Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

“Well, at least I can sleep like a millionaire,” she said, plumping up her treasured mattress.

From the trunk, she produced embroidery frames, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and balls of yarn and thread. Soon, the apartment began to fill up with decorative cloths and ornamental towels.

“It’s prettier like this,” she said, spreading a cloth embroidered with roosters over the typewriter.

Klim kept taking away the cloth, but the following day, there it would be again in the same place.

Kapitolina had firm ideas about domestic economy. “You should eat the stale bread before you start on the fresh,” she lectured Klim.

“But if I do that, the fresh bread will have gone stale by the time I eat it,” he objected. “Am I supposed to live on dry rusks?”

Kapitolina’s cheeks reddened with indignation. “Fine then! Let the bread rot and the house burn, and let’s all go to the devil!” she cried.

Klim did not back down, so Kapitolina would eat up the stale bread herself to not let good food go to waste. She did nothing by halves: if she was making soup, she would boil up a whole vat full of it; if she started on the washing, she would set all the linen to soak at once, not leaving a single dry sheet for the night.

“You great dolt!” Afrikan scolded her. “You donkey!”

Kapitolina would sometimes roar with laughter. At other times, she would snap back, “Stop your yelling! You’re not living in the Tsarist regime now!”

One day, hearing Snapper barking and Kitty squealing, Klim went into the kitchen to see what was going on.

“Get rid of this fool of a girl!” Afrikan demanded. “She’s just burned a pound of your coffee.”

“Informer!” Kapitolina wailed. “Why are you such a backstabber?”

“I’m not a backstabber. I’m trying to see you do things right. What did you think—that the master wouldn’t miss all that coffee?”

“Well, he didn’t miss the cup, did he?”

“What cup?” asked Klim, frowning.

Kapitolina and Afrikan both fell silent. There was a tense pause.

“The cup was on the table, and they had a fight and started running around the table,” Kitty explained. “And everything fell off. But there’s no need to get mad, Daddy. Kapitolina gave me my milk in a tin.”

Klim took some money from his wallet. “Kapitolina, go out for me and buy us some new cups.”

“Don’t go sending that great lummox out to a china shop!” cried Afrikan in horror. “She’ll break everything in sight.”

But Kapitolina was already winding the paisley scarf around her head. “Yes, sir, this minute, sir! I’ll be quick, so I will—I swear to God.”

Klim had wanted a guardian angel to relieve him of his household chores, but Kapitolina was more like a goddess of destruction. He could not use her as a courier either. She did not know Moscow, and in any case, she was not allowed to go anywhere. Anyone taking messages from a foreigner needed official permission.

Klim bit the bullet and went to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to ask permission to hire an assistant.

Weinstein was clearly delighted at this turn of events. “We’ll find you somebody with just the right qualifications,” he promised.

7

“Sir,” Kapitolina hissed and ran up to Klim on tiptoe—she believed that this was less distracting. “There’s a woman asking about a job as a courier. Her name is Galina Dorina.”

Klim told Kapitolina to let the prospective courier in, and in walked a diminutive, shabbily dressed woman with an extraordinary face. She had almond-shaped eyes the color of honey, a long thin nose, and full, pale lips. With her looks, Comrade Dorina would have been well-suited to play the role of a Christian martyr from ancient Byzantine icons.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “I’ve been sent from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.”

“Sit down,” said Klim, pointing to the divan, “and tell me about yourself.”

Comrade Dorina asked Klim to call her Galina. She told him that there was nothing much to say about her life. She had worked until quite recently as a filing clerk. But now, the Commissariat was laying off staff, and she was looking for a new position.

“Have you ever worked as a courier?” asked Klim.

“No, but I know Moscow well—I grew up here. And I have a good pair of felt boots. If you don’t take me on, you should ask the other candidates about their footwear. Without felt boots, you’ll find your courier ending up in bed with a cold.”

“Do you have any other skills?”

“I can type in Russian, English, and French and do shorthand.”

“Could you type something for me as a test?”

Galina sat at the typewriter like a pianist at her instrument and shot an enquiring glance at Klim. He began to dictate the first article that caught his eye from the Times: “The Soviet Union’s economic experiments are continuing to amaze the world…”

Galina clattered away confidently at the keys and, in just a few minutes, had typed out an article about the budget crisis in the USSR. Klim could not believe his eyes: there was not a single typing error in the whole text.

“And with your skills, you still want to be a courier?” he asked.

Galina shrugged. “I need any work. And I’ve heard that foreigners have their salary paid on time. Is it true?”

Klim nodded. So long as this Galina did not ask for too high a wage, there seemed little point in interviewing anyone else for the job.

As he looked at her, he noticed an ugly lilac scar on her neck, protruding from beneath the collar of her blouse.

“I see you’re looking at my scar,” Galina said. “Perhaps you’d better ask me right away how I got it. Otherwise, if I come and work for you, you’ll only keep wondering about it.”

Klim smiled. “How did you get it?” He rather liked this Galina.

“My husband was a commissar in the civil war,” she said. “The White bandits set fire to our house down. I had to carry my daughter out in my arms, but my husband died. I was badly burned.”

“How do you manage alone with your child?”

“What’s there to manage? There’s not much washing as we hardly have any clothes, not much cleaning as we live in one small room, and we don’t have anything much to cook either.”

She got up. “Well, I’ll be going now. If you would like to take me on, you can call me—I have a telephone at home.”

Klim saw her out.

In the hall, Galina pulled on a pair of huge men’s felt boots. “Goodbye,” she said.

Suddenly, she looked at Klim with a serious expression. “There’s just one thing I want to say. There’s a mistake in your paper, the Times. Socialism isn’t an experiment; it’s a necessary stage of human development.”

“Let’s look at it logically—” began Klim, but Galina interrupted him.

“We don’t need your logic! What can you and the Times possibly know about us? You’re trying to crush us, to undermine our belief in our own strength, but we don’t care! We…” Galina put her hand on her heart. “We know that there is not a capitalist army in the world that can defeat us. We shall never surrender; we shall fight to the end for our bright future.”

Suddenly, she became embarrassed. Her face reddened, and her lips began to tremble as if she were about to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’ve spoiled everything, and you won’t employ me now. I just wanted to make you understand…”

There was no need for explanations. Klim could see that Galina lived a very hard life and that all her hopes were tied up in the idea of the “bright future,” which the Soviet press continued to depict in such glowing colors. The article from the Times was challenging this belief, so Galina refused furiously to accept the facts cited by the foreign journalist.

“I’ll take you on for the job,” said Klim. “But let’s agree on one thing: we all have a right to our own opinion: you, I, and the Times newspaper.

Galina nodded, bitterly. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you? I’m badly in need of one, but I left my packet at home.”

“I don’t smoke,” Klim told her. “I have a small daughter, so I won’t allow cigarettes in the house.”

“Of course. I’m sorry. I was just a little flustered.”

Galina ran outside, and Klim went back to his room. He watched from the window as she cadged a cigarette from a young man loitering by the skating rink across the road. She smoked it hungrily, looking back now and again at the Moscow Savannah building.

Klim had no doubt that Galina would inform on him. Well, let her inform the authorities that he had sent off a dozen cables checked by the censor or that he had gone to a stationery store to buy blotting paper. Perhaps she might even earn a ruble or two for herself.

1

Galina Dorina was a dentist’s daughter. For as long as she could remember, her family’s large apartment had been a meeting place for the revolutionaries welcomed into the house by Galina’s mother, who was keen to be thought of as a progressive social reformer.

The badly dressed guests would eat and drink their fill before they began to give speeches declaring that the Tsar, the landowners, and the capitalists were bleeding the life out of the Russian people.

Galina’s parents encouraged her to read books in which the idea of freedom was lauded to the skies; her own life, however, proceeded according to a strict and unvarying schedule from the moment she greeted her parents each morning to the moment she lay down to sleep at night in the position considered most conducive to healthy breathing.

 When Galina turned sixteen, her mother made her a wardrobe of new clothes and started taking her daughter out to social engagements to make the acquaintance of important gentlemen with stout figures and gleaming bald heads. The family had run up debts, and Galina’s parents were hoping to arrange a good marriage for her.

“You’ll find her a very obliging girl,” Galina’s mother would assure them.

Galina had a keen instinct for what was required of her and generally lived up to her parents’ expectations, whether it was a question of achieving good grades at school or disappearing into her room when she was not wanted.

If she fell short in any way, her father would hiss in her ear, “You’re in for it this evening.” Later, he would thrash her with a dog leash.

Her mother was given to periodic fits of rage, during which she would often pick up the first thing she could lay her hands on and hurl it at her daughter. The scar on Galina’s neck had been caused by a pair of red-hot curling irons—the story about the fire was her own invention.

One day, Galina’s mother had invited over to the house a revolutionary, Comrade Alov, who was under surveillance by the Tsarist police. He was twelve years older than Galina and wore a ridiculous pince-nez on a greasy ribbon. The cook took one look at him and dubbed him the Stick.

Comrade Alov’s passionate speeches had a profound effect on Galina. He spoke of how, in the present cruel age, the country needed not men and women but “superhumans” free of the doubt, fear, and petty vices of ordinary mortals. This, he argued, was the only way to retain dignity and not to demean oneself before those in power.

Whenever Alov was invited to dinner by Galina’s mother, he would criticize his hostess for her sentimental books and deplore her husband’s desire to live “as well as the next man.”

“We only live once on this earth,” Alov said passionately. “And look at how you’re wasting your lives! Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Is that really all you want—to be narrow-minded, bourgeois conformists?”

“Oh, dear, I am ashamed,” Galina’s mother sighed, dabbing away a tear with a scented handkerchief.

“Hear, hear! Spoken like a true man!” her father exclaimed and scribbled down phrases from Alov’s speech in the special notebook he used to note down words of wisdom.

A romance grew up between Galina and Alov, but when her parents found out, they threatened to take their daughter’s young man to the police. Alov was not the son-in-law they had been hoping for.

He took Galina away with him to Paris, where the Bolshevik party had assigned him to go, and that was the last time she saw her parents. Many years later, she found out that they had died of hunger during the civil war.

2

Galina did everything Alov asked or even hinted, cooking and cleaning for him, typing out his articles and translating materials from English and French into Russian. Alov had no intention of marrying Galina, so he informed her that she was an emancipated woman and that marriage was a bourgeois institution, unthinkable for one who held his convictions.