Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

What did he mean? Was he hinting that unrequited love can turn a woman into a monster? The same could be said of men too. I know from my own experience.

I’m trying to make sure Galina spends as little time with my daughter as possible. God forbid Kitty should blurt out something to her about my trip to Crimea!

Fortunately for me, a new library has opened near my house with lots of activities for children. Kapitolina takes Kitty there, and she can play with other kids a little.

Of course, the library isn’t offering anything even remotely resembling a proper education. The teachers keep asking Kitty, quite seriously, to tell everyone how she has been oppressed by evil imperialists. They have also taught her a poem by a certain Agniya Barto, “Li, the Little Chinese Boy”:

Li had heard of a land far away

Where everything was as bright as day,

Where a magician, great and wise,

Has raised a red flag up to the skies.

And secretly Li dreamed and planned

To walk all the way to that magic land.

Kitty happily reads out this doggerel to a delighted audience, and I have decided to overlook their patronizing racism. So long as Kitty’s happy, that’s all that mattered.

Magda, Friedrich, and I have been thinking how we can buy some time for our Germans. I have put up a huge sign over the entrance to the Church of St. Michael, “School for the Study of the Lenin’s Works.” There are quite a few books of his writings left over from Elkin’s shop, and I have given them to our refugees. Now, if one of the boys on sentry duty signals that a stranger is approaching, the Germans grab books and try to look studious.

So far, they have not been evicted—nobody dares to close the Lenin school. But all our cleverness has not solved the basic problem that the refugees have nothing to live on.

Seibert sent me an indignant letter, and I can’t quite face showing it to Father Thomas just yet. Apparently, the government in Berlin has refused to take in any Russian Germans. In Europe, everyone fears Bolsheviks like the plague, and nobody cares to find out whether refugees from the USSR are communists or poverty-stricken peasants. It’s far simpler to refuse them all a visa.

5

I have signed up for driving lessons in the old Catherine Institute for Noble Maidens, which is now the Red Army Club.

The kind old lady in the reception turned out to be a graduate of the school. Recognizing immediately that I was a “gentleman,” she took me on a tour of the recently refurbished classrooms.

The Red Army has done very well for itself indeed. It’s quite something: precious parquet floors and marble staircases. Apart from this, there is an ancient park behind the building with ponds and bicycle tracks.

In the club, efforts were being made on all sides to raise the cultural level of soldiers and commanders of the Red Army and the members of their families. From the classrooms, we could hear the sounds of choirs singing, accordion music, and the hum of fretsaws. Muffled shots came from the cellar where they were holding military training classes, and in the lecture hall, a gray-haired professor was giving a lecture on “Chemical Warfare and How to Combat It.”

I have already made a mental list of the courses I will sign up for when I have finished my driving lessons. I would far rather build birdhouses or dance Russian dances than have to look at Galina’s crushed expression.

1

All day, Klim had been traveling around the Moscow markets, conducting research for an article about the economic situation in the capital.

He got talking to a peasant who was selling horses’ tails for making soft furnishings.

“How does a horse manage without its tail?” asked Klim in amazement. “The flies must eat it alive.”

But the peasant only shrugged his shoulders. “Horses these days are all being sent off for slaughter. If you have a horse, you’re made to pay extra tax. But if you haven’t even a shirt on your back, you can join the collective farm next year and get a tractor.”

The man did not seem to know what this “collective farm” was and did not seem to want to know.

“We’ll get by,” he said. “We haven’t seen the end of Mother Russia yet.”

But I wonder how much longer she can hold out? thought Klim.

Russia was dying in instalments. In the Great War, more than eight hundred thousand people had perished; in the civil war—ten million, and during the famine of 1920–21—another five million. That was as many as the population of a country as big as Romania.

And it was frightening to think what awaited Russia now. The threat of famine and terrible privations was becoming more real every day.

2

Klim arrived for his driving lesson in a deeply gloomy state of mind. The lessons had not begun yet, and a crowd of would-be drivers—young men in work overalls—were crowding together next to the locked classroom door.

Klim approached the group and froze.

“The fire in the samovar went out,” he heard Nina’s voice, “so my daughter decided to ‘help it along.’ She took some paraffin and put it into the water, not the pipe. The landlady arrived and poured herself a cup of tea, and it stank to high heaven!”

The young men laughed.

Nina was wearing a sky-blue dress and a lacy shawl with a long fringe. With her simple outfit, her golden tan, and her seductive girlish smile, it was no wonder the driving students could not take their eyes off her.

When she caught sight of Klim, Nina gave a barely perceptible nod and continued with her story. “The landlady ran to the neighbors to ask them if they could smell paraffin, and Kitty was afraid that she would get into trouble. So, she tried to fix things by pouring a bottle of cologne into the samovar.”

Klim could not help smiling. So, she’s come back after all, he thought. Well, I wonder what she’ll get up to now?

The instructor appeared, a droll little old man with a fat belly and a mustache twisted up at the ends. He opened the door, and the students entered the classroom. Nina sat at the front next to a loutish-looking fellow with fair hair who hadn’t even bothered to remove his cap indoors. Klim made his way to the “dunce’s bench” at the back of the class.

The instructor put up a diagram of a Ford Model T on the blackboard.

“Today, we’ll be studying the construction of a modern passenger car with a four-cylinder engine,” he announced. “This car has a twenty-horsepower engine, and it can achieve breakneck speeds of seventy kilometers an hour.”

Klim did not take his eyes off the back of Nina’s head, but she never once looked around. She seemed to be genuinely interested in the location of the car’s fuel tank and how to measure the level of petrol using a special gauge stick.

During recess, Nina once again gathered her crowd of admirers around her and began to tell anecdotes about the time she had spent in Crimea. Klim stood a little way off, listening, growing gloomier with every minute.

A small Red Army soldier with protruding ears came up to him. “She’s a bit of all right, isn’t she?” he said. “I guess there’s some lucky guy out there enjoying all that, eh? Gotta be.”

Klim could barely restrain himself from breaking the man’s nose.

After the class, Nina said goodbye to her new friends and left.

All Klim had to show in the way of personal triumphs that day was a single nod of her head.

3

Klim was sure that Nina had only signed up for driving lessons because he would be on the course, but she paid no attention to him. During recess, a crowd would always gather around her, and the only time Klim found a way to speak to Nina was when they were instructed to crawl under an old Ford car together.

“Have you found the coil spring?” asked the instructor.

“Yes, I’ve got it,” answered Nina.

“If the car should break down on the road, you’ll need to fix it on your own. Go on then. As for you, Comrade Rogov, keep an eye out and help the young lady if she needs it.”

The screw nut was worn, and no matter how hard Nina tried to undo it, she could not get it to budge.

“Let me help,” suggested Klim, but she motioned him away with an irritable jerk of her shoulder.

“There’s no need.”

“You don’t have the strength.”

“Maybe not, but when I make up my mind to do something, I generally do it.”

It was difficult for Klim to argue with that.

Eventually, Nina managed to release the screw nut. There were cheers from the other students as she handed it to the instructor.

“You see, we can achieve anything with patience and hard work,” he said, shaking her by the hand.

After class, Klim went up to speak to Nina.

“You haven’t once asked me about Kitty,” he said. “Don’t you want to know how she is?”

“I already know,” she said coolly. “Kapitolina takes her to classes at the children’s library, and I see her there.”

Klim did not know what to say at this.

“How’s Elkin doing?” he asked.

“He stayed behind in Crimea,” Nina said. “He proposed to me, but I told him it would never work.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll give you three guesses,” laughed Nina and, swinging her bag, she set off down the path to the park.

4

Kitty admitted to Klim that she really had been meeting her mother. Kapitolina remembered Nina from her time in Elkin’s store and decided that she must have got a new job in the children’s library. Kapitolina had simply been leaving Kitty with Nina and going off about her own business.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Klim asked Kitty sternly.

“Because you already took Tata away from me!”

It was painful to look at Kitty. She was convinced her father would forbid her to see Nina, and she already had tears in her eyes.

Klim pretended that he did not care about their secret meetings. He himself was seeing Nina three times a week. But that was all he was doing—seeing her. She spoke more to the cloakroom attendant than she did to Klim.

Nina was close but at the same time quite out of reach. She was doing everything she could to make herself into a valuable prize and was always surrounded by a throng of admirers. She was insinuating herself into Klim’s thoughts, making him wonder where she was living, how she was earning a living, and what plans she was making. There was some air of mystery about her.

It was a strange feeling, thought Klim: to know that you were being shamelessly seduced, to be indignant about it, and at the same time to wait impatiently for the next session of emotional torment.

Klim noticed that after class, Nina did not go with everybody else to the bus stop but hurried to the park. It happened time and again, and it could only mean one thing: she was meeting somebody there.

Naturally, this was too much for Klim to bear, and one day, he set off after her.

The evening sky was soft and clear, and little butterflies were fluttering over the late-blooming flowers.

Klim followed Nina at a distance, annoyed at the cyclists who kept hurtling toward him, shouting at him to watch out. God forbid Nina should turn around and see him!

She disappeared around a corner, and Klim began to walk faster. He already imagined finding some Red Army officer waiting for Nina on a park bench, but when he rounded the corner, he saw her in the company of a large gray goose. She was standing on the bank of a pond, feeding it from her palm.

Spotting Klim, the goose shook itself, spread out its wings, and set off toward the stranger, hissing.

Nina laughed. “Hey! He’s a friend! Stop that this instant!”

She threw the goose a crust of bread, and it immediately forgot about its rival.

The ground was damp after the rain the day before, and as Nina tried to climb up the bank from the pond, she kept slipping on the wet clay.

Klim held out a hand to her. “Here—let me pull you up.”

This time, Nina accepted his help and even allowed him to hold her by the elbow while she cleaned off the mud from her shoes with a stick.

Klim had imagined she would ask him why he had been following her and was trying to think up an acceptable excuse, but Nina, acting as if nothing had happened, began to tell him about the goose.