“What an extraordinary person you are.”
“I was on the lookout for her at Leningrad University. I never imagined where I would find her.”
“Who?”
“Klara, my dear! A woman’s hands could mold me into any shape—make a great rogue of me, a cardsharp of genius, or the leading expert on Etruscan vases or cosmic rays. I’ll be that if you want me to.”
“What, forge your diploma?”
“No, I mean it! I’ll become whatever you decide. All I need is you! All I need is that slow turn of your head when you come into the laboratory. . . .”
* * *
* Raikom: Soviet shorthand for a Raion Committee of the Communist Party. A raion is a district within an oblast, thus two steps below the national level.
Chapter 43
A Woman Was Washing the Staircase
MAJOR GENERAL PYOTR AFANASIEVICH MAKARYGIN, candidate in Juridical Sciences, had behind him a long career as prosecutor in “special cases,” meaning those of which the public was for its own good best left in ignorance and which were therefore dealt with discreetly. (The millions of political cases were all of this kind.) Not every prosecutor was given access to such cases, in which the interrogation and the whole proceedings were conducted according to the rules and a verdict of guilty obtained.
But Makarygin was always welcome; apart from his long-standing connections in that world, he managed to combine very tactfully an unswerving devotion to the law with an understanding of the special character of the work done by the security services.
He had three daughters, all three by his first wife, his partner during the Civil War. She had died giving birth to Klara. The girls were brought up by a stepmother, who had, however, succeeded in being what is called a good mother to them.
The daughters’ names were Dinera, Dotnara, and Klara. Dinera meant “Child of the New Era” (Ditya Novoy Ery), Dotnara “Daughter of the Working People” (Doch Trudovogo Naroda).
The daughters were born at two-year intervals. The middle one, Dotnara, had left high school in 1940 and gotten married, beating Dinera to it by a month. Her father thought it was too soon and was angry at first, but he was lucky in his son-in-law—a graduate of the Higher Diplomatic School, an able young man with good connections, son of a well-known father who had fallen in the Civil War. The son-in-law’s name was Innokenty Volodin.
The oldest daughter, Dinera, would sit at home on the sofa swinging her legs and reading the whole of world literature from Homer to Farrère, while her stepmother visited her school to arrange a recalculation of her poor marks in mathematics. When she left school, she got into the Drama Department of the Institute of Cinematography (with some help from her father), married a quite-well-known director in her second year, was evacuated with him to Alma-Ata, took the leading role in one of his films, then divorced him and married a quartermaster general (also married before) and accompanied him to the front, or not exactly to the front but to that Third Echelon, the best of zones in wartime, beyond the range of enemy artillery but also exempt from the hardships of the home front. There, Dinera met a writer who was becoming fashionable, the war correspondent Galakhov, traveled around with him collecting copy on war heroes, and returned with him to Moscow after restoring the general to his previous wife.
So for the past eight years Klara had been the only daughter left in the family home.
The two older sisters had divided the good looks between them, leaving Klara neither beautiful nor even just nice-looking. She had hoped for some improvement in time, but there was none. Her face was frank and open but too mannish. There was a hardness about the temples and the angles of her chin. Klara had not been able to get rid of it, and in the end she reconciled herself to it and stopped noticing. The movements of her arms were ungraceful. Her laugh, too, was rather hard. For that reason she did not like laughing. She did not like dancing either.
When Klara was in the ninth grade, several things happened at once: Both her sisters got married, war broke out, and she was evacuated to Tashkent with her stepmother, sent there three days after the German invasion by her father, who himself left to serve as a divisional chief prosecutor.
They lived in Tashkent for three years, in the house of an old friend of her father’s, who was deputy to one of the senior public prosecutors down there. The southern heat and the unhappiness of the town could not penetrate the closely drawn blinds of that quiet second-floor apartment near the officers’ club. Many men had been called up from Tashkent, but ten times as many had moved into the city. And although every one of them had convincing documents to prove that Tashkent and not the front was where he belonged, Klara had an unverifiable feeling that the city around her was awash in sewage and that heroic purity and spiritual nobility had withdrawn to some place five thousand versts away. The age-old law of war was in operation: Although it was not of their own free will that people went to the front, the best and the most ardent found their way there; and on the same principle of selection, once there it was they who were most likely to perish.
Klara finished school in Tashkent. There was some argument as to where she should continue her education. She herself did not feel particularly drawn to anything; she had no definite ambitions. But the daughter of such a family had to enroll somewhere! It was Dinera who made up her mind for her; she insisted in her letters, and when she came to say good-bye before leaving for the front, that little Klara should study literature.
She did what she was told, although she knew from school what a bore this literature was: Gorky, so very right but so very unalluring; Mayakovsky, also very right but so stiff and awkward; Saltykov-Shchedrin, so very progressive, but you’d be yawning your head off as you read; Turgenev’s blinkered gentry ideas; Goncharov’s links with nascent Russian capitalism; Lev Tolstoy’s conversion to the attitudes of the patriarchal peasantry (their teacher had advised them not to read Tolstoy’s novels because they were very long and would only obscure the clear message of the critical articles that had been recommended); then they reviewed a whole bunch of writers nobody had ever heard of, such as Stepnyak-Kravchinsky, Dostoevsky, and Sukhovo-Kobylin but didn’t even have to memorize their names. This dreary procession filed past year after year, and Pushkin alone shone bright as the sun.
At school, literature had meant nothing but intensive study of “the message,” the ideological standpoint adopted, the social class served by all these writers. They also read Soviet writers, both Russians and those of the fraternal nationalities. To Klara and her classmates, it remained incomprehensible to the end why so much attention was paid to them: They were not the cleverest of people (publicists and critics, and a fortiori Party leaders, were all cleverer); they were often mistaken, tying themselves up in contradictions when the truth was obvious to a schoolchild and falling under undesirable influences; yet they were the ones you had to write essays about, trembling for every misspelled word and every misplaced comma. These vampires who preyed on young souls could inspire nothing but hatred for themselves.
Somehow Dinera’s experience of literature had been quite different, exciting and enjoyable. Dinera assured Klara that this was how it would be at the institute. But Klara found it no more enjoyable. At lectures, historical phonetics, monkish legends, the mythological school, and the comparative-historical school came and went, leaving no trace, while in study groups they discussed Louis Aragon and Howard Fast and the same old Gorky, with special reference to his influence on Uzbek literature. Klara sat through the lectures and, to begin with, went along to the study groups, always expecting to be told something very important about life—about life in wartime Tashkent, for instance.
When Klara was in tenth grade, a classmate’s brother had tried, with his friends, to steal a basket of bread from a moving delivery tram and had been cut to pieces. At the university one day, she tossed a half-eaten sandwich into a trash can in the hallway. Immediately a student in her own year, and a member of the Aragon group, while clumsily trying to di
sguise his intentions, fished the sandwich out from amid the garbage and pocketed it. Another girl took Klara along to help her buy something in the Tezikov bazaar, the finest flea market in Central Asia, if not the whole Soviet Union. There were big crowds for two blocks around, and there was a particularly large number of men crippled in the war, hobbling on crutches, flourishing stumps of arms, scooting along, those without legs, on little carts, selling, telling fortunes, begging, demanding; Klara gave them some money, and her heart was nearly breaking. The most frightening of the war cripples was the “Samovar,” as they called him: He had lost both arms and both legs; his boozy wife carried him on her back in a basket; people tossed money into it. When they had collected enough, they bought vodka and drank it, loudly abusing everybody and everything. Toward the center of the bazaar, the crowd was denser; you could hardly shoulder your way through the mob of black marketers, male and female. Prices were sky-high, up in the thousands, out of all proportion to local wages, but everybody took them for granted. The city’s shops were empty, but here you could buy everything anyone could swallow, or wear above or beneath, or invent—down to American chewing gum, pistols, and manuals of both black and white magic.
But in the Literature Department, nobody ever talked of, and it was as if nobody even knew about, this side of life. In the literature they studied, the world was full of everything but what you saw with your own eyes all around you.
Miserably realizing that in five years it would end in her becoming a teacher herself, assigning little girls tiresome essays and pedantically looking for mistakes in spelling and punctuation, Klara began to spend most of her time playing tennis; there were good courts in the city, and she developed a powerful volley.
Tennis was a rewarding occupation. She enjoyed the physical exertion, and confidence in her game gave her greater assurance in other activities. Tennis took her mind off her disappointments at the university and the complications of civilian life in wartime. The clear-cut boundaries of the court, the sure flight of the ball. . . . More important still, tennis brought the joy of being noticed and praised by people around her, something very necessary to a young girl, and especially to a plain one. Suddenly she finds that she has skill! Quick reactions! A sharp eye! She thought she had nothing, and suddenly finds she has a great deal. She can hop around the court tirelessly, for hours on end, as long as there are a few spectators watching her movements. And the white tennis costume with the short skirt really suited Klara.
Deciding what to wear had in fact become a torment. She sometimes changed several times a day, and every time the agonizing problem was how to cover those thick legs. Which hat didn’t look ridiculous on her? What colors suited her? What sort of collar would do something for that square chin? Klara had no insight into such things, and although she could afford to dress well, she was always dowdy.
She simply didn’t know what made people “attractive.” What did the word mean? Why wasn’t she attractive? It could drive you crazy, and nobody could help you. Why weren’t you what you should be? What was wrong with you? One, two, or even three mishaps you could put down to chance, incompatibility, inexperience; but she was always left with the same inexplicable bitter taste in her mouth. How could she overcome this injustice? It was not her fault that she was born like that!
In her second year Klara got so fed up with all that literary blather that she stopped going to classes.
The following spring the Soviet forces had advanced into Belorussia, and evacuees could begin to go home. Klara’s family, too, returned to Moscow.
Even there, Klara had no real idea which higher educational institution would best suit her. She was looking for one where people didn’t just talk but did something, so it had to be a technical school. But not one with heavy and dirty machinery. And so she landed in the Communications Engineering Institute.
She had made another mistake from lack of guidance but refused to admit it. She was stubbornly determined to finish her course and find a job, somewhere, anywhere. Besides, she was not the only girl in the course (there were few boys) who found herself there almost by chance. A new age was beginning; everybody was chasing the dream of higher education, and those who didn’t get into the Institute of Aviation switched their applications to the Veterinary Institute, those rejected by Chemical Technology became paleontologists.
At the end of the war, Klara’s father was very busy in Eastern Europe. He was demobilized in autumn 1945 and was immediately given an apartment in the new Ministry of the Interior building at the Kaluga Gate. Within a few days of his return, he took his wife and daughter to look at it.
The car glided to a stop just past the railings of the Pleasure Garden, short of the bridge over the Circle Line. It was late morning on a warm October day in a lingering Indian summer. Mother and daughter were both wearing light raincoats, and father his general’s overcoat, unbuttoned to show his decorations.
The house under construction was crescent-shaped, with one wing fronting Great Kaluga Street and the other facing the Circle Line. It was going to be eight stories high, and the plan included a sixteen-story tower with a solarium and a statue of a twelve-meter-tall female collective farmer on the roof. There was still scaffolding around the building, and even the brickwork was incomplete on the side facing the street and square. The construction bureau had, however, given in to the impatience of its client (the Ministry of State Security) and was already leasing a finished section (the second), one stairway and all the apartments on it. The site was surrounded, as is always the case on busy streets, by a board fence; people in cars went by too quickly to notice, and people living across the road had stopped noticing the rows of barbed wire fixed to the top of the fence and the ugly guard towers looming over it. The procurator’s family walked around the end of the fence to the finished section. They were met at the front entrance by a polite site manager. Klara paid no attention to the sentry who was also standing there. Nothing remained to be done. The paint on the banisters was dry, the door handles had been wiped clean, numbers had been screwed onto the front doors, the windows had been cleaned, but the stairs were still being scrubbed by a woman in dirty clothes crouched over her bucket so that her face could not be seen.
The site manager said, “Hey, you there!” and the woman stopped scrubbing and made room without looking up from her bucket and floor cloth for them to pass in single file. The procurator went past her. The site manager went past. The procurator’s wife went past, almost brushing the charwoman’s face with her heavily perfumed pleated skirt. Perhaps because the silk and the scents were too much for her, the woman, still bent over her bucket, raised her head to see whether there were many more of “them.” To Klara that look of searing contempt was like the touch of red-hot metal. The expressive face smeared with dirty water was that of a sensitive and educated person. It wasn’t just the shame you always feel when you step around a woman washing a floor, at the sight of that ragged skirt and that quilted jacket with the padding escaping. Klara felt deeply ashamed and also afraid. She stopped dead, opened her handbag, and was about to give its contents to the woman, but she did not dare.
“Move along there, can’t you?” the woman said angrily. Holding in the skirt of her fashionable dress and the edge of her dark red coat and hugging the banisters, Klara fled upstairs.
In the apartment there were parquet floors, which would need no washing.
They liked it. Klara’s stepmother told the site manager what still needed attention and was particularly unhappy that the parquet floor in one room creaked. The manager teetered on two or three wooden blocks and promised to replace them.
“Who does all this work? Who are the builders?” Klara asked abruptly.
The manager smiled but said nothing.
“Prisoners, of course,” her father growled.
When they went back downstairs, the woman was no longer there. Nor was the soldier standing outside.
They moved in, a few days later.
Months went
by, years went by, and Klara for some reason could still not forget that woman. She remembered the exact spot, on the next to last step of a long flight, and whenever she passed it, on days when she did not use the elevator, she remembered the crouching gray figure and the upturned face full of hatred.
Afterward, she always kept close to the banisters, fearing that she might step on the cleaning woman. She could neither explain this superstitious impulse nor repress it.
She did not, however, confide in her father or stepmother. She could not bring herself to mention it to them. Relations with her father had been strained ever since the war. He got angry with her and shouted that she had grown up with all sorts of crazy notions. She had a mind of her own; he called it wrongheadedness. Her memories of Tashkent and her reactions to Moscow life he found offbeat and unwholesome, and her way of generalizing from these episodes aroused his indignation.
She could not possibly tell him that the cleaning woman was still there on their stairs. Nor could she tell her stepmother. Was there anyone at all she could tell?
One day last year she had been going downstairs with her younger brother-in-law Innokenty, and before she realized what she was doing, she had taken him by the sleeve and pulled him aside at the spot where they had to step around the invisible woman. Innokenty asked what was wrong. Klara hesitated; he might think she was mad. Besides, she saw him only rarely. He was in Paris most of the time, he dressed like a dandy, and he always teased her and talked down to her as though she were a child.
But she made up her mind, stood still on the stairs, and told him with many gestures what had happened there.
He stopped playing the glamorous Westerner, stood still on the step where the conversation had come upon them, and listened, looking humble and rather lost, and for some reason hat in hand.
In the First Circle Page 40
