John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

And here was Logan, master of dead languages, leaping from his fishy car. Mrs. Evans, for God’s sake get him in the house quickly!

Yanking open the rear door, he hauled Yasha out. I could see immediately how frightened my son was.

Mom, what’s going on?

There was no time to answer him, and how could I anyway? Taking him by the hand, I fought our way through the shouting mob that stood between him and that priceless freedom to be a child that will never again be his.

4 April

That, I say nervously, touching the black-and-white photograph, was your grandfather .

Who was he? Yasha wants to know, at once curious and perhaps already faintly, though still unconsciously, troubled. For the image I have just handed him, while famous the world over as a document of history, is to him wholly unfamiliar: Stalin, Churchill, and Truman at the Potsdam Conference, circa late July 1945.

Your grandfather was the leader of the Soviet Union all through my childhood, until his death in 1953.

Only when I do not speak the name and get away with it, at least for the moment, does it become fully confirmed in my mind that my son has never actually heard his grandfather’s name, does not know it or connect himself with it, still considers it, as it were, an unknown fiction, that historical asterisk of a name that even children in Cameroon and farthest Indonesia and the highest mountain reaches of Nepal know to despise.

The leader? Like the president?

You could say that. But the differences are important.

That’s Churchill next to him?

Yes, Winston Churchill. Prime Minister of Britain during the war. I met him when I was just a few years older than you.

You met Winston Churchill?

Only for a minute. He told me that before he went bald his hair was red like mine used to be. And that man there—

That’s Harry Truman.

Yes.

So these are the leaders who beat Hitler and won World War II.

You’re right, I say to my son.

And he was my grandfather? That’s pretty cool. I can’t believe you never told me any of this.

Yasha, listen to me. There is only one thing you need to know. You are American. Your father is American, and so are you. I am now an American citizen. But you, you were American from the second you were born.

I get it, Mom. I’m American.

Of course, he did not get it, not yet, because I had spent his entire life to that point making sure never to give it to him to get. Had kept him growing always in the dark, as a hypocrite farmer, congratulating himself for being humane, might keep his prize hog locked in the barn before the slaughter.

But now, thanks to the supposed journalist Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge (friendly enough to me when I first landed, but whom Fiona says she heard last evening gossiping disgracefully about me and my father on BBC Radio) and his tribe of Fleet Street arsonists, my son’s last vestige of innocence will be consumed by their flames in a matter of days, if not hours. And there is nothing I can do to stop it. And there is nowhere for us to go.

13 June

Today a letter from Josef. The Soviet government will allow him to travel to Helsinki, where he and I can meet.

I write this miraculous news again, to show myself it is real: The Soviet government will allow my son to travel to Helsinki, where he and I can meet.

Helsinki, Finland.

I could copy the words a hundred times and still not truly believe. He promises another letter as soon as he has more details. Okay. I can wait, knowing I will see him soon.

My firstborn. My son.

The time has come.

I wrote that at one in the morning. Now it is three and I have begun to doubt. Familiar disease, blowing under my closed door. I have not slept. Because I know the people in charge there. Oh, some of them have died, some have changed; but I know them. And they think they know me. They think they understand a mother’s love.

They have no idea what I’m willing to do for my children.

I have the most recent photo of Josef propped on my knees so I can look at his face and see the painful and unhealthy life I abandoned him to. See that if there was ever a boy who needed his mother, it is this boy. This man. My Josef.

Daylight. Fell asleep just before dawn and dreamed of a place called Helsinki. Winter, clean and cold and harshly bright, so blinding I can’t look without shading my eyes with my hands and squinting.

And now through this hellish glare I see what looms ahead of me:

An entirely empty airport.

29 June

I give you the curse of believing. The curse of fucking Helsinki. The curse of a photograph of my son that is not my son. For even in that photograph he looked sick and old before his time, a son in need of his mother.

Being examined by experts, he writes. Medically unable to work… Unable to travel.

So disappointed… Wanted to see you so much.

I drop his letter on the kitchen floor—spotless for once because I have recently cleaned it, imagining as I pushed the mop here and there of being in Helsinki with my son, bringing him home with me. But there is no Helsinki. Helsinki was a curse. So there is no home. There is only this letter on my clean floor as I dial his Moscow phone number and let it ring and ring. No answer in the USSR. I hang up, dial again, it’s the bloody same, and I go on like this dialing, listening, hanging up, dialing, until finally I hear the double click I have been praying for, followed by the voice of a dying patient.

Mother?

Bunny, I cry, I’m coming to take care of you!

And the moment I speak them, I know these words are the very truth that I have carried and planned for since my unforgivable mistake all those years ago, abandoning my children for what I assured myself was their own good. For never in his life—never in his life—has Josef needed me more than he needs me now.

I am his mother. And I must find a way to go to him, whatever the consequences.

17 October 1984

Chaucer Road, Cambridge

Dear Peter,

You will be home by now. Will you have told Martha, after all, that you came to see me during your business trip to England? I wonder. But then you are probably regretting in any case that the visit was not as you hoped. I am sorry that after the joys of seeing each other again after so long; after getting to hold you again as I often imagined but never expected; after physical and emotional honesties between us—that all this should have ended, stupidly, in an argument at the very last minute.

I did not mean what I said. You must know this. You are not a spy or enemy; you could never be that to me. I am under increasing amounts of stress, and anger sometimes is the result. You once told me, back at the beginning, that you have a terror of feeling trapped. Well, it is the same for me. I am good and trapped now, Peter. I have tried my hardest to make certain things possible in this part of the world for myself and Yasha, you know I have, and you have seen with your own eyes how it has not worked out. And when one is older, you also know, one’s mistakes become magnified within one’s history; they are easily made catastrophic. And so I realize my situation to be now. The sacrifices I have made for Yasha’s schooling have had some beneficial effects—you witness how he has grown in body and mind—but they also I think created the illusion that there was a chance to outrun my father’s ghost and establish some permanent life of peace for myself and my son. And this was a lie. It cannot happen in the West, I finally see that; too many betrayals have occurred, with only more to come. (I don’t mean you.) The illusion is over. Perhaps just as well. You asked me—you were angry—what the hell was I going to do now that I was determined to “burn every last bridge” in my life. I told you that I didn’t know. But I do know, Peter. And when you learn what it is, you will want nothing to do with me ever again. And that, for me, you must believe, is a terrible cost to pay. But what else can I do? I have made mistakes no mother should make.