The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  To teach someone to speak correctly is almost impossible. It’s easier to teach a foreigner, who will simply memorize the rules. A native-speaking provincial whose conversational Russian had been ruined from birth by the illiterate speech of the lumpen industrial outskirts couldn’t be taught in principle, despite the presence of brilliant instructors. In any case, the department’s main concern was to instill in us faithful interpretations of the Party dogmas. We were being trained to become ideologically sound ignoramuses, despite the availability of an outstanding classical literature.

  Only the final exam stood between me and graduation: “Theory and Practice of the Soviet Party Press and the Foreign Communist Press.” God. I couldn’t force myself to cram for this. The night before the exam I pulled myself together and decided to walk over to the library to glance through the encyclopedia. I didn’t know a single name, a single date, nothing.

  Unfortunately, fate sent Yurka, my classmate, and his mother to intercept me while I was crawling, full of doubt, to the unknown source of information concerning the foreign Communist press. (Our dear professors had never bothered to put together a textbook on this mysterious subject.)

  Junior year. At the humor magazine The Crocodile.

  “Hi,” shouted Yurka, “it’s my birthday, come with us!” His petite mother, a radiologist, beamed at me. “Why not,” I responded irresponsibly. I returned home on the last train.

  In the morning I was understandably late for the exam. My exhausted classmates were crowded at the door, staring at their notebooks with unseeing eyes. It was too late to borrow their notes. They themselves must have begged the class nerds. The A students were already in the auditorium.

  I peeked in. Mamma mia. Not bad for a state-appointed committee. I saw the one-armed departmental chair, plus young Zasurski, the founder of the foreign press department, plus some hags—seven in all.

  I didn’t wait. I had nothing to lose. As if in a dream I walked in and picked up the slip of questions. Glanced at it. No, I certainly didn’t know anything about the Communist media in Japan. And the question about the founding of the Bolshevik press in Siberia during the revolution didn’t evoke any associations. General Kolchak? General Vrangel? Only these two names and also the two heroes thrown into the engine furnace, whatever they were called, knocked inside my poor empty head. But the Bolshevik press?

  I stood up and walked over to the execution spot in front of the committee. The members were still fresh; it was early. In the middle sat our chair, with a prosthetic arm and eyes of different colors that also looked artificial. He wore the severe expression of a character in a horror movie. (The teachers in our department were famous for their fantastic appearance. One instructor, of dialectic materialism, barely cleared the edge of the table and sometimes lectured, invisible, from underneath it.)

  There I was, standing at ease in front of the committee. I declared in a relaxed voice, not without some swagger: “I can’t answer these questions.”

  The committee woke up and fidgeted excitedly. What an adventure! They politely suggested I try another ticket. I did.

  “These questions I can’t answer either. Any questions, in fact.”

  “Okay.” The fellow on the far right fidgeted in alarm. “Tell us, what did Comrade Khrushchev call journalists?”

  The plump lady in the middle sat back in her chair and moved her lips, prompting me. But I had no time for such details.

  “Don’t know,” I announced proudly.

  Everyone looked embarrassed. It began to look serious.

  “Party executives!” the fellow said, reproaching me.

  “Ah, right,” I agreed, as though remembering.

  Pause. No one knew when or how to kick me out. Terror filled the air. Behind me the elite forces of our class were straining their brains.

  Surprising myself, I made a shocking announcement: “None of it will come in handy, you know.”

  Pause. They couldn’t believe their ears. A graduate denounces her education within the very walls of her university.

  “What exactly won’t come in handy?” a fellow asked in a leading manner.

  “All of it! Foreign press!”

  Zasurski sat up straight. It was his life’s work, the product of an enthusiastic polyglot!

  “I’m going to the virgin lands in three days,” I declared with all the force of a wholesome proletarian. “To work construction. That’s right. Because one needs to study life—before writing about it.”

  The committee grew wistful. Now they faced the problem of slinging an F at a future proletarian, whose thinking, incidentally, was ideologically sound. Damn Zasurski and his foreign press. What do these cretins need foreign press for? Who’s ever going to read it? So what if it’s Communist—it’s all in foreign languages that no one knows. Hindi, Japanese—who can understand them? Communist, fine, but who can tell exactly what they write there?

  They were probably thinking: One can send a failing student to cover some remote construction site for a year, to air her brain, but this one is actually volunteering! Lecturing us along the way, loudly and proudly.

  These subtleties I didn’t grasp at that moment, but in my five years of college I had firmly grasped the main demagogic principles. Virgin lands. Proletarian work for the benefit of common peasants, common workers. The committee must have sensed the classical Bolshevik connotations: the supremacy of the working class over the rotten intelligentsia; bringing culture to the people; potential letters to the Central Party Committee, God forbid. They all denounced each other.

  This must have been the only way of talking to such people.

  I retreated, chin high. Students listening at the door parted before me like the Red Sea. I crossed the hall, smiling belligerently. Then I found a little nook and hid there.

  That’s it, the end of the line, I thought miserably. I won’t get a diploma, and no one will hire me, not a single provincial rag. We’ll have nothing to live on, and next year I’ll have to take the same exam over again. Damn you, Communist press of Japan.

  Then there was a commotion in the hall, and we were summoned to hear our grades. I got a C! I laughed out loud from shock. That laughter rang sacrilegiously at the solemn moment of graduation.

  The committee members were hiding their eyes, looking past me bitterly, like a multiheaded dragon who had let the rabbit slip across the river. It was clear that at that moment they would gladly slug me with an F. But that was spilled milk.

  • • •

  On graduation I had five rubles to my name, and I submitted them to the head of the student brigade. Buses carted us to the freight station. We climbed into cattle cars equipped with bunks, and I began to elaborate the plan for my future. I planned to work that summer with the students in northern Kazakhstan, and then, after they left, remain in the steppes and hitchhike from town to town toward the Pacific Ocean, writing for local papers along the way, the same route Chekhov once took. I would survive on fees from my writing and study the life of ordinary people. For some reason I considered that my most important goal.

  This way I was keeping the promise I gave to the exam committee. I broke my back at the construction site, as a simple laborer, carrying stone blocks in 120-degree heat, without access to a shower (twice in two months), with saline drinking-water out of a barrel, without access to mail, with identical meals of brown pasta mixed with boiled lamb fat.

  After a month of such life, we were covered with lice and pimples, and even organized a strike of sorts: we sat listlessly around our grain silo like some displeased slaves at the unfinished Colosseum, and refused to work. This could have been interpreted as an economic crime and gotten us all expelled from the university and the Komsomol, but our leader, a math graduate student named Belenky, didn’t think like that. He didn’t care about ideology. He was simply a good person. Instead he borrowed a pickup truck and took us to the co
llective farm’s public bath, and also gave us some money to buy candy and mailing supplies. We walked into the stationery store as if it were paradise. As soon as we were ready to leave, a squall flew in and an ocean of water descended on the steppe, which before our eyes turned into a green carpet of grass, and the road turned into a swamp. We were driving through runny mud in our truck, happy, filthy up to our eyebrows, singing songs.

  After another week of this life I was discovered on the floor behind the oven in our stuffy barracks, burning with fever. The heads of the other brigades had driven from Bulaevo, the district center, specifically to find me: I was the only professional journalist in a territory three times the size of France. Looking at me politely, they offered me a change: to leave for Bulaevo and start working on the newsletter. At first I refused, considering it a betrayal; but two days later, when they came again, I agreed—things were winding down anyway—and quickly began to recover.

  It was a fantastic life. Freedom. Endless spaces. I traveled from brigade to brigade, interviewing students, writing down anecdotes and songs. The only ones I never visited were the journalists: I had had my fill of my future colleagues.

  I hitchhiked; rides were far apart. I had to wait for hours, lying in the grass under the faded blue sky, in the ringing emptiness. There is nothing more beautiful than the steppe. Nothing. Even the ocean is smaller and ends sooner. For the rest of my days I will remember the sunrise over the steppe: a recently plowed purple earth and an orange sun trembling over the horizon like an enormous egg yolk. On the road a truck stops, letting out milk women in white robes, colored red by the rising sun; the herd of cows arrives in waves, led by the mounted cowherds, who yell greetings at the women in German. The women, tall and healthy, incredibly clean and even starched, respond with laughter. They are ethnic Germans from the Volga region, exiled by Stalin to Kazakhstan.

  When everyone returned to Moscow and I was ready to press ahead toward the Pacific, the informed people from the district paper warned me that local rags didn’t pay freelancers and that permanent positions were filled with Party members—I wouldn’t make enough money to rent a cot; plus no one would want to publish my pieces anyway. They were right about that: local media weren’t interested in creativity. I looked through their archive: it was teeth-pulling misery. Local editors published cheerful news from collective farms—who harvested what crop ahead of whom; interviews with the farms’ chairmen—and ideologically correct rubbish by the state news agency, themselves squeezed on all sides by the local Party organs, at the very bottom of the Party ocean. The farther you got from the capital, the center, the more conspicuous you became; there was too much empty space, no crowd to disappear in. I couldn’t survive there.

  That spring, before my graduation, I thought of another way of finding a job: through my estranged father. Stefan Petrushevsky was a professor of Marxist philosophy and a member of the editorial board of Science and Religion, a respected magazine. He could help. After a long search I discovered him in the same courtyard where I’d spent five years: his department was directly across from mine.

  He knew about me. Rumors of my ideologically unsteady behavior had reached him. He seemed a little frightened and even jumped up when I walked into his office. Before that I had seen him exactly once, ten years earlier. Still, we recognized each other immediately: the call of blood, apparently. Recovering his nerve, he took me to a restaurant on the waterfront and bought me a meal. At the end he asked cautiously about my future plans. His tone told me that asking him for anything would be useless.

  “I’m going to the virgin lands as a common laborer.”

  He seemed relieved: “That’s how all careers take off!” He gave me ten rubles.

  I visited him one more time, for no reason. Missed him, perhaps. He remarked: “My wife is against our meetings, but I told her, ‘Who knows, she may be useful to me one day.’” Then he took me to the cafeteria. I never saw him again, my amazingly wise father.

  This is the story preceding my appearance at the Petropavlovsk radio station.

  The next day, after the editor’s call I got off the local train (dragged by an ancient steam engine) and very soon sat in a warm, bright studio in front of the microphone, recapping my newsletter. Every piece was presented as a “novella.” I also sang the brigade’s work songs and played my guitar. I sang for no less than an hour, also performing some prison songs. For the Soviet radio it must have been a huge novelty.

  As I was leaving the studio, in my duck bell-bottoms, tanned like a mulatto with hair faded to bone white, my whole appearance beyond exotic, I was approached by a well-groomed gentleman of about forty.

  “Where does a character like you come from?” he inquired politely.

  “Bulaevo, that’s where.”

  “Where is that?”

  “Thirty-five miles from here.”

  “How interesting. My name is Konstantin Ardi. I work at The Late Night News.”

  From the far corner another old fellow of about thirty-five nodded. He looked fatigued in the extreme. That’s how people look the morning after a major binge. I had completed an internship at Gorky’s local paper, among the hard-drinking local correspondents, and could tell different shades of hangover.

  “And this is Vasily Ananchenko. We came together. We really liked you.”

  Vasily attempted a smile. His eyes were the same purple color as the bags underneath. He crossed his legs and drooped again.

  Young girls react with caution when greeted with compliments by middle-aged strangers. I pricked my ears.

  “If only you were a Muscovite,” Ardi declared, “we would have hired you for our program!”

  “I am a Muscovite,” I replied sternly.

  A heavy pause followed. A promise was made.

  My 1960s.

  “Well, here’s the phone number,” Ardi said, recovering courteously. “My wife, Alexandra Ilyina, is the head of the arts and culture section.” Aha, “my wife.”

  The editor who had invited me to Petropavlovsk interrupted us and took me home, where his wife fed me dumplings and then entertained me with stories about their life in Petropavlovsk, which they called “Petroholesk.”

  The children ran around me wildly, and then I was assigned a little room with two featherbeds. The moment I sank into their luxurious softness I was attacked by an army of bedbugs, eager to taste new blood. Poor us, how we all lived.

  I finished printing the newsletter and brought the copies with me to Moscow. I stayed at home for a month amidst my mother’s moaning that we couldn’t survive on her salary, which was true—mothers always inform their children of the unpleasant truths they refuse to recognize. Then I gathered my nerve and dialed the number.

  “Where on earth are you?” a smoky female basso replied. It was Ms. Ilyina, Ardi’s wife. “We’ve been waiting and waiting. Ardi told me all about you.”

  I arrived at the radio station, received an assignment to cover the return of the student brigades, as if it had just happened instead of happening two months before, then handed in my report to Ilyina. She read it, nodded, and sent me to the recording studio. That same night, sitting at our radio head to head, Mama and I listened to my very first radio appearance. What a squeaky,

  shrill voice! I couldn’t understand a word. I sounded like I was chewing something.

  The photograph on my first work ID, at the radio station, in 1962.

  Nonetheless, I began working there part-time.

  Two months later, Ilyina gave me a full-time position.

  My wise father was right, after all. My adult life took off in the steppes, on a Socialist construction site, just as he had predicted . . .

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