The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  Majolica mosaic (1896–1905), by Mikhail Vrubel.

  The book begins with the author’s earliest memories and ends with her coming of age, when she finishes college and begins her first job as a journalist. It is composed as a series of vignettes that allows full-screen glimpses of her life in different periods. Petrushevskaya is famously reticent and rarely grants interviews. The Girl from the Metropol Hotel was her first volume of autobiography, ardently welcomed by her fans. When the book came out in 2006, it received the prestigious Bunin Prize—fittingly, since its art is undoubtedly Buninesque. These two masters, like no others, understand how to collect squalid facts, reassemble them, and present the resulting fable in such a way that the reader sees mostly art and beauty, with filth and hardship confined to the corners of one’s eyes, to the narrative’s unlit margins. Suddenly the evil fairy’s gifts appear unimportant and irrelevant, and the book’s foreground is occupied by very different memories: a golden autumnal tree, a piece of Tchaikovsky’s music, a stained glass window, a favorite teacher, a sunrise over the steppe. And the reader is gripped by a desire to hug this little girl, to pull her close, to tell her that it was for her, for her incredible talent, for her future art, that our grandfathers died in the war, that she just has to wait, to hang on, and the disgusting fog of lies that have caused her so much suffering will dissipate like the clouds on the famous Vrubel mosaic that adorns her beloved Metropol.

  ANNA SUMMERS

  The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

  When we leave this life, our memories and accumulated knowledge leave with us, but some traits and habits may be passed on to the next generation. Extreme, often unreasonable stubbornness; a conviction that food must be spartan (despite unbridled gluttony during holidays) and showers cold; indiscriminate hatred for the authorities; loyalty to one’s principles, even if one’s family must suffer; a sentimental fondness for music and poetry and unseemly squabbling over trifles; a fierce honesty in all affairs and utter disregard for deadlines; love for humanity and acute hatred for the next-door neighbor; need for both silence and constant screaming; the ability to survive on nothing most of the time and then mad spending on presents; a terrible mess in the house, while insisting on everyone else’s cleanliness; and endless love for the little ones, especially when they are asleep in all their cherubic beauty.

  • • •

  My great-grandmother Asya died from sepsis at thirty-seven, leaving six children. Her husband, Ilya, walked down to the river to drown himself—he was a doctor and held himself responsible. The five children ran after him, carrying the baby; they stopped him on the riverbank. When Asya was being buried, one daughter, Valentina, my future grandmother, trailed her father like a shadow, mumbling, “I’ll always follow in your steps.”

  And she did—she became a revolutionary, a member of an underground cell, just like he was. An erstwhile defender of the oppressed, he worked among the poor all his life, usually as a doctor at some factory, treating all the sick from the surrounding villages. He never accepted money for his services, living only on his salary. He would see every patient, as a matter of principle, although he was paid to treat only the factory personnel. He was regularly fired and would usually find his next job in an area struck by some epidemic, like cholera, where all medics who applied were hired, even the ones with a criminal record.

  As soon as I could talk, I called him “Dedya.”

  The Veger family on a stroll in 1912. My grandmother Valentina is in a white blouse. Behind her, my great-grandfather Ilya Veger (Dedya) and grandfather Nikolai Yakovlev. Dedya disliked when his daughters got married. That probably explains his belligerent expression.

  Family Circumstances. The Vegers

  I was born in Moscow’s most famed residential building—the Metropol Hotel. It was also called the Second House of Soviets, because its rooms were occupied by the Old Bolsheviks, such as my great-grandfather Dedya—Ilya Sergeevich Veger—a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party since 1898. In the same building, after her divorce, lived his daughter, my grandmother Valentina, a Bolshevik since 1912, with her two daughters: my aunt Vava and my mother, also Valentina.

  All three, as it happens in fairy tales, were wonderful beauties. My grandmother had been courted by the young poet Vladimir Mayakovsky; Vava, with her dark blue eyes, long braid, and snowy smile, was the prettiest student in the Armored Transport Academy; my mother, who was tall for her age, attracted attention early on, especially from soldiers, and innocently answered their questions about her name and address (though not her age—fourteen), which greatly upset her mother and older sister. A hardworking student, she consumed mountains of books (she was majoring in literary studies) and took literature so seriously that simple reading for pleasure she considered a sacrilege. Secretly, she was in love with the portrait of young Maxim Gorky. And this naïve, serious-minded, and completely innocent girl became pregnant on her twenty-first birthday, on August 23, 1937. As a child, I heard her say laughingly to our heavily pregnant janitor, Granya, that to her “it” happened the very first time—and she pointed at me.

  During the summer of that cursed year, my future family lived in Silver Forest, Moscow’s summerhouse area. (The house belonged to my grandmother’s older brother Vladimir, an Old Bolshevik, the leader of the underground revolutionary cell in Moscow and one of the organizers of the 1905 uprising. In Vladimir’s house a young Mayakovsky fell in love with my grandmother; Vladimir was the one who inducted the poet into the Bolshevik party.) In May, my grandmother’s younger brother Zhenya, two sisters, Asya and Lena, and their spouses, all prominent Bolsheviks, were arrested and, with the exception of Asya, never seen again. Their official sentence was “ten years of hard labor without the right to correspondence”—a euphemism for the firing squad.

  Valentina ("Liulia") and Vera ("Vava"), my mother and aunt, in 1930. That year my mother and grandmother ran into the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on the trolley bus. The poet seemed exhausted and gloomy. He committed suicide months later.

  My grandmother was left to wait her turn. Every night she heard the gate open and footsteps rustle on the gravel. But nobody came to arrest her. She couldn’t sleep and went to see a psychiatrist, who told her to stay at the clinic, where she would be safe. She did, and this probably saved her life—they were arresting everyone except for certified psychotics. When the young wife of her arrested brother lost her mind from nightly interrogations, they let her go. (Her end was terrible: she, her mother, and her little son were buried alive, along with other Ukrainian Jews, by the advancing Nazis.)

  But my grandmother was completely healthy. Stefan, my future father, visited my mother at the dacha that summer. It was Stefan’s footsteps that my grandmother must have heard, when he tiptoed over the gravel to my mother’s window, to summon her outside—such is my theory. He went to the same college as my mother, majoring in philosophy, while my mother studied literature. Later that fall, at a general meeting of students and faculty, my mother’s case was discussed and Stefan disowned us (my mother and me, in her belly), because we were relatives of the arrested enemies of the people. Another student, a consumptive boy, my mother’s admirer, stood up and offered to marry her if my father was refusing! Later my father changed his mind and married her after all, though not for long.

  Approximately two years after these events, upon coming home to their apartment at the Metropol, my grandmother and her daughters found their doors sealed by the Party’s own police and intelligence agency (NKVD). My grandmother began to open one, then stopped, turned on her heel, and walked away without a word. Aunt Vava, who followed her out, saw that the door handles were encircled with a wire, and on the wire hung a lead seal. If they had returned an hour earlier they would have been taken. But my family is always late. With nothing—clothes, utensils, bedding, books, not to mention furniture and paintings, all remained in the sealed apartment—they knocked on Dedya’s door in the same buildi
ng and took up residence in his room. But I do retain a fragile memory of my first home: two adjacent rooms and over the connecting door an exquisite portrait—my maternal great-grandmother. That portrait, long vanished in NKVD’s underground storages and probably appropriated by one of “theirs,” marked the beginning of my life; that is, my memory.

  Other earliest recollections:

  . . . I’m learning how to walk—taking unsteady little steps along the couch, holding on to the seat. I’m practicing on a summerhouse porch—it’s flooded with the evening sun. I’m squinting happily against the sun rays. I learned to walk late, after a prolonged pneumonia. I’m happy, I’m having fun, and Mama is happy that I can finally walk. Happiness is associated with warmth, light, green foliage, and Mama. This is 1939.

  . . . The Metropol Hotel. I’m standing in the middle of an enormous room, in front of the connecting doors and my grandmother’s portrait—a swan neck, burgundy hair. I hear someone shout that I be careful and not to step into the full potty.

  . . . I fall from a trunk on which I was sleeping. A dark, narrow room, piled with furniture and luggage. I split my head. I see tall, concerned people, their long shadows. This isn’t our suite in the Metropol. This is somebody else’s house. Our own apartment there has been sealed, and now we are “wandering”—an important word from my childhood vocabulary. I still have a scar on my left temple.

  • • •

  The Metropol Hotel. Postcard from 1905.

  I was born on May 26, 1938, nine months after my mother’s twenty-first birthday. I was lucky. I wasn’t left behind in a sealed apartment, as often happened to the infants of the arrested. I grew up by my grandmother’s side, to the sound of Russian classics—but more on this later.

  The War

  My uninterrupted memories begin with the war, summer of 1941. Mama is carrying me to a bomb shelter, a designated subway station after hours. I’m watching the night sky, crisscrossed by light beams; they look like fireworks. In reality, they are plane detectors. I remember not wanting to go underground, stretching my neck toward the festive sky, demanding to stay and watch the lights. But down we go, and spend the night on sheets of plywood laid over the tracks. My mother always carried with her a bag with blankets. I can see the arched ceiling of the black tunnel—it’s an adventure!

  In October 1941, Dedya, my grandmother Valya, my mother and I, and my aunt left Moscow for Kuibyshev (Samara before and after the Soviet Union) in a cattle car. According to my aunt, people were forced to evacuate, especially children and the elderly.

  My aunt went to the station to see our train. It consisted of shiny new trolleys, mounted on wheels, and at the very end a cattle car, very dirty, with a thick layer of what looked like chalk all over the floor. My aunt knew that enemies of the people like us would not be put on a clean new bus, so she immediately proceeded to sweep the cattle car. The next day my mother joined her, and for many hours they scrubbed, using pieces of plywood as shovels. When everything was clean, they brought the rest of us: Dedya, my grandmother, and me, and also our luggage, which consisted mainly of blankets. The weather was extremely cold; it was the beginning of the terrible winter of 1941. My family spread one blanket over the floor, covered themselves with the rest, and sat like this for several days, waiting for the train to depart. At the last moment, they were joined by the train’s officer in charge, with his wife and child. He must have realized that the metal trolleys were virtual iceboxes and wisely chose our cattle car, though it, too, was freezing.

  Women and children taking cover in the Moscow subway during a bomb alert in 1942.

  We were lucky he did: At the very first stop he resourcefully procured a small cast-iron furnace that looked like a barrel with a chimney. He had noticed neat rows of coal along the tracks, for the train’s engine. During stops, the grown-ups jumped off the car and gathered up the coal to feed our furnace. As a result, it was almost warm, and there were two kettles bubbling cozily. (That feeling of coziness, of home, when a match strikes and a tiny circle of light appears, always returned when I had to settle in a new place. Never have I been frightened by circumstances. A little warmth, a little bread, my little ones with me, and life begins, happiness begins.)

  I remember living inside Dedya’s coyote coat, watching the fire in the furnace through the crack. Dedya spent that journey like a kangaroo, letting me out only occasionally.

  At night, the train would halt in the steppe, letting Moscow-bound military trains pass. They carried fresh troops from Siberia, well fed, well dressed, and well armed. Moscow’s own defenders had no rifles or winter coats; they were clerks, factory workers, and high school students, and they were dying en masse among the frozen summerhouses. The authorities had no time to think about them and were preparing to give up the city. In November it was already snowing. The terrible winter was upon us.

  October 1941. Moscow outskirts; defense lines.

  I was let off the train to stretch my legs in the snowbanks along the tracks. I remember that at one stop my mother fed me “pastry”—a slice of white bread. I had a poor appetite and was thought to have TB like my father and so many others in Moscow. But at that moment, looking out over the white horizon under the black sky, I must have felt something, some foreboding of the coming hunger, and licked up every crumb.

  Kuibyshev

  At one of the stops, Dedya handed me over to the women, walked out on the platform, and disappeared. He boarded a faster passenger train, to get there first and find housing, like a quartermaster arriving ahead of the troops.

  In Kuibyshev, as an Old Bolshevik and civil war hero, he was assigned a separate hotel room. By the time we reached Kuibyshev, Dedya had found us all housing: a narrow shoe box with two beds and a small table. Dedya and I slept in one bed, and my grandmother with two daughters in the other, with extra chairs for their feet.

  Despite these conditions, Dedya took a cold bath every day (with a bowl of water and a rag) and performed Müller exercises. My grandmother, his daughter, hardly left the bed: the result of a contusion she’d sustained during a terrorist bombing at the Moscow Party Committee.

  The Moscow government offices also evacuated to Kuibyshev. The Bolshoi Theatre came, followed by the Durov Theatre of Animals. A munitions plant arrived, too. My mother was sent to work there in the packaging department; Aunt Vava, an engineer who hadn’t finished her degree, also found work. Mama moonlighted reading poetry to the wounded soldiers and also wrote about art for the local paper. One of her subjects was a huge canvas that adorned the waiting room of Kuibyshev’s train station: a fascist soldier dying alone in the winter steppe, watched over by a gray wolf. This shocking artifact I remember in the greatest detail, having spent many hours staring at it during our later “wanderings.” My mother wrote a long article about it.

  Eventually Dedya moved us to a communal apartment in a residential building for army officers, where the four of us occupied two rooms connected by a door. Even though three of his children had been sentenced for political crimes, Dedya still commanded the respect of Party members and received some assistance. Devoted colleagues and pupils brought him gifts of food; I even remember a bunch of grapes on a saucer. I spent a lot of time in Dedya’s room; he fed me and took care of me. But he had to return to Moscow, and at the same time my mother received a letter of acceptance from the revived Institute of Theatre Arts, also in Moscow.

  It was a miracle. My mother had left the Literary Institute after the memorable general college meeting, while she was pregnant with me, but it is possible that she was never officially expelled. She didn’t mention any of it in her application, didn’t mention her executed relatives, enemies of the people; she just put down four years of studies and was accepted. (Until the sixties, when Stalinism was partially condemned, she concealed the truth about her family, disliked talking about the past, and avoided mentioning “political repressions.” During her last year, when she couldn’t l
eave her bed, I suggested to her, “Let’s try to remember happy times,” but she only moved her fingers, as if brushing something away.)

  Women evacuees at work at one of Kuibyshev's wartime factories.

  Still, there were some bright moments—that acceptance letter, for example. My mother was passionate about studying; her dream was to finish college. On receiving the letter, she tried to obtain a train ticket to Moscow, but that was impossible. Train tickets didn’t exist in wartime.

  She even asked our neighbor Rahil, the horror of my childhood, for help, because her husband worked for the railway. Rahil herself told me this decades later, when I was visiting Samara with my play and found our old apartment. Rahil still lived in her room, alone. I informed her that my aunt and grandmother had been rehabilitated, and that my mother had died, but that Vava, my aunt, lived in a private apartment in the center of Moscow and received a state pension. Solemnly, Rahil explained to the curious neighbors who’d gathered to listen to us that during the war she’d had to hide all the foodstuffs from us, had to keep everything under lock. “But I was five, I was starving—we had nothing to eat,” I said and broke into tears. The neighbors’ eyes bulged: not to give a crumb to a starving child! Rahil quickly retreated to her room, an impoverished, ancient hag.

  My mother left by sheer accident. On the way home from the store, she detoured to the station to look at the departing Moscow train, walked up to the drivers, and, without any hope, asked for a lift, as she often did. And the drivers agreed! They let her stand on the engine; she wasn’t allowed in the cabin. All she had with her was a bottle of cooking oil and a week’s salary, which she gave to the drivers. There was no time to run home, and she was probably afraid, too. I don’t know if it was a freight train or a passenger train; a freight train could easily take a week.