The Red Daughter

by John Burnham Schwartz

But the State is the State and its contradictions are its own. A few months later, after Brajesh had taken his last breath in our bed and his ashes had been returned to me in a small plastic container, there came a knock on the door of my apartment. It was Kosygin’s special courier, hand-delivering my passport so that I might personally return the distinguished foreigner’s remains to his family in India—and thus remove his foreign presence, once and for all, from the Soviet Union.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon shortly before my departure—it would be my first trip outside the USSR, two weeks carefully stage-managed by the Kremlin—I was emerging from the GUM department store with my arms full of gifts for Brajesh’s family when I encountered Lyusia, whom I had not seen in over a decade.

  We stared at each other in shocked, wary silence.

  You’re looking well, he remarked, finally.

  And you.

  It was true. Like a beautifully carved, much handled pipe of burled wood, he had grown only more burnished and interesting with age.

  My husband…I said.

  I had no idea what led me to begin this embarrassing sentence, but once begun it was too late to stop.

  Well, we were not allowed to marry. In any event, he died from an illness not long ago.

  I’m sorry.

  And you? Are you still married?

  A nod, his expression fatalistic, raising his hands as though they belonged to someone else and so could not be judged any fault of his own.

  What can I say? You know me.

  Yes, I knew him.

  A sudden wind gusted along the wide expanse of sidewalk then, forcing us to duck away to catch our breaths. Turning back, I was shocked and moved to see tears in his eyes.

  Just the wind, he said quickly, dabbing at his eyes with the corner of his coat sleeve.

  Lyusia…

  He cut me off. Good to see you, Svetlana. I wish you happiness. Goodbye.

  * * *

  —

  On the day I was to leave for India, a blizzard swept over Moscow. All afternoon and evening the snow continued to fall over the city, as I waited in our apartment with Josef and Katya, calling the airport every half hour to try to learn whether my 1:00 A.M. flight for Delhi would be allowed to take off. The news was shifting and contradictory, and I found the tension hard to manage. At one point Josef picked up my heavy suitcase to move it by the door, and I snapped at him to put it down. I apologized immediately for my harsh tone, explaining that unbeknownst to him, I had put the urn containing Brajesh’s ashes into the suitcase. But the damage had been done. On the eve of my departure, when we all would have wished to feel closest together as a family, my son turned remote from me. It was my fault.

  Josef, I’m sorry.

  He looked at me, but his heart was somewhere else.

  Please forgive me?

  My son’s nod suggested acquiescence at my request, rather than the sentiment itself.

  If you’re still angry when Mama gets back, Katya remarked to her brother from the table where she was studying, you can tell her so then. But right now, if you ask me, you should just get over it.

  Josef glared at her. After a moment, he went into the kitchen. I heard him filling a glass with water from the tap.

  Mama?

  Yes, my Katya.

  Will you bring me back one of those colored cloth skirts?

  A sari?

  Yes.

  With pleasure.

  Something with some red in it, please. I have nowhere to wear it, but I can at least hang it on the wall.

  Just then there came a knock on the door of our apartment. It was Mrs. Kassirova from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who would be accompanying me all the way to Delhi to make sure there were no surprises on my journey.

  The snow has stopped, Mrs. Kassirova informed us.

  And so it had.

  * * *

  —

  Outside the foreign departures lounge I embraced Josef, who had driven us to the airport. He could come no further with me.

  I’ll be home soon, I said, believing my own words.

  We’ll be here, Mother, he replied solemnly. Have a good trip.

  I kissed and hugged my son, my firstborn, and then I turned away from him toward the plane.

  * * *

  —

  The Singh family lived along the bank of the Ganges, six hundred miles from Delhi. There were many of them, and though their son and I had never married, they welcomed me into their house like a newfound relative.

  The day after my arrival, I watched wooden boats carry Brajesh’s ashes out into the river. After the ashes we tossed flower petals, which remained floating on the water’s surface long into the falling dusk.

  The following morning, I was taken by an old woman to bathe in the same part of the river. Climbing out of the water, cleansed though not clean, I discovered flower petals stuck to my skin.

  * * *

  —

  One day after another passed in that place, with those good people who were so kind to me. Each morning began with a bath in the Ganges in my sari, accompanied by the same old woman—one of Brajesh’s many aunts, whose name was Maya. The river was always crowded with people likewise bathing; one was never alone. It was a village, a community, an ongoing narrative in which I, a foreigner in every sense of the word, had no part, yet which absorbed me all the same. Each morning came to feel like a reenactment of that first morning after Brajesh’s funeral, when Maya had led me into the river the color of milky, oversteeped English tea so filled with the runoff of human life and death that, wading into it, one hand holding the hem of my borrowed sari and the other a small clay pitcher, it was as if the cool viscous weight climbing my legs, steadily rising, emanating an acrid bovine stink, was the hand and breath of all those who could not bring themselves to let go or give up. Here was a way station of some kind, I’d only half-understood, a hallowed, ever-flowing bridge between worlds: where our ghosts had not quite left us yet, were still with us, grasping on, and for these last minutes we might bathe in their ashes and shit with a sadness so keen it was almost like joy.

  * * *

  —

  After bathing, Maya would sit with me on the riverbank as we dried ourselves under the rising sun. We communicated in the most basic English, though mostly we were silent. To her, I believe, I was simply a woman her nephew had loved, and who had loved him. That was enough. My Russianness, let alone the details of my personal history, any notions of status or legacy, power or shame that so completely defined me in my own world and determined who I was and would always be in the eyes of my own people, anything to do with Josef Stalin or the murder of countless millions—such biographical information was to her irrelevant, or perhaps even nonexistent. What she wished to know—all she wished to know—was about my children.

  On our eleventh morning together, she asked me their names.

  Josef and Katya, I told her.

  Their ages?

  Twenty-one and sixteen.

  Were they healthy?

  Yes, thank God.

  And happy?

  When instead of answering this last question I began to cry, Maya appeared unsurprised. Her smile was calm and knowing as she stroked my hair with her small wrinkled hand, her long fingernails pleasantly scratching my scalp, until my tears stopped.

  * * *

  —

  That afternoon in my bedroom, which was decorated with only a few colored cloths, I fell into a sleep that overtook me like a sickness. I traveled so far down the tunnel of mental exhaustion that my dreams floated above me like clouds I could see but not touch. Within these ethereal masses, I somehow understood, were narratives of my past I had forgotten or never known; truths I must discover if ever I was to wake up. And I longed, as I slept, to know what these
truths were.

  * * *

  —

  I came awake two hours later, painfully clearheaded. The dream-clouds were gone. In their place, I sensed Josef and Katya close but not reachable, their loving, troubled spirits floating above me like airborne kites tied to a tree.

  While I’d slept without dreaming under the spell of that old Indian woman’s touch, some space in my mind had cleared, and a realization had entered. I could not say how this had happened, but it had; nor could I honestly say that it was knowledge I’d been waiting for or wanted. But it had come just the same. And now I was awake.

  Josef and Katya were trapped. They could not fly away because they were kites tied to a tree.

  The tree was me. And it was my father. And like my father—like me, who every second of my life in the country of my birth had always been, and would always be, Josef Stalin’s daughter, a character written in blood in the ledger of his atrocities—the tree that was holding back my children was dead but still standing. It would always be standing in Russia, no matter the future. And it would always be dead.

  So long as my children remained tied to that tree, I now understood, they would never be free.

  Which left only one thing for me to do, if I truly loved them.

  I had to cut the strings that held them.

  And I must do it now, without thinking anymore, while I had the chance.

  26 April

  It is hard to know what time it is in the ballroom of the Plaza hotel, whether day or night. Ornate crystal chandeliers spread every couple of meters across the wood-paneled ceiling shine like unblinking stars. I am seated beside my handsome young lawyer, Peter Horvath, and his senior partner, Mr. Lucas Wardlow, Esquire—an elegant and distinguished older man of precious few words who, it is said, regularly beats the crafty Mr. George Kennan at cards—on a raised stage in the center of the massive room. The hundreds of reporters and photographers from newspapers around the world who have gathered to hear me answer questions appear as little more than faceless presences, mere reflections of the light shining from above.

  Peter is wearing a different suit from our first day together, of brown wool carefully pressed, and a boyishly striped necktie. His short dark hair neatly parted to the side. Today for the first time I am aware that his eyes are an unusual shade of light brown, honeyed like walnuts.

  One by one in a steady, slightly hoarse voice, Peter reads out the questions that we have agreed on in advance, and waits for my answers with a patient but curious leaning-in of his shoulders that reminds me once again of my brother Yakov. This, and the trembling edges of the sheet of typed questions in his hands, is the only sign of what must be a considerable case of nerves. Every so often, he casts a sideways glance at his boss, Wardlow, as if trying to gauge how things are really going.

  Miss Alliluyeva, can you tell us something about the actual moment of your decision to defect from the Soviet Union, the United States’s avowed Communist enemy, the country that, from 1922 until his death in 1953, your father Joseph Stalin ruled with one of the bloodiest, most paranoid, and most ruthless hands in history?

  This last is a bit of dramatic flourish on Peter’s part. I am not saying that it isn’t accurate, in its way. I am saying that until now I have not recognized my new lawyer’s quiet, well-mannered wish to have some of history’s spotlight fall on himself.

  I turn to him and smile. Have you ever been to India, Peter? I begin. And then I turn my face and smile directly into the blinding lights:

  Have any of you ever been to India? Have you ever bathed in the Ganges?

  * * *

  —

  After the final question and answer, Peter guides me through exploding camera flashes to the elevator. The Plaza hotel elevator is a beautiful creation, fitted out like a small mobile salon. Peter and Lucas Wardlow lead me into it, with a few of the more senior newsmen insinuating themselves inside just before the door closes. Male eyes stare uncomfortably at empty space as we begin to descend. We are between the third and fourth floors when the car comes to a sudden, grinding halt. Tense silence, then one of the newsmen lets out a crude curse. I glance at Peter and am surprised to find his brow glistening with sweat.

  It is Lucas Wardlow, the former Navy admiral, who manages to save the situation. Don’t take this personally, my dear, he says to me with his gentleman’s small dry smile. Khrushchev got stuck in here too. It was nearly World War Three.

  Now some relieved chuckles, followed by general chatter about Khrushchev’s shoe-banging incident at the United Nations. This is still going on a couple of minutes later, when the elevator suddenly begins to descend again. Before we know it, Peter and I are out on the street and inside a waiting car. Wardlow has gone off in a separate limousine. Peter gives our driver his office address and falls back on the seat beside me, silent and pale, dabbing at his shining face with a handkerchief.

  The limousine begins to move. I ask Peter if he is all right.

  The elevator, he confesses. I’m not crazy about confined spaces.

  I stare at him awhile. Confined is the word that interests me, here in this country. My lawyer looks quite young now, American young, still not wholly made.

  You don’t like to feel trapped?

  He nods.

  I take the handkerchief from his hand. In the backseat of the car, I press the damp square of cotton to his brow to calm him. He lets me do this like a dog that expects to be petted.

  I say, Maybe this is why you and I, we get along so well.

  Maybe, he acknowledges, with a quick inquisitive glance at me that I find charming. You could be right.

  4 May

  Katya’s birthday: she is seventeen today.

  Weighing less than two kilos, she arrived weeks early into this world. The nurse whisked my baby away to the heating unit before I could properly welcome her. I was terrified—was there something seriously wrong with her? But as it turned out, my daughter was just anxious to get going with her life. Even in the incubator, where most of the premature infants slept from morning till night, my Katya would not rest. A stubborn scientist even then, gathering data with her tiny fists, probing silent questions with her miniature wrinkled feet. As if she already knew how she must strengthen and prepare herself for the day, so many years in the future, when her mother, the one person who should never do such a thing, might fly away to the other side of the world and not return.

  * * *

  —

  From the convent in Fribourg, Switzerland, where this winter and early spring I was forced to wait to learn whether or when the U.S. government would take me, it was arranged for me to place a single telephone call home.

  It was evening in Moscow when I heard the double click of the line being connected, and Josef’s manly voice saying hello. His tone changed the instant he understood it was me.

  Oh, dear God…

  And then, with a sharp intake of breath, he fell silent.

  At the same time, in the background, I could hear the unmistakable groan of the oven door being opened; and with a feeling like being scalded, I saw my son standing at the three-legged phone table in the corner of our kitchen and my Katya opening the oven door to put in or take out whatever it was she was making for their dinner. That kitchen that had been our family’s home for fifteen years, where, on my own, with my dear nurse departed to the grave (her heart finally exhausted from giving so much for so long), I learned to cook on a gas stove, sew basic clothes, do the washing up—to become a mother. That kitchen where now my children would be standing with only themselves for company, as over the crackling, infiltrated line their mother kept repeating in a voice of barely contained panic, I am not a tourist…Josef, do you understand? I am not a tourist…I will not return.

  My son asked me no questions that day. All he would reply, like a bank teller speaking through a grated window as you try to explai
n the problem you are having with your account, was I hear you.

  Then the line went dead.

  17 May

  My host, Mr. Gus Seward, a kind widowed gentleman of Locust Valley, New York, knocks carefully on the door to my room. This was his daughter’s bedroom—she whom I scarcely have met but who supposedly is going to translate my book, though I must say I have serious doubts about her Russian credentials—and so he must know it well. How many times during his daughter’s adolescence might he have heard coming from here similar sounds of wretchedness and anguished confusion?

  Svetlana? Are you all right?

  I can’t help it—I begin to cry all over again. He enters then, a gallant fireman in baggy tennis whites, yellowed faintly at the hems from age. His legs practically hairless, pale as fish bones. His hair reduced to a white horseshoe that sits atop a nicely shaped head. He has a regular game of doubles tennis that he never misses, I’ve learned, with three other widowers like himself at the country club.

  Gus stops short, perhaps taken aback by the trail of used tissues running from his feet to the dressing table, where I sit hunched, my face averted from him.

  Are you feeling sick?

  Still sniveling, I translate aloud for him my son’s Russian message, delivered to me this morning by Peter’s office:

  You may rest assured that your words on tourism were fully understood, and I have no intention of inducing you to return, especially after our talk. I consider that by your action you have cut yourself off from us and, therefore, please allow Katya and me to live as we see fit. I want to emphasize that I do not take it upon myself to judge your actions; but since we have endured fairly stoically what you have done, I hope that from now on we shall be allowed to arrange our own lives ourselves.

  * * *

  —