The Birobidzhan Affair: A Novel Read online

  Stalin ran his fingers through his hair and sat up on the couch. She moved out of the way to give him some space. He didn’t try to touch her or even speak to her; he simply picked up his trousers and tunic off the floor, then stood up to get dressed.

  Outside, the hum of voices continued. Marina found her gown and underwear. She slipped them on while Stalin took a comb out of his jacket pocket and carefully combed his hair, using the palm of his hand to make sure that not a single lock was out of place. She was still looking for her shoes when he strode toward the exit. He looked right through her. Anybody might have thought she had become quite invisible all of a sudden, a shadow in the shadows.

  As soon as Stalin opened the door, the voices broke off. The light from the passage glared on the screen. A woman’s voice shrieked, “Joseph! Oh, Joseph Vissarionovich!”

  Marina heard him grunt and ask what had happened. Kneeling on the carpet, she finally found her shoes under a chair. Her head was splitting and her temples were pounding, a painful reminder of the vodka she had drank the night before.

  Out in the passage, Stalin’s voice rose above the rest. He was asking questions that Marina couldn’t quite grasp. Nobody seemed to have any answers.

  She realized that her fingers were shaking. Perhaps fear was beginning to set in. Sitting down on the floor, she put her shoes on. She was aching all over. Her back, neck, hips, and insides hurt, as if she’d fallen from a height and hit the ground rolling.

  Out in the passage, the talking and shouting had trailed off. She could hear nothing but the echo of receding footsteps. They were making off without a thought for her! What was she supposed to do now? And what about her cloak? She had left it in the Voroshilovs’ apartment.

  She got to her feet just as a silhouette stole into the room. As soon as she saw the figure in profile on the screen she knew who it was.

  “Galia!”

  “Shush! Be quiet!”

  Egorova rushed up to her, whispering, “Quick Marinotchka! We can’t linger here.”

  “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  “Later, later!”

  Egorova wasn’t wearing any makeup. She looked drawn. Her hair was hidden under a scarf, and she was wrapped up in a plain heavy cloak. Reaching inside it, she pulled out the one she had lent to Marina, rolled up in a ball.

  “Put that on. Hurry!”

  “But—”

  “Be quiet. Not now. … Come on!”

  Egorova made sure that the coast was clear before pushing her out of the movie theater. As on the previous evening, they plunged deeper and deeper into the maze of corridors. This time, though, Egorova was careful to avoid the guards. They hurtled down unlit service corridors. Egorova had caught hold of Marina’s hand and wouldn’t let go, twisting her wrist as she pulled her down the winding staircases. She knew where she was going, even in the dark. When she pushed open the last door, the cold air hit them like a slap in the face. Dawn was only just breaking. Wet snow fell in heavy clusters, melting as soon as it touched the ground. The black asphalt in the little square they now found themselves in had an oily sheen. The snow was sticking to the branches of a thick copse on the other side.

  “Follow me!”

  At last Egorova let go of her hand and made a dash for the thicket. They splashed through freezing puddles. The icy water went straight through Marina’s flimsy shoes. Egorova was practically running. She dodged in and out of the trees. The branches whipped at their faces. Snow slid down the back of Marina’s neck. They came out at one of the broad avenues leading to the Palace of the Patriarchs. Its golden domes were as dull and gray as the sky. A car was waiting by the curb, its engine idling, the condensation from its exhaust curling around its bumper. Marina recognized it as Egorova’s husband’s Gaz. The pennant had been removed from the grill.

  No sooner had they sat down in the back seat did the chauffeur pulled away. Egorova tugged Marina’s sleeve and motioned to her to be quiet. The car headed for Borovitskaya Tower. The chauffeur rolled down his window so that the guards could identify him. They nodded their heads and raised the barrier without so much as a glance at the passengers. As soon as they were outside the Kremlin walls, the Gaz turned left toward the Moskva River. Before they reached its banks, Egorova slipped a tiny note into Marina’s hand. She pointed at the back of the chauffeur’s head, warning Marina with a look to be quiet.

  Marina unfolded the note. The writing was barely legible, but when she started to lift the note to her eyes to read it, Egorova stopped her wrist.

  NA KILLED HERSELF LAST NIGHT.

  A BULLET THROUGH THE HEART.

  NOBODY KNOWS.

  WHATEVER YOU DO, KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT!

  NA could only stand for Nadezhda Alliluyeva!

  Before she could stop it, a cry escaped Marina’s throat. Egorova pinched her thigh hard. She snatched the note off her and tore it up. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, she swallowed the pieces.

  The chill that had numbed Marina’s feet had spread through her whole body. She thought she was going to stop breathing. Egorova squeezed her thigh again, more gently this time, but her fingers were still like iron.

  The Gaz skirted the ruins of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. For the past year, it had been nothing more than a pile of rubble. Gogolevsky Boulevard was still deserted when the car came to a halt just before Arbatskaya Square. They were still a long way from the Meshchansky District, where Marina lived.

  Surprised, she asked, “Why are you leaving me here? Couldn’t you take me back to my place? It’s miles away.” A sob rose in her throat. She hated herself for making such a show of weakness.

  Without making any reply, Egorova got out of the Gaz. She pulled Marina toward her as if to kiss her but hissed some advice in her ear instead. “Forget last night, Marina Andreyeva. Forget me. Forget Joseph. Forget what you heard and saw. The Kremlin is a nest of vipers. In a few hours, someone will whisper in Stalin’s ear that you are the cause of his misfortune. If you want to live, disappear before they make you disappear. Above all, never show your face at the theater again. Pretend you have ceased to exist!”

  Washington, June 22, 1950

  One Hundred and Forty-Seventh Hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee

  “ … AND THAT’S WHAT I DID. I somehow managed to whittle down my existence to a bare minimum.”

  “Miss … Wait! Wait a minute!”

  That was Nixon. He clutched hold of the microphone again, as if afraid it might sprout legs and take off.

  “Stalin’s wife died in a hospital from appendicitis.”

  “That’s not true. She committed suicide.”

  “So you say.”

  The Russian simply shrugged. Nixon glanced over at McCarthy and Wood.

  McCarthy stepped in, “Do you have any proof that it was suicide?”

  “Proof?”

  She let out a mocking silvery laugh that came from the heart, as if privy to a good joke.

  “I am the proof, sir. Nobody knows better than I do where Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was when his wife died. She wasn’t ill during the meal. She was furious.”

  “But you don’t have any proof that it was suicide?”

  “It’s the truth.”

  Nixon took over. “You didn’t see her commit suicide. You didn’t even see her body.”

  “Believe what you like. … ”

  “You’ve already lied about a lot of things, Miss … Goussov!” said McCarthy gruffly.

  From the outset, Nixon and he had done their damnedest to mispronounce her name.

  “I had no choice. I was afraid I would be arrested.”

  “That’s what happens when you find yourself on the wrong side of the law!” exclaimed Wood pompously.

  She turned on him with a fury that we didn’t know she had in her until then.

  “I used a fake passport, true, but I haven’t done anything wrong. Now that you know, I have no reason to lie anymore. I’m telling the truth.
Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s suicide ruined my life. If she hadn’t killed herself, I’d have made my name as a great actress back in my own country and even here in yours by now. It was meant to be, but because she committed suicide that night, I’ve spent my life running away and seeing everything I held dear come to nothing!”

  As she spoke these last words, her voice cracked. Her eyes had disappeared behind her dark eyelids. Her chignon continued to come undone. Strands of hair were falling onto the nape of her neck. The escaping tendrils were fluffed up like feathers. It was just the opportunity that Cohn had been looking for. He seized it, picking up where the congressmen had left off.

  “Do you mean to say that it was because of that night at the Kremlin that you became a spy?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I am not a spy. I have never been a spy.”

  “In that case, if you’ve got nothing to hide, why did you use a fake passport when you arrived in our country?”

  “You know perfectly well why! Because I didn’t have one! In Russia, people only have domestic passports, not passports to travel the world, whereas, over here, I wouldn’t have been let into the country without one. Michael had warned me about that. The border police would have sent me back there, or I would have been put in a camp. You have camps over here too, I know you do. … ”

  “Michael? Are you referring to Agent Apron, the man you killed?”

  “Stop it! Stop saying that over and over again! It’s not true. I didn’t kill him. It’s not true. … ”

  Everyone was expecting her to explode, but she merely bowed her head. All I could see now was her back. The tendons at the nape of her neck were as taut as wires. The clickety-clack of the stenotype machines kept going for a few seconds. Then a fraught silence hung over everyone, even Cohn, but not for long.

  “What happened after … that night at the Kremlin, Miss Gousseiev?”

  She paused before lifting her head.

  “I followed Galia Egorova’s advice and disappeared.”

  “How did you go about it?”

  “It was easy. I fell ill. I must have caught a chill walking through the snow. I didn’t have the shoes for it. I came down with a terrible fever, bad enough to kill me, but it worked out for the best. It gave me a good excuse to abandon the theater, no questions asked. They replaced me, and that was that.”

  “Did you see Stalin again?”

  “Never. … ”

  “What were you afraid of?”

  “Oh, everything. … That the secret police would come looking for me and make me disappear. That was already happening back in 1932, not as much as afterward, during the grisly years, but everyone knew that it was possible. Guys in leather coats would knock on your door and you would never be heard of again.”

  “But you weren’t arrested?”

  “No, they didn’t come. I expected them day and night. The fear was as consuming as the fever. I didn’t sleep from dawn till dusk, I had my coat and boots out, ready … but they didn’t come. I didn’t understand why not. There was no end to the reports on the radio and in the papers that Nadezhda Alliluyeva had died of appendicitis. They also said that Stalin was so grief-stricken that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to accompany her coffin to the cemetery. Later, I saw pictures showing Uncle Avel heading up the funeral procession. He knew the truth, and so did I. Joseph Vissarionovich wasn’t behind the coffin because he felt guilty, and not without reason.

  “Nadezhda Alliluyeva had fired a bullet into her heart while he was on top of me in the little movie theater. No doubt she couldn’t stand him cheating on her anymore. That story they spun about appendicitis was just another lie. Joseph Vissarionovich did nothing but lie. He was a liar, and his lies killed. Yes, the great Stalin was just another husband who cheated on his wife with an insignificant actress, but nobody was supposed to know. Nobody! Galia Egorova couldn’t have been more right. Joseph Vissarionovich would stop at nothing to destroy all evidence of his guilt, and I was the worst evidence there was. For days, I lived in full expectation of being squashed like a fly by Stalin’s big thumb.”

  She spoke these last words in a whisper.

  There was an embarrassed silence before McCarthy asked, “But what about you, miss? Did you have no remorse?”

  She didn’t reply immediately. A bitter, weary half-smile crept over her dry lips.

  “You want to know if I was ashamed? If I felt sullied, if I felt I had behaved like a whore? Is that it?”

  McCarthy’s cheeks turned pink. His face twisted into an ugly grimace under his broken nose.

  “I was nineteen years old, sir. I was learning how to get by in a country where, for years, people had been dying or disappearing to some remote corner of Siberia for nonexistent transgressions. That was the Bolshevik Revolution for you. Living in the new world is like scaling an ice face with a child’s fingernails, one of our poets wrote. His name was Mayakovsky. Stalin claimed to be a real fan of his work. Mayakovsky committed suicide.”

  Another tendril tumbled onto her neck. This time she noticed. Closing her eyes, she used both hands to tidy up her chignon. She was showing more and more signs of fatigue. The powder had disappeared from her cheeks. A glaze of perspiration glistened on her skin. She had worn off her lipstick in her repeated attempts to moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue. The water jug in front of her had been empty for some time.

  Cohn riffled through his documents, ready to start firing off questions, quite capable of tormenting his quarry all night. Wood stopped him.

  “Just a minute please, Mr. Cohn.”

  Wood leaned toward Nixon and McCarthy, screening his mouth with his hand so we couldn’t read his lips. Mundt and the others joined in with their whispered deliberation. They kept glancing over at the press table. The woman was leading them into uncharted waters. They were growing suspicious.

  She was trying to recover her strength, like a hunted animal in the final stages of the chase, making the most of every second of respite. Without a second thought, I retrieved a glass and the water jug near my colleagues’ notebooks. I was hoping she would look up at me when I put them on the table in front of her, and she did. Her eyelids snapped open just as Wood called out my name.

  “Mr. Koenigsman … Mr. Koenigsman, what are you doing?”

  I filled her glass without taking my eyes off her blue irises, grown wide with surprise. While Wood fumed, my colleagues were in fits. As the police guards came up behind me, I smiled at her. I tried to give my smile a human touch so she wouldn’t think that it was a trap or that I was flirting with her. Her eyelids were red around the edges, not from crying but from the stagnant cigarette smoke that hung in the auditorium. Before the guards grabbed me by my jacket, I thought I saw a point of light appear in the black depths of her pupils, or at any rate, something warmer than the icy blue that surrounded them.

  The police guards prodded me back in the direction of the press table. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that she was gulping down the water as if she had just crossed the Mojave Desert. I apologized to Wood.

  “I beg your pardon, Mr. Chairman. Somebody had forgotten to refill the lady’s water jug. … ”

  He ignored me and struck his gavel to call for silence.

  “The hearing is adjourned for today. We’ll resume tomorrow. You’ll be informed of the time presently.”

  Before continuing, he ordered the guards to position themselves beside the Russian.

  “Miss Gousseiev, you have violated United States law. It is this Committee’s duty to bring you to justice according to the law of this land. Chief Investigator Cohn is going to bring you before a judge who will read you your rights.”

  In other words, she was going to spend the night in jail, and no doubt a good many more after that.

  The idea of it gave me the chills, but she didn’t so much as flinch. She’d been expecting it and must have been relieved to have a chance to be silent for a moment. When the guards took hold of her arms, she tried to s
hake herself free from their grip. Once again, I had a hunch that she’d been through it all before, perhaps even worse.

  They hauled her over to the door at the back of the auditorium. Cohn followed them. I watched out for a signal, hoping she might turn around and try to make eye contact with me before she disappeared. It was probably too much to ask. I can be quite a romantic when I let myself.

  My colleagues were already on their feet. They nudged me toward Wood. Wedged between McCarthy and Nixon, he was beckoning us over. Once we were standing in a row in front of him like prefects, he asked us to keep it all hushed up.

  “We would be grateful if you could put your articles on hold for a few days. In view of today’s hearing, the Committee believes that the witness’s next statements could pose a threat to the security of the United States, so they’ll be heard behind closed doors before a select committee, like all hearings relevant to national security.”

  There was the usual protest. Wood let us have our say until McCarthy intervened, launching into one of his lectures. It was his favorite spiel, reminding each and every one of us of our duty to be good citizens and true patriots. No, of course, our newspapers weren’t communist rags. He loved expressions like that, savoring the words on his tongue as others might do with sweets. Wood assured us that we would be the first to hear how the hearing progressed.

  “We’ll invite you back as soon as we’ve sorted out the lies from the truth in the woman’s testimony. We’ll be sure to contact you and not the other papers. You’ll have your story—you have my word.”

  In other words, Cohn and McCarthy’s merry men were going to give the Russian the third degree until she couldn’t take any more and was willing to spout any manner of lies. She was behind bars, so they were bound to get what they wanted. If, in spite of everything, she managed to resist, they would come up with even worse dirt on her, and we would be left with no choice but to trot it out parrot-fashion.

  I left my colleagues to protest. Personally, I had better things to do with my time. Discreetly, I fell in with the typists. One of them was a good friend of mine and happened to work in Wood’s office, a pretty redhead in her thirties named Shirley Leeman. Two years earlier, we had toyed with the idea of committing to each other. Every now and then, we still saw each other, just to check how much we were missing each other.