Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  “But you knew that I wanted to have children.”

  “Stay here and you have them. Things can be as they always have been. But I will never let you take them away from me.”

  And she never did.

  We left behind us one of the enduring legends of literary Moscow. One afternoon Valentin Nikitin appeared at our offices in Koznetsky Most and demanded to see me. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days, and was ashen and shaken. He had been drinking, his glasses were askew on his nose, and he dropped to his knees on the oriental carpet by my desk and begged my forgiveness. “I am worthless,” he told me “I am not fit to live. To abuse children is the cardinal sin, a crime against life and the future. It is unforgivable and I can never atone for such a crime. She was their mother, as you are their father, and I have destroyed them.”

  I told him I doubted that they had been severely damaged, and assured him I forgave him for whatever transgressions he may have committed.

  But that was unthinkable: how could a man like me forgive an artist like him?

  After he left he went back his rooms and wrote one more poem. He had humiliated and shamed the woman he loved most of all, shamed her and her children beyond redemption, and in such circumstances he could not endure to live. He had run out of ink so he cut his wrist enough to draw blood, copied the poem out carefully with it. With that accomplished, he went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, forced his way past the guards at the entryway, rushed up the staircase to Tania’s office on the third floor, presented her with his apology and the holograph copy of his poem, pulled out a gun and put a bullet through his head.

  iv

  One evening that September, the last September we spent in Moscow, I was walking home along the Tverskaya when I saw a face in the crowd, a face remembered from somewhere, a dark-haired, heavily made-up young woman, one of the whores that patrolled the streets beyond the casino. A face like a half-forgotten song, a fragrance carried on the wind from nowhere. A moment later I realized who it was. Varya, Katya’s sister.

  I hurried on down the street in the direction she had gone and tried to find her. I had never realized how many women there were for sale in Moscow, young women, old women, ugly women, beautiful women, women of all ages and sizes for all tastes and inclinations. But I couldn’t find Varya anywhere. I went out looking for her the next night and for some weeks to come. The faces of the women became so familiar that I found myself stopping them to ask if they knew where I could find her, Varya, Varina Ivanovna Arkadyevna.

  But none of them knew her name, or recognized my description. Then, when I was about ready to give up, I caught her reflection in a shop window not far from the Pushkin monument, and followed her down the street, pushing my way through the crowds, calling her name. The faster I moved, the faster she moved, and finally she turned off the Petrovka into an alleyway and I had her cornered. “Leave me alone,” she said, “What are you trying to do, destroy me too?”

  “I want to know about Katya.”

  “There’s nothing to know. She’s gone. She doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know why.”

  “Tell me,” I said, “what do you know.”

  “The secret police took her away. It was a long time ago now.”

  “But you don’t know what happened to her?”

  “Somebody told me once—a GPU man I think it was, one of my customers—that she had been sent to Magnitogorsk, or was it Irkutsk. I don’t remember anymore. But what does it matter. She’s gone. So, please, leave me alone. I’m afraid to be seen with you.”

  “You think I’m responsible?”

  “Who cares anymore? It happens to hundreds of people every day. Please let me go, Viktor. This isn’t the greatest way to earn a living, but it’s better than others I can think of.”

  “But you don’t know anything?”

  “I know nothing. I told her not to get involved with you, but she never would listen. She loved you a little. Maybe more than a little. She thought you’d be able to protect her, but you didn’t, or couldn’t, or didn’t care enough.”

  “Couldn’t,” I said.

  “If you say so. You made her happy for a little while, and maybe that will be enough to last her the rest of her life.”

  “Oh, Varya,” I said, taking her into my arms, trying to comfort her and myself, but she broke away from me, saying, “Please leave me alone. I’m afraid.”

  I tried to give her some money, but she wouldn’t take it. She gave me a professional smile, and laughed. “I never accept charity, I work for a living. If there’s anything in that line I can do for you.”

  “I’ve got to get back to work,” she said and then kissed me and ran down the alley into the street.

  There was a storm coming. Every now and then there were faint flashes of light in the sky above the rooftops. The wind had started to blow, the streets were wet from an earlier shower, and the light from the streetlamps glinted on the trolley tracks. It was a mild night, surprisingly mild for that time of year. The last of the autumn leaves clung to the trees and rustled in the wind.

  I was almost unbearably depressed, my body heavy, my head, leaden. Every step was exhausting, every thought. I was not even mourning Katya any more. It was as if Varya had simply confirmed what I had known long ago—that Katya was dead—and the knowledge no longer touched me. I felt used, manipulated, betrayed. I was in mourning for my life, for all I was and all that had ever happened to me.

  Except for a light in the entryway, Red House was dark. The porter hadn’t locked the gate yet, and I pulled open the door, went inside, and climbed the stairs to our rooms. You could almost hear the place echo. Everything was empty, as antiseptic as a hotel room.

  Through the window I could see the silhouettes of the shapes in the courtyard, the huge tree that occupied its center, a squat and massive maple with arms that reached out from the central trunk like a candelabra. In these rooms we had shared for nearly three years I could find no trace of Tania anywhere, nothing except a smudged fingerprint on the edge of the hand mirror. Nothing at all.

  I opened the doors to the nursery and there was nothing there either. The children’s beds were still there, but the mattresses had been stripped. The cupboards were empty, toys had been taken away.

  I flicked out the light on the ruins of my life. My wife gone, my children taken away, as irrecoverably as Katya had been. I knew I would never get them back, though I would go through the motions for as long as I stayed in Moscow, ever after if I could. I lit a cigarette and smoked a while, sitting upright in the dark in a chair by the window of the bedroom, across the room from that immaculately made bed, and belligerently flicked the ashes on the floor. Every time I drew in a breath, I could verify that I still existed, the smoke reaching deep into my chest, seeping into the blood, quickening the pulse. I didn’t care about anything anymore, and when I had drawn the cigarette down to a stub, I ground it out on the floor.

  I was twenty-eight, and I felt as if I had reached the end of my life. What was I going to do with the rest of it? Everything I had loved in Moscow had vanished. I wanted to get away, to go home.

  I was too depressed to sleep, too agitated. I wanted to cry on somebody’s shoulder but there was nobody anywhere in Moscow I could turn to, no one who would care enough to listen to me. I wandered down the dark corridor toward Manny and Yelena’s apartment. There was a line of light under the door, but I was sure Manny wasn’t there, and I couldn’t face Yelena.

  I started back down the corridor, and as I turned the corner I heard the door open behind me and saw a spill of light. A woman’s voice cried out, Is somebody there? I stood motionless and waited until Yelena shut the door again before going on down the hall. There was no sign of light under Mama Eva’s door, but I couldn’t have faced her if she had been up. She would be either too sodden to respond or too falsely solicitous to be borne. So I turned my back and headed down the marble staircase to the lobby and through
the narrow passage to the courtyard.

  There was a rush of wind when I opened the door, and I could hear Cerberus coming, Pop’s beloved wolfhound, running silent as an express train, and I slammed the door shut upon him, trembling. A moment later Pop was there, coming out of the darkness somewhere, and he said, “Oh, it’s you,” and opened the door and let the dog in. The dog was perfectly agreeable now. Unthreatening. He waited beneath Pop’s fingertips, panting softly.

  “Let’s have a drink,” I said. “I think I feel like a drink.” I felt suddenly dangerous, like a bomb about to explode, waiting to go off. I wanted to throw things, smash them, pull the whole world down around me. “Why not?” Pop said, and the three of us went down the darkened corridor and into the library. It was a large room with floor-to-ceiling shelves on all sides filled not with books but with art objects that Pop and Mama Eva had picked up over the years. There were large French windows looking out on the courtyard, but when Pop turned on a table lamp by the window, all you could see was the gloomy reflection of the room. Our shapes caught eerily in the glass.

  Pop poured vodka into some water glasses, handed one to me, and sat down in a large winged chair, one hand holding the glass, the other touching Cerberus’s head. I sat down on the small sofa across from him.

  I must have made him uneasy, suggesting a drink together like that. We didn’t have that kind of relationship. We weren’t accustomed to sitting down with each other and just shooting the breeze, never mind having heart-to-heart talks.

  Pop lit a cigar, and the flame threw his face into shadow, giving him a sinister look. He sat back and puffed, watching the smoke drift upward into the darkness. I took another cigarette and tried to keep my voice calm.

  “I ran into an old friend tonight,” I told him.

  “One of your money-running friends from the old days?” he said, teeing me off. He was always slyly criticizing me for my ability to do the things that had to be done when the firm needed money.

  “You didn’t complain when you wanted $5,000 for Gitlow,”

  “I wasn’t complaining. I was just asking.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “Well,” he said after a moment, “do you want to tell me who you met?”

  “Varya.”

  “Varya?” he said blankly.

  “You don’t even remember?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Katya’s sister.”

  “I don’t think I ever met her.”

  “She told me what happened to Katya.”

  “Poor girl, she had so much warmth to give somebody.”

  “Somebody else, you mean. You never did like her.”

  “I liked her very much. In some ways.”

  He stopped short of saying anything else, but he didn’t need to.

  “But you do know what happened to her?”

  “The secret police took her away,” Pop said. “She was seen plotting with a counterevolutionary agent in a café on the Kalinnin Prospect, or some place.”

  “They sent her to Siberia,” I said.

  “That’s where such people usually end up.”

  “A prison camp, a work camp.”

  “Come on now, Victor. You know it’s not just a penal system. They’re building a new country out there, and they need people, young, vigorous people. Stalin believes the whole world is aligned against him, and one day the country is going to need the industrial engine he’s trying to build there on the far side of the Urals.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “What else is there to believe? We’ve all seen the pictures of Magnitogorsk in the papers. The biggest steel mill in the world, bigger than anything in Germany, bigger even than anything in the United States. Katya will help build the socialist world of tomorrow.”

  “On her back, I suppose.”

  “If need be, yes. You need that to build a new world just as you do everything else.”

  “You make me sick sometimes.” I said. At least I think that I said it. I certainly thought of saying it. God, but I hated my father. He didn’t even look like my father anymore, with that shaven head, like some Mongolian warlord, not the man I remembered from my childhood with his full head of hair and drooping moustache.

  I spat out, “How did they happen to pick on Katya? Tell me. Why did they pick on her?”

  “Because she was engaging in some sort of counterrevolutionary activity.”

  “At a coffee shop? Don’t give me that.”

  “That’s what they said at the time, and I see no reason to doubt it.”

  “Who said?”

  “I don’t remember anymore. The GPU man the night they came to take her away maybe.”

  “What I want to know is why they picked on her?”

  “How do I know why they picked on her,” Pop said. He ground out his cigar and began to get up. “It’s late, it’s time we both got to bed.”

  “Stay here. I’ve got to talk with you.”

  “Not when you talk such nonsense.”

  Cerberus growled, low in his throat, teeth bared. He sat at Pop’s feet, not curled up but straight out, as imperial as one of those lions in front of the New York Public Library. Pop’s right hand dangled over the arm of the chair so he could reach down and touch his head.

  “Why don’t you get rid of that dog? He’s vicious and dangerous. Why do you make the whole house put up with him?”

  “He’s mine,” Pop answered. “And he’s devoted to me. He protects the house and all of us in it. He would tear your throat out if I told him to. I like that about him, his wildness, his savage recklessness, he’s like a lightning flash.”

  We just looked at each other. It wasn’t a threat, I knew that. It was a fact, but that didn’t help any.

  “I want to know about Katya,” I said again.

  “Look, I don’t have to explain to you what life is like in this country. You’ve been here for ten years now, even longer than I have. Katya was living with you. She was involved with us. We’re foreigners. You have anything to do with foreigners and you’re suspect. I shouldn’t have to spell that out for you.”

  “But we’re the Fausts, the fabulous Faust family. The managers of the aspirin trust, cofounders of the party in America. You’re telling me we still count as foreigners?”

  “These days everybody counts as foreigners. The new government is obsessed with them.”

  “But this isn’t now, this was then, this was four years ago, before Stalin had taken over the country. It wasn’t that bad then. Do you mean that the Fausts couldn’t have protected her?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saving that I don’t believe anymore that the GPU would have taken Katya away unless they were pretty sure you wouldn’t protest. If you had, I don’t think they’d have sent her away. They’d have let her go. I think you arranged for them to come take her away. I think you wanted to get her away from me. I think you’re a murderer.”

  “What do you know about murderers? I do, I spent three years of my life with them.”

  The storm was rising, the winds rattled the windows, and outside you could see the shadows of the tree, tossing, shaking its leaves.

  “Couldn’t the Fausts have protected her—if they had wanted to?” I went on insistently.

  “I don’t have any idea. They took her to Lubianka.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Stop behaving like a child. Everybody goes to Lubianka. You go around all the time whimpering and whining, and you blame people for things you should blame yourself for.”

  “I didn’t send her to Lubianka, and didn’t that give you any second thoughts? You know what happens to people there. Didn’t you have any feeling for her? Don’t you remember how she would tease you? She liked you.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “There isn’t anything you wouldn’t do, is there?” I said heatedly. “Nobody you wouldn’t sacrifice—Katya, me, Mama Eva, Manny—”

&nb
sp; “That isn’t true,” he said, cutting me off as I added Madame Onegin.

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. You think I don’t know,” I found myself shouting. I rose to move toward him, and as I did, the dog leaped forward and began growling.

  “Quiet!” Pop said, “quiet,” touching the dog. “How dare you say that? How dare you bring up that woman? I never killed anyone in my life. I’m a doctor. I swore to heal.”

  “You swore to a lot of things in your life. And what does it mean? Nothing.”

  “You don’t know what you’re taking about.”

  “Don’t try to kid me. I know what happened to Madam Onegin. Don’t tell me you didn’t kill her. You think I didn’t know what was going on between the two of you? I walked in on you that day and saw you humping her on your consulting table. Have you forgotten that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right, you had other things on your mind. And don’t think I don’t know what happened after that. You knocked her up, and when she wasn’t content to have an abortion, you killed her. I heard you quarreling. I used to listen at keyholes.”

  “I can’t believe I ever had a son like that. You turn my stomach.”

  “I disgust myself, Pop, I have always disgusted myself. But I know what she said, how she wanted to run away with you and make a new life, and I heard you tell her how you couldn’t stand Mama Eva anymore, and her three runty boys. You wanted to go away but you couldn’t, and she kept insisting, and when she wouldn’t shut up, you killed her.”

  “I’ve never heard such twaddle in my life. These are childhood fantasies, like something invented by that degenerate Viennese Jew.”

  “You’re telling me these things didn’t happen? You didn’t cut her up on the operating table, and she didn’t die?”

  “These things happen. Any surgical procedure involves some risk, and this was a perforated womb. I didn’t know it had happened, I swear. You think I haven’t been haunted by her death ever since? It was an accident,” and then he heaved a deep sigh and looked across the darkness at me.