The Prince of the Soviets

9. COCAINE

Magda discovered a new way to get access to the Comintern hostel: she registered as a student on the Russian language courses for foreigners that had recently opened there.

The hostel was home to communists of all nationalities, from Norwegians to Indians. They shaved their heads, wore traditional Russian shirts, and spoke in a strange jargon of their own, peppered with the words “Lenin,” “communism,” and “primus.” The Kremlin thought these foreigners were potentially useful—come the world revolution, new governments all over the world would be formed from their ranks.

That radiant day was still in the future, however, and meanwhile, the communists at the Comintern hostel lived at the expense of the Soviet authorities, spending their time arguing heatedly about politics and signing all sorts of resolutions.

At the entrance to the hostel, a receptionist asked for Magda’s documents and entered her name in a ledger.

“First floor on your right,” he told her, but Magda headed straight off to see Friedrich in room 66.

She walked down a damp, dimly lit corridor and stopped in front of the precious door. Some jokers had added another “6” to the number plate and scrawled on it, “Gates of Hell—Please knock.”

Quietly, Magda tapped on the door with her fingernails. Nobody answered, so she pushed open one of the double doors, which was slightly ajar.

“How much do you want?” she heard Friedrich’s voice coming from the bedroom.

Barely aware of what she was doing, Magda crept into the hall and then in the bathroom. She stood with her back to the water heater, her heart thumping, listening to what was going on in the bedroom.

“Let me tell you, you won’t find better cocaine in Moscow,” Friedrich said persuasively.

“But why is it so expensive?” asked a voice with a French accent.

“Well, if you don’t like the price, you can go and buy hashish from the Uzbeks at the market.”

Magda’s head was spinning. The man she loved was a drug dealer!

Soon after, the Frenchman left, and Friedrich came into the bathroom. He was so startled to see Magda that he cried out in alarm.

“What are you doing here?” he snapped.

“I… I wanted to buy some cocaine,” she blurted out, unable to think of anything better to say. “I heard you were selling it.”

Magda began to make regular visits to room 666. It was madness to spend the last of her money on cocaine she neither wanted nor needed, but it was the only way she could meet Friedrich alone.

They would speak only briefly, and their conversations always began with Friedrich criticizing Magda for her “drug habit.”

“I don’t feel sorry for the others,” he said. “They can poison themselves for all I care. But you saved me from the Chinese police. Do you know what’s going to happen to you? First of all, you’ll have hallucinations and fits of despondency; then, after a couple of months, you won’t be able to think of anything except your next meeting with me.”

Magda looked into his eyes. “You’re quite right, you know.”

But despite all his warnings, Friedrich provided her with liberal supplies of cocaine, issuing strict warnings not to buy it from street kids.

“The stuff they sell is contraband from Livonia—cut with chalk or soda.”

She would go back to her hotel room and flush her purchase down the toilet.

One day, Magda asked Friedrich why he had started to deal in drugs. His reply amazed her. He told her that his superiors had given him a choice: either he would start transporting cocaine into the country or somebody else would be given the job of flying to Berlin, and Friedrich would join his friends the Trotskyites in exile or in prison.

Like vintage wines and brandy, expensive drugs came into the USSR mainly from Hamburg, Berlin, and Riga. The top quality stuff was brought in not by smugglers, who tended to manufacture their own substandard product, but by ships’ captains, train guards, diplomatic couriers, and pilots. These groups could get through customs without having their baggage inspected, and their product would be sold straight to eminent Party dignitaries and “useful foreigners.”

“Do you think I’m ashamed of what I do?” Friedrich asked Magda. “Not in the least! Half the people in the Kremlin either swill vodka or sniff cocaine. Those scoundrels have killed the revolution, and I’ve no sympathy for them. What I can’t understand is why you’ve become a drug addict.”

Magda assumed a tragic expression. “What else do I have to live for?”

Then she told him all about how Klim Rogov had taken the job she had set her heart on. In spite of all her efforts to find work, no Soviet editor had expressed an interest in hiring her, and she now had no visa and no money.

“Do you know how to do anything?” demanded Friedrich angrily.

Magda put her hand to her heart. “I can write books, and I’m a good photographer.”

The next time Magda came to Friedrich, he gave her a letter from an editor in Berlin. This editor explained that Germany was very interested in what was going on in the USSR because many German firms were hoping to supply goods to the country. They had nowhere else to turn since the victorious allies had placed heavy restrictions on German foreign trade after the Great War. If Miss Thomson were willing to write a book about her life in Moscow, the publisher would take on the expense of having the book translated, even paying her an advance. All the editor asked was for her to send him a plan and a couple of sample chapters.

“It’s one of my… well, my customers,” muttered Friedrich. “You need to grab your chance with him while he can still think straight. Pretty soon, his family will have him committed to a clinic, and he won’t be any use to you.”

Magda was so moved that tears came into her eyes. “Of course I’ll write to him! Let me have the address.”

Friedrich told her that all correspondence should be directed through him. That way, it would be possible to get around the censors.

“I’m happy to help you,” he said, “but on one condition. You must give up cocaine. And believe me; you won’t be able to fool me. If you carry on taking it, I’ll be able to sniff it out.”

Magda swore in the name of all that was sacred that she would never again touch the dreaded white powder. She was overjoyed at the prospect of her new job.

Magda’s plan was approved in Berlin, the contract was signed, and work began on the new book.

The Bolsheviks were very keen to attract tourists into the country, and Friedrich advised Magda to inform the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs that she was planning to write a travel guide for foreigners. Her visa was extended straight away, and she was allowed to rent the apartment of an opera singer who had left the country on a tour.

What a shame it was, thought Magda, that Nina was no longer with her! The interpreters sent to her by the state did their best to take her to places she did not care about, such as the Bolshoi Theater or the furniture museum. In the end, Magda decided she would go everywhere alone and explain herself to Russians using sign language if she had to.

For a chapter of her book devoted to Soviet children, she had to write about the street urchins, homeless waifs who had appeared in vast numbers as a result of the civil war, the recent famine, and widespread alcoholism among the working class.

They had their own turfs and professions. One might steal coal from the railroad yards while another specialized in pickpocketing, and still others ran errands for construction teams. Magda was keen to build up a picture of how these children lived, so she set off for the market to acquaint herself with the future characters of her book.

A huge street market had sprung up beneath the half-ruined wall of Kitai Gorod. Lookouts sat in the embrasures in the ancient towers, ready to give the signal if a police patrol arrived. Beneath them jostled crowds of unlicensed traders peddling all manner of goods—from counterfeit perfume to dried fish and from coarse cloth brassieres to rat poison. Many of them were selling identical goods, produced out in manufacturing workshops in the suburbs of Moscow.

An enormous peasant moved through the crowd festooned in toy pistols and swords. Every once in a while, he would shoot a cap into the air with a deafening bang.

Chinese traders waved bags and briefcases sewn from patchworks of colored scraps, calling, “Buy, buy! Latest fashion!”

“Fresh pi-i-ies! Get yer fresh pies he-e-ere!” called a woman wearing a dirty apron over her heavy cloth coat. Nearby, students fumbled in their pockets for a few kopecks to buy something to eat, dancing from leg to leg and shivering in the cold.

Old women measured out sunflower seeds with wooden tumblers and poured them into their customers’ pockets. This was a risky trade: the citizens of Moscow consumed enormous amounts of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells all over streets, and the Moscow Soviet had recently threatened to impose huge fines on anyone selling the snack. But as usual in Russia, the severity of the official laws was tempered by the casual attitude of the populace toward them.

Magda snapped some pictures of various wares spread out on oilcloths on the ground—children’s books, underwear, cigarette lighters, and strings of beads. It was frustrating not to have a movie camera to film the street barbers who shaved their customers’ with lightning speed; something she could never capture with a photograph.

Soon she came across a very exotic sight: braids of hair of all colors—from bluish-black to auburn and golden. These days, peasant women from the villages cut off their hair to sell to fashionable city women to make artificial chignons.

A young street urchin in a torn hat with earflaps ran up to Magda, stretching out a bony hand, blue with cold. This was just what she had been looking for. She reached into her bag and took out a raisin bun.

“Here,” she told the boy. “Take this!”

The boy, amazed at this unheard-of generosity, took a step backward and sat down in the snow. Then he tucked the bun under his shirt, put his fingers in his mouth, and gave a piercing whistle. A moment later, a whole flock of children dressed in indescribable rags had gathered around Magda.

She began to hand the children some of the treats she had brought beforehand in the café of the Metropol Hotel. They chattered excitedly and tugged at her skirt. The scene attracted some openly disapproving glances from passersby.

A man in a sheepskin coat came up and tried to explain something to Magda, but one of the street children lobbed a piece of broken brick at his back. He spat angrily and went on his way.

Magda took out a carefully prepared “crib” and read aloud in Russian: “I would like to find out how you live. I want to take photographs of your house.”

The boy in the hat with earflaps grabbed Magda’s arm. “Come on.”

They set off with the mob of street children streaming off after them. The children led Magda to a crumbling tower in the fortress wall. Here, street cleaners were piling up pieces of ice chipped from the pavements, together with trash and horse manure, into an enormous mound of waste. After clambering over the mound, Magda found herself facing a small opening covered with a metal grating, leading into a cellar. Grayish blue smoke drifted out from inside.

A girl of about nine pulled away the grating and was first to dive into the damp, black hole.

The boy in the hat with earflaps poked Magda in the back. “Go!”

She looked around at the children who smiled back at her. Looking at their unkempt figures, their runny noses, and filthy faces, she shuddered, seized with a painful sense of pity. What lay in store for these wretched youngsters?

Bending double, Magda squeezed her way into the damp-smelling crawl space, but her clothes caught on something. She lost her balance and went sprawling onto a heap of broken bricks.

I was coming out of the store with a bag of groceries when suddenly a street urchin with a crutch threw himself under my feet. He fell into the snow and sent up a howl: “Help! I’m being trampled underfoot!”

While I was helping him to his feet and apologizing, his little friends grabbed my groceries and ran off in all directions, and the invalid suddenly lifted up his crutch like a cudgel and came straight at me.

“What did I just hear you say about the Soviet authorities?” he yelled. “Citizens, this bourgeois scum should have got what’s coming to him long ago. He just called Lenin a bastard!”

The lad took me for a Nepman and thought that I would take fright and run off. I explained to him that he had just disgraced his country horribly in front of a foreign journalist. Now I would have to write a report about how workers in the Soviet Union were prevented from going about their business and were even subject to attacks by children.

The young defender of Lenin was hugely embarrassed to hear this. “Tell you what. You come back to our base, and we’ll give you your stuff back,” he promised, leading me after his fugitive comrades.

As we walked back to his den, he introduced himself to me as Tsar Pest and told me a little about his life. His parents had taken to drink, and he had refused to go into an orphanage because, as he explained it, all those places were run by “bourgeois do-gooders.”

Until a year or so ago, Tsar Pest had earned his keep by running around attics and rooftops stealing clothes and bed linen from washing lines, but one day, somebody had caught him at it and thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg. The break had healed badly, and he had walked with a crutch ever since.

He had earned his nickname thanks to his cocky attitude, his belligerent character, and his extraordinary love of power. He told me that he had more than a dozen “minions” over whom he enjoyed absolute authority. They aided and abetted all his criminal activities and were obliged to bring him something valuable every day. In exchange, he allowed them to sleep in a cellar under the Kitai Gorod wall and protected them from the police or from other street gangs.

To cut a long story short, today, I made the acquaintance of an underage feudal lord.

Tsar Pest led me to the cellar where his “minions” were hiding out. Their lair was like the home of prehistoric cave dwellers: broken brick battlements above and a stone floor below covered with straw, and on the walls, smutty drawings done in lamp black. Right in the middle of the floor stood an iron stove and a big chest labeled “Froot” into which the kids put their catch at the end of every day.

Tsar Pest kept his word and gave me back my groceries, except those that had already been eaten. He also offered me his girlfriend, a hideous girl of about twelve who was clearly pregnant. All the time I was in the den, the girl was sitting next to the stove draped in an old theater poster, sniffing at some faded artificial forget-me-nots plucked from a funeral wreath.

When I turned down his girlfriend, Tsar Pest showed me some women’s clothing that was clearly not of Soviet provenance.

“Buy some of this, and you can give it to your girl,” he said.

In the pile he offered me, I noticed a battered rust brown Kodak camera case—and then it struck me: I was looking at the belongings of Magda Thomson. I recognized the dress she had been wearing on the day I met her.

When I asked Tsar Pest where he had found the stuff, he flared up and told me to mind my own business. He didn’t need to tell me though. It was quite clear that he had robbed poor Magda.

I decided it would be a good idea to return her possessions, so I proposed playing Tsar Pest at cards for them. He agreed, quite unaware of what a devious opponent he was about to face. As a young man, I had quite a passion for card tricks, and in my time, I mastered a few techniques that would earn me a battering with a candelabra if I ever tried them out in a casino.

We sat down to play, and soon, I won back Magda’s camera. Next, I won back her dress, her coat, and all the rest.

As they watched our battle, the “minions” got quite carried away with excitement.

“Holy cow, look at that!” one or other would exclaim. “This guy’s a pro and no mistake.”

First, they were all rooting for Tsar Pest, but gradually, their sympathies switched to me. Clearly, the Tsar’s subjects were enamored of their master.

“Watch out, or he’ll have the shirt off your back,” said the pregnant girl with a guffaw.

“Shut it, you,” muttered Tsar Pest, who was puffing nervously at a roll-up, turning it around now and again to smoke with the lit end in his mouth. His cheeks were scarlet, and smoke came pouring from his nostrils.

Once or twice he went for me with a knife made from a piece of sharpened metal. “I’ll rip out your guts, so I will!”

All the kids roared as we scuffled together.

“Had enough?” I asked, pinning Tsar Pest to the floor.

“No-o!” he wailed, and we got back to our game.

In the end, Tsar Pest lost everything he had—his crutch, his knife, his “minions,” and even the box labeled “Froot.” Burying his head in his shoulders, he got to his feet and shuffled to the hole in the wall.

The urchins, who had all fallen silent, stared at me with eyes like saucers. I have no idea whom they took me for: a savior or a new slave owner.

I told them I had no intention of exacting tribute from them, but I needed them to help me.

“I want you to go around all the market traders and ask them if they’ve seen a red velvet coat with Chinese dragons on it. I’ll give a handsome reward to the one who finds it.”

I had tied Magda’s clothes into a bundle and was already on my way out when the pregnant girl called out to me.

“There’s a foreign lady in the cesspool over there,” the girl said. “She might be dead already. Tsar Pest went at her with his crutch.”

It turned out that the foreign lady was Magda: she had come to visit the urchins two days before. They had battered her and thrown her into a shallow cesspool in the corner of the cellar.

The “minions” helped me drag Magda out. She was unconscious, her face was smeared with dried blood, and there was a gaping, wet wound on the back of her head.

The children assured me that they had attacked the foreigner on the orders of Tsar Pest; had it not been for him, they would have left her alone.

“She was kind,” they told me. “She even gave us buns.”

I was surrounded by underage murderers, unpunished by the law and quite unwilling to accept responsibility for their crime. To look at them, it was clear they really believed they had done nothing wrong.

I took Magda off to the hospital. The doctor’s told me she had a bad concussion, a great many injuries, and generalized hypothermia. It was a miracle that she had survived her ordeal.

The whole affair left me deeply shaken. What incredible luck that I turned up at that place at that very moment!

Another thing: it gave me an insight into the nature of power—the power of one person over another.

The street urchins almost killed Magda because their feared leader told them to do so. They didn’t hate her. And in any case, all the loot went straight to Tsar Pest, so they gained nothing for their wrongdoing. Their crime was simply a symbol of their obedience. “Do you see how much we respect you? We’re prepared to murder or to stoop to any despicable act so long as you leave us alone.”

Tsar Pest’s authority stayed in place until he experienced his first symbolic defeat. After losing a few games of cards, the “minions’” mighty commander was transformed before their eyes into a pitiful failure, and his power melted away like snow. The “minions” had committed a horrible crime out of fear of a power that turned out to be entirely illusory.

Alas, all too often, the world of adults follows similar laws.

I visited Magda in the hospital. She is already looking more like herself again.

An investigator came to see her, but she told him she has no intention of reporting the crime to the police. In her opinion, the children who tried to kill her were not guilty—they had simply been unlucky enough to fall into a corrupt world of crime.

Soon, we were joined by a mutual acquaintance, a pilot by the name of Friedrich. I had met him once at Seibert’s house: when Friedrich was sober, he had sworn allegiance to Stalin, but once he had a drink or two inside him, he began to sing Trotsky’s praises. Clearly, he was one of the many oppositionists who quickly had to change their views in order not to share the fate of their leader, who, at the time, was about to be exiled either to Siberia or Central Asia.

Friedrich had not even got through the door before he began to curse Magda, calling her every name under the sun and accusing her of going to the street kids to buy cocaine. Eventually, I had to step in, and we left the ward together. Then, blushing, nervous, and shamefaced, he began to thank me for saving Magda’s life.

“Would you like me to bring you some ketchup back from Berlin?” he asked. “Or Coca-Cola? You Americans like that, don’t you?”

I asked him if he could smuggle abroad my article exposing the amorous exploits of the Bolsheviks, and after a few awkward moments, he agreed.

So, today, I had my second lesson about the nature of power. People may fear their leaders so much that they shake in their shoes at the sight of them and forget all their morals. But despite all this, they will still happily thumb their nose at their oppressors on the quiet. It’s a very natural human impulse: you may have the right to airplanes, Berlin, ketchup, and Coca-Cola, but you can’t be truly happy unless you are free.

Once Magda was out of the hospital, she sent me a long letter of thanks with a snapshot of Nina taken not long before her disappearance.

Just now, I’m sitting at my desk looking at this small black-and-white photograph printed on bad paper. This picture is all I have to show for my efforts after several months.

In the daytime, I can forget about my troubles for a while and can even feel happiness over little things. Friedrich took my article out of the country, and Owen has already sent a telegram: “Letter received from Berlin. Expect bonus.” Of course, I should be happy.

But an obscure ache creeps into my heart every night. I try to distract myself with books and newspapers, but I can’t get away from it.

I can recall everything so clearly: how Nina and I used to amuse ourselves at bedtime acting out idiotic romantic novels, trying to keep a straight face, and always end up crying from laughter. Or how I would walk past Nina as she was washing her face and put my arms around her waist for a few moments. I can still remember how it felt to run my hand over the silk of her open peignoir and the warm skin beneath.

How many moments of secret intimacy we enjoyed when we spoke to one another by touch alone!

Magda has captured Nina’s beauty for me, but the photograph doesn’t show even a tenth of what I have lost.