It was in the early spring of 1931 that we first met, at an evening party to which I had been invited at the Commercial Academy, where she was a student in the chemistry faculty. There was a concert of sorts, an ad hoc series of entertainments put on by the students themselves. Afterward I was taken by friends to the party bureau room, where I found a small company of men and women relaxing in armchairs and chatting quietly, none of whom I knew. I was introduced to a woman, about thirty, with a rather large yet shapely nose and short hair brushed back from the forehead in a manner which accentuated this. Far from being unattractive, it was the kind of honesty which was her mark, of the same sort which no doubt was to cause her sudden and mysterious death. She held out her hand, saying simply, “Alleluyeva,” and I remember my knees becoming weak.
“Zabrodny,” I had said.
At Peace smoothed the hair from my face. “Did you love her that first night?”
“Never.”
“Did she not like you then?”
How to explain the paradox of romantic love, the frustration of being far from one’s adored, and yet loving that?
“Be careful of him,” the woman next to Alleluyeva had cried. “He is a heart-eater!” She was the wife of one of the generals who by 1937 would be dead.
“Are you a heart-eater?” At Peace asked, and sometimes thereafter would tease me, murmuring “Captain Heart-Eater” as she stroked my face or we practiced honi, which the missionaries in their ignorance had described as rubbing noses, but which was simply an exchange of scent. Captain Heart-Eater. I was not much of a heart-eater then. I was shocked at how human and accessible Nadezhda Alleluyeva could be at the very period when her husband was closing himself in with his delusions. She herself opposed him at almost every point, until in November of 1932 it became too much. As early as 1929, when Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky were condemned — the famous Buryto grouping — she openly showed her sympathy, and made no secret of her respect for Bukharin in particular. It must have enraged Stalin even then.
“But why did she remain with him?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She was the mother of his children.”
“She might have taken them away. I do not think she was as brave as you say.”
“In my country, to speak is to be brave.”
“You must take me to that atoll,” she said. “I shall speak. I am not afraid.”
“The hand of Tranck Tane will not protect you there, my sweet.”
“Then yours will.”
“I was hard put to protect myself,” I told her. But I am certain she could not have understood. For almost ten years I had daily risked my life as part of the amorphous and ultimately powerless resistance known as the democratic underground — in Stalin’s terms, the deviation of the right. I had been told so many times that it was better to work from within that in many ways I had forgotten what it was to be bold. Still, it was better to work from within. It hardly made sense to die. “At Peace,” I said, “who is the policeman of this atoll?”
“Tepia a Tevu,” she said.
“If Tepia a Tevu, if Turtle Eggs, wished to hurt you, who would stop him?”
“Why would he wish that?”
“Let us say that your interests and his were not compatible.”
“But I have not known him to have any interests.”
“His interests are to protect this atoll from alcohol.”
“Because it is bad for the people,” she said.
“And if the people want it?”
“They should not want something which is bad.”
I do remember that night. Before dawn it had rained, so that the sea air seemed to part away. “Have you loved before?” I took the courage to ask.
“With many,” she replied.
I suppressed my horror, for by our standards, those of an enlightened Soviet society, At Peace would be nothing more than a whore. “But have you loved?”
“I do not know what that is.”
“A man — ” to stay with, I would have said. But it was not enough.
“He would have to be a man then,” she said. “There have been none here. He could not be French, for I hate them for what they have done to my mother’s race. He could not be Marquesan, for there are none left that are men.” She looked at me with a dread beyond her years. “That is why my father brought you. He said that you are a man who has read books, and is honest and strong, and that if you become one with this island you will be my husband, and father children by me, and have Atu-Hiva for your own.”
“Is that the bridal price?” I asked, making it a joke. “How is it all believe Tranck Tane rules this land? It is French.”
She waved her hand and proceeded to educate me in the ways of the South Seas. She told how her father had acquired the atoll from the Tahitian dentist, Porter, because it was famed in the annals of the a’riori, the ancient minstrels, as a place of orgiastic dancing, a retreat to which the old aristocracy retired to rest, and where the noblewomen could sit beneath the shade of the banyans and let their skins whiten again. But the royal family of Tahiti had fallen into the dentist’s debt, and for so many gold fillings and facings, for so much bridgework and extraction, they had bartered away the isle. Porter found it planted with thousands of coconut trees and planted thousands more, only to discover his commercial venture endangered by a plague of ship-borne rats which, with no natural enemies, grew without limit, feeding upon the copra crop. He sold the atoll to Tranck. “It is my father’s,” At Peace said. “As one day it will be mine.” She said this as haughtily as any woman of these islands might. For even had she one hundred brothers, Marquesan inheritance follows the female line. It was clear she was making me a bargain I would be fool to turn down.
But her pride, together perhaps with her youth and sullen beauty, rankled me. “Does this atoll not belong to the people who live here?” I asked. “Those whose fathers and grandfathers are buried here, who were here before your father came to these seas?”
She laughed. “Before my father there were only guardians here. This place was tapu, kept for the Tahitian chiefs who visited only from time to time.”
“Surely all these people going about haven’t sprung up from the sea.”
She continued looking at me as does a child when an adult has done some foolish thing. “But my father brought them,” she said. “Did you not know? Just as he brought the cats.”
“The cats?”
“To eat the rats,” she said. “My father collected all the stray cats of Tahiti and brought them here to eat the rats.”
“But I haven’t seen any rats.”
“Because the cats ate them all, my darling. First they ate the rats and when there were no more they ate themselves; the stronger, the weaker…”
“The swifter, the slower; the brighter, the duller,” I found myself saying. It was the Russian proverb I had learned as a child.
“Until there came a day when only two cats were left,” she said.
“And one ate the other, and that one starved.”
“Yes, yes. And then my father brought people from all the islands to live here and be peaceful as in the old times, and work the copra, and bring up the pearls until those gave out, and be free of the bad ways. Missionaries followed, but he sent them away.”