The Red Daughter Read online

  * * *

  —

  Perched like a squat little doll on the lap of Lavrentiy Beria, newly elected member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and known to be the vozhd’s most trusted subordinate, I watch my father swallow an oyster with one deft scoop of his strong blunt hand. How like a shark he feeds himself carelessly, never tasting the food, his attention darkly riveted by papers and charts spread over the round stone table on the terrace outside his summer dacha. Of course, it doesn’t occur to me that these must be food production numbers: thousands, millions, starving to death in the countryside, though no one dares speak or write of it.

  My father’s face is a fist. Without looking, he tosses the empty shell back on the ice-covered tray.

  And now, from behind me, Beria’s hand emerges: the lithe manicured fingers of a knife artist. His arm brushes my ribs, then retracts holding a plump, glistening oyster on its shell—someone’s stolen gray tongue. I listen to it being slurped down inches from my ear, smelling the seawater in which it lived, mixed now with the sickening taint of Beria’s breath. The sunlight reflecting off his pince-nez. The cunning smack of his lips practically inside my head.

  A starving man is no threat, he observes to the vozhd, the oysters already decomposing in their stomachs. And my father in his simple peasant tunic doesn’t bother to contradict him, says nothing. Closed for business. With a twitch of nervous satisfaction, Beria lights a cigarette.

  * * *

  —

  I am being taught to swim by a military instructor. My father observing me from the rocky beach, Beria a human tuning fork beside him. Out in the water the instructor’s strong hands let me go: I begin to sink, mouth and throat filling with liquid salt, which is the drowning taste—I know this even then—of the black sea of my mother’s absence.

  Swim, Housekeeper, swim! That’s an order! My father walks away, not waiting to see whether or not I will obey him and live. It’s half-amusing to him, this idea of his giving me, his bossy little Housekeeper, an order. Beria, meanwhile, round lenses of his pince-nez silvered like coins in the sunlight, never cracks a smile. He lingers behind a few moments, hoping to see my arms flail and my legs thrash and my head go under once more. But I refuse to give him that pleasure. I will swim, or I will die.

  Bravo, calls the snake in his snake’s voice when I finally crawl and gasp my way onto the shore.

  He makes sure to say it loud enough for the vozhd to hear. Unfortunately for him, no one is listening.

  * * *

  —

  As the vozhd’s only daughter and Little Hostess, she who (at that time, anyway, and aided by that doll-master of perfection Lyolka) could do no wrong, I was to a large extent removed from direct experience of my father’s increasingly vindictive temper. My brothers, however, were not so fortunate; you might say that our father’s nose for human frailty was not mere sport, but a form of insatiable hunger. It could hardly be coincidence that Vasily began drinking heavily at the age of thirteen; or that by the age of twenty, in 1941, good-looking, arrogant, thin-skinned, and hysterically insecure, he had become both a raging alcoholic and a colonel in the Red Air Force. I tried never to be alone with him.

  But it was Yakov, my Georgian half brother, nineteen years older, gentle and shy, from the first marriage to Kato Svanidze (a dark beauty who died of typhus six months after giving birth), who paid the steepest price. My father would not agree to even meet his firstborn until Yakov was sixteen—and then only because my mother threatened to leave him if he did not exhibit, at minimum, this basic sense of decency. So they brought him into their sphere, if not exactly their home. My mother grew to love her stepson, I believe, and worried about him. But my father would not relent. He bullied the young man with the quiet nature who looked, everyone said, so much like his mother; no opportunity was missed to remark on some perceived failing, some weakness or slowness. When Yakov’s first daughter died in infancy, our father’s silence rang like a personal indictment. And sometime afterward, when Yakov’s despair led him to attempt suicide with one of his father’s pistols, only to flinch at the last moment so that the bullet missed its intended target, that great deep heart, and passed straight through to his other side, leaving him badly wounded but still alive, my father’s contempt knew no bounds. Weakling! he snarled. Look at you! You can’t even shoot like a man!

  But eventually Yakov did learn how to shoot, oh yes: he became a soldier. And when war with Germany was declared, he chose to prove himself by volunteering for the front the very next day. Our father’s parting message to him was to publicly declare that his son was to be shown no special treatment of any kind—not on the battlefield or anywhere else.

  A month later, Yakov and his unit were captured by the Germans. During the next four years, the enemy made numerous attempts to engage the Supreme Commander of the Soviet Republic in a prisoner-of-war exchange for his son, but Josef Stalin refused every offer.

  * * *

  —

  Reports on the death of Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili (our father’s birth surname, before he began to call himself Stalin) are now, as they were then, impossible to verify. Some vow that he was shot by German camp guards as he attempted to escape from the concentration camp in which he’d spent the last four years. Others swear that one frigid, endless night, mustering whatever reserves of strength he had left, he threw himself against the electrified razor wire surrounding the camp and, hanging there as if crucified, was electrocuted to death before his captors’ bullets could touch him.

  The only thing that is absolutely certain is that he never returned.

  * * *

  —

  I once overheard my aunt Anna, my mother’s sister, saying to my uncle Stanislav, through a closed door that I should never have been anywhere near, What about exile?

  And he replied, We don’t have exile. We just disappear.

  Stanislav was executed in 1940. Eight years later, Anna was arrested. The only thing my father mistrusted more than strangers was family.

  The vozhd’s death, in 1953, finally liberated my aunt, but she was never the same. More and more over the years, she found it threatening to leave her little apartment. Every day she sat in the same chair in the same room and said the same things, her thoughts magnetically sealed inside her imprisonment, which had grown more real to her than her life. It was as if she too had never returned.

  * * *

  —

  But I can’t know any of this yet. It is August 1942, I am sixteen, and my head is filled with my own concerns.

  Word comes: I am summoned to dinner at Kuntsevo, the rarest of invitations. Why this evening in particular? I am not told. My nurse, Alexandra Andreevna, insists I wear the longer skirt, the one that falls well below my knee. I am still a schoolgirl, reading all the time, half in love with Mayakovsky and Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. Yet when the summons from my father comes, without so much as a whiff of irony, I put on the longer dress and go.

  I enter the room and there is a bald man, round and full-fleshed, wearing formal clothes and smoking a preposterously large cigar, which he holds between the thick second and third fingers of his right hand. The room pungent with his cultured, foreign smoke. And because of the nature of that smoke, though I am still ignorant of the identity of the man producing it, I become aware that for the first time my father has invited me to witness a meeting of the highest diplomatic importance.

  Prime Minister, my father announces in his gruff voice nonetheless warmed by a certain strategic pride in showing off his domestic qualities for his visitor, this is my only daughter, Svetlana, the youngest and bossiest of my children. Quite bright and opinionated she is. Always telling me what to do and not do with myself. And most of the time I listen—isn’t that so, Svetlana? Now give greetings to Mr. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of our ally Great Britain.

  Mr. Winston
Churchill smiles at my father, his manner at once perfectly jolly and perfectly grim. Allow me to say, Mr. Stalin, that you are a most fortunate man to have such a charming, sharp-minded adviser at your constant disposal. And redheaded. My dear—he turns to me, gesturing with the glowing eye-tip of his cigar about his hairless round skull—I was a redhead too, you know. But look what the war has done to me.

  Moments later, I am ushered out of the room.

  It is years hence, of course, that I come to understand the reason for Churchill’s unexpected visit to Kuntsevo that night, and why my father might have wanted to present me to him. The Prime Minister had come in person to discuss strategy, but really to deliver the unwelcome news that the Allies were delaying still further any attempt to establish a second front in the war in Western Europe—meaning there would be no immediate relief for the USSR in our bloody struggle against Hitler in the Eastern campaign, which was on the verge of annihilating our country. Even now, I confess I am rather moved by the thought that my father could have been desperate enough to imagine that trotting out his redheaded Housekeeper (who in truth was no longer that girl) before Democracy’s great aristocratic orator might have been enough to tilt history’s compass in his favor. In any event, I was quickly dismissed from the room, and then from Kuntsevo altogether, and many more thousands, indeed millions, of human beings would go on to lose their lives in the carnage presided the world over by men who smoked cigars.

  * * *

  —

  Three months later, I again find myself at Kuntsevo, this time at a party thrown by Vasily. The evening has grown late. Wearing my first real dressmaker’s dress, low-heeled shoes, a garnet brooch of my mother’s, I am being guided in the fox-trot by Alexsei Kapler, a handsome and well-known Jewish filmmaker more than twice my age, with a reputation for enjoying the company of beautiful women wherever he goes.

  He is just back from filming guerrilla fighters in Belorussia, he tells me. He adds that he keeps an unheated room in the Moscow Savoy, where he greets friends and colleagues with black-market coffee. Do I like coffee? In a few days, he will be leaving for Stalingrad. Who can say how long he will be gone?

  My close friends call me Lyusia, he says.

  Last record! someone shouts down the room—it is Vasily, drunk as an entire brigade. (Where is my father? On this night at least, I have no memory of him.) I can feel Lyusia’s warm hand in the small of my back, our feet somehow moving in unison.

  Tell me, he murmurs in my ear, his troubled, knowing eyes on mine. Why do you look so unhappy?

  And because I am already a little in love with him, and because no one else has thought to ask, I answer his question.

  Tonight, I tell him, the eighth of November, is the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death.

  * * *

  —

  That night I hardly sleep for thinking about him. Waking me in the morning, my nurse calls me silly, but she is tender as she makes me breakfast; for with her animal-hearted love she understands that something important has happened to me, and that suffering and grief are the only possible end to it.

  * * *

  —

  There has been no promise, of course, no plans made. To attempt such a thing with the vozhd’s daughter would be an act of unthinkable recklessness.

  Yet next afternoon, as I emerge through the gates of my school into the November gloom, he is the first person I see, hunched in a doorway, smoke from his ration cigarette blurring the sharp lines of his face. Waiting for me. His slow smile causes my breath to freeze in my throat.

  Then he notices Klimov, my official shadow, a few meters behind me, and his smile deserts him. A stocky, middle-aged fellow with a round, pushed-in face, Klimov regards me with an attitude of resolute apology. But he will not be deterred. His life depends on this, I have no doubt. Several times a day I catch him writing down his observations of my actions, acquaintances, conversations in a small leather notebook he keeps in his breast pocket.

  Lyusia strides up and offers him a cigarette. Klimov appears momentarily disarmed—there is nothing about this sort of scenario in his field manual. But when the Jewish filmmaker flourishes his steel lighter, the KGB flunky sticks the cigarette between his lips, bends over the flame.

  Klimov trails us to Gnezdnikovsky Street, where for six hours he waits outside the private screening room of the Ministry of Cinematography, while I am shown Queen Christina with Greta Garbo; then Young Mr. Lincoln with Henry Fonda; and finally, best of all, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

  I still do not know how Lyusia got hold of those films, or how on this day he is privileged to use the theater, but it doesn’t matter. There is nowhere else we can go. For these few blissful hours we are able to sit together in the darkness, alone. Ours the only eyes in the room, the only ears. At the start of the second reel, he takes my hand. I lean my head against his shoulder. His heavy tweed suit, wool cardigan sweater, his thick black hair—everything he wears or touches smells of smoke. By the end of the day, I smell of it too, it has infused me. His smoke. Not the smoke of war, incinerated villages, rationed cigarettes. But the smoke of burned love letters, shared secrets. The smoke of promise.

  Klimov smells it too. I see him sniffing like a confused dog as we emerge from the theater. But he cannot identify what Lyusia and I are now, has not recorded us with his own eyes, has no Party-approved definition of us to put in his notebook for the vozhd. And so he can do nothing but stand there looking fidgety and downtrodden as my lover and I bid each other a polite good night on Gnezdnikovsky Street. Snow has begun to fall, large flakes sifting down through vessels of dim yellow light formed by the streetlamps, endlessly filling their emptiness.

  Poor Klimov! He has not yet grasped the greatest truth about the vozhd, which is that smoke is the thing he fears most. The smoke of fires not his own.

  * * *

  —

  And now it’s March the third, 1943. Just another morning—or so I believe, rushing around the Kremlin apartment where I live with my nurse, late for school, searching for a misplaced sweater. I enter the dining room…and there to my surprise (he is always at Kuntsevo at this hour) stands my father. He turns on me, his face inflamed by months of pent-up rage but his voice like a cold steel blade:

  You think your boyfriend wants you because you’re pretty? Are you fucking joking? He’s got twenty other whores besides you, this I know for a fact.

  Only now do I notice the sea of confetti spilled over the dining table and the floor around my father’s boots. And realize, as in a nightmare, that he has found and torn to shreds every last letter and photograph that Lyusia ever gave me.

  Papa, where did you find those? What have you done?

  Think you have secrets from me? he bellows, making the room quake. From me? Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you know who I am?

  I practically spit at him. No. But now I know what you are.

  With one quick strike of his powerful arm, he slaps me across the face.

  Your boyfriend’s not even Russian! You had to go and find yourself a fucking Jew to make yourself feel important. Well, there’s nothing left of him. You’ll never see him again—yes, I’ve had him arrested. Now get out of my sight before I tell them to take you too.

  * * *

  —

  For many months afterward, I was banned from Kuntsevo and my father’s inner circle for what he called depravity. And then, for unexplained reasons, I was reinstated into his life, though never fully: never again would my father and I be Housekeeper and Secretary to each other.

  During the next ten years I was married to two men—one a Jew, one not, in the end it made no real difference to him—and with them had my two children, Josef and Katya. I can report that for the rest of his life my father showed no interest whatever in his grandchildren, and only intermittent curiosity about his daughter.

  *
* *

  —

  Yes, the rest of his life:

  On March the second, 1953, I am at the academy as usual, pursuing my advanced studies, when I am called out of French class to find a gray-faced man I have seen before in my father’s company.

  Malenkov wants you to come to Blizhny, he says to me.

  Surprised and unsettled—Blizhny is the code for Kuntsevo, and the only person who has ever requested my presence at the dacha is my father himself—I say nothing. The man turns on his heels, sure that I will follow him to the car outside.

  The short ride through the Moscow suburb passes in total silence. Of course, it occurs to me that my father is dead. Why else would this be happening? And yet my thoughts during the silent trip are tinged with banal recriminations. It has been a long time since I’ve seen him. He is an iceberg glimpsed from a distant ship, perhaps a mirage. From the usual sources I know that on the eve of my birthday the previous week he was at the Bolshoi seeing Swan Lake, though he did not think to ask me to join him. My last visit to Kuntsevo was many months earlier, when I could not help noticing the large color photographs of children on the walls of every room—not pictures of Josef or Katya or his other grandchildren, but enlarged images of vital young comrades of the Motherland, as he proudly referred to them. Who were these young heroes? I asked. Had he ever met any of them? Some boy expertly skiing, another sitting handsomely, bravely, in a blooming cherry tree, and so on. But he had not met any of those young comrades. No, he had no idea who any of them were.

  We pass through the gates of Kuntsevo. Khruschev and Bulganin, both in tears, are waiting outside to intercept me the moment I step from the car. Each takes one of my elbows, ushering me inside the house, murmuring only that Beria and Malenkov will tell me everything I need to know.