Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  We had rubles galore, and we went from auction house to auction house picking up treasures and trash. We wandered into churches and monasteries turning up something everywhere we went—an ikon here, a mitre there, a dinner service, a set of silverware.

  We had until the first of the year to move and I began traveling all over making arrangements for the shipments.

  I saw a lot of Yelena that fall. Manny was away much of the time, and Tania was busy. Yelena had begun drinking heavily, but unlike Mama Eva she didn’t just get sodden and stupefied, she got sloppy, staggering, falling-down drunk. She didn’t want to see her little boy, little Immanuel. She would shove him away from her and send him off to his nurse whenever he came to her for comfort or affection.

  Her whole world seemed to have fallen apart. The government had outlawed gypsy music as degenerate and subversive, and though lesser entertainers could continue to perform, Yelena was too big a draw to attempt to get away with it and too demoralized to put together another style. We would sit together in the conservatory, and she would play her guitar for me and sing all those songs too wild to be heard in public any longer. I would find myself comforting her. Manny couldn’t abide her drinking, and whenever she started in on the booze he kept out of her way.

  She cursed the day she had met him. He had ruined her life. If it wasn’t for him she would still be a headliner.

  “I should never have married into this family. You made me a political performer, as I would never have been otherwise.”

  We were drawn to each other, and I know if I had made the slightest move to reach out to her—a touch, a glance—we would have become lovers. But I never made such a move. I was too loyal to Manny or Tania, or too fond of Yelena, or perhaps too intimidated, to do something that would bring disaster on us all. All these years later, I am not sure I was wrong, though I don’t think Yelena ever forgave me for failing to do so.

  She didn’t want to go to the United States with Manny. She didn’t know the language, and she wasn’t sure that in a land of crooners and blues singers anybody would want to listen to gypsy music. She had a rich, deep voice, throaty and husky, quite different from the soprano thrushes that dominated New York in those days, people like Kitty Carlisle, Helen Morgan, or Gertrude Lawrence. I told her with a voice like hers it didn’t matter what language or style she sang in.

  She began to have fantasies about Manny, and suspected he was seeing somebody else.

  Then one morning I came across Manny standing in the kitchen visibly shaken. He had been awakened in the middle of the night by Yelena. She had been sitting by his bed in the dark, a lighted cigarette in her hand. And had threatened to put his eyes out.

  “I think you should take her to a doctor,” I said.

  “I am a doctor, I know what to do in these circumstances.”

  What was happening to Manny and Yelena made me feel a lot better about Tania. We had our problems, but we were still rational human beings; we still cared for each other.

  I took comfort in this for a while, but the feeling didn’t last long. One day in September I had been planning to catch an afternoon train for Leningrad and had brought my luggage with me to the office. Then I discovered suddenly that I had forgotten my tickets. I hired a cab, hurried back home, and rushed up those marble stairs and down the shadowy hall. I threw open the door to our room, and there on the bed were the two of them, naked, Tania and her lover, she sitting astride him, with her head thrown back. The instant I came in she fell forward. Between his outspread legs, and the golden opening of her rear I could see his balls, dancing, dangling like brownish bulbs of garlic on a string.

  iii

  I missed my train.

  I think I must have cried out when I saw them.

  Tania rose from her lover and—naked, pink and lovely—crossed the room like a breaking dawn and got a silk robe from the chair in front of her dressing table. I was breathless with desire.

  The man covered himself with a sheet and looked at me in a daze. It was the same man I has seen Tania with at the Actor’s Club, Valentin Nikitin, writer, poet, swordsman. All he had on was a pair of round steel-rimmed glasses that had slipped down on his nose. Tania lit a cigarette and sat down at her dressing table, while I stood, pressed back against the closed door and stared at the two of them.

  “Get into your clothes, you fool,” Tania said, and Nikitin covered his shrinking privates and began searching for his underwear on the floor beside the bed.

  “Viktor, this is my friend, Valentin Nikitin. He’s a client, one of the main speakers at the poets and playwrights collective.

  “Do you treat all your clients so kindly?” I heard myself saying.

  “I do what the job requires.”

  He was a small man, frail and lightly muscled, with a sexual apparatus to match, and I was appalled to find myself checking that out. He had a crown of curly golden hair, with a thick mat of hair on his back, his chest, his groin.

  I wasn’t prepared for my own response. I have never wasted any time considering the classic Othello quandary. Does the outraged husband have to kill his wife (as Othello did) or her lover (as Harry Thaw did) or both? I was embarrassed for all of us, especially when a moment or so later I heard voices in the children’s room next door and one of the double doors swung open to reveal Katerina and Maria. I heard myself explaining that Mommy and Daddy were busy now, they ought to go back in their room and play. I heard the nurse’s voice reprimanding them, and the door swung shut again. A moment later there was a knock on the door behind me, and I heard Yelena’s voice in the hall asking if everything was all right, she had heard someone cry out.

  I told her that everything was all right.

  “Viktor stumbled and hit his knee on a chair,” Tania said coolly. “He’s all right now.”

  “I was worried,” Yelena said. “I didn’t know what had happened.”

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, without opening the door.

  When I decided Yelena had gone away, I said, “I would have thought you’d have tact enough not to expose the children.”

  “I think it was you that cried out,” Tania responded, “not me.

  “Children?” I heard Nikitin saying. His voice was husky, hoarse, as if his throat had gone suddenly dry.

  I realized that from where he was standing he couldn’t see who had opened the door.

  “The children,” I said. “That’s the nursery on the other side of the wall.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Valentin said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Accept my apologies.” He stood up, his clothes thrown hurriedly over his fragile frame. He was not much over five feet, and I towered over him.

  He was dressed like a peasant, with pants that went into his boot tops and a tunic cinched at his waist, but whatever he once was, you knew he wasn’t a peasant anymore but one of those Bohemians that hang out in Moscow’s cabarets, night clubs, and performance galleries. You could imagine him in some Arbat cafe caterwauling his verse to the strumming accompaniment of a guitar.

  “I think you can go now, Valya,” Tania said.

  “When will I see you,” he began, and fell silent.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Tania answered with a liquid smile.

  The man crossed the room, and offered his hand to me before thinking better of it. I moved to one side and he opened the door and went out.

  Tania sat there in her chair, the silk rode falling back from her legs, the cigarette smoke rising before her face.

  “I thought you were going to Leningrad,” she said.

  “I forgot my tickets.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “My railroad tickets.”

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to embarrass you like this, but this isn’t the first time. It amuses me to see what I can do with people like him.”

  “You’ve fallen in love with him?”

  “Don’t be silly. He’s only a child.”

  “I’m sorry I failed you.”

  �
��You didn’t fail me, Viktor. I never did have any interest in you, or any other man, I thought you knew that. I put up with these things, I endure.”

  “I thought we thought that we loved each other.”

  “We thought what we thought, but that’s over, Viktor. Whatever it was is over. I’m not sure it ever was.”

  “You want a divorce?” I asked.

  “Why would I want a divorce? We have a very convenient and comfortable relationship. Why should I want to destroy it? I tell them I am a married woman, and they leave me alone. Men are very chivalrous.”

  “I think you should get out.”

  “In my own time, Viktor darling, there’s no reason for anything to change. We’re just the same with each other as we always were.”

  “I understand that now,” I replied quietly.

  I was surprised at how unmoved I was. Yet looking at her—god, she was beautiful, with her honey hair and golden skin, her long lovely legs in the drape and sheen of glistening silk. For a moment a tide of rage broke over me, and I thought of crossing the room, throwing her onto the bed and taking her forcibly, beating her into submission or insensibility in a frenzy of anger and outrage and rut.

  How I ever got out of that room, I don’t know, but I did. I was covered with sweat, but otherwise I was calm. I went back to the office where Manny was meeting with some people from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I was proud of how cool I was, how deliberate. I told Manny’s secretary I had missed my train, I would try to make the trip to Leningrad tomorrow, and I told her to ask Manny when he was free if he could have dinner with me that evening. Then I went out and walked for hours along the river. When I got back to the office, Manny had already left.

  I went home to Red House but he wasn’t there either. The girls were sound asleep in their bunks, and our room was dark, looking as desolate as if it had never been lived in. I got my things together, packed my clothes in a valise, and moved them down the hall to a room we maintained for occasional guests. Then I went back to our room to wait.

  Tania never came home. When I awakened it was daylight and I was stiff and aching from sleeping all night in that straight chair by the window.

  When I called Tania at her office that morning, she answered the phone as bright and efficient as ever.

  “This is Viktor. I missed you last night.”

  “I spent the night at my mother’s. I worked late. It seemed easier than bothering you.”

  “I’ve moved my things down the hall to the guest bedroom.”

  “That’s thoughtful of you.”

  “I won’t get in your way.” I said.

  “There’s no reason why we can’t still be friends, we’ve always been friends.”

  “Just one thing. I’d appreciate your not bringing your clients home with you to Red House.”

  “Viktor, I never intended to embarrass you. I would never have done such a thing to you. It was an accident it happened.”

  I hung up.

  Valentin Nikitin. What a ridiculous name. Like something out of a Restoration comedy. Yet, I discovered I wanted to find out everything I could about him. I don’t know what I was trying to do. I wasn’t jealous. How could I possibly be jealous? A pint-sized pretty boy like that, as slim and delicate as a child? I suppose I must have wanted to weigh myself in the balance and find what he had that I lacked, why Tania would give herself to him when she had me.

  He was famous, for one thing. He was one of the three or four glories of postrevolutionary Russian poetry, along with Alexander Blok, that blowhard Mayakovsky, whom I had run into at the Moscow Art Theatre, and Sergei Essenin, Isadora Duncan’s husband.

  If you had set out to invent a postrevolutionary poet, you might well have come up with someone like Nikitin. He had been born in a hut somewhere in Georgia. His father was a peasant, his mother an illiterate field worker, but he had known from the beginning who he was, what his talents were, and what he was going to be. He refused to work in the fields, got himself enrolled in the local school that only the landowners’ children attended, and began writing poetry almost as soon as he could walk. Valentin was ambitious, talented, and beautiful. A young angel with golden curls who enchanted everyone he met. Or took everyone in, depending on your point of view.

  When he was seventeen, he went to Moscow and was taken up by the capital’s artistic and intellectual set. He showed up at parties and receptions and would thrill his audiences with bright, outrageously dirty, Noel Cowardly doggerel. He moved on from there to more serious matters in Moscow’s cabarets and clubs, half singing, half reciting his poems to the accompaniment of a guitar or an accordion. Such a little man, but a giant in performance. With his flamboyant gestures and burning eyes, he would recite his poems in a deep, hoarse, and strangely melodious voice and reduce his audience to tears, catch them by the throat and shake them, and leave them limp and adoring. They were enraptured, they had been in at the birth of a major literary artist.

  If you didn’t know better, you might have thought he was somebody’s pretty boy, ineffectual and epicene, but he was anything but that. He had been married three times, fathering a child with each of his wives, and then abandoning them as indifferently as he abandoned their beds. But his wives never abandoned him, adoring him ever after, considering themselves blessed to have been among his lovers.

  He went out of his way to become the Peck’s Bad Boy of Soviet literature. He drank heavily, even by Russian standards, and he liked to pick fights with people twice his size and make them regret they’d accepted his challenge. What he lacked in heft and power, he made up for in speed, spirit and aggressiveness. If he sometimes looked a little dissolute, that only added to his charm. The party politicians loved him, he mauled and manhandled their wives, and somehow they were flattered by his attention. He lived from hand to mouth, scrounging from the government, from his cabaret audiences, or from the women he got involved with.

  Valentin didn’t give a damn about politics and wrote poems about the peasant experience, nature, and love. Translated from Russian into English, he always sounded like Edgar Guest to me—“it takes a heap of livin’ to make a house a home,” that sort of thing. I never claimed to have any ear for poetry, but he captivated virtually everyone he ever ran into. The more literary types would say, Pushkin thought in verse, Mayakovsky makes love in verse, but Nikitin lives his whole life in verse. I never knew what they meant by that until someone explained they were really saying Nikitin wrote with his prick the way Titian or Renoir painted with his. I don’t know about Titian, but I never thought Nikitin had that much to work with.

  In the end, I decided that it wasn’t Nikitin himself that interested Tania. He had become her chosen instrument, the means whereby she would tell me that everything was over between us.

  We had decided to wind up the Faust family’s affairs by the end of the year, when the aspirin concession finally expired, and Manny began shuttling back and forth between New York and Moscow, making arrangements for where we would live. He still had his house in Greenwich Village, and he found one for me in Chelsea, down the block from the Episcopal Theological Seminary and for Mama Eva and Pop, a place in the Bronx not far from where we used to live.

  Now that I’d lost Tania, the girls seemed more precious to me than ever. I went out of my way to stop in the nursery every night when I came home to play with them. I would take them out to the amusement parks by the river, to the zoo and the botanical garden, and for rides in the country. I would teach them English nursery rhymes. The more I saw of them, the more they meant to me, and the more determined I was that I was going to take them with me when we went back to New York.

  I tried to persuade Tania to get a divorce. In Moscow in those days, getting a divorce was almost as easy as getting married. All you had to do was appear together at the registry office and announce that the marriage was at an end. But the decision had to be mutual, and Tania didn’t want a divorce. She had nothing to gain by it. She preferred to be Mrs. Faust. It ga
ve her a lot more freedom of action in her job and everywhere else than she would have if she were single again. More important perhaps, if we were divorced, I would have guardianship of the girls as the sole head of the family, and they could travel with me on my passport. But so long as our marriage endured, Tania and I and our daughters were bound together.

  I got passports for the twins from the American embassy in Berlin, but in order to take them out of the Soviet Union, I needed visas from the Soviet government and that turned out to be a nightmare. I went from agency to bureaucrat, ricocheting from one end of Moscow to another.

  Before I was through, I must have shaken every strand of the bureaucratic web in the government. I would get encouraging responses but I got nowhere. I should have known that sooner or later Tania would discover what I was up to.

  One afternoon I came home to discover that the children were gone, all their toys and clothing, their nurse and tutor, and so were all of Tania’s things, coats and dresses, jewelry, cosmetics, even her combs and mirrors, leaving not a trace of her behind. Tania left word with the porter that she had gone to her father’s house, a few blocks away, and I began the complicated business of trying to win custody of the children.

  I was still determined to take them back to the United States, but Tania had no intention of letting that happen. She would permit me to visit them in the precincts of her parents’ house, but nothing beyond that, so I began to plot to get them away from her. I even thought of kidnapping them and smuggling them out of Russia somehow, but I couldn’t do that to them, or to Tania, or myself.

  I went to Tania and begged her to let them go.

  “You can’t have them, Viktor, everything, anything else, but not them. You gave them to me and for that I shall always be grateful, but they are mine. They are my body, my flesh, my life, I will not relinquish them.”