Thirty-three Swoons

by Martha Cooley

  “Surprise!” they chimed. “We’ve come to pay you,” Stuart said solemnly.

  “Actually,” said Carl, “we were out for a stroll, and I remembered we owed you money.”

  Stuart grinned. “That box of books you gave me? We sold every last one of ’em today. For a tidy sum! Thanks to him,” he added, jerking his thumb in his partner’s direction.

  “Dumb luck,” said Carl. “Some guy comes in, flirts with Stuart for a while, then tries acting all serious with me—like I’m the book guy and Stuart’s the fun guy.” He rolled his eyes. “So I showed him your box and told him the contents were really something else indeed.”

  “Were what?” I laughed.

  “That’s what I kept saying—a bunch of high-minded shit like quite extraordinary, really something else indeed . . . And the guy was totally convinced! He won’t read the books, of course. He’ll display them. Brag about them.”

  “Although he did know his theater,” said Stuart, fake wistfully.

  “He wasn’t talking to you about that,” Carl drawled. “I have eyes and ears, pal.”

  Stuart chuckled as he handed me a wad of bills. “Two hundred and fifty smackers! Happy now?”

  “Oh yes,” I said, stuffing the bills in a side pocket of my duffel. “You’ve just supplied my play money for Ithaca.”

  “For a spot of gambling, maybe?” Stuart mimed the shuffling of a deck of cards. “Or some twenty-year-old rum?”

  “No—cigars,” said Carl. “You don’t even have to smoke them. Just show ’em off. I can just see you and Danny in some student pub at Cornell, lighting up a couple of those nice long Cubans . . . That’ll get the boys’ attention.”

  We all laughed, and Stuart gave me a parting hug. “Have fun, babe. You look tired—get some sleep. If you have more dreams, try to remember them! And don’t forget, you can always call me.”

  It was true: I could always call him, I thought as I lay in bed an hour later, tossing uneasily. But I wouldn’t. Better for Danny and me to venture forth with no one to rescue us when we slid down the rabbit hole, as I felt certain we would.

  INTERLUDE

  PUTTING THE ex-husband on stage in Camilla’s latest dream proved more effective than I’d imagined. One never knows! Dreams are ever rambunctious . . .

  Every play, Seva once said, is produced unfinished. The final, crucial revision is always made by the spectator. And as the sole spectator of her own nocturnal dramas, Camilla had to be kept on her toes, wondering how things would pan out.

  I pause the action now to fill in some important information related to Seva’s career. And linked, too, with Camilla’s crucial revision . . .

  FROM HIS Petersburg days to the mid-Thirties, Meyerhold’s artistic ascent proceeded virtually unchecked. By the Twenties, he’d become the chief luminary in Soviet theater and a personage known throughout Europe and even in America. Then his career fell—was felled, I should say, like a tree.

  Russia in the Thirties was a place of everyday preposterousness. As the evidence of abuses and terror mounted, millions of Russians went about their daily business, pretending everything was fine. With one shot from his revolver, Volodya Mayakovsky had permanently removed himself from the national drama. Thereafter Seva and his colleagues found themselves forced to bushwhack a trail through increasingly dense thickets of political uncertainty. This they did with varying degrees of success, and always with anxiety.

  Fortunately Seva possessed large reserves of confidence in his professional capabilities. It was nearly impossible to flap him; plenty of people had tried all along to do so, but to no avail. His imperturbability was a result of the amount of time he spent on the stage, first as an actor, then as a director. For Seva a stage was a construction site, a director very like an architect. Actors were sculptors: with their voices and bodies, they lent shape to words. Beneath the words lay music. It was always there, if only metaphorically—and it was what most excited Seva.

  YEARS EARLIER, Seva had told Anton Chekhov that he finally understood the challenge of staging The Cherry Orchard. The director must get the sound of it, Seva said—by which he meant the underlying cadences of the play’s action.

  At the start of his career, during rehearsals at the Moscow Art Theater, he’d held several long conversations with Chekhov about such matters, and he’d chronicled those talks in his journal. Anton Pavlovich had harbored serious misgivings about the way in which most dramas were being staged. In one journal entry, Seva recounted how Chekhov had scoffed at the sets for The Seagull.

  “Get rid of these damn bits of trees and those flowers,” the playwright had urged the cast, amiably but firmly.

  The actors, proud of having lugged such props onto the stage, gave Anton Pavlovich chagrined looks.

  “Why do you need all that stuff anyway?” Chekhov added.

  “To make it real,” one actor answered.

  “Real?” retorted Chekhov. “But the stage demands a degree of artifice! It reflects the quintessence of life!”

  After hearing that remark, Seva committed himself to devising new ways of staging that would disrupt everyone’s assumptions about theatricality. Hilarious and bewildering, Seva’s productions had viewers literally yelling in the aisles—and the critics baffled or outraged. His daring strategies worked: people flocked to his theater.

  FOR A while, Seva’s star rose and shone. But then Volodya killed himself, Sasha Golovin died, and everything started coming undone.

  In 1932 the playwright Nikolai Erdman was arrested and deported to Siberia. In 1936 Dimitri Shostakovich was condemned by the Party for his so-called formalism. In 1938 Seva’s former mentor Stanislavsky died.

  Dramatic enchantment, said Seva (quoting Pushkin, whom he revered), vibrates three chords of the imagination: laughter, pity, and terror. Among Russians the first two chords had ceased vibrating; only the third, terror, still resonated. In 1937 the directorial approach favored by Comrade Meyerhold was described by one Soviet critic as a “systematic deviation from Soviet reality,” which in turn constituted a “hostile slander against our way of life.” For months everyone was on edge, wondering what might befall Seva.

  In 1938 he was allowed to take over the lead of Stanislavsky’s Opera Theater, to the surprise of his colleagues. Was a lull setting in at last? The worst of the purges seemed to be over; perhaps the darkness was lifting.

  Not yet.

  That same year Lavrenty Beria became Internal Affairs Commissar. The following May, Seva attended a meeting of the Writers’ Union, where he let slip a few remarks about the banal subject matter of Soviet literature. Afterward several telephone calls were placed to key government officials. Apparently Seva was denounced by (among others) a Russian journalist named Koltsov, who linked him with the counterrevolutionary Bukharin.

  Not good. Or as the Americans put it, way not good.

  ONE MORNING in June of 1939, Seva was dragged down the stairs of a flat in Leningrad by several men who transported him to Moscow. He was thrown into a dark, filthy cell in Lefortovo Prison and eventually transferred to the Military Collegium. His wife and friends obtained no information regarding his whereabouts.

  Thus began the vanishing.

  Now imagine the actual ending. After many months of imprisonment, Seva is standing in his darkened cell, awaiting a sham trial scheduled for the next morning. Picture him pinned at the terminus: no exit. He sits in an unbreachable concrete block, a bare, all-revealing space, perfect for so tragic a farce. He couldn’t have designed a better set himself!

  Did he attempt to prepare for the moment when the executioner would barge in? Did he repeat his defense to himself silently? Or did denial take over, urging his thoughts to drift backward and swirl languorously in eddies of memory?

  Zina: visions of her flashing like popped lightbulbs before his closed, swollen eyelids. Zina in extravagant costume for The Lady of the Camellias . . . Zina in bed in the flat on Gorky Street, wearing one of his nightshirts . . . Zina perched on the steps o
f the Bolshoi, panting slightly and grinning after one of their long rambles through Zamoskvarechie, over the bridge to the Kremlin, past the gardens, through the gates to Prospect Marx, to the theaters.

  A letter he’d written her a few months earlier, from the countryside: You are golden . . .

  Did he remember, at the very end? Or could he remember nothing, not even her beloved face? This is a question to which I will never have an answer, for it arose as Seva was being sundered from his life, and I from him.

  SEVA DIED in Moscow on February 2, 1940, in the basement of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union, near Red Square.

  His death went unremarked. As far as the average Russian was concerned, Vsevolod Emilevich Meyerhold ceased to exist after that morning when the NKVD came for him. References to him were excised from books and journals on Russian theater; theatergoers and critics were forbidden to mention him in public. It was as if his productions had never been staged in Moscow and St. Petersburg, not to mention Paris and Berlin. As if his astonishing offerings to the theater had never materialized anywhere, period. As if they were a dream.

  Zina couldn’t have helped. A few weeks after Seva’s abduction in St. Petersburg, she was arrested in Moscow, then released and returned to the Gorky Street apartment. A few days later, her slashed, crumpled body lay in the middle of the living room floor. Neighbors told of two men and a car. No suspects were ever apprehended.

  Zina’s daughter had forty-eight hours to remove her mother’s and Seva’s clothing and other belongings, including books and papers, from the flat. She was traumatized, of course, but also thorough. Afterward she emphasized that whoever had committed the murder had not burglarized the apartment, at least not in an obvious fashion. Nothing at all was missing except, apparently, the contents of an unlabeled manila envelope.

  Shortly after the place was emptied, a young female member on the staff of Commissar Beria moved into half of the apartment. Beria’s chauffeur took the other half. The chauffeur eventually left; his roommate stayed on until her own forced eviction, nearly fifty years later. (Picture her, purple-faced: “I am an old woman! This is my home! Why, Comrade Beria himself was responsible for my being in this apartment! Have you no sense of history?”)

  One unlabeled envelope . . . Nobody knew what it had contained, and nobody thought much of it. I did, however. And I happened to know it hadn’t been taken by Zina’s killers, whose only assigned task had been as follows: delete that slut wife of that Jew traitor Meyerhold. The papers inside that envelope were missing because Seva had already delivered them (via a visiting English journalist, whose suitcase was fitted with a false bottom) to Jordan Archer.

  THERE: I’VE done the necessary catching-up work.

  Camilla’s next dream took place in what might be called the theater of unaccepted loss. And since a fine set—that loft in which her ex-husband and his second wife celebrated their nuptials—had already been constructed, I decided we might as well use it for our next act.

  In it Camilla’s cousin and mother join forces unexpectedly. A disconcerting alliance, as Meyerhold makes sure to point out. On we go!

  SIX

  A PARTY is taking place in a loft: Sam and Lila’s wedding. In a far corner is a bed strewn with red roses; at the center of the space, people are dancing. The mood is merry.

  I am with Eve and another woman—my mother, Camilla. We’re all dancing together. Eve and Camilla resemble each other: they have the same finely arched brows, the same lithe way of moving their shoulders. Swaying together as they dance, their hands on each other’s hips, they look nearly like twins.

  Jordan is watching all three of us. He’s wearing a tux; his cummerbund is a silvery gray, his bow tie a beautiful ivory-maroon stripe. Unaffectedly elegant, he looks like a man accustomed to getting his share of attention. This, I think, is how it must have been for him in Paris, in the days when he attended fancy dinner parties.

  The music slows and the crowd starts to thin. Grasping one of Eve’s hands, Camilla beckons to Jordan, who approaches and offers her one of his. Camilla puts the two hands together—Eve’s and Jordan’s—palm to palm.

  Your turn, she says to them.

  I want to ask my mother a question, yet I’m mute; my mouth opens, but no words exit. It occurs to me that I haven’t found my question; I’d be able to ask it if I could locate it, so I ought to start looking for it. To me it’s a physical entity, a missing object. I walk around the perimeter of the loft, peering everywhere, but nothing turns up.

  Meanwhile the room has begun emptying. Soon only my mother, my father, and Eve remain. As I stand off to the side, wondering where to continue searching for my missing question, I notice a tall man astride the rose-covered bed. He’s backlit, so I can’t see his face clearly, but I’m certain I know who he is.

  I approach him, determined to make him speak. He holds up one finger in warning, as if asking me to wait. Then, smiling, he twirls his ebony cane and points it in my mother’s direction, spritzing her with perfume—the cane is an atomizer in disguise. The scent it emits is Lune.

  My mother vanishes—poof!—like a soap bubble.

  The tall man laughs gaily. You’re barking up the wrong tree, he says to me. She wouldn’t have been able to tell you a thing! The question’s over there, where it’s always been!

  He gestures in the direction of Eve and Jordan, who’re still holding hands. They dissolve into a Lune-fragranced mist that envelops the entire loft. The man, too, evanesces, and I’m awaking woozily, and it’s morning, the alarm’s ringing, but isn’t it a Saturday?—yes, today we go to Ithaca—where’s Danny?

  DANNY CARRIED her bags to our room at the Cornell Motor Inn. It reeked of stale cigarette smoke. There were, however, no other vacant rooms in the motel—no rooms anywhere, the proprietor sourly informed us. Apparently a convention had brought swarms of visitors to the area. We were lucky to have found a place near Sapsucker Woods, not far from the main campus.

  Glancing around, Danny flopped onto the bed nearest the door. Like the one by the window, it was covered with a dull cotton spread.

  “I’d like this one,” she said. “Okay with you?”

  “You may have that bed,” I answered imperiously, “as long as I can have the monogrammed towels and the plush terry cloth robe in the bathroom.”

  She snickered. I began unpacking, which evidently wasn’t on her agenda. Although she’d driven the entire way from New York, Danny seemed not in the least slowed down. She jiggled the Volvo’s keys lightly.

  “What a dump,” she growled, doing a decent Bette Davis imitation. “Let’s go! The less time we spend here, the better.”

  “Where to?” I closed a bureau drawer, unlined and none too clean.

  Danny gathered up her sunglasses and backpack. Even as a teenager she’d displayed little of the dawdling behavior of her peers.

  “Judy Deveare’s house,” she announced. “Let’s get it over with. I’ll drive.”

  “You know where she lives?” I asked.

  “More or less.”

  LESS, ACTUALLY. It took us a while to find the subdivision of single-story tract houses, about a half-hour from Ithaca. Neither of us could make sense of the map we’d brought with us. By the time we arrived at our destination, we were in a mixed mood: part goofy, part apprehensive.

  The tall, pale woman who answered the doorbell reminded me of no one at all. She wore a nondescript blue pantsuit with a simple white shirt. Her appearance said nothing about what she did with her days, whether she was a worker or a homemaker. Directing a slightly suspicious gaze at us, she asked us our business.

  Danny’s brief and admirably direct explanation did not appear to faze Judy Deveare. She listened impassively, then stepped to one side and motioned us in. A man’s voice called from an upstairs room. In a voice giving nothing away, Judy answered that she had visitors, and the man offered no reply.

  “My husband,” she said to Danny and me. She led us down a dimly li
t hallway to a kitchen whose windows gave onto a back lawn. “He’s watching the game,” she added. “Coffee?” she said, pointing at an old-fashioned percolator on the range. “It’s fresh.”

  We murmured thanks and sat down at the kitchen table. Judy produced three mugs and a plate of what looked to be homemade muffins. “My daughter dropped these off this morning,” she said. “Help yourselves.” She abstained while Danny and I each took one.

  “How old’s your daughter?” Danny asked.

  “My daughter? About your age,” answered Judy. She eyed Danny now, finally ready to scrutinize her. Her gaze did a brisk dance over my face, then returned to Danny’s. After staring for several long moments, she looked away, nodding, as though confirming some statement she’d just made silently to herself. She said nothing further while we ate our muffins and sipped our coffee.

  Danny finally broke the stillness. “So did you know?” she asked slowly. “About me?”

  Judy’s face moved into and out of a scowl. “You mean,” she said, “did I know that my brother claimed paternity in the case of an illegitimate child?”

  Danny raised her brows. “Well,” she said, “I do have a birth certificate. Which your brother did sign.” To my relief, she spoke slowly and evenly.

  “So he did,” said Judy. “And you are . . . ?” She turned suddenly to me, as if she’d forgotten the part I was meant to be playing in this improvisation.

  “Her cousin,” I said, gesturing at Danny. “Technically, I’m her mother’s cousin, which makes the two of us—”

  “—first cousins once removed,” Judy finished smoothly.

  “Right.”

  “How removed is that?”

  I shook my head uncomprehendingly. Danny, who’d understood, glanced at me and stepped in, her tone placatory. “Camilla’s along for the visit,” she said. “To keep me company. I’m just trying to get a sense of who my father was. I figured you’d be the right place to start.”