The Prince of the Soviets

8. A PROBLEM CHILD

As far as Galina knew, Klim had neither a wife nor a lover. He had no interest in prostitutes, but he clearly had an eye for female beauty; Galina would be driven to impotent fits of jealous rage when she saw him staring at some attractive girls from the Communist Youth organization. He never looked at her like that.

Galina was amazed at the change that had taken place in her. Until recently, she had heartily condemned foreign capitalists and their evil ways and been certain that the triumph of communism was all she needed to be happy. But no sooner had she gone to work for Klim than all her former convictions had vanished like smoke. She could not help herself: she realized now that she liked elegant manners, sophisticated tastes, intelligent conversation, and even something as vulgar as money.

Klim did not think himself rich and kept talking about how he could not afford this or that. He had no idea what real poverty was, of how it wore you down, day after day, year after year, to scrimp and save all the time—even when it came to buying bread.

Now, Klim was dreaming of buying an automobile so that he could race Seibert to the main telegraph office with his dispatches. Meanwhile, Galina could not save enough money to buy mittens for her daughter.

“Ask the master for a bit extra,” Kapitolina had advised her. “He’s kind. He won’t refuse.”

But Galina did not want to ask Klim for anything. She needed more than a crumb thrown her way in charity now and again. What she needed was a husband to drag her out of the morass she had fallen into years ago.

She and Klim were now on friendly terms, and Galina began to work toward a private plan. She would help Klim make a brilliant career for himself in Moscow, making herself indispensable so that when his contract with United Press expired, he would marry her and take her and Tata in with him.

“It’s essential that Weinstein singles you out as a ‘friendly journalist,’” she advised Klim. “Then the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs won’t be afraid to help you. In Moscow, everything comes down to connections. If they see you as one of them, you’ll become a real expert on Soviet affairs because you’ll get to talk to all the right people.”

“Even Stalin?” Klim asked.

“Even Stalin.”

Galina surmised that the quickest route to Klim’s heart was through Kitty. He loved his daughter and felt guilty that he was unable to give her a “normal” childhood.

Kitty was desperate to go and play outside with the other children, but Klim would not let her because the neighborhood kids would tease her, calling her “slit-eyed.” However proudly Soviet papers wrote of the “inseparable friendship of nations,” it was a different story in Moscow’s yards and children’s playgrounds. There was too much that was different about Kitty: her race, her clothes, and the foreign expressions she used when she spoke. All this aroused both curiosity and dislike among strangers, and invariably, some child or adult would start to pick on her when she went outside.

The casual racism they encountered every day drove Klim into a rage.

“Idiots,” he would fume. “They don’t understand that difference is a wonderful thing! Kitty knows games they’ve never even heard of. She can tell stories and show them things. She can let them play with her toys, but all they want to do is shove her into a snowdrift and laugh in her face.”

Galina would nod in agreement. When the occasion presented itself, she told Klim that her own daughter, who was twelve, would be happy to play with children of any nationality. She was determined to introduce Kitty to Tata and do everything she could to encourage a friendship between them.

As a matter of fact, Galina was ashamed of her daughter. Tata was ugly and not very bright. Almost all the girls in her class at school were homely—they had grown up in the years of civil war and suffered from poor nutrition and constant bouts of illness. But even compared to them, Tata was puny—she was a whole head shorter than other girls her age, and with her straggly ginger braids, her snub nose, and her ear-to-ear grin, she looked like an underfed gnome.

But the girl’s character was worse still. Tata would have tried the patience of a saint. She was lazy, disrespectful toward her elders, and always answering back. Sometimes, she would come out with such rubbish that it drove Galina to distraction.

Galina had hoped that the school would sort Tata out. However, it turned out that rather than teaching children geography or Russian, schools now taught them to fight the “relics of the Tsarist past.” As Tata saw it, the first of these relics was her mother.

“Your religious belief brings our whole family into disgrace,” she said, imitating the tones of her teacher. “As for keeping cactus plants on the windowsill, it’s a bourgeois habit that should be stamped out once and for all.”

Tata rejected everything her mother loved: comfort, convenience, beauty, and gentleness. Often, Galina would be pushed to breaking point, but even if she beat Tata, there was nothing she could do to knock some sense into the girl.

“You can kill me,” Tata would yell, “but I will never give up on our radiant vision! And you can be sure that my comrades will avenge me!”

What comrades? Who would avenge what? Galina had given her daughter a spanking because Tata had not turned off the light in the lavatory, and at a residents’ meeting, they had been given a public reprimand.

Like her mother, Tata lived in a fantasy world, but whereas Galina dreamed of love, her daughter dreamed of partisan brigades, of heroic deeds, faraway journeys, and world revolution.

Galina had told her daughter that she worked as a secretary in the OGPU. If Tata had found out what her mother actually did, she would have had a fit. At school, it was hammered into them that a good person should be humbly dressed and as simple as a spade. Any attempt to ask spiritual questions or to strive for intellectual development or even good manners was regarded as “bourgeois.” And everything bourgeois was regarded as not only foolish but also evil and treacherous, the mark of a secret desire to destroy everything on earth that was real or alive.

It was out of the question to bring Tata to the house on Chistye Prudy: she had never in her life even seen a private apartment, and Galina was afraid it would be too much of a shock for her daughter. It was better to start gradually.

Tata herself suggested the solution to this problem. When Galina hinted that she knew somebody who had come from Shanghai, Tata jumped up in excitement. “Is he a revolutionary? A real live revolutionary?”

“No,” Galina said. “He’s a journalist.”

“Oh, I see! It’s a state secret.”

Up until quite recently in Tata’s school, they had been discussing the heroic struggle of the Chinese proletariat. The children had held political arguments and debates, learned some words in Chinese, and collected money to help the striking workers. Tata now believed that there were only two sorts of people in China: revolutionaries and imperialists. An imperialist could not have come to the USSR, so Klim Rogov had to be a freedom fighter for the workers.

Galina invented a quite plausible story about how Klim had to hide his true identity to win the trust of the bourgeoisie and bring its secrets to light. Just now, he was working with foreign journalists in Moscow and was obliged, like it or not, to adapt himself to their corrupt tastes.

When Tata found out that Klim Rogov had a little Chinese daughter, she was overjoyed. She loved to boss other children around, but she was too small and plain to be taken seriously by her peers and preferred to play with younger children.

“Mother, can Kitty come and play with me?” Tata whined. “Please? I’ll do the washing-up for a whole week without being asked.”

Galina “grudgingly” agreed to her daughter’s request, but first, she made Tata swear not to pester Uncle Klim with questions about his revolutionary activities.

At one time, the large apartment building on Bolshoi Kiselny Lane had been home to eminent doctors and lawyers. But after the revolution, they had been turned out of the building, and new tenants had been moved in—ten families to each apartment.

In the old days, if people shared a house, they would have had something in common: a similar lifestyle, a similar level of education, or similar income. But now, academics lived cheek by jowl with alcoholics, policemen with petty thieves, and aristocratic old ladies with staunch young communists.

Galina’s apartment was no better or worse than any of the others. For the most part, the residents got along, but the cramped conditions and differences in opinions would invariably end in rows.

Who had trampled dirt from the street all over the entrance hall? Who had been splitting firewood in the bathroom and cracked the floor tiles? Who had hung up their washing in the kitchen out of turn? While tenants had individual washing lines, the nails in the walls were shared by all, and it was strictly forbidden to break the rota.

On Sunday morning, Galina went to Klim and Kitty’s house to pick them up, and they took a horse-cab to her house. All the way there, she felt horribly anxious, and despite herself, she kept noticing omens: church bells were ringing, which was lucky; but then a flock of crows flew up from a fence—a bad sign. She felt sick at heart, thinking of what Klim might say when he saw how wretchedly she lived. What if Tata blurted something out? What if the other tenants started a row and disgraced her in Klim’s eyes forever?

Klim noticed how nervous she was. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “The main thing is for the girls to enjoy themselves.”

She smiled gratefully in answer. It was incredible how he could always guess exactly what she was feeling and thinking.

After paying the cab driver, they entered a stairwell plastered with old announcements and went up to the second floor.

The marble staircase had survived ten years of Soviet rule, but the wooden rails had long since been taken off the banisters—they had been used for firewood in 1918. Here and there, plaster was peeling off the walls, and the doors were disfigured by a rash of doorplates, bells, and wires.

“Just a minute,” Galina said as she dug in her handbag for the key.

Kitty looked at the rows of electric doorbells in amazement. “Why do you have so many?”

“We all have our own doorbells,” explained Galina. “They all play different notes, so we know straight away who has a visitor.”

The door opened suddenly and out came one of Galina’s cotenants, Mitrofanych, an archive assistant. He greeted the visitors and set off downstairs, glancing up over his shoulder as he went. Klim and Kitty had clearly made quite an impression on him.

They entered a dark corridor hung with washing. From within the apartment, they could hear the whirr of a sewing machine.

“Sasha, you can heat up that meat rissole,” a female voice came from the kitchen. “It’s on the saucer under the cloth.”

They walked along the corridor past a row of trunks. Galina told her guests that some of the residents in the apartment had domestic helpers who had come in to Moscow from the countryside. In the daytime, they did the housework, and at night, they slept on these trunks.

“Please, come in,” said Galina, throwing open the door to her room. “Make yourselves at home.”

She had done what she could to brighten up her room. The walls were hung with decorated birdhouses and little cages that contained toy airplanes instead of birds. There was a lamp made of carefully assembled bits of glass, and instead of a divan, a garden bench stood in the corner of the room with a brightly colored mattress made of a patchwork of scraps. This was where Galina slept. Tata slept in the wardrobe under the clothes, but the guests did not have to know that.

Kitty looked spellbound at the wardrobe, which was decorated with pink-nosed white rabbits.

“They’re so pretty!” she said.

“My daughter painted them,” Galina said proudly.

“Where is she?”

“Here I am!”

Tata was standing in the doorway, looking like a child from an orphanage in her blue school smock and the ugly knitted cardigan.

Tata was holding an old ginger cat in her arms, Pussinboots, a wretched, communally owned creature who was fed by each of the tenants in turn.

For a second or two, Tata stared at her guests without saying a word. Galina tensed inside. What would happen now? But all went well. Tata greeted the visitors and, ignoring Klim, walked straight up to his daughter.

“What’s your name? Kitty? That won’t do. We’ll have to think up a new revolutionary name for you. My name is Traktorina, but you can call me Tata for short. Would you like to stroke Pussinboots? “

“Yes, please!” said Kitty, delighted.

“She’s called Tatyana,” said Galina with irritation, but Klim paid no attention to Tata’s fibs.

“Let them play,” he said.

“Who’s that?” asked Kitty, pointing at a portrait of Lenin that was hung above the desk. “Is it your father?”

Tata gaped at her. “He’s not my father. Or rather, he’s everybody’s father, not just mine. He’s the leader of the workers of the world!”

Kitty looked puzzled. “That’s my daddy, right there.” She pointed at Klim. “But I don’t know that man.”

“What?” Tata was lost for words. “But that’s… that’s…”

“Why do your servants sleep on trunks?” asked Kitty, suddenly. “In our house, Kapitolina sleeps on a sack of money. If you jump on it, you can hear it rustling.”

Tata looked slowly from Kitty to Klim. “Mother!” she said in dismay. “Can I talk to you in private?”

Galina took Tata out into the corridor.

“Who are these people?” Tata hissed angrily at her mother. “Why have you brought them here? They have servants who sleep on sacks of money!”

Galina put her hand over Tata’s mouth. “Quiet, for pity’s sake! It’s nonsense about the sacks. Kitty’s making it up!”

“Really? And why doesn’t she know who Lenin is?”

“They’ve only just come here from China. If Uncle Klim had told Kitty about Lenin, she might have said something in public, and it could have got them arrested.”

Tata looked thoughtful. She knew all about the outrages committed by the Chinese police.

“All right,” she agreed at last. “Let’s go back in.”

Tata taught Kitty to play political exiles—they perched on the windowsill and pretended they were on their way to Siberia. The cactus plants were the gendarmes who were standing guard over them.

Galina poured Klim some tea and got out some biscuits bought at a ridiculously high price from one of the other tenants. Everything seemed to be going well.

“I expect you’re at the Lubyanka now and again, are you?” asked Klim suddenly in English.

Galina stopped with her teacup halfway to her mouth. “What makes you say that?”

Klim pointed to a letter stuck behind the wire for the light switch. “OGPU Trade Union. Overdue membership fees: final notice.”

Galina’s hands began to shake. That fool of a girl Tata! Galina had told her a hundred times to hide the mail.

There was no point in denying it now.

“I don’t tell them anything bad about you,” she said hurriedly. “You can see my reports if you like. I don’t—”

Klim shook his head. “Don’t worry. I’ve nothing to hide. But could I ask you a favor? I want to know if the OGPU has a file on a woman called Nina Kupina.”

“Who’s that?” Galina frowned.

“A friend of mine.”

“Very well. I can find out.”

Klim leaned forward and touched Galina’s wrist, sending shivers through her body.

“Just don’t tell anybody I asked you. Do you promise?”

Galina nodded.

More than anything else, Tata Dorina wanted to join the Young Pioneers, the organization of young builders of communism. But to do this, besides having an excellent school record, she needed to “harden herself up” physically, help workers in other countries, and organize other children to carry out socially useful work. More importantly still, she needed a recommendation from somebody who was a member of the Young Pioneers.

Tata had problems with all of these conditions: she did not enjoy schoolwork, cold showers made her ill, and she could not organize other children because they never listened to her.

Once, she had tried to help workers in other countries by bringing in a big roasting dish for scrap metal. As a result, she had received a thrashing from her mother for her efforts.

“But they gave me twenty-five kopecks!” she shouted, trying to avoid her mother’s belt. “I gave it to the worker’s fund!”

“And now I’m going to give you what for!” threatened her mother.

Tata found even simple tasks difficult, such as talking to older people about why they shouldn’t believe in God.

“Mother, just remember,” Tata said, “God doesn’t exist. If you ever feel you need to make the sign of the cross, raise your hand to your forehead and give a Pioneer salute instead.”

“What if I find it easier to live with God than without?” asked her mother.

This remark angered Tata. “You shouldn’t think only of your own enjoyment. We need to put all our strength into the fight.”

“I’m doing that already,” her mother sighed. “And I feel as if I have no strength left.”

Tata despised her mother for her degenerate morals, but she was scared of her all the same. Not so much because of her beatings but because of her tears and her long, dreary spells of melancholy. Sometimes, when her mother got back from work, she would lie straight down on the bench without having supper and turn her face to the wall.

“What’s the matter, Mommy?” Tata would ask, alarmed.

“Nothing.”

Tata felt sure that her mother was upset because of something she had done, and Tata was always doing the wrong thing.

Once, she had been sitting at the window when she had spotted her archenemy from school, Julia—a dark-haired girl with a heavy face, pale skin, and unhealthy-looking swollen eyelids. She had an urge to throw something at Julia, and as ill luck would have it, the first thing that fell to hand was a tray of eggs that Tata’s mother had bought at the market. Tata had subjected Julia to such a bombardment that she had been forced to retreat in disgrace.

But Tata’s mother chose that moment to come in with a basin of wet washing.

“You awful girl!” she wailed, grabbing a wet towel and starting to thrash Tata with it. “I was going to make you a birthday cake!”

Tata kept apologizing and told her mother that the Young Pioneers would definitely correct her bad character. They had managed to reform even worse offenders than herself.

“Nothing will change you!” her mother spat at her. “How did you turn out to be such an idiot? Where did you get it from?”

Tata really did feel stupid. A little later, she found out that Julia was a member of the Young Pioneers and was now doing all she could to prevent Tata from being accepted.

There was nobody to stick up for Tata as she had no friends.

Tata enjoyed playing with Kitty. That little girl was pretty and amusing just like a doll, and Tata had never had a doll.

Kitty looked at her with adoring eyes. “Can I come play with you again? We could play we’re running away from the jond… the jor… from the cactus plants.”

It was a pity that Kitty’s father had such bourgeois habits. Tata understood that he had to wear those dreadful ties and fancy ribbed socks for work, but why did he have to go about dressed up like a bourgeois on the weekend? He probably just wanted to show off in front of other people. It was very antisocial and immature of him, she thought.

When Uncle Klim and Kitty left, the tenants gathered in the kitchen and asked Tata about her guests. Tata could not help adding some extra details of her own to Klim’s biography.

“He’s a progressive journalist from Shanghai. He fought on the barricades there and saved wounded Red Army soldiers.”

The tenants exchanged respectful glances.

“Well, I hope you and your mother don’t get too big for your boots now,” said Mitrofanych. “You know the sort of thing. That foreigner gives you a stamp from one of his letters, and the next thing, you’re too proud to say hello to us.”

“Why should we care about his stamps?” Tata snorted, and immediately the thought struck her—maybe she should ask Klim for some old envelopes? Foreign stamps were worth their weight in gold at school. You could swap them for anything, even radio parts.

When Tata went back to their room, her mother had already gone to bed. Tata crawled into her sleeping quarters and stretched out. At last, she had grown tall enough for her head and feet to touch the opposite sides of the wardrobe.

The bench creaked, and her mother suddenly asked in an uncharacteristically affectionate voice, “How were things at school today?”

That was strange. She never asked questions like this. She would even sign Tata’s report without looking at it.

Tata told her that they had all played a game called “The Privilege Catcher.”

“They gave us balls that had things written on them: ‘union budget,’ ‘tax relief,’ and ‘electoral rights.’ We had to throw them to one another so that the churchman representative didn’t catch them. And guess who was the churchman? Julia!”

Tata climbed out of the wardrobe and began to run excitedly around the room in the dark.

“I’m a priest. I’m the enemy of the Soviet system!” she growled in a threatening voice, playing at being Julia. “I want to get the same privileges as the workers!”

“So, what happened?” asked her mother. “Did she get them?”

“Of course not!”

Actually, Julia had managed to get her hands on all the “privileges”—she had been chosen as the churchman as she was faster and nimbler on her feet than all the other girls in the class.

After the game, the Young Pioneer leader Vadik had made the panting children line up and told them that the real enemy was just as cunning and clever as this and that the privileges that had been given to the working class needed to be guarded fiercely.

“I hit Julia on the head with ‘tax relief,’ and she got nothing!” fibbed Tata. “They even praised me for being vigilant.”

There was a sigh in the darkness, and Tata fell silent, unsure if her mother felt proud or angry at her for her fight against the church.

“Did you like Kitty?” asked her mother.

“You bet!” said Tata. “I wish I had a sister like her.”

“I’m so glad,” said her mother and laughed a quiet and happy laugh that Tata had not heard for a long time.