Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

But what if I don’t manage to find rail tickets in time? Klim thought. His period of leave from work would pass, the summer would be over, and perhaps Kitty would still be sick.

He opened the door to his apartment, and Galina came rushing to meet him. “How was the Shakhty Trial?”

“Fine,” he answered, his mind elsewhere.

What if he did decide to go to Koktebel after all? What would he do about Galina? When he had told her he wanted to go south, she had immediately assumed he was taking her, although he had promised nothing.

Klim stared gloomily at Galina’s thin legs in their short socks, shrunk from constant washing, and at her coarse cloth dress, creased from long hours of sitting at a typewriter.

Why had he got involved with Galina? For months now, he had been justifying himself by reasoning that it was what she wanted, but this charm no longer worked. He had a crime on his conscience: he had allowed Galina to hope for something. Now he faced a choice of either crushing her completely or carrying this pointless and heavy burden around for the rest of his life.

Galina put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Why were you so long? I missed you!”

Any failure to respond to her affectionate advances was to risk bringing forth a torrent of alarmed questions. But to respond was only to wrap a noose tighter around his own neck.

Galina could already see from his face that something had happened. “What’s the matter?” she asked anxiously.

Klim blurted out the first thing that came into his mind. “I just saw them demolishing the Church of St. Parascheva. What a shame! That church is more than two hundred years old, you know. It’s the same all over the country. I read in the paper that in my hometown of Nizhny Novgorod, the city council has ordered the demolition of the churches on the main square so that they don’t get in the way of military parades.”

Klim remembered the church in which he and Nina had been married. “The Church of St. George is going to be demolished too,” he said. “Those swine don’t give a damn for history or tradition.”

“Are you from Nizhny Novgorod?” asked Galina, surprised. “You always said you were from Moscow.”

Klim cursed himself silently. What a stupid blunder!

“Well… I used to visit Nizhny Novgorod… a long time ago when I was a child….” Just in case, he decided to change the subject. “Do you know what? I think that all those fires and accidents in the Shakhty region were the result not of sabotage but of something far more mundane: worn-out equipment and a failure to observe safety procedures. After all, similar things are happening all over the USSR.”

Klim was hoping to draw Galina into an argument so that she would overlook the slip he had just made. But, unusually for her, she did not rise to the bait.

“I’ve got soup on the stove,” she said and went off into the kitchen.

1

The news of Kitty’s illness had alarmed Nina so much that it had driven everything else clean out of her head. She was beside herself with fury at Galina. Nina was convinced that the fool of a woman had failed to keep a proper eye on Kitty.

Taking matters into her own hands, Nina managed to get ahold of rail tickets to Feodosia in two days. Now, fate had given her and Klim a chance. What they needed was to go far away and forget all their previous woes.

“He has to come to the station!” Nina kept repeating to herself. But every now and then, a sickening thought would set her heart beating wildly: What if he doesn’t come?

On the day of the last session of the Shakhty Trial, Nina was on the point of telephoning Klim several times to find out what he had decided but could not bring herself to do so.

Everywhere, it seemed, there was talk of “the verdict.” The word was on the lips of market traders and cab drivers and blared from loudspeakers on the street. To distract herself from her own gloomy thoughts, Nina went to the cinema only to find that the main feature was preceded by a newsreel on the Shakhty Trial. Eleven men had been sentenced to be shot while the others had received long sentences in labor camps. The presiding judge of the Supreme Court was shown silently pronouncing sentence while the pianist thumped out a solemn march and the cinema-goers on either side of Nina commented approvingly, “That’ll show them!”

That evening, Yefim came to check on Nina. Oscar had asked him to keep an eye on his wife while he was abroad.

“Have you heard the news about the verdict?” Yefim asked. “They let the Germans off in the end. Oscar arranged a swap—their liberty in exchange for a contract for railroad sleepers. But the Russians are of no use to anybody; neither their government nor their people.”

Nina buried her face in her hands. She felt that she too was of no earthly use to anybody.

2

Nina arrived at the station early and set off slowly along the empty platform to the second car. She had told Elkin that she would be arriving together with Klim and Kitty, but she no longer had any faith that her plan would work.

What would she do if Klim did not come? Should she go to Crimea alone? Oh, God, Nina thought, anything but that!

“Mommy!” she heard a child’s excited cry. “Daddy, I’ve found our Mommy!”

Kitty, dressed in a comical, frilled pink sundress, came running up to Nina and hugged her legs.

Nina was overcome by happiness and relief. Her hands shaking, she kissed Kitty, exclaiming over her and hugging her tightly. “Look how much you’ve grown!”

It was hard to believe that her daughter still recognized her after such a long absence.

“Hello,” said Klim, walking up to them.

He was carrying a small suitcase decorated with pictures of flowers cut out from postcards.

Nina looked up at him happily. “I’m so glad to see you both! Where are your things?”

“I’m not coming with you,” said Klim.

Nina’s heart froze. “But why not?”

Klim took a small folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to her. “I got this yesterday evening.”

It was a carbon copy of a typewritten text. Nina quickly scanned it:

Dear Comrade Rogov,

You have been selected as a participant in a polar expedition of journalists leaving for Archangelsk this week. Everything has been arranged with your employers in London.

As you will know, the airship Italia piloted by General Umberto Nobile has been wrecked somewhere in the Spitzbergen Archipelago. The Soviet government has sent the icebreaker Krasin to the aid of the airship, and now, the world is watching our valiant sailors break their way through the ice to the stranded Italian fascists.

You will be taken to the vessel by airplane. There is a radio transmitter onboard which will allow you to send your reports back.

Communist Greetings, Weinstein

“It’s a petty act of revenge by the Press Department,” said Klim with a bitter smile. “Weinstein knew I was planning to go south, so he has deliberately sent me north.”

“But you don’t have to go!” exclaimed Nina. “Why didn’t you refuse?”

“Well, for my press agency, this polar expedition is a great scoop. Usually, the Soviets don’t send foreign journalists to the north. Would you be able to look after Kitty while I’m away?”

“Of course.”

“When will you be coming back home?”

“I’ve left Reich, so there’s nothing to come back to.”

Nina had been sure Klim would be pleased to hear this news, but instead, he clutched Kitty to him as if Nina had told him she was planning to kidnap her.

“Promise you won’t take Kitty away from me!” he said.

Nina stared at him, nonplussed. “What are you talking about?”

“Anything could happen. Your Oscar would never have a little Chinese girl in the house, but you’re a free woman now. You can do whatever you please.”

Klim did not seem to realize how hurtful his words were. He had no faith in Nina’s good intentions and was asking her not to act even more contemptibly than he had come to expect.

“Promise me you won’t take Kitty,” he repeated. “I’ll come and collect her as soon as I can get away.”

Nina was on the point of losing her temper but managed to restrain herself. She took a pencil from her bag and wrote down a few lines on the back of the letter from Weinstein.

“This is Elkin’s address. If you don’t trust me, send him a telegram and ask him to keep an eye on us.”

Klim nodded and put the letter in his pocket.

They went through to the compartment, and Klim explained to Nina what she should do if Kitty became ill again. He showed her where he had packed her medicine and, most importantly of all, her pink rag horse.

Kitty clambered up onto the seat and began fiddling with the light switch on the wall. “Look! You can turn the light on. Daddy, do you remember when we went to Moscow? There wasn’t a light in the train then.”

Kitty kept turning the light switch this way and that. One second it was bright, and the next, they were plunged into gloom.

The bell rang.

Klim got up and hugged Kitty tightly. “Be a good girl; try not to be too much of a nuisance to Nina.”

He had said “Nina” not “Mommy” just as if she were some stranger.

3

The train began to move, and a succession of dreary station outbuildings slid by outside the window.

Kitty sat swinging her legs, chattering to Nina of how she had recently fallen from the porch and got “a re-e-e-ally funny cut on her leg.” She wanted very much to make an impression on her mother.

Nina nodded, looking at the tiny scar on Kitty’s brown knee.

Why hadn’t Klim left Kitty with Galina? she was wondering. Did he trust her even less than Nina? Or perhaps his lover had developed a dislike for the girl?

Nina was quite unprepared for the maternal responsibility that had suddenly fallen to her. Shameful to admit, she and Kitty had been apart from each other for so long that now, neither was sure of how to behave with the other.

They heard a group of children in the neighboring compartment begin to sing the “Internationale” in German. One-third of the railcar was taken up by foreign Young Pioneers, the children of communists from other countries who had been sent to the Soviet Union for summer camp.

Kitty began to pester Nina to take her to meet the foreign children, and when Nina refused, she had a tantrum. All of a sudden, Kitty had realized her father was no longer there, and there was nobody to indulge her every whim.

Things went from bad to worse. The food in the restaurant car was horrible, and the tea was too hot. And what was so bad about putting bread up your nose, anyway, Kitty wanted to know. And if it was so bad, why did people have nostrils? Before long, Kitty was howling, and Nina was desperate.

When the train stopped at the next station, Nina ran out onto the platform and darted about among the peasant women selling home-cooked wares. The engine stood under steam, and every time one of the couplings heaved or gave a shudder, all the passengers would dash back to the cars in a panic. Nina was terrified the train would move off before she could get back on board, taking Kitty with it.

She bought some fried chicken, some boiled potatoes, and a few small cucumbers. Kitty at last consented to eat but was sick almost immediately.

Nina rinsed the pink sundress in the sink in the toilet cubicle. I’ve completely forgotten how to look after my own daughter, she thought with desperation. What if it turns out to be a serious case of food poisoning?

But when she got back to the compartment, Kitty was bouncing on the seats as though nothing had happened.

“Let’s play fishermen!” she said to Nina. “You can be the fisherman—you cast your line and pull me out of the sea.”

She made a great show of pretending to be the biggest fish ever, then a cabdriver’s horse, a singing radio loudspeaker, then a variety of sea monsters.

“You have to faint!” she shouted excitedly. “I’m a hideous three-headed diver!”

Again and again, Nina swooned obediently back on the seat.

After it grew dark, they lay in each other’s arms while Kitty told Nina how Kapitolina would pray to her “little father God” and how she sewed cloths embroidered with cockerels.