Fellow Travelers

by James Cook

  “But you’re right, I killed her. I was responsible for her death, and I always felt that they were somehow right in finding me guilty even though I was innocent. Victor, I loved that woman. For a while I loved her, I was intoxicated by her, as I was years before with your mother.”

  “And with dozens of others before and since. You’ve got the morals of a jackrabbit.”

  “I won’t talk about these things with you.”

  “I don’t think there is anything you wouldn’t do if you thought it was to your advantage.”

  “My poor, poor boy. I never knew you hated me so much.”

  “You’re not worth hating. And are you telling me I didn’t see you fucking her on the consulting table?”

  He got up and poured some more vodka in the tumbler. “No, I’m not telling you that.”

  “Are you telling me she didn’t say all those things about running away together?”

  “Look, son,” he said. “That was her idea, not mine. I would never have deserted my family, not for anything, not for a minute.”

  I don’t think he had ever called me son before.

  “You mean you were lying to her?”

  “If you want to put it that way, I was lying to her. You ought to know enough about women to know that there are lies that seem like truths even when you know they’re not. I have always been devoted to your mother. When we were young, we were crazy about each other. Almost literally crazy. She excited me more than any woman I’ve ever known before or since.”

  “But all that passed?”

  “Not entirely. If it had, we wouldn’t still be together, we wouldn’t fight so much. She wouldn’t drink, and I wouldn’t go down the hall to Olga.”

  “And Promyslov?”

  “The brave little tailor? He didn’t care. I used to give her money to take care of the house, and she gave it to him. It was a neat arrangement. Finally she couldn’t stand it anymore and she left him, and that was it.”

  “Manny was his son, too.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But you’re not sure.”

  “Nobody is ever sure. After all that’s happened, can you be sure now that the girls are your children? Maybe they are Mayakovsky’s or the chauffeur’s, George Bernard Shaw’s or Nijinsky’s for all I know. Tania saw plenty of everybody.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? You’re willing to tear yourself apart over some other man’s children? You keep saying you want to take them away from this terrible country and bring them up somewhere where things are decent. And they may not even be yours.”

  “Is that what all this is about?” he said. “You want to believe that Manny is Promyslov’s son?”

  “How can you be sure he’s not?”

  “Your mother and I were lovers. She told me, and I believe her, and that’s enough.”

  “That’s bullshit and I am ashamed to have your blood in my veins.”

  “You’re no blood of mine, I can’t believe I have such a son, you’re sick and disgusting.”

  His words seemed to linger in the room like a trail of smoke, and I suddenly laughed, “I guess we deserve each other.”

  “I’m tired,” he said, “and it’s late.”

  “Four years late,” I responded. “All right then just admit it. They wouldn’t have gone after Katya if you hadn’t told them.”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t,” he finally said.

  “So you did tell them?”

  “We mentioned her at lunch one day with Genrikh Yagoda.”

  “The head of the secret police? And you mentioned her at lunch?”

  “We had to do something. She could have done incalculable damage to our relations with the government. If we wanted to extend the concession we couldn’t be involved in anything that would look suspect.

  “Her father was a kulak. We couldn’t have a kulak in the family. You were getting much too involved. You brought her into this house, into this family. We didn’t know what you might do. We had to have somebody acceptable, and Katya wasn’t it. Tania seemed a better bet.”

  “But didn’t you know I was in love with Katya? I really cared about her.”

  “Don’t give me that. You think I don’t know Tania was giving you blow jobs in the Rolls and you loved it and you aren’t going to tell me that when you went to Yalta you spent the time watching the palm trees on the beach?

  “We knew you’d get over it. Love doesn’t last forever, you always get over it, and you did. You’re foolish, Manny was right. You never have used the brains the good god gave you.”

  “So you decided to manage everything.”

  “Look Victor, you were only a child. We knew you needed our guidance, that’s all.”

  “We, who is this we?”

  “Me and Manny.”

  “How could you have done this? You and Manny manipulating my life like this?”

  “You’ll get over this, too. You were a child. You still are.”

  The storm had really begun. It was pouring outside, the rain cascading against the window, with crashes of lightning. Cerberus was shivering with excitement, and Pop got up finally, went to the French doors and let him out into the court. The wind rushed through the room like a fist, as he closed the door and came back to his place by the lamp.

  “I’m sorry you think so little of me,” he said, settling into his chair. “You may not believe it, but it matters to me.”

  “It’s a little late for that now.”

  “Because of that business with Madame Onegin?”

  “Because you always treated me like a secondhand son.”

  “Never.”

  “You always favored Manny above me. You still do.”

  “I deal with both of you as you deserve. That’s what being a father is all about. It’s how you get sons worthy of being your sons.”

  “That says it all, doesn’t it?”

  “What kind of son have you been? Your whole life has been one unending rejection of me, my life, of everything I’ve done and believed in. You have fought against me all your life, refused to ever have anything to do with what I most believed in.”

  “Why should you care about that? Manny did all that for you.”

  “Manny did nothing. Manny is Manny. He has his own view of things. I used to think I had something to offer the world, that that was what being alive was all about. It’s why I set about organizing the men in that steel mill, why I wanted to become a doctor, and why I have done everything I could to support what these people are doing here and back home. It’s a noble dream, the noblest in the history of mankind.”

  “Everybody talks like that,” I said, “and what does it mean? Not a goddamn thing. What have you done here, Pop? Nothing. Except get Katya killed.”

  “Katya hasn’t been killed.”

  “So Varya was right. How did you find out?”

  “I have ways.”

  “I suppose all of this was part of your larger purpose in treating me as I deserve and fixing me up with Tania.”

  “It was important that we get the aspirin monopoly going. And the Churnuchins were important people. We needed Boris’s help.”

  “But this was before the aspirin monopoly.”

  “Manny knew that Faust American’s days were numbered. He was planning for the future and your mother didn’t think Katya was suitable. She was just an ignorant, illiterate peasant. It seemed the right thing to do at the time. We thought we didn’t have any choice.”

  “We?” I heard myself yelling. “You and Manny? Manny? Always you and Manny. Don’t I count for anything?”

  I could see the two of them, huddled together in Manny’s office all those years, calling me in like some private secretary for consultation. I could have killed him at that moment.

  And no sooner did I think that than the lightning struck, the thunder broke, and the court was lighter than daylight. There was a tear, a rip, and a huge limb of the tree in the central court came crashing down to the pavement.
Even Cerberus let out a wail of fright and alarm. We both went to the window to look, but it was dark again, you could see nothing except a swirl of leaves in the spill of light from the window.

  When we turned back, Manny was standing in the doorway of the hall looking in at us.

  “I didn’t expect to find the two of you here at this hour of night,” Manny said with a smile.

  It was after one in the morning, and we had been going at each other for three hours.

  “We’ve been having quite a talk, Pop and I.”

  Manny watched me warily, as if he had detected something not quite right in my voice. We looked at one another for I don’t know how long. Finally I asked, “Why did you do this to me?”

  “Do what?”

  “Ruin everything, my whole life. Both of you. My father, my brother, the two people I most value in this world.”

  “Victor, it’s time you went back to New York and the Academy of Dramatic Art. This kind of melodramatics doesn’t play anymore.”

  “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”

  “Why should I care?” Manny said. “It’s your life, not mine.”

  “You are not your brother’s keeper?”

  “I try not to be.”

  “But you had Katya picked up by the GPU, and you arranged for me to marry Tania.”

  “Come off it, Victor. I didn’t force you to marry Tania. You did that on your own. The next thing I know you’ll be saying I made you father those two children of yours, assuming you did. You did all those things because you wanted to, because you looked around and went for whatever happened to be at hand. You always do.”

  And I was thinking, like some four-year-old, You made me, Manny, you and Pop made me. I couldn’t accept that I would be manipulated so easily.

  “I admit I helped the whole thing along,” Manny went on. “I introduced the two of you to each other and even saw that you worked together. I provided you with opportunity, but you seized it on your own.”

  There wasn’t anything I could say.

  “You never did anything on your own in your life. Somebody always has to tell you what to do and where to go, and as for Katya, I told you she was just a little whore from the beginning.”

  “She wasn’t a whore.”

  “Just because Katya didn’t give blow jobs to everybody in Moscow the way Tania did doesn’t mean she wouldn’t do something else. Tania did a job on me and for all I know she did Eddie and Pop. You’ve lived with her all this time, and you still don’t know what she’s like.”

  “Not me,” Pop said. “Never me.”

  “But not because she didn’t try. She wanted to keep everything in the family.”

  “Shut up. I won’t believe that.”

  “Stop it,” Pop said. “There’s no reason why we have to be like this with each other. Have a drink, Manny.”

  Manny poured himself some vodka. A short glass. He never used to be so abstemious, but these days he was determined to keep himself under control.

  “You owe me something,” I finally said. “Let me ask just one thing of you: Talk to all those people you know in the government and get them to let me take the girls back home with me”

  “Don’t your realize what’s happening? We’re on the verge of being persona non grata here in Moscow. We’re among the last surviving members of Lenin’s chosen people. Pop was one of his men of confidence, I was one of his instruments of economic liberalization in launching the NEP. And that’s out of style now. Pop wasn’t even reappointed to the Comintern executive committee. Things are changing so fast none of us can keep up with them. I’ve done nothing for the last six months but try to find ways and means of ensuring we could maintain our position here in Moscow.”

  “Your position,” Pop interjected. “I don’t care about my position anymore.”

  “My position then. But that’s going to be what keeps you and Victor and the whole Faust family above water for the next year or two until we find our feet again You don’t know what I’ve had to do to see we get out of here even partially whole. We’ve become agents of the government, their instruments in raising foreign capital. Don’t you realize what I had to do to accomplish that?”

  “Turn over the aspirin monopoly to Boris.”

  “That’s almost the least of it. I’ve had to convince them that we will continue to be supporters of the Soviet government. They don’t care about foreign investment the way they once did, but they don’t want us going back to the United States and telling everybody you can’t do business with the Russians.”

  He sipped his vodka. “Look, Victor, sometimes you have to do things you’d rather not do. I’ve done them. I’ve done them for their good as well as ours.”

  “Pop, how could you let him do this to you? What could matter that much?”

  “I don’t really care anymore,” he answered, sounding tired to the depths of his bones. “I used to think that what was going on here was a marvelous experiment in human compassion, but now I know that’s not true. So maybe I did alert them to Katya, but you shouldn’t have a system where anything like that is possible. At the time, I thought what I did would be justified by the results.”

  “The results?”

  “Yes,” Manny answered for him. “We were able to win the aspirin concession and do the country enormous good. I don’t agree with Pop. I think in the end what they will achieve here for us and for the world will justify everything. That’s what you always taught me, Pop. They’ve got a vision of human life that redeems us all. I have done everything I could to help them win the approval of their regime.”

  And suddenly something else became clear to me too.

  “You screwed Eddie, Gitlow, and the others. You told them about the plan to transfer the party’s American assets.”

  Manny shrugged, “I did what I had to.”

  “You sold your own brother down the river.”

  “He wasn’t a part of it. I may have sold out Gitlow and Wolfe and Lovestone, but what are they to me, what are they to any one of us? They’ve supported the regime all along, and they’ll go on supporting it.”

  “And Pop told the government he’d given them his membership dues to take back to the U.S.”

  “I never did that,” Pop said.

  “I did that,” Manny retorted. “Where would we have been if they had found out we had given money to three men read out of the party by the entire Communist International? Where would we have been? We’d have been finished here, and the government would have found out. There is no way we could have kept that a secret.”

  “I would never have done that,” Pop said. “Those men were part of my dream. From the time I worked in that steel mill in Bridgeport, the movement was part of that dream.”

  “Oh, come off it, Pop,” Manny said. “You were part of it only because you were interested in power. That’s all anyone in the party has ever been interested in, here and back home. You thought you were going to come back to the United States in triumph after the revolution. You thought you would be revered here forever as one of the founders of the second American revolution, but power is what it’s all about. With power you can do any of the things you want to do in life. And without it you will simply whine around the edges. And that’s why we are going to triumph here, because we understand that.”

  “You understand,” I said. “I don’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you understand. You will do whatever you do because you choose to do it the way you always have. And Pop too. You will both do what is necessary. Do you think Pop has that many choices? I’m not sure he could even get back into the United States. He’s been consorting with the enemy all these years. He’s not a native-born citizen like us, and they can take back all they have given him if they want to. His citizenship. Everything. Well I’m not going to see that happen. And you—what do you think you will do? Go back and be an usher at the Hippodrome on Saturday matinees?”

  “I could go work for a bank or in Wa
ll Street. I’ve learned a lot about finance.”

  “Jack Faust’s son? They would laugh you out of New York.”

  We talked until dawn, drinking, arguing, planning for the future, and I saw what was ahead of us. We were going to get ourselves and our holdings out of the country while we still could.

  And finally we stopped talking. We sat around the table in front of the windows overlooking the court, sodden and beaten all three of us, and when the light in the court turned gray, I opened the windows and went outside. The storm was over, the air fresh and damp. The rain had stopped and the wind whipped gently. One huge limb of the tree had been broken off, and a gash of whitish wood rose into the sky.

  Suddenly Pop was aware that the dog had not come bounding out of the darkness to see us. “Where’s Cerberus?” he asked. “Cerberus, you old hell hound.” There was no answering pounding of feet, no welcoming bark. He called again and went out into the courtyard, and there under the fallen limb he found the dog.

  I will never forget that moment the rest of my life.

  He knelt down and touched the dog’s head with his hand, and suddenly his shoulders began shaking and he gave out a cry of desolation and anguish the like of which I have never heard before or since.

  It lasted only a moment, like a flash of lightning and he bent over that black corpse and got to his feet, his shaven head glinting in the light from the window. He was unsteady and swayed a little.

  “We’ll take care of him in the morning,” His voice was strangled and choking.

  He went in then, poured himself a water glass of vodka, downed it in one gulp, turned his back on both of us, and climbed the stairs to the room he still shared with Mama Eva.

  v

  That February afternoon several months later when I hailed a cab and drove off to the Byelorussian station for the last time, Moscow had vanished from the world around me—disappeared in an envelope of dank, bone-chilling fog. Gone were the onion domes of the churches, the crenellated rooftops, the twisting shapes and substance of the streets and alleys. All that remained was the muted sounds of the city—the hooves of horses on the cobbles, the hum of tires, the pad of footsteps on the uneven pavement. I had spent ten years of my life in this city but as I left I felt as if the city no longer existed. Gone. Vanished. Obliterated.