Moscow Rules

by Robert Moss

  He often lay like that, in the breathing stillness of the night, after his mother turned out the lights. His mother slept on her stomach, face turned into the pillow, like the dead. She was a hard woman to know. Every day she took the trolley-bus to the Sokol metro station and boarded a train to the city center, where she had a job in one of the ministries. She was not a bad-looking woman, with a ripe, full figure, dark hair, and big brown eyes, but she minimized her assets. She kept her hair pinned up, dressed in severe, mannish dark jackets and skirts, and rarely used makeup. Her manner seemed to proclaim that she was a serious person, with no space in her life for frivolities. She often came home late, and Sasha was given to understand, from an early age, that this had something to do with Party meetings. Their relationship was oddly impersonal. She never kissed or touched him, and usually had little to say to him besides routine inquiries about his progress at school. Sometimes she would read to him, when he was little, from Pushkin or Nekrasov or Grimms’ fairy tales, but there was never a sense of drama. She worked her way from the beginning to the end of a story as if resigned to a mechanical chore. He preferred it when Vera Alexandrovna read to him. She could mimic all the characters. Best of all, he liked it when she told him about his father and his grandfather and the men of the Preobrazhensky family before them.

  ‘The men of this house,’ she would say, leafing through the album, ‘have always been defenders.’ There were the stiffly posed portraits of his grandfather and his great-uncle with their brides. Both men had died in the civil war, fighting for the Reds against the Basmachi, the Muslim bandits in Turkestan.

  Or Vera Alexandrovna would pick up a well-used edition of War and Peace and start reading to him, yet again, the passage about the battle in the gold fields of Borodino where Napoleon’s armies were slowed to a halt at the gates of Moscow. It was from the battle of Borodino that the family derived its name. Sasha’s ancestor was a sergeant of artillery, one of those in charge of the batteries on the knoll that became known as Raevski’s Redoubt. His men ran out of cannonballs, so he made them fire grapeshot. He stayed with the guns even when the blue-coated French scrambled over the earth-works, flashing sabers and bayonets, and overran the Russian positions. Then he tried to save the colors of the regiment, folding the flag and hiding it under his tunic. When they found the sergeant’s body, there were fifteen rents in the flag. As his grandmother read from Tolstoy, Sasha would shut his eyes to visualize the whole scene more clearly: the dark shadows among the woods, the smoke from the cannons like tufts of cotton wool, the teams of frightened horses dragging green ammunition chests. A Russian general, visiting the scene, was impressed by the gallantry of the gunner sergeant, and wrote a report that went all the way to the Tsar. The Little Father rewarded the sergeant’s family with a small gift of land and a new surname: Preobrazhensky, the same name Tsar Peter had picked for his Guards.

  Sasha’s mother didn’t like all this harping on family history. Most of all, she hated talk about Sasha’s father. It reached the point where Vera Alexandrovna only talked to the boy about his father during the long walks they took together, along the river embankments, or through the Alexander Gardens, in the shadow of the russet walls of the Kremlin.

  Sasha’s mother never had time for him. When she wasn’t at the office, it was always some Party meeting or other. Once, on a Sunday in May, she had arranged to take him to a sports event at the Stadium of the Pioneers, and Sasha was excited, because this kind of thing never happened. But on the way to the metro, they ran into a sharp-faced man in a dark suit whom Sasha had never seen before.

  ‘Good morning, Comrade Krisov,’ Nina greeted him. Sasha didn’t like the way his mother talked to the man. Her manner was almost simpering.

  Krisov stood there on the street corner for a good twenty minutes, totally ignoring the boy, lecturing his mother in a high, nasal voice about the work of some committee. Nina smiled and nodded in a way she never did at home.

  So they arrived late for the games, and got the worst seats, and all Nina would say by way of explanation was that ‘Comrade Krisov is the Party Secretary in my department.’

  From that time on, the idea of the Party and the narrow face of this Comrade Krisov were synonymous for Sasha. He resented the Party for keeping his mother from him, and her for putting it above him. She never tried to explain the point of all this Party work except to say, ‘I have to support this family.’ She never explained anything.

  ‘You will understand when you are older,’ Vera Alexandrovna would say to him when he complained that it was impossible to talk to his mother. ‘She’s had a hard life, poor thing.’

  Little by little, from his talks with his grandmother and the things he gleaned for himself, Sasha began to understand something of his mother’s hardness. She had met his father in a brief wartime romance. They had just long enough to meet, to court for a week or two, marry, take snapshots, and conceive a child before Sergei was off to the front. Then there was the endless wait, the uncertainty, the rumors of death and disaster, the weary trek along muddy roads, choked with panicky refugees, to food and safety in the provinces. The few letters that Nina received had been written months before; there was no way of knowing whether her husband was dead or alive as she read them. She was little more than a child when she married, swept off her feet by the uniform and the patriotic ardor that infested the air in those days. She tried to behave like a romantic heroine in a movie. Then suddenly she was alone, left to shoulder the burden of bearing a child and caring for it, left to brood over the fact that she hardly knew its father. Oh, Vera Alexandrovna stepped in, solid as a rock, the eternal babushka, feeding the baby, changing its diapers, crooning over it, while Nina went to work in a factory. But Nina made no secret of her resentment; she felt she had been dealt a rotten hand. When the news came that Sergei had been killed, it confirmed her suspicion that the deck had been stacked against her from the start.

  She didn’t waste time grieving. She abandoned the child to Vera Alexandrovna, attended night school, pursued full Party membership, entered and left the house like an automaton, as if she believed that if only she could purge herself of personal emotions, nobody would bother her or hurt her again.

  *

  There was a quarrel going on in the kitchen when Sasha returned home after the hockey game. Fufkov, the neighbor with the refrigerator, had obviously been guzzling vodka all day — or maybe aircraft glue, since he worked at the nearby plant and would sniff or swill up anything that had alcohol in it, even paint thinner that he doctored up, when he ran out of money after payday. Vera Alexandrovna was trying to fry up chicken tabaka on the stove. It was one of her specialities. She would chop the bird in half and let it marinate in garlic for an hour before cooking it in a covered saucepan. But Fufkov wouldn’t get out of her way, determined to deliver one of his little harangues.

  It’s all Nikita’s fault that there’s no food in Moscow,’ he was bellowing. You could hear the wretch all the way down the corridor. ‘Isn’t that right, little mother? He takes the food out of our mouths to send to the black-asses in Cuba. And there he sits, grinning like a fat pig. I say fuck our fraternal socialist brothers!’

  To stress his point, he brought his fist down so hard on the table next to the stove that the lid came off Vera Alexandrovna’s pot, and boiling liquid hissed to the floor. She was going after Fufkov with her stirring spoon when Sasha came in.

  Fufkov sidestepped Vera Alexandrovna with an agility surprising in a drunk and pranced over to Sasha. He tugged at his coarse brush of hair, doffing an imaginary cap.

  ‘Good evening, Your Excellency,’ he greeted Sasha. His face was beet red and sweaty. Fufkov drank the way a man might wake up in the morning and start hitting his head against the wall, and go on banging it until finally he dropped down senseless.

  ‘Go on, try me,’ Fufkov challenged, squatting down at one of the four tables jammed into the kitchen. He stuck his elbow on top and made a fist. ‘Let’s see if you’re a man yet.�
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  ‘Get away with you.’ Vera Alexandrovna glowered at him, her spoon raised menacingly.

  Fufkov guffawed. ‘Look at this, fuck your mother. A grown man hiding behind skirts. Why, at your age, I was out getting my bell rung.’

  Very calmly, Sasha set his boots and his bag down against the wall. But the bag slid down, and Levin’s book fell out.

  ‘Well, look at the little professor,’ Fufkov goaded him. ‘I know your little secret.’ He turned to Vera Alexandrovna and said in a stage whisper, ‘He’s been hobnobbing with that Yid who’s moved into the building. I told you, everything’s going to the dogs since Stalin died.’ He ran a broad finger up and down his nose. ‘If you rub it enough,’ he leered, ‘you’ll get a big nose too.’

  While Fufkov sat sniggering, Sasha took the chair opposite. His face had reddened; he could feel the heat. He set his elbow on the table, reached out, and laced his fingers through Fufkov’s.

  With the first lunge, the heavier man almost had him. Sasha’s forearm was forced down, till it was only an inch above the table. He could smell Fufkov’s stinking breath on his face. He held on, willing all his strength into his right arm, ratcheting up until they were back in the original position. It was over so fast it surprised both of them. A sudden twist, and he had Fufkov’s arm pinned to the table. The drunk was so startled that he fell off his seat. When he picked himself up, there was pink murder in his eyes.

  Vera Alexandrovna came between them. ‘Go and see to your wife,’ she commanded Fufkov. ‘If she’ll have you.’

  Fufkov stumbled out cursing, and Sasha’s grandmother started clacking her tongue at him. ‘Your father would be ashamed at you.’ He didn’t argue with her. Neither of them believed it.

  Later, when the dishes were cleared away, Sasha turned to the women and said, ‘I’d like to know how my father died.’

  His mother’s mouth was a straight edge. It might have been drawn with a ruler.

  Vera Alexandrovna said, ‘I’ll make some tea.’ She started to rattle around, getting the kettle ready.

  His mother said, ‘I’ve told you already.’ Each word came out like the snip-snip of her scissors. ‘Your father was killed at the front. That’s all we know.’

  ‘There must be something,’ he persisted.

  ‘All right.’ The words were an accusation. ‘There’s this.’ She went to the box where she kept her papers. There were several small trays inside. She got to the bottom one, lifted it out, and brought it to the table.

  ‘Here.’ She thrust the yellowed document to him. ‘Take it. See for yourself ‘

  Sasha realized that he was looking at a death certificate. It was a standard form, printed on coarse, cheap paper, no better than newsprint. All the authorities had to do was fill in the names and dates. He saw his father’s name, written in a spidery scrawl.

  He read: ‘Your husband, Captain of Artillery Sergei Mikhailovich Preobrazhensky, Hero of the Soviet Union, died defending his motherland on April 17, 1945. He was buried in a brothers’ grave. Please accept our condolences.’ The notice was signed with an indecipherable scrawl.

  ‘What is a brothers’ grave?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘It was a war,’ Vera Alexandrovna said in a soft, lilting voice, as if she were reciting something in church. ‘So many bodies could never be found. Or identified.’

  Sasha’s eyes moved from his mother’s set face to the remaining papers in the tray.

  ‘Father wrote letters.’ It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘No!’ his mother burst out as he reached for the tray. She covered it with her hands. ‘You have no right.’ She looked frightened, and it struck him that this was the first time in a long while that she had manifested any sign of spontaneous emotion.

  ‘He has the right,’ Vera Alexandrovna interposed. ‘He is old enough.’

  Nina rummaged through the tray and pulled out a few rumpled letters. The envelopes were soiled and stained. The pages inside were thin and translucent, like ricepaper. Sasha took the letters away to his bed by the balcony and sat up, straining his eyes to make out the minute writing. Vera Alexandrovna started up her sewing machine. Nina went along the corridor to the bathroom. When she came back, she was in her nightclothes. She climbed into her bed and pulled the sheet up over her face without saying good night to either of them. That was one thing Sasha’s mother could always count on. Whatever the state of the world, whatever dramas were taking place around her, she could switch herself off like a light.

  Sasha did not sleep for a long time after he finished the letters. There were intimate things in them, the longings of a soldier at the front, that embarrassed him because he never thought of his mother as a woman in the sexual sense. But far more troubling was the shift in mood from the early letters, written when the carnage was at its worst and Russia seemed on the brink of utter destruction, and the final one, written when the conquering Red Army was ploughing through the suburbs of Berlin. In the first letters, Sergei Preobrazhensky spared his wife heroics and bloody descriptions of the war. He quoted scraps of poetry, asked for news of home, recalled a summer trip to the Crimea. The last letter, from a newly decorated war hero, seemed to be written out of total despair. ‘I’m sending this with a friend,’ he began. ‘I doubt if it would get past our gallant censors.’

  ‘When your back is to the wall,’ he wrote, ‘the moral sense is numbed. Everything is a matter of survival. To hell with the rest. You step over bodies without seeing them, like so many piles of logs. It’s victory that is harder to bear. What the Germans failed to do to our army, we are doing for ourselves. We have become our enemy.’

  He mentioned the rapes, the pillage, the slaughter of civilians. ‘Our zampoliti — political officers — say that to worry about these things is to fall victim to bourgeois humanism. I wonder whether these years of fighting and suffering have been merely spent deciding whether the concentration camps of tomorrow will be red or brown.’

  Sasha rolled over on his back. The moonlight, filtering through the curtains made everything in the room seem ambiguous and insubstantial.

  He didn’t understand everything in his father’s letter. But it was plain why his mother wanted to conceal it. Sasha was angry, and also ashamed. The letter was at odds with everything he had learned about the war — from babushka, from books and museums, from school, where the pupils were enjoined to preserve the ‘holy memory’ of the country’s martial heroes. The men of his family had been soldiers, from the battle of Borodino and before. His father’s letter seemed to betray them.

  The ugly word uncoiled in his mind. Was his father a traitor?

  Damn you, he silently cursed the man he had never known. Why aren’t you here to explain?

  *

  He went back to the professor, hoping that he could explain. Levin was friendly, but he found excuses to shift the conversation to safer ground. He gave Sasha more books to read, and he talked about the early history of Russia — the adventures of the Viking marauders who were the original tribe of the Rus, the Tatar invasions, Peter’s forays into the West — in a way that brought everything to life and made Sasha eager to learn.

  ‘He who controls the past controls the present,’ the professor remarked to him during one of their sessions.

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘It’s from a book by Orwell. I’m afraid it’s banned. You’ve a natural flair for historical detection, Sasha. You ask the right questions. You ought to pursue this at university.’

  ‘I think I’d like to.’ His talks with Levin had made Sasha appreciate that history had nothing to do with the dull repetition of dates and slogans in his school classroom. History was an adventure, a means of discovering himself as well as the world he had inherited.

  At that moment, there was a light tap on the door and a girl walked in. She moved like a cat, with natural, unstudied grace. In an instant, she had slipped across the room and wrapped her arms around Levin’s neck. She was wearing a dark, loose woolen sweater a few
sizes too big that billowed down to her hips. When she turned to Sasha, her eyebrows arched, slightly mocking, her dark eyes full of fire, he stared down at the toes of his scuffed boots. He had reached the embarrassing age when he thought about girls a lot, but found it uncomfortable to be in the same room with them.

  ‘This is my daughter, Tatyana,’ Levin said. Sasha was surprised. There was no family resemblance. This beautiful girl, who seemed so sure of herself and her body, seemed to belong to a different world from the professor and his narrow room.

  Tanya took charge of the conversation immediately. She started quizzing Sasha as if she had discovered a new game; soon he had forgotten his reserves and was talking as if they had grown up together. She was quick and precocious and laughed easily, and soon she had Sasha laughing too.

  ‘By the way, I forgot to ask,’ she said. ‘Which hand do you write with?’

  ‘This one, of course.’ Sasha held up his right hand, astonished.

  ‘You see?’ Tanya said triumphantly to her father. ‘That’s what everybody says. Can either of you explain to me why there are no left-handed people in the Soviet Union?’

  Levin sighed indulgently. He had obviously been subjected to this routine before.

  ‘Now I happen to be left-handed,’ Tanya explained to Sasha. ‘Don’t be shocked. It’s not my fault. It begins in the brain, like cerebral palsy. But at school, they make me write with my right hand, like you, and then they complain that my writing is sloppy. It’s not fair. In a society built on the ideas of the left, everyone should be required to be left-handed.’

  After they had finished tea, Levin said, ‘Your mother will be expecting you.’

  Tanya made a face and started complaining about her stepfather. Sasha gathered that he was an important man, a member of the Writers’ Union, whose articles appeared in Literary Gazette.