry has decided to requisition Yelena’s townhouse and make it the headquarters for a new agency.”

  “All those small rooms and rickety staircases,” Yelena said, “are just what the bureaucrats cry for. I hope they fall through the floor and break their legs.”

  Yelena’s house was a short walk from the Kremlin, Manny explained, and the government couldn’t afford any longer to let private individuals occupy so much space. Sometime in the next week or two he and Yelena would be moving into Red House.

  “But where are you going to be living?” Tania wanted to know.

  “We’ll move into those three unoccupied rooms in the west wing. They’re small, but we’ll be all right for the time being, and little Manny can share the nursery with your girls.”

  “I’m not sure I like that,” Tania announced. “The nursery is right next to our bedroom, and the twins are quite noisy enough.”

  “So are we,” I said out of some sudden perversity.

  “We’ll work something out,” Pop said, “Don’t you worry about it.’”

  “I’m not sure I’m prepared to rely on your sympathy,” Tania responded.

  I was too distracted that night to pay much attention to what was going on. Yelena and Manny had always had what I thought of as an unconventional relationship. Though they had declared themselves husband and wife not long after we were married, they came and went as they chose. Yelena had her friends and Manny had his, and though Manny lived with her most of the time, he never moved any of his things out of Red House, and slept there often enough that you weren’t surprised to find him coming down to breakfast in the morning.

  But it was Gene Lyons who asked the question lurking in the back of everyone’s mind: “How could they do this to Yelena, one of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished artists?”

  “Because she is not an artist anymore,” Yelena said. “She’s a mother, and as such no longer very distinguished.”

  “Don’t be so maudlin, Yelena,” Tania said. “Motherhood’s just an excuse for lethargy.” She smiled icily and couldn’t care less at the implied insult to Yelena.

  Mama Eva rose to the occasion. “I’m delighted you’re going to be living with us. I never thought it was right, your being so far away, and it’ll be wonderful having you, Manny, and little Manny just down the hall.”

  That ended the discussion, and a moment or two later a waiter brought Tania a message, and she announced that something had come up and she would have to leave. I looked at her for an explanation, but she offered none. She simply said she was sorry, kissed Eddie a warm goodbye and started for the door. She looked wonderfully elegant that night, in a tight-fitting dress that ended well above her knees. I intercepted her and kissed her, but she turned her head away. I said, “Will I see you later?”

  “I expect I’ll be late,” she answered. “Don’t wait up.”

  “I never do anymore.”

  We had gotten over the night I had seen her at the Actors Club with Valentin Nikitin. She had a perfectly reasonable explanation: Nikitin was one of her clients, and they’d told her to see that he had a good time. I saw no point in being jealous, even if there was cause to be.

  Sometime after she had gone, Svetlana managed to take me to one side and say, “Viktor, I’m worried about Tania. What’s happened to the two of you?”

  “Nothing’s happened. Nothing has changed at all.”

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “She’s not happy at the prospect of our having to go back to the United States, but you know who’s responsible for that.”

  “That’s not true, Viktor,” she said. “You’re imagining things. Boris had nothing to do with it. There’s no reason you have to leave. We need foreign skills to help us build a new society and you’re a very capable young man.”

  “Maybe so,” I said. “But you’re right, something has changed. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just that Tania is very busy and we don’t see very much of each other.”

  “Take a vacation, dear boy. Go to the Caucasus with her. Don’t leave her to herself so much. I’m worried about her. Go away together; you don’t see enough of each other.”

  We still cared about each other and what was going on in our separate li
ves. We were civil to each other, and we still enjoyed being together—on public occasions anyway. But Svetlana was right. It wasn’t enough, and I found myself almost bursting into tears just thinking about it.

  We ended the evening singing the International over the remains of our sumptuous banquet. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation. Arise, ye wretched of the earth. Let each stand in its place. The International Party shall be the human race.”

  I had never heard the ending of the song quite like that before, with the rest of the world condemned to barbarity and eternal damnation.

  From the moment Eddie told us he was going to go home by way of Odessa I knew I was going to make the trip with him and see that he got his things transferred and aboard ship. I don’t know what I expected from that trip, maybe that we would somehow seal our brotherhood, establish the bonds that would sustain us into the future, but none of that happened. It was a seven-hour trip, and we rode that crowded train through the flat endless black-dirt fields of the Ukraine hardly speaking to each other the whole time.

  I saw him to the hotel, went with him to the passport people, finally stood at the gangplank of that Greek freighter and watched him climb aboard, wave, and disappear from sight.

  As long as I was in Odessa, I decided to try to find Mama Eva’s in-laws—the family of her first husband, Vladimir Promyslov Ostrovsky. Mama Eva had been excited at the prospect of our going. She had vivid recollections of the city from when she was a child and they had haunted her ever after. It was the Paris of the Ukraine, she kept saying, which meant only that it was a depressingly provincial city with pretensions of cosmopolitanism.

  I could not find Mama Eva’s first husband’s family anywhere but did find a tailor shop not far from the waterfront run by somebody named Abraham Promyslov, but he couldn’t remember that anybody in the family had ever gone to the United States, never mind married the prettiest girl in the world and carried her off with him. And why should he or anyone else remember Mama Eva and her lover? They had become Americans, and had cut themselves off from the past.

  And so, Eddie and the other delegates headed home. But more than a month later, Ben Gitlow, Jay Lovestone, and Bert Wolfe, the three nominal heads of the American party, were still in Moscow. They had been unable to get their passports and they came again to Pop asking for his help. Pop promised to do what he could. He was, after all, the most eminent American communist in Moscow, as deserving of a burial spot in the Kremlin wall as John Reed. He didn’t get one, though, and by the time he died, nearly twenty years later, he probably didn’t want one. He wound up in a tree-shaded cemetery in New Rochelle.

  Pop called some people he knew and a few days later the passports were finally forthcoming. However, that wasn’t the end of the problem. The three men had no money. The government that had so readily paid their passage over, turned niggardly in paying their passage back, and offered them third-class carriage to Bremerhaven and steerage to the U.S. I felt sorry for them. They had lost everything, not only their cause, but the organization that they had lived off from the time they were out of college a decade before. Now they had nothing—no jobs, no money, no skills that would be worth much in conventional society.

  Pop gave them enough money to get home in a style worthy of their station. It wasn’t a gift, he explained, it was his dues, and it was up to them as heads of the party how they chose to dispose off it.

  When they got back to New York, the new head of the party, Bill Foster, demanded they turn over Pop’s $5,000 dues and threatened to take them to court to collect it. I never knew what came of that, but I assume Foster was mainly interested in harassing them out of the party.

  Manny couldn’t have cared less about Gitlow and company. All he had on his mind in those days was finding some way of recovering our investment in the aspirin business, and he found it. In no time at all he got us into what would be the family business for the next fifty years: the art business. A summer or two before, an Armenian art dealer Manny had known in New York—a Youssuf Tufenkian—looked us up when he was on a trip to Moscow, and we had dinner together one evening. Manny showed off Red House, and Tuffy took one look at all the stuff Pop had collected over the years—the paintings, the objects d’art, the ikons, the statuary—and made some offhand comment that we ought to go into business together.

  What I had always admired about Manny was his ability to see things I couldn’t see and make a connection between them. I could do things far more efficiently than he could, but Manny could not only put two and two together and make four—he could put two and two together and, as the slogan of the Five Year Plan used to have it, make it add up to five.

  The morning after Tania’s birthday party Manny and I were having breakfast together at Red House and Manny began admiring the emeralds I had bought for Tania.

  I was feeling pleased with myself at what a bargain I’d got and told him there was case after case of similar jewelry everywhere, not to mention ikons and objects d’art that you could pick up for virtually nothing.

  Manny began badgering me for a kopek and ruble accounting of just how much things cost, and the next thing I knew, he had begun to invent our new enterprise. We’d go into business with Tufenkian selling priceless Russian art objects, the heritage of the church, the treasures of the tsars.

  “They’re crazy about everything Russian back in the States these days.” Manny said. “The politicians may be enraptured by Russia’s social experiments, but the people with money are caught up in the romance of the tsars.”

  “But what do we know about art?” I asked

  “What does anyone know? It’s a commodity like anything else, and all you have to do is market it right. What did we know about platinum? Or the aspirin business? We’ll learn.”

  I thought to myself, Why not?

  “The problem,” Manny said, “is finding some way of getting the stuff out of the country without having to pay confiscatory taxes on exporting the patrimony of the Russian people. You have to understand, Victor, they don’t mind giving away the store, but they’ll want us to do it so that nobody will know what they’ve been doing. They’re businessmen like everybody else. Offer them a good deal and they’ll go for it.”

  Manny didn’t say so, but it was clear that our position had changed. In the old days we wouldn’t have had to deal. We would have demanded some sort of compensation and they’d have given it to us. But no more. We no longer had the power and influence that we once had. Pop had been a friend of Lenin, and Manny a confidant of all his successors, but Stalin was a different matter. Every time Manny attempted to cement his friendship with Stalin, he was coldly rejected. Stalin would not shake his hand, or recognize his face when he passed by, or even come near him if he could help it. Manny couldn’t even save Yelena’s house, and he must have attempted to do that.

  And it wasn’t just Manny. Pop’s intercession on behalf of Gitlow and his crew could not have helped any. As far as I know that was the last time Pop had the clout to do anything.

  I wasn’t like a lot of people in Moscow who refused to see all the things that were going on in front of their faces. I saw all right, I just didn’t want to think about it and what lay ahead.

  But I did manage to solve our financial problem. At the next meeting with the trustees of the aspirin monopoly, I began by saying that if the government could see its way to meeting certain conditions, we might be able to work out a deal. In the best interests of the Soviet government and people, we would abandon all our claims for compensation if the government would grant us one thing: the privilege of taking with us, when we left, all the household property we had accumulated over the years we spent in the Soviet Union.

  Let us retain title to all our household property in Red House as compensation for the loss of our aspirin investment and we’ll call it quits.

  They knew a reasonable settlement when they saw one and nobody had any use for tsarist artifacts anymore, and so it was arranged. In New York these artifacts would comman
d premium prices. The arrangement covered not only all the stuff that Pop and Mama Eva had collected over nearly a decade, but all the things that Yelena had brought with her when she moved into Red House. But I shouldn’t have expected Manny to leave it at that. He began talking with people in the government, pointing out how short of foreign exchange the government was, how desperately they needed it, and how the Fausts could help. We couldn’t go public with such a deal, but considering that were already authorized to bring home all our goods and chattel, who would know what was ours and what was somebody else’s if the government decided it wanted us to market in the U.S. all the tsarist junk they had confiscated over the years?

  They leaped at the bait. They not only agreed to give us 35% of the retail price of anything we sold, but guaranteed a minimum of $1.3 million a year.

  Manny took off for New York, acquired a 50% interest in Tuffy Tufenkian’s gallery, and we were in business. That was the beginning of what would eventually become the Faust Galleries, one of New York’s premier galleries. We were undercover agents for the Soviet government.

  We couldn’t have picked a better time. Economic conditions in the Soviet union were getting steadily worse, nobody had money enough to eat or even time to stand in the lines. The Five Year Plan to industrialize the Russian economy was just getting under way. The government decided to starve the civilian economy in the interest of steel mills in the Urals and oil refineries in the Caucasus. People were saying things were as bad as they’d been just after the revolution, when the whole country was in chaos, maybe worse.

  They no longer wanted their family treasures, they wanted money and wanted it desperately, just to acquire the necessities of daily life. Things began to come out of closets and from under beds, from canisters squirreled away in the garden, or in cubby holes in the attics, and all this stuff wound up in the auction houses. Fans and boas, ikons and candelabra, church vestments and jewelry, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds. The frippery of the very wealthy. Bejeweled desk sets and paper cutters, scissors and inkwells, watering cans, and mechanical birds in precious metals, a tree that at a touch released a singing bird from its top, a sedan chair whose door opened to admit a customer.