John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

I accept, thank you.

He raises his glass to my eye level and drinks. Budem zdorovy .

I smile. You speak Russian?

No. But I can say Cheers in twelve languages.

That is clever.

Useful at dinner parties, anyway. Tell me something. How does it feel to defect to America only to realize that this government is run by fucking liars too?

I am not surprised, I reply . Governments will always lie. It is the job of artists and intellectuals to tell the truth.

All right. But when a government’s lies are criminal and go unpunished, they make liars out of everyone.

I refuse to accept responsibility for other people’s lies. Only my own.

Again he raises his glass at me, but this time I sense something ironic in the gesture.

You are mocking me.

Not at all. He is quite a lot taller than I, with a canny well-worn face, and I must crane my head to meet his steady, penetrating stare. The whites of his eyes are stippled with blood veins.

I don’t believe you.

His grin disarms me. Hey, it’s a free country, right? His impudence reminds me of Vasily: the reckless manners of a prince who has been drinking since breakfast.

Of course . Why else would I have come here?

Ever been to Vietnam?

No.

The shit going down over there is worse than anything even your old man ever cooked up. And I’m not fucking kidding.

Suddenly, Peter is at my side, a hand on my elbow. All right?

Our Russian friend and I were just talking about travel, the journalist says in a tone that might as easily be sincere as a savage joke. So many places to go and so little time.

Peter glances at me for confirmation. I allow him to guide me across the room to the female novelist, whose black hair is cut straight across her forehead like that of a schoolgirl in a provincial town. She lives in Atlanta and has written fifteen books. When I ask whether she has a particular subject that she returns to in her work, she replies, Human beings, more or less . We find common ground in our admiration for Chekhov, though not so for Pushkin, whom she clearly has never read.

At dinner, I am seated between our host and the bank director, who regrets to say, goddamnit, that being in a war, any war, he means to say, is simply good for business. I’m very sorry, but it just goddamn is, Jasper. That’s the way of the world and everyone knows it.

Oh, my grandfather Lawrence certainly would’ve agreed with you, Jasper Penshaw replies . He made a killing in coal during the First World War, you know. And he only had one leg.

The bank director appears startled. Your grandfather lost a leg in the war? Christ, I didn’t know that.

No. He lost the leg flying a kite.

There follows a brief silence. Then as the borscht is served by a waiter, our hostess rings a crystal glass with a tiny silver spoon, rises to her feet, and, with one diamond-encrusted hand placed over her significant breasts, recites:

Staring at me across the long oval table, she then speaks the same poem in Russian. Last, comes her toast:

Our late prophetess Akhmatova was persecuted for what she believed and had the courage to say in her poetry and in her life. Our honored guest this evening has made her own poetic statement against the morally bankrupt Soviet system by choosing freedom of act and expression over the chains of her own blood. We salute her for her courage and welcome her to our country.

Two hours later, we embrace by the door. She calls me sister and predicts an everlasting bond between us. I profess my deepest debt of thanks for her heartfelt welcome, the poetry of the great Akhmatova, the most generous toast, the pristine Russian vodka—though in my private mind I already have doubts about my new sister. Here in this country, cut off from its roots, her abject romanticism for survivor-heroes strikes me as a couple of shades too bright. She is enjoying herself too much. Only in the drawing rooms of émigré nostalgics like Raisa Malinov will we go on making toasts and singing songs as though the original film were still running, over and over, the villains larger than life, the heroes ever arriving.

I did not leave my children and my homeland to traffic in such fairy tales.

19 July

Almost noon and I am still in bed. This cottage made of flimsiest wood, reverberating sound. Half an hour ago, I heard Martha say to Peter in what I am sure she believed was a low voice, This is ridiculous . We’re not waiting another minute for her . And the family gathered itself together—towels, suntan lotion, beach umbrella, sandwiches by the sound of it—and piled itself into the car and drove off for the beach on the other side of the island, where the surf is always strong.

I have brought my notebook into bed so that I may revisit yesterday and lie here a little longer and think. The story goes on. There is more to say. And still one tries to tell the truth. Yes, one tries.

All right: I drank too much. But I wasn’t the only one.

On the way home from the Penshaws’, Martha sits in the shadows of the backseat with a hand covering her eyes as though a spotlight is trained on her and she is trying to disappear. Migraine. We arrive at the cottage and she goes straight upstairs, leaving Peter to pay the babysitter.

The teenager drives off, and Peter and I are alone. For a moment my lawyer stands with slack features, looking suddenly doubtful and tired and all too young. But then he seems to recognize this as a dangerous condition in himself, some weak or drifting quality that he must remain vigilant against. He puts a smile on his face and asks if I wouldn’t care for one more drink for the road.

I have no idea what road he’s talking about, not that it makes a difference.

I’ll just go check on Jean, he says. Be down in a minute .

By now, I know to look for the vodka in the freezer. I pour two drinks in plastic blue glasses designed for small children and take them to the back porch, where folding chairs are set up around a small wooden table. If the crickets would be quiet, I might hear the surf breaking on the beach. But these insects are something plugged into an electric current, pulsing like stars in the black sky.

In a few minutes Peter emerges, sits down next to me, and picks up his drink.

Once in a while Jean has nightmares . He keeps his voice low, presumably to spare Martha’s headache.

What do you do for her?

Nothing much. Hold her and tell her it was just a dream. Give her a back rub till she falls back to sleep.

And Martha?

He swallows more vodka. We each have our roles, he says finally.

I say nothing. Because when my children were small enough to have nightmares that caused them to shiver with fear, it wasn’t me they called for in the middle of the night. Nurse! they would cry. Nurse, come! Come now! I’m scared! And Alexandra Andreevna would always be near; she was the one who would comfort them in their beds. As she did for me when I was a child. Yes, we may call our land Mother Russia; but it turns out that we are not a land of mothers after all. I cannot remember, not really, physical tenderness from my own mother. Nor, though I was unquestionably more demonstrative in my love with my children than my mother ever was with me, can I honestly claim that I ever was for them what my nurse was for all of us, which is to say a physical mother whose love daily and nightly was delivered through hands and hugs and kisses; whose body, profound in its comforting solidity, would always lean across any distance to bridge the ever-yawning gap between lonely child and all that is cold and cruel in the world.