Elena didn’t understand all the words. But she understood it was asking people not to sit on the front stairs, a comical request considering almost every set of steps hosted groups of men.
The apartment was a little further on. She walked past the vendor, past the children sucking on uneven chunks of ice, ice they must have stolen when the vendor wasn’t looking. She had never felt so foreign in her entire life. Self-conscious, it took an effort to continue walking and not run back to the cab. She didn’t have far to go. The building was directly ahead.
There was a man on the steps, a tall white man, dressed in a suit, smoking a cigarette. Elena had been warned that Mr Austin was under pressure from the American secret police. She didn’t know if this man was an agent but he didn’t belong hre, that was obvious, almost as obvious as the fact that she didn’t belong here either. Her eyes darted about, searching for somewhere to hide. But it was too late. He’d seen her. She had no choice. She increased her pace, pretending to be in a hurry. At the same time he descended the steps to intercept her. As he drew closer Elena kept her eyes down, towards the ground, holding her breath.
They passed each other on the sidewalk. She continued walking, missing Mr Austin’s address as if there was somewhere else she was heading for. Once she’d turned the corner, she pressed her back against the wall. There was no way into Mr Austin’s apartment. And no way back to the cab.
Same Day
For a man who considered himself an optimist, it was a strange sensation for Jesse Austin to feel despair stalking them, glimpsed from time to time out of the corner of his eye. Even as his wife walked across the apartment her body expressed profound weariness, a heavy sway instead of her once characteristic brisk pace, exhaustion that went deeper than working too hard or fretting about money, exhaustion sunk into her bones making them as heavy as lead. She’d been worn down. Constant worrying had matted her hair, dulled her eyes, squeezed the blood from her lips and even altered the way she spoke. Her words had lost their playfulness, no longer singing with mischievous intelligence. They dropped out of her mouth as if a burden sat on the shoulder of each syllable, revealing tiredness that couldn’t be remedied by a good night’s sleep, or even a couple of days off work. In recent years he’d wondered if Anna’s strength and resilience had been a curse rather than a gift. Anyone else would’ve left him, broken by the strain. Colleagues and friends had cut him loose. A few had even testified against him, stood before a HUAC hearing, pointing at him with trembling outrage as though he’d been guilty of murder. Not Anna, not for a second, and not a day went by that Jesse didn’t feel humbled by her love.
Anna had been right. She’d prophesied that the men he was making enemies of were vengeful and absolutely did not forget. Jesse had joked that the authorities could take anything but they could never take away his voice and as long as he had his voice he had a career. He’d been wrong. In the 1930s he performed to audiences of up to twenty thousand. On tour in 1937 the combined audiences around the world totalled over a million. Today no venue would book him, not the grand concert halls, not even the smallest, smokiest bars, places where the sound of bottles clanking was louder than the singing. It wasn’t enough that Jesse signed a contract promising not to launch into one of his polemics, vowing merely to sing songs that had been vetted and cleared as inoffensive. The day after his performance the venue would inevitably receive an inspection from health and safety officials, or from the police regarding an alleged disorder, a fight on the street. In every case the venue would be shut down for several weeks. No matter how outraged they were by the principle, no one could afford to make the same mistake twice. If they did, their licence was revoked. The managers of venues, men who’d once shook Jesse’s hand after one of his concerts with eyes filled with tears and a cash register brimming with dollars, didn’t even have the decency to admit the truth. He couldn’t blame them for looking after their interests but did they have to lie? They’d tell him he was too old, or that his kind of music was no longer fashionable. They’d rather insult him than admit that they were scared.
It was a cruel joke that Jesse’s appearance at the House Committee on Un-American Activities in July 1956 would prove to be his last performance on a major stage. Questioning Jesse, the congressmen quoted words he’d spoken in favour of Communism and run them up against the words he’d spoken in criticism of America. Had he claimed that he felt more at home in the Soviet Union than in the United States? Jesse tried to explain the meaning of his statements: that the notion of home referred to the way in which he was respected abroad and abused domestically, his people Jim-Crowed and kept down. Footage was shown of him speaking in Moscow in 1950, in the Serp i Molot factory, while in subtitles, incorrect translation ran along the bottom of the screen: JESSE AUSTIN: The Statue of Liberty belongs here, in
Moscow, not in New York.
He’d listened to the gasps of the congressional audience, the scratching of pens against notepads by the journalists. He’d spent vast sums on counsel only to realize that there was no defence against insinuation. Quotes, stripped of their context, were tossed about the room. The issue of his refusal to sign a non-Communist affidavit had been debated. Photographs of his visits to Moscow were passed from side to side with circles drawn around some of the men he’d stood beside. They were described as KGB agents, decried as monsters that had murdered and enslaved the civilian population. Jesse had protested: the committee had no evidence to support those accusations. They’d shouted back that the men circled were secret-police officers and the secret police was proven as an instrument of terror. Did he deny there were slave-labour camps in the USSR, labour camps that made a mockery of his talk of equality and fairness? He’d retorted that draconian measures, if they existed at all, were only ever used against a Fascist element, an element that when left unchecked in Germany had brought about many millions of deaths. He wasn’t about to weep over a few dead Fascists.
Though no court had found him guilty of any crimes, his passport had been taken away. He was no longer able to visit the Soviet Union or to accept invitations from non-Communist countries such as the United Kingdom, France and Canada. He was no longer booked for public performances. His recording career was starved of oxygen. No radio station would play his music. No record company would release his songs. No store would stock his albums, his back catalogue was removed from sale – his achievements made invisible. Royalties stopped. Although he was a taxpayer since the age of sixteen, a man who’d brought in thousands of dollars from other countries, the State had his livelihood, cutting off their own source of taxes. His income dropped to less than four hundred dollars a year. His savings had been drained by legal costs, including pursuing his record label for breach of contract. No court ever ruled in his favour. It had taken twelve years, but finally he was destitute. They had what they wanted. He was penniless, just as he had been when he’d started out. Forced to sell his apartment near Central Park, he’d been certain that the FBI informed all prospective buyers of his financial straits. The sale price was half its true market value and didn’t cover the debts.
Anna opened the window, perching on the ledge, looking out at the street below. Strands of her hair hung around her face, waiting for a breeze that wasn’t coming any time soon. Jesse joined her, putting s arm around her slim waist, resting his head on her shoulder, wanting to say sorry a thousand times over. The words dried up in his throat.
At the knock on the door they turned at the same time. Jesse could feel the tension in Anna’s body. The difference between an agent’s knock and the knock of someone who lived in the building was the silence that followed. A friend would call out. There’d be the normal bustle around the landing. An agent would silence the building – the stairwells fell quiet, everyone would stop and stare and wait. Jesse stepped towards the door, reminding himself that Yates was looking for the slightest provocation. Taking hold of the handle, bracing himself, he opened the door.
It wasn’t Yates but Tom Fluker, a cantankerous man in his sixties who ran a small hardware store at the corner of the block. Beside him was a young white woman with long dark hair. He didn’t recognize her. Before Jesse could speak Tom launched into a tirade:
– I found this girl trying to sneak around the back, skulking like a thief. She says she’s looking for you. I ask why she can’t use your front door like everyone else. She gets confused, like she doesn’t understand. First I think she’s playing dumb then I realize she doesn’t understand English too good. Got an accent too. So I listen a little more. She’s a Russian! What’s a Russian girl doing round here, looking for you? We don’t need any more problems than we’ve already got, and we’ve already got plenty.
Jesse looked at the young woman, and then at Tom, his face scrunched up in anger. The FBI had tried to isolate Jesse among the local community. Friends and strangers, ministers and businessmen, went on record repudiating his Communist views and claiming that he was a disgrace, entirely unrepresentative of their desire to work hard and build a more integrated America. There were some who wouldn’t speak out against him on record but who thought the adverse attention Jesse generated was senseless. While they were trying to improve conditions for their communities and gain rights for their people, he was dragging them back. Tom was one such
