John Schwartz - The Red Daughter

I will write and ask his permission for us to leave. Beg him if I have to. Prostrate myself, kiss his cunning feet. Somehow I must extricate Yasha from this calamity I have made, that is all I know.

This is no place for a child. It never was.

“Pete, I thought you should know,” Dick Thompson began as soon as our drinks had been served in the Irish bar near Penn Station that we used to frequent and that now, under new management, appeared to have a Spanish theme, “that yesterday 11:17 A.M. Moscow time, our Russian friend was taken into custody by the Soviets outside the American Embassy.”

“What? I thought she and Yasha were in Tbilisi.”

It was almost exactly a year after Svetlana had written in her journal about Gorbachev and his “cunning feet”—though of course I had no knowledge of such a personal record at the time. I had not heard from her in eighteen months.

“They took her to the Kremlin,” Dick said. “Our sources report a meeting with Foreign Ministry officials. Best guess is that the sit-down was her goal all along, since she would have known that as a Soviet citizen—which she is again—she’d be barred from all foreign embassies.”

“So what do you think she’s trying to do?”

“Get her and her kid the hell out of the USSR. She’s been hounding Gorbachev with letters to that effect all this past year. Poor Gorby’s smack in the middle of his first Party Conference as General Secretary, and ten to one, he’s ready to let her leave the country without a fight.”

“Where are she and Yasha now?”

Dick paused. “That’s another thing I wanted to tell you personally, Pete, so you wouldn’t hear it from somebody else. It seems that hours after leaving the Kremlin, Svetlana suffered some kind of cardiac incident.”

“You mean a heart attack?”

“She’s alive—we would’ve heard if she wasn’t. But she’s in Kremlin Hospital right now.”

“You saw Dick Thompson today.”

Martha and I were in the kitchen of our house that evening, finishing what, until now, had been an uneventful dinner of broiled salmon and potatoes. I had removed my tie and suit jacket; Martha was wearing her gray cashmere cardigan and her mother’s pearls; she always took pains to look nice at home, even when it was just the two of us.

When I refused to take the bait, Martha confirmed my suspicion about her source: “Beverly told me.”

“Beverly should know to keep her mouth shut about things that don’t concern her.”

“What did Dick have to say? We both know he never appears unless he’s got news of some kind. Usually about your ‘Russian friend.’ ”

I stared hard at my wife. “Svetlana had a heart attack.”

My announcement had its desired effect: briefly stunned, Martha sat back in her chair, perfectly still. “Is she dead?”

“No, she’s not dead. She’s in a hospital in Moscow.”

“Well, I hope she has another heart attack and this time it kills her.”

My wife took a moment to compose herself, and then she began to clear the dishes.

5 April

Kremlin Hospital

I should be gone by now, or dead. Where I should not be is this high-security prison run by apparatchiks where the nurses are iron maidens and the doctors all spies. A guard attempting not to look like a guard stands outside my door day and night. Not the state of my heart they are worried about, but my death-defying name and the loudness of my voice.

Visiting hours come and go. Yasha brings me the Akhmatova book I asked for, sits by my bed holding my hand for a quarter of an hour. I tell him that physically I will be fine, he must believe me, I just need to get the hell out of this hellhole.

Mom, he says in a small voice just past cracking, you really scared me this time .

Then I must have fallen asleep under these Gulag lights, because when I next open my eyes Yasha is gone and it is my other son sitting in a chair a meter away. Josef, whom I have not seen in some fifteen months, appears even older and more unhealthy than last time.

We stare at each other.

I should have come back for you and your sister, I tell him. I’m sorry.

I have spoken with your doctors and looked at your chart myself, my older son addresses me in the voice of a state-appointed medical functionary. What you suffered was not technically cardiac arrest, rather a cardiovascular spasm caused by extreme stress. It didn’t kill you this time, but you must find a way to calm down or it will kill you soon.

You wish I was dead, I can’t stop myself from accusing him.

I did not come here to fight with you, Mother.

Then why come at all, if you despise me so much?

His furious, pained, defeated eyes boring into mine, my son rises to his feet.

I am here, he says, because you gave birth to me . I am here because to not come would be to make more of a statement about you than I care to make. I am here because soon you’ll get your wish and be gone again and I will still be left wondering what I ever did to you, what any of us ever did to you, to make you treat us, your own flesh and blood, like your most hated enemies.

Oh, Bunny, please don’t…

No, Mother. It’s too late to act as if you never did what you did. It’s way too late.

13 April

Hotel Sovietsky

A week out of hospital. Yasha and I still waiting for decisions about our future to find their way from Gorbachev to Ligachev and the Central Committee to the embassies and various shadows on the ground. Gatekeepers and gates. Waiting for passports and passage. Yasha’s term at the Friends’ School begins in a week, so perhaps they will let him leave first.

If I could give him anything I would give him this: let him go free not only from this country of poisoned families and broken manifestos but from me. Let him, for once, live his own mistakes instead of his mother’s.

I have been the ruin of too many children already.

A minute ago, I heard him stirring with unhappy restlessness in the maid’s cot on the other side of our room. I went and stood by him, tugging the edge of the blanket to cover his exposed feet.

Telling myself: He is not a man yet, thank God. There are things he cannot understand. My time on this earth may be measured now only in memories, but he is still the unwritten future.

Mom?

His eyes have opened and found me standing over him like a watchdog.

My darling.

What if they never let us leave?

Don’t be silly. Go back to sleep.

But what if they don’t?

Listen to me, my love. Are you listening? If I have to, I will call George Kennan, the CIA, the New York Fucking Times, Gorbachev and Gorbachev’s mother—I will call everyone there is on the planet, and I will make such a scene that in the end they will beg, beg us to leave their miserable country and never come back. Do you believe me?

Yasha’s smile is slow and sleepy. I believe you, Mom.

Good. Now go back to sleep. When you wake up, we’ll be in another country.

16 April 1986

Zurich London

Dear Peter,

I write you today like a god, ten thousand meters in the sky, flying at a speed that would make gods weep. But if I’m a god this incarnation is a tragic absurdity, for I am traveling backwards, not forwards, in my life; blind, not all-seeing; humbled, not proud.