John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

I rest my cheek against my son’s letter. Fearing that this, right now, might be the closest I will ever come to my children again.

7 June

Egypt and Israel are now at war, joining America and Vietnam. Meanwhile, here in Locust Valley, we have our own little United Nations.

I am informed that the bus that has been parked near the house all this past week belongs to an Italian television company. Who knew Italians could be so patient and watchful? The best they could manage thus far, Gus tells me with a glint of victory in his eye, was an interview with the Polish gardener. As the gardener speaks very little English and no Italian, I’m not sure what news he was able to provide, save for the fact that I seem to be especially fond of azaleas.

The two private security men who have taken up virtual residence in the kitchen downstairs are brothers from Budapest. Together they must weigh three hundred kilos. They take turns eating vast quantities of the stews and chops prepared by Gus’s German housekeeper, who grumbles about the added work but cannot help looking pleased at the reception her food is getting. The brothers are unfailingly courteous to me, despite the fact that it was the Soviet Army’s invasion that forced them to flee their country. It is their job to scare away the newsmen who come every day to photograph the house and the windows of my borrowed room, my one haven in this place, which more and more I am reluctant to leave.

The other day, however, my translator, Marina, came for a visit (“consultation with the author,” she called it), and she and her father coaxed me out for a shopping expedition in town. We were accompanied on our walk by Gus’s Irish setter Geronimo, whose nervous and overbred disposition was not helped by the noise from the news helicopters following us everywhere we went. No surprise then that by the time we reached Main Street, there were gawkers and photographers everywhere we turned.

My translator desires me to buy new shoes. On this point she is strangely insistent. Her intimation, not in so many words, is that the shoes I have brought with me to this country are representative of a discredited, evil time in history. Actually, I want to tell her, they are just shoes, and French. Marina herself, I observe, has large American feet. Blond and rangy and long of limb, she is a woman who clearly spent much of her childhood playing tennis and riding horses; stallion is a favorite word. Her Russian she learned at college under scholars of varying quality, I would say.

She desires me to buy several pairs of shoes at once. Apparently what one does in America, as soon as one can, is buy as many of everything as possible. Without asking me what catches my fancy, she takes the store manager over to the window and points out several pairs of the latest styles for me to try on. All have substantial heels to improve my meager height. When after ten minutes I agree to buy only one pair of low-heeled walking shoes, and insist on paying for them with my own money, I can see the disappointment in her face, much as she tries to hide it. Perhaps my stubbornness and lack of appreciation for commercial opportunity and high fashion are traits associated in her mind with the world I come from, the anticulture of Soviet Russia. At any rate, the shoes I buy with my own money are shoes that I can see myself walking in anywhere in the world, not just in Locust Valley, New York.

Because—I want to grab her and say— anywhere in the world is a place I might still go. And so I must be ready, in case that happens.

25 June

Today at a UN press conference, Kosygin delivered Moscow’s first public remarks about me since my defection:

Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aims or to discredit the Soviet country.

26 June

Tonight Gus takes me in his Buick convertible, the top pushed down, to his favorite restaurant on the Long Island seashore for a farewell dinner. Though no longer young, he drives rapidly but with ease, a look of quiet refreshment on his face, dipping the steering wheel this way and that with the first two fingers of his right hand.

We come to the coast road and there is the moon, full and fat, suspended above the silver-streaked ocean, brackish wind in our faces. And I cannot explain it: suddenly each breath I take, braced with salt and memory, strikes my heart like a blow.

The restaurant is a steak house, that temple of carnivore abundance that Americans must be dreaming of when they exclaim to each other, with genial innocence and a boundless smile, You know, I think I could eat a horse! The Stars and Stripes flaps and snaps in the ocean breeze atop a tall metal pole beside the parking lot. The other cars filling the area are as long as Gus’s, some even more handsome. The dear man looks faintly crestfallen when I don’t wait for him to open my door.

We are seated at a table near a potted tree. In Russia, the grim half joke goes, even the potted trees have been cut down. Vodka martinis are brought. A few stares from other customers, but for once no reporters. Gus is charming in his boyish enthusiasm at having eluded them. I’ve always wanted to drive at Le Mans, he says with a wink. I have no idea what he’s talking about. The shrimp cocktail is very fresh here, he adds with gallant sincerity. And then I’d recommend the sirloin, medium rare. It’s the house specialty. Declaiming his best intentions thus, his voice is suddenly more than it was a minute ago—deeper, more confident—and I feel myself happy to be under his care for the evening.

Is the steak cooked enough for you?

Oh, yes.

Would you like some more creamed corn?

No, thank you, Gus. Too rich.

A waiter in a tuxedo pours us more wine.

Is Russian food anything like this? asks Gus.

I pretend to think for a moment, already knowing my answer: Not really.

Apple pie à la mode follows. Then we drive home under stars, moon, moist air, salt wind. Gus turns on the radio, twists the dial. It is not classical music or American jazz that he chooses but Elvis Presley singing “Long Legged Girl.” To my astonishment Gus begins whistling along with Elvis, his left hand playing rhythm on the outside of the car, his self-made notes dry but on key, quickly swept away by the onrushing wind.

The light on his front porch must have been on all the time we were at dinner: shining, it welcomes us back now. The car doors open and close like steel wings. Gus pours us a nightcap . We sit on the porch with our drinks, gently swinging and creaking on a wooden bench hung from the beams by chains.

4 July

I have been now for a week on Block Island with Peter and his wife, Martha, and their young daughter, Jean. From their rented cottage, covered like so many others here with wooden shingles, you can’t see the ocean, but you can smell it, and at certain times hear it. My hair and skin have grown soft from the salt in the moist island air. Even the tap water has a faint briny flavor, reminding one that this is but a tiny outcrop of rock where no one is ever very far from the sea; or from the cliffs that have been a hazard to ships and submarines for two hundred years, frequently sinking them; or from the graves of the Native Indians who were the original settlers here, and who, when they were not slaughtering each other, were massacred by the white islanders without a thought. Or so I have heard.

But America’s birthday is perhaps not the day for such histories. The main town is awash in red, white, and blue. I have never seen so many stars and so many stripes, to say nothing of watermelons, hot dogs, corn on the cob . Members of the local fire department shoot a cannon out into the bay—no bullets, only water, powerful and oddly thrilling. I am with Peter among the crowd at Old Harbor. (Martha has taken Jean off to meet a group of young mothers and their children.) Like the other men, he wears a white tennis shirt, khaki short trousers, and sunglasses like the ones Vasily and his pilot friends used to wear after a night of drinking. Smelling of a suntan lotion called Coppertone, his jaw darkened by a scrim of unshaven beard, my lawyer looks rather reborn in this place, his own master finally, no longer the young legal apprentice. Of course, I do not tell him this because I do not think he would consider it a compliment.