Fellow Travelers by James Cook

whatever they needed to do to get money, shelter, food, to survive. When their mother had a seizure of some sort and died, they buried her in a field by a roadside and moved on, heading in some undefined way toward Moscow and to me.
    After everything that had been done to her, Katya nonetheless felt guilty. All her life she had thought her father was a good and honorable man, and now the whole world declared he had been an enemy of the people, declared her sister and dead mother were enemies as well. She tried to convince herself he’d been wrong, that it was unjust to hire those people, that he had exploited the peasants, but she could not believe it for long. She had grown up with the men who had evicted them, she had loved them, and she could not believe either that they were monsters or that her mother, father, sister, and all her relatives were as well. She knew she should believe it, and in the darkness of the night she would tell herself this, but she did not.
    â€œThey say these things are necessary in order to build tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t care about tomorrow. I only want to know today.”
    Through those months—that summer and into the fall—Manny ran like a wry and sour note in the music of our lives. It was time for me to grow up, he kept saying, I wasn’t a kid anymore. You’re behaving like a lovesick boy. Grow up, for god’s sake. Well, why should I? I was not twenty-one yet, and I had never fallen in love before. He said, “Just don’t let that blind you to the realities of life. She’s using you, she hasn’t had it so good in years, she’s got decent food and clothes and a place to stay, and she’s using you for all you’re worth. And my god, she’s even beginning to get fat.”
    â€œWhat do I care? Let her use me, just so she doesn’t stop doing it.” And yet in a sense Manny was right.
    Two or three times a week, Kasha spent the night at the rooms she shared with her sister in that tenement on the other side of the city. After they arrived in Moscow, they had gotten by as best they could. If you had a work card you automatically entered the workers’ paradise. Everything that mattered was free—housing was free, dental and medical care, meals and clothing, even tickets to the Bolshoi or the soccer matches.
    But Katya and her sister had no credentials, no papers, no claim on the benefits of the socialist society. Katya finally found work in the commissary, but what her sister did I never was told. I didn’t want to know, Katya didn’t need to tell me what she herself might have done on occasion to survive, but that didn’t make her a streetwalker, as Manny liked to tell me. It made her a survivor.
    I had to remind myself that things were different now. Men and women were easier with each other in Russia than they ever seemed to be at home. The culture was different, and I wondered later whether this didn’t explain my father’s casual affairs, or perhaps even my mother’s. The revolution had transformed the relations between men and women, and women were free to choose their partners just as men were. Presumably it was no worse to be paid than it was to pay. I could never see it that way, but I had to believe it, because I knew that that was the way it was.
    A few months after we met, a warm day in August when the leaves were beginning to shrivel, she took me home to that ancient four-story structure where she and her sister lived. It was built around a central rectangular court like something out of the Middle Ages. I have no idea what it must once have been, a manor house perhaps, a monastery. We passed through the shadowy gateway and into the courtyard, filled with debris, offal and garbage, abandoned implements, and other junk. Around the sides of the courtyard was a wooden passageway, roofed in, and every fifty feet or so a staircase rose to the floors and