The Prince of the Soviets

11. CHRISTMAS NIGHT

Kitty went several times to visit Tata. At first, Klim was pleased she had found herself a friend, but soon, his daughter began to use expressions like “a class-based attitude” and “rotten idealism.” One day, instead of asking for Klim to read her a fairytale at bedtime, Kitty asked for the “Young Pioneer’s Solemn Oath.”

The following day, Tata rang Klim to demand that Kitty be given a topical, revolutionary name.

“I’ve made up a list of names,” she said, “so you can choose: either Barricade, Progressina, Diamata, or Ninel. ‘Diamata’ comes from ‘dialectical materialism,’ and ‘Ninel’ is ‘Lenin’ backward.”

Klim told Tata that his daughter was quite revolutionary enough.

“Actually,” he said, “‘Kitty’ stands for ‘Kill the Imperialist Traitors of Tomorrow’s Youth.’”

“You don’t say!” Tata gasped in admiration. “Kitty never told me that! I promise you, I’ll make such a fine communist out of your daughter you won’t believe it!”

Afrikan went out into the forest and bought back a moss-covered fir tree, which he put up in the living room. Galina and Kapitolina spent all Christmas Eve making paper lanterns while Kitty cut pictures at random from postcards and punched holes in them to make decorations.

The window panes were half coated in snow, but inside, the room was wonderfully warm and inviting, smelling of fir sap and the smoke of birch logs.

Klim picked up from the table a sealed envelope, which Galina had given him earlier, and opened it. It was Tata’s Christmas present: an article from The Pioneer’s Pravda.

At the end of the article Tata had added a handwritten note:

When Galina went out in the kitchen to check on the pastry for the pie, Klim followed her.

She lifted the pan lid, breathed in, and closed her eyes in pleasure.

“What a delicious smell!” she said. “When I was little, our cook would make a wonderful apple pie every year, and I would stuff myself so that I could barely move afterward.”

She gazed at Klim, her eyes shining. “It’s wonderful that you can cook on a proper range,” she added. “At home, we have to use kerosene stoves. Coal is too expensive, and we never have enough of it.”

“Your daughter seems to have taken it upon herself to educate Kitty and me,” said Klim and held out Tata’s letter to Galina.

She scanned the note and then threw it angrily into the range. “The little pest! She’s incorrigible. No matter how much I thrash her—”

“What? Do you beat her?”

“I don’t beat her badly. I just give her a taste of the belt from time to time. To keep her in line.”

Klim felt his hands tightening into fists despite himself. He had been thrashed as a child, and the memory of it was a source of a profound sense of humiliation.

“Never beat people smaller and weaker than you are,” said Klim, enunciating each word coldly and deliberately. “Don’t you see how despicable it is?”

Galina realized that she should have held her tongue, but she still tried to defend herself. “It’s the only language Tata understands!”

“No, it’s that you have no idea how else to deal with her. Children simply stop listening to you if you punish them all the time. Tata can’t live in a state of constant fear, believing that her mother thinks she’s bad. She has only one way of protecting herself: to ignore all the insulting things you say.”

For too long, Klim had concealed a growing annoyance with Galina.

“Adults who beat children,” he said, “are like lackeys taking pleasure in the fact that for once, they can exert power over somebody else. They grovel to their bosses and then take it all out on some defenseless victim who can’t get away from them.”

Galina looked stricken. “Is that really what you think of me?”

“Well, isn’t every word of it true?”

Galina’s lips trembled. “It’s easy enough to have scruples when you have plenty of everything and can be your own master. But my nerves are at their breaking point!”

“Why do you think that is? Tata’s your only child, yet you spend days over here at my house. She doesn’t have any idea how to get your attention.”

Galina looked at Klim in horror. “But she… but I…”

Klim realized he had gone too far. What was the point in reminding Galina that she was a terrible mother? She knew already after all. And now Tata would be punished for her silly Christmas “gift.”

Good god, thought Klim, and that woman still holds out hope that something will happen between us!

As he left the kitchen, his gaze fell on a parcel beside the door. It contained books that Klim had ordered for Elkin from a Swedish catalogue. It was much easier for foreigners to order things from abroad.

Klim did not want to go back into the living room. He knew that Galina would start apologizing and vowing never to lay a finger on Tata again.

He took the box of books and set off downstairs.

Elkin had once been a garage owner, but after the West had imposed a trade boycott on Soviet Russia, it was no longer possible to get spare parts. Forced to change profession, he had become a bookseller.

His bookstore, Moscow Savannah, had become popular with readers for its wonderful selection of prerevolutionary books. Visitors would rummage through dusty tomes, discussing the new finds unearthed in abandoned warehouses. Subversive conversations could be heard in the store about how the only worthwhile books were printed in the prerevolutionary script.

Elkin’s shop, like Klim’s apartment, was lavishly adorned with giraffes. Herds of painted giraffes paraded around the walls, and small wooden and bronze figurines stood on top of the bookcases. There was even a miniature giraffe with a parasol perched on the cashier’s desk.

Until recently, business had been lively at the Moscow Savannah, but in the summer of 1927, the authorities had raised the taxes on private trade so that it was no longer profitable to run a store. Elkin was afraid he would have to close it.

Klim found him in a small room piled high with reference books, sketches, and all sorts of equipment. Elkin was listening to the radio with a pair of improvised headphones.

“It’s a devilish business!” he exclaimed, removing his headphones when he caught sight of Klim. “Have you listened to the Comintern Radio lately? They’re deliberately trying to give the whole country the jitters, scaring us with talk of saboteurs who want to sell the population into slavery to imperialists.”

“Don’t let it upset you,” Klim said. “Intelligent people know that it’s all propaganda.”

“But that’s the point!” Elkin exclaimed. “These good-for-nothings are turning the rabble against educated people. That’s the Bolsheviks’ state policy—to declare the workers the ‘vanguard’ and the ‘hegemony’ and make them believe their superior to all the ‘bourgeois specialists.’ Just read the papers! I tell you, it’s civil war all over again—only this time not between the Reds and the Whites but between the schooled and the unschooled.”

Elkin grabbed a magazine from the table and thrust it toward Klim. “Take a look at this! ‘Machine Operator Exposes the Lies of a Technical Specialist.’ Or here’s another one: ‘The Dirty Tricks of a State Fisheries Engineer.’ They’re throwing mud at anyone with higher education now. After all, we all studied under the Tsarist regime, so now we are ‘alien class elements.’ These social Darwinists have decided that the son of an alcoholic and uneducated peasant is made of better stuff than the son of a family of scholars.”

With his hair standing up on end, Elkin resembled a large, disheveled bird.

“Do you have a parcel for me?” he said, finally noticing the box in Klim’s arms. “Well, that’s one bright spot in the gloom.”

He began to dig around in the box, and soon all his woes were forgotten. “Well, just look at this!” he exclaimed delightedly as he leafed through a large textbook on the corrosion of metals. “This is excellent stuff!”

“Do you know Swedish?” asked Klim in surprise.

“It’s not difficult. If you know three or four European languages, you can get the hang of the rest, especially when it comes to scientific material.”

Elkin told Klim that these books would be sent to the Gosizdat, the state publishing house. They would be translated and printed there unofficially on paper earmarked for Party literature.

“The publishers are sent orders from those at the top to print a certain number of trade union anthologies or textbooks on ‘Scientific Marxism.’ But of course, there’s no demand for that stuff. On the other hand, the authorities want publishers to make a profit, so the solution is to let them publish useful technical literature on the quiet. Officially, we’re doing one thing, but in reality, it’s a different picture.”

“Do the Swedes know their books are going to be translated into Russian?” asked Klim.

Elkin regarded him with a wry smile. “My dear fellow, have you no idea of where you are living? The country of the Soviets is a kingdom of deception. The Bolsheviks have deceived themselves with their theory, but they stubbornly keep trying to make it real because they don’t want to lose power. They can explain to the fools that ‘everything has to be this way,’ and meanwhile, they declare all intelligent people who doubt their propaganda as enemies and saboteurs. Everything here is lies and fakery, and no matter what scruples you may have, you can’t get by here unless you lie and bend the rules. Have a look at me! If I didn’t cheat, my business would go up in smoke tomorrow.”

Just at that moment, they heard the piercing cry of a child from outside the building. “Daddy! Help!”

Klim rushed out into the corridor, flung open the door, and ran into the dark, snowy yard. There was nobody there, but he could hear bloodcurdling howls from the porter’s lodge where Snapper was locked up.

“Daddy!” squealed the voice again.

A shadow flitted past the woodshed—a small man in a long greatcoat was trying to drag off Kitty, who was struggling with all her might. Klim caught up with them and knocked Kitty’s kidnapper into the snow with a blow to the jaw before snatching up Kitty in his arms.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

She was wearing nothing but her indoor dress—she was even without shoes.

Kapitolina ran up to them. “This man tried to steal our little girl!” she shrieked and began to kick the kidnapper, who was still spread-eagle in the snowdrift. The man’s Red Army cap had fallen off his close shaved head, and blood was pouring from his split lip.

“Why are you attacking me?” the man wailed in a high pitched voice like a woman. “I’m just looking for a foreigner who asked about the Chinese coat with the dragons.”

Klim’s heart skipped a beat. He handed Kitty to Kapitolina. “Take her home,” he said.

Klim took the kidnapper under the elbow and dragged him inside the house. The lobby was lit only by a dim bulb.

“What do you know about the Chinese coat?” he asked hotly. “Do you know the woman it belonged to? I’ll let you go if you tell me the truth.”

The man stared at Klim warily and sniffed. “They told me at the market that you’d give a reward for information about a Chinese coat. That was Nina’s coat!”

“And where is she now?”

“How the devil should I know? She was taken away by those bourgeois opposite the Korsh Theater.”

“What do you mean by ‘taken away’? Where?”

The man did not seem to have heard Klim’s question. “Your girl has a pretty dress,” he said. “I had one like that when I was little.”

He’s completely insane, thought Klim, looking into the man’s crazed eyes.

At that moment, Elkin ran out onto the landing, brandishing an ax. “Freeze! I’ll call the police!”

“I’ll kill you, you bastard!” roared the kidnapper, whipping a homemade blade out of his pocket and making a lunge at Klim, who leaped to one side.

The man ran headlong out into the street, and Klim and Elkin were unable to catch him.

Klim went back to his apartment, his heart hammering in his chest. Could it be that he had stumbled upon a clue to Nina’s whereabouts? All the foreigners in Moscow knew who lived in the house opposite the Korsh Theater. It was Oscar Reich, an American who earned millions from business concessions in Soviet Russia. Klim had met him several times at official banquets.

Kitty’s voice came from her room. “Daddy, where are you?”

“I’m coming,” he said.

What if I hadn’t heard Kitty cry out? thought Klim. That madman would have carried her off, taken her dress, and left her somewhere in the snow.

Galina, her eyes swollen with crying, came out of the living room and, catching sight of the bloodstains on Klim’s shirt, stared at him, horrified.

“Were you in a fight? Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “How could a stranger have just walked into our apartment?”

Galina gave a plaintive sob. “Kitty took a postcard with a picture of Comrade Stalin on it. She punched a hole through his forehead with a pencil to hang the picture on the tree, so I told her to go and sit outside in the corridor and think about what she had done. She was on her own out there—Kapitolina and I were laying the table. I think the door may have been open—you didn’t slam it shut. And that character must have walked in—”

Hearing this, Klim felt another wave of anger at Galina. “What do you think you’re doing? Punishing a child about a Stalin postcard! Why are you so keen to fall down and worship sacred objects? You’re no better than a savage! Or were you just taking it out on Kitty because I had upset you before?”

Saying nothing more, Klim went into Kitty’s room. She was lying on the bed.

“I thought the man was Santa Claus,” she said, wiping away her tears. “He promised to give me a biscuit. And then he suddenly grabbed me and carried me off.”

Klim sat down beside her on the bed. “But he didn’t have a beard, did he?”

“I thought maybe he was a modern Santa. I thought maybe Santa shaves his beard nowadays.” Kitty sat up on the bed and looked into Klim’s eyes. “Daddy, I promise I won’t…” She did not finish and flung her arms around his neck.

They assured each other several times how frightened they had been and how good it was that everything had ended happily.

“You must promise me never to go anywhere with a stranger,” said Klim.

Kitty nodded. “I promise.”

He sent her off to wash her face. Then he went back into the living room and dug an address book out of the desk drawer.

“Klim, it wasn’t my fault,” Galina began, putting her head around the door. “I didn’t think—”

“It’s fine,” he said without looking up. “You can go home. Kapitolina will put Kitty to bed.”

He was overcome by nervous excitement. What if he was about to find Nina after all? What if he was about to experience a simple, ridiculously ordinary miracle and receive the most precious gift possible on the night before Christmas?

He stood for a long time, unsure whether to pick up the telephone and make a call. This indecision surprised even himself. What was stopping him? Addiction to the misery that had now become his lot in life? Fear of the unknown?

Plucking up his courage in the end, he lifted the receiver and asked the operator for Oscar Reich’s number.

The housekeeper answered the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said with a sing-song intonation. “Mr. Reich isn’t at home right now.”

“When will he be back?” asked Klim.

“In four months,” came the answer. “He’s leaving for Europe tonight.”

Klim’s heart gave a lurch. “What time is his train?”

“At ten. If it’s something urgent, you might still catch him at the station.”

It was already five to nine—there was almost no time left.

Klim could not simply approach Reich empty-handed and ask him about Nina because that might attract unwanted attention. He picked up a few postcards from the floor, put them into an envelope, and wrote on it the first thing he could think of: “Central Post Office, London, for collection by Mr. Smith.”

I’ll say that I need to send this letter in a hurry, Klim thought, and ask Reich to post it in the first post box he finds abroad.

Galina appeared again in the doorway. “Please don’t be angry with me—”

Klim rushed past her and began to pull on his coat. “I’ll be back soon.”