John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

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 explain 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.

Oh dear, murmurs Gus.

I glance up and see compassion in his faded blue eyes.

I don’t suppose you’d like to come with me to the club? It really is a very nice place to relax.

No, thank you.

No, of course not, why would you? Well, we’ll meet for dinner then, as usual? I have a new Brahms record I think you might like.

I nod and blow my nose, adding another balled tissue to the pile, and he backs gently out of the room, shutting the door softly. A minute or so later, I hear his car—a magnificent Buick convertible about six meters long—roar to life in the driveway, then move slowly out into the quiet street and away.