The Red Daughter Read online

  The scene inside, however, in the place my father always kept so controlled, is a study in human panic. There are no familiar faces. I am led through the front hall and down the corridor, through a shifting maze of obscure medical personnel (his longtime personal doctor is in prison) and weeping apparatchiks, to my father’s quarters. His once-spacious room so packed with people that I can’t see to the back, where a still denser knot of human obsequiousness—I can hear Beria’s constipated voice above the rest—has gathered around the sofa where he always slept. Near this cultish scrum looms a large machine with oxygen tanks, which must be an artificial respirator, though it’s obvious that none of the men tentatively pawing at its tubes and switches has the slightest idea how to make it, or my father, breathe.

  It is then that I see Beria, his entire body vibrating with the kind of rage only terror can bring, berating a professor from the medical academy.

  You call yourself a doctor! You idiot! Now get over there and do something!

  The singled-out victim steps forward with utmost reluctance—one almost pities him, forced to walk the fatal gangplank leading to the vozhd, which he has no doubt spent his entire professional life desperately trying to avoid—and I follow in his wake, the crowd briefly parting around us. Passing Beria, I note his round lenses streaked with the sweat that drips from him like madness. His drawn-out half bow in my direction is cynical in the extreme.

  A body lies prone on the sofa. My father. Eyes open—but staring, dulled, nothing like the eyes I remember. His gaze a cruel illusion, the medical professor assures me, meaning to be kind, I suppose: the hemorrhage that erupted in my father’s brain in the middle of the night has left him in a profound state of unconsciousness. It is clear to me already that none of them knows how to wake him, and even if they did, are too terrified of failure to succeed.

  As I stand watching, an injection is given into his limp arm. Then leeches are applied to his neck and the back of his head. It is medieval even by Soviet standards, and I turn away. Forgive me, sighs the medical professor under his breath—to me possibly, or to the vozhd himself, unlikely though he is to hear, or perhaps to the vozhd’s son Vasily, who at this moment comes storming into the room like a vengeful prince from the wrong fairy tale, shoving men out of his path and shouting, You’ve killed him! You’ll pay for this! All of you! Poisoned him! I’ll see to it myself! Just a few seconds, too drunk to recognize me or his own truncated future—or perhaps this is exactly what he recognizes—and then, as if struck by lightning, he turns on his heels and bolts from the room.

  Over the next three days, while Josef Stalin, trapped in that unwaking body, suffocates and withers, my perpetually drunk brother will return and replay his histrionics twice more, each time looking no one in the eye, each time running from the room as fast as his legs will carry him.

  Meanwhile, I sit down. And take my father’s lifeless hand. And wait.

  * * *

  —

  With the exception of my brother’s hysterical apparitions, I will be the only member of our family, distinct among the Berias and Malenkovs and the entire unimaginable apparatus of state power now witnessing its own demolishment in the dying body of a single man, to sit vigil over my father to the end. The rest of our people are either in prison or exiled from Kuntsevo by my father’s own decree. When I want company, which occasionally I do, I venture to the kitchen and sit quietly among the servants.

  And Beria? He is a spider, spinning his web around the vozhd’s body while the blood is still warm. He wants to wrap up something that never existed and hold it for himself alone. He thought he understood its nature, but he was wrong: they will kill him anyway.

  By the third day, my father’s lips, cheeks, throat, the tips of his fingers and toes have turned a necrotic black, as his lungs fill with fluid and slowly, ceaselessly his own biological system strangles the life from him. He is rotting from the inside. I refuse to leave my place beside him. It is strange and awful how, now that it is too late, compassion for him riddles my perception. In every one of his struggling breaths I imagine a fatherly tenderness from a lost childhood which contradicts all that has transpired between us since. The more ravaged his face grows, the more beautiful I find it.

  And then, as the death rattle grows imminent, just when it seems the final exhalation of his power has gone forever, something happens that I will never be able to unremember. His eyes, closed these last hours, open, his head turns to the side, and he looks out over the room, over every single face, his anger dissolving into a small child’s lonely fear of the dark—when suddenly he raises his hand and jabs a blackened finger at us all, one last wordless curse over those who would watch him die.

  * * *

  —

  Within weeks of the vozhd’s death, those multitudes who somehow had managed to survive the Gulag and the prisons began returning to the strange ruins of their existence. Some of them were walking ghosts, but not all.

  It’s been said that Saint George’s Hall is painted with more gold than exists in certain countries. Perhaps. All I know is that the light that evening in 1953 at the Congress of Soviet Writers was radiant in a way I can’t recall seeing anywhere else before or since. As if the sun had entered the night, and the night had entered the hall. I had arrived only a few minutes before, had just excused myself from a conversation with a former professor of mine, when, walking past a group of garrulous, good-looking filmmakers—garrulousness, or the Soviet version of it, was then only just coming back, at least among writers and artists—I noticed the cluster of male bodies shift ever so slightly, revealing a face whose every line (deeper now, but topographically exact) was known to me.

  Alexsei Kapler saw me too—I’m certain he did—and for a moment my insides shuddered at the prospect that he was about to ignore me. Instead, he stepped away from his coterie, walked directly over to where I stood, and, without a word of greeting, took my hand. Then he laughed. Heads all around turning to observe this sudden, unforeseen meeting: my hand in his, my face looking up into his, after all that had happened and not happened between us.

  We leave Saint George’s Hall together, then the Kremlin, walking arm in arm to the little café on the far side of Sokolniki Park. The maître d’ with the sallow face and silver walrus mustaches (how in the name of Saint Peter did he manage to survive this long?) seats us at the precise table we occupied eleven years earlier. I know Lyusia is thinking the same thing because he murmurs, Remember old Klimov? and laughs again. It is his way, his remarkable ability, or agility, to laugh in the face of whatever is thrown at him. I remark as much, but he shakes his head. A silence follows, horrible to me, broken only by the waiter bringing vodka. This fellow wears a broken watch chain—just filigreed links dangling pointlessly from his vest pocket. I drink my vodka and confess to my former lover what is, now that I am with him again, my greatest fear.

  I am afraid, Lyusia, that you hold me responsible for what…was done to you. I hope you understand that the only reason I never tried to write was that I assumed it would make your situation worse.

  This time he does not laugh. He looks at me a long time. Rather than absolve me, he removes a hand-rolled cigarette from a dented tin case—a memento, obviously—and lights it. He offers it to me first, but I decline. He inhales deeply, the smoke entering and stirring him, darkening his eyes. The smoke alone—his scent, the scent of his hair and clothes—makes me nearly insane with longing.

  Do you know what happened to me, Svetlana?

  I shake my head.

  They took me off the street. March the second. I was on my way into a film meeting. The car was a Packard—black, too clean—and sitting up front was none other than General Vlasik. You remember him: chief of your father’s personal security. Never far away, even in one’s sleep. When I saw him was when I began to have an inkling of what they were going to do to me. And then at Lubyanka, what an honor to have Deputy
Minister Kabulov himself read out my arrest: “By Article Fifty-eight of our law…” The man was a terrible actor. Can you believe they accused me of being a British spy? Among many other made-up charges. Of course, the real reason was never spoken. I had crossed a personal line, I don’t deny it. And the fact that I’m a Jew…and your father…Well. I was allowed no possessions, no communications with my wife. Do you know how it is to make a film, Svetlana? On set, I mean. The people, actors, actresses, production designers. The community. The human community of it all. Where silence exists only in relation to the talk. In Lubyanka, you see, they kept me in isolation for a year. Nothing but silence. And to think that now I have outlived Vlasik, and Kabulov too. Well, as they say, life is just one long, very interesting movie, no?

  He laughs, more quietly than before, and lights another cigarette.

  After a year, without explanation he was put on a Black Crow prison truck and sent with other deviationists, Trotskyites, and terrorists to Vorkuta, one of the most brutal Gulags in the coal-mining area of Siberia. But Lyusia was not everyone; he was famous and charming, and lucky too, and he was named the camp’s official photographer. As a zazonniki, he was allowed to live and work outside the prison zone, where he joined a prisoners’ collective theater. One of the actresses he met there became his lover.

  His sentence was five years. Upon his release, he was told he could travel anywhere he wanted except Moscow. His parents were in Kiev, so that’s where he decided to go. But first he stopped in Moscow to visit the woman who was still his wife. Though he had never been literally faithful to her, he loved her, and his love and his hubris in the face of danger were inextricably bound, they were what made him who he was. Any woman who’d ever loved him knew this. My father, who could smell weakness at the very point where it began to corrode iron, also knew this. Two days later, his plainclothes security men pulled Kapler off the train before it could leave Moscow station for Kiev.

  Our waiter brings more vodka. Lyusia lights a third cigarette.

  Following his second arrest, he tells me, he was sent directly to Inta, another Gulag in Siberian coal-mining territory. This time he had less luck, none, and only one thing allowed him to survive with his mind intact. The actress who’d been his lover in Vorkuta would come to see him, bringing food and tenderness. There was nothing else. (By then, his first wife had divorced him.) Another five years passed in this way. Then the vozhd died and Lyusia’s case was reviewed, by whom he never knew. One day he was summoned and told he’d been rehabilitated and could go home. A telephone was handed to him. One call. For the first time in ten years, he began to weep.

  He returned to Moscow and married the actress who’d been so devoted to him, and they moved into the city flat which their marriage now entitled them to.

  I’m going to Crimea on a photo assignment, he tells me now. My wife is staying behind. Why don’t you come?

  The café will close soon. Our waiter with the broken watch chain leans against an unoccupied banquette, watching us out of the corner of his eye: he will have stories to tell, this one, oh yes. But Lyusia doesn’t give a damn. He has lived nine lives to my one. He is made of smoke and mirrors and more smoke. He opens his cigarette case and, finding it empty, gives a faint smile of unsurprise.

  So you’ll come?

  I have Josef with me. My son.

  How old is he?

  Nine.

  Bring him. He will enjoy the sea.

  Where would we stay?

  With me, of course.

  All right, Lyusia.

  There is just one thing you need to understand.

  What is it?

  Whatever we have, whatever we do, I will never leave my wife.

  * * *

  —

  I went on that trip, and one or two others. But Lyusia was as good as his word and remained married to his wife, the actress.

  One winter night, I found myself in the bitter snow-dripping cold outside the theater where she was appearing in a play, I can’t remember what play it was, waiting for her to come out. There were only two of us there by the stage door: a few feet away from me stood a man in a trooper hat and faded military parka smoking a state cigarette beneath a lamp and a poster that said ANSWER THE CALL OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY. Was he there to spy on me? It crossed my mind. Or perhaps waiting for a different actress? Clouds of smoke rose from his face and mingled with the falling snow. After ten minutes of this, I could no longer feel my toes. Then the door opened and she emerged, bundled in her coat, her theatrical face under her shapka wiped clean of makeup as only a tired professional would do. She stopped when she recognized me, then turned her face away to show that she could not stand the sight of me.

  You may choose not to look at me, I said. But I have loved Lyusia since I was sixteen years old.

  Slowly the actress turned her head until our eyes met. Her gaze that was trained to penetrate hearts at the very back of the theater; up close, she possessed a force I was not prepared for.

  Did your husbands know?

  I’m trying to make you understand.

  I understand I never saw you at Vorkuta. Or at Inta. Because you were never there, were you? You never visited him. Never wrote him. Not once in ten long years. Tucked away in your perfect complacency. Nice and protected. Celebrated, even. So tell me, Princess: Who are you now that your daddy’s just a fucking ghost? You’re nobody and nothing. Isn’t that right? You pathetic, poisoned bitch. You can’t touch what Lyusia and I have, and you know it. Don’t come near either of us ever again.

  She walked away then—made her exit through falling snow. As I said, she was a professional. And of course she was right.

  A minute passed, possibly more. I stood there unable to move, as if my feet were literally frozen to the ground.

  Then a noise: the man under the Party sign, crushing the last centimeter of cigarette beneath his boot.

  He raised his head and looked me square in the face. My shame between us.

  You should go home, he said.

  * * *

  —

  I returned to my life: Josef, Katya, my nurse, the four of us living together in our simple apartment on the Embankment. With my ability in English and my degrees, I was able to teach and translate. I took my mother’s name. It was Khrushchev’s country now: my father’s image began to disappear from the walls, if not the memories, of our people.

  * * *

  —

  In 1962, my brother Vasily, after being released from prison, where over the previous years his mania and chronic inebriation had landed him repeatedly, died of heart failure. I wanted to mourn him, or at least to pity him, so cruelly distorted had he been by our father, but at this I cannot honestly say I ever succeeded.

  In truth, however, in those grim days of drifting, it was not the state of my late brother’s orphaned soul that concerned me most, but my own.

  One evening, under cover of darkness, I rode a bus out to the Moscow suburbs, to a little church next to the Donskoy Cathedral called Deposition of the Shroud. Father Nikolai Alexandrovich was waiting for me there.

  In the USSR, of course, then as now, to convert to Christianity was an offense punishable by prison for all involved. And so on the night of my secret baptism Father Nikolai never recorded my name in the church registry. I can only assume that he took this risk because of who he knew I was. Yet he assured me—I hear his voice as I write this—Father Nikolai did, oh, he promised, that God loved me, even if I was the daughter of Josef Stalin.

  * * *

  —

  Already in my thirties, I did not expect to fall in love again. But one day in the hallway of a state hospital, of all places, to which I’d been admitted for an emergency appendectomy, I met an Indian man nearly twice my age. Brajesh Singh was a Communist intellectual who had come to the Soviet Union to study our political system firsthand. Thoug
h not young or especially handsome or in good health—his heart and lungs were failing—Brajesh was a thoughtful, kind man who radiated an Eastern respect for all he encountered. We spent the long days of our convalescence together, discussing literature and old movies and the spiritual aspects of life (in this department, as in so many others, he would always be far wiser than I), and when the time came for my release, I realized that I did not want to part from him. I told him so, and we agreed that when he was well enough to leave the hospital he would move in with my family and me.

  As it turned out, Brajesh would never be well enough again; he required an oxygen mask to breathe at night. But he moved in with us anyway, and they were happy months for our little family. In his very being, Brajesh brought a dignity and patience to our existence that I was incapable of producing on my own.

  I had no idea how First Deputy Premier Kosygin got wind of our domestic arrangement, but one day I was summoned to the Kremlin. Kosygin’s office I knew well enough, because it had been my father’s; with that familiar portrait hanging there (one of the few places where one could reliably find his image still publicly displayed), our meeting had an ironic quality that was not lost on either the First Deputy Premier or myself. He immediately came to the point, which was to inform me that while the Party might tolerate my living with this Indian, as he put it, I must be aware that under no circumstance would I be allowed to marry him.

  He is dying, I said.

  Kosygin shrugged; of course he knew. The law is the law.

  He has asked me to take his ashes back to his family in India when he dies. I’ve promised him I will.

  We have your passport, Kosygin pointed out.