The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  The Portrait

  And so, after a day of reciting Gogol’s “The Portrait” in the courtyards, I found myself in the director’s room at the Officers’ Club, on the scratchy couch, and, resting my head on my arm for a pillow, saw in the light of an endless sunset that particular portrait, in which Stalin seemed ready to turn around and fix me with his beady black eyes. Terrified, I quickly turned to my other side and covered my eyes.

  The figure in the painting exuded malice. After that, I always slept in other offices. Who knows what the artist must have felt when he was working on it? He may have been fearing for his life, hoping for mercy.

  After receiving the green sweater, I developed a strange shyness and couldn’t perform anymore. I had to move my begging act indoors, into a store. My artistic career stalled until I found myself in a children’s home.

  The Story of a Little Sailor

  But begging in a store is much harder! You tap someone on the shoulder. “Please, Comrade, give us a kopeck.” And they give you a kopeck, but the smallest ice cream costs three rubles. You mumble and edit your request, and they reasonably object that this is what you asked for. The formula “spare a kopeck” must have survived from before the revolution, when a kopeck was actually worth something.

  My debut took place in a large grocery store. Beggars formed an honor guard next to the cash register. Customers passed through our double ranks on their way to pay, then turned around to face a human wall of misery.

  As I remember it, that store was almost empty of customers; its high shelves were empty of goods, too. In those days, goods were delivered unpredictably and then “tossed out” onto the shelves: the customers rushed inside, quickly formed a line, and in the end “obtained” something or other.

  I took my place at the end of the long line of beggars. There was zero hope.

  Suddenly the situation changed. The honor guard had annoyed the cashier long enough; she yelled at them from her little window, and they meekly crawled over to the back wall. But I stayed. Right below the cash register was a little ledge, to catch the change, and I squeezed myself under it, away from the angry cashier’s eyes. I was too tall and had to bend my neck painfully.

  My God, people stampeded to shower me with change—the pocket of my sundress under the green sweater ballooned. I felt a little scared, not understanding: Why were they giving me all this money?

  Then I understood: my crooked neck looked like an exotic injury. My face, I suppose, expressed genuine suffering: to remain in one position, with a crooked neck, is unbearable for a child. But I endured—after getting lucky with my little nook, I couldn’t just abandon it. I must have looked like a little martyr. Other beggars were seen there every day and lost their appeal. Now here was something different, a new sample of misery, a crippled little girl.

  The last straw was a boy beggar, who solemnly gave me his penny, then returned meekly to his legless father by the far wall. When I realized what was happening, I felt a burning shame. My heart stopped. What disgrace awaited me if they found out I wasn’t crippled! My face turned even redder. People approached me, asked me questions. Keeping my neck even more crooked, I unglued myself from my nook and shuffled past the beggars to the door. Outside, I continued my act a little longer. Finally, I snuck into a courtyard and counted my riches: fourteen rubles!

  I could buy an ice cream. The smallest portion cost three rubles, the medium nine, the large twelve. But I nurtured a dream about a doll. It lived in my imagination, tall and beautiful. I flew over to the little stationery store that sold toys. I visited it often, just to stare at the toys, and was regularly expelled, but this time was different—I had money. In emotional agony, I scooped out my change and dumped it onto the counter. The seller counted the money sternly: my riches could buy me only the cheapest item in the store. Under the glass counter lay a little boy sailor with a celluloid head and stuffed limbs. The more expensive girl was beyond my means. My tears unspent, my hopes dashed, I accepted the toy sailor and stuffed it under the green sweater next to my heart.

  Panorama of postwar Kuibyshev.

  But then I paused. Then I thought for a bit. Then I hugged the doll tightly. He was mine. My own little baby. I took off

  down the street, jumping with happiness. I had my own little boy!

  When I ran into our courtyard, the little sailor wasn’t under my sweater. I had dropped it running. My luck ran out. I knew it was justice. I had deceived everyone, and God had punished me. My little sailor had warmed my breast for a very short time.

  My New Life

  Soon after this tragedy a miracle occurred. After my escape down the ladder I lived on the street—that is, in the courtyard—for several days, performing during the day and spending nights at the Officers’ Club. I was even adopted by a woman who had lost her child; she lived in a little house nearby, under a huge shade tree. The child’s bed stood under a portrait crossed with a black ribbon. The woman bathed me in a tub and anointed my hair with kerosene, for lice. The woman was dark and small. She avoided looking at me directly and kept going through her daughter’s precious clothes, not ready to part with them yet, wanting first to get used to me. I slept under the portrait one night, then escaped back into our courtyard. For some reason I was still waiting for my own mother. She had left four years before and was sending us money transfers with which we bought kerosene and black bread.

  Free as a bird, shaggy, covered with lice and bedbug bites, probably all dusty again after the bath (there was no mirror; like all tramps, I didn’t know what I looked like), I was flying around our courtyard. Suddenly I spotted my enemies: a brother and sister, both older than me, from the apartment upstairs, who always hit me and shooed me away. I hid in a corner, but they smiled nicely and said I must come with them, that my mommy was waiting for me upstairs. My mommy? Which mommy? That dark woman with the funereal portrait? And why should I go to my enemies’ house? But the brats kept shouting, “Your mommy came for you from Moscow.”

  Incredible. I felt dizzy.

  Street children don’t trust anyone. What if they were trying to lure me back home, under lock? Or get me sent to an orphanage? Two ladies from the welfare department were looking for me, I knew. Once, I tapped on someone’s back. “Please, Comrade, spare a kopeck.” The back turned, and there she was—the welfare dragon. How I ran!

  I followed my enemies. We walked past the door to the apartment, where my poor aunt and grandmother were waiting in vain for me, walked up another floor, and there, at the kitchen table, sat my own mother.

  I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t seen my only one for four years. Her face was smiling, but I could see the dimples under her eyes that always appeared when she was about to cry (my daughter has them, too). She sat me down and began to spoon-feed me hot cereal she had made while waiting for me, with milk, butter, and sugar. I threw up. My mother cleaned me and carried me over to the public baths, like the five-year-old I used to be. There the bath workers shaved my head, leaving only a tiny fringe. That night we spent at the airport, in a huge room filled with sleeping people. We slept on canvas cots under clean white sheets that smelled of sun and summer; my mother held my hand. I couldn’t sleep. Clean sheets and my mother’s closeness kept me awake.

  The date was June 9, 1947. I remember it always. We were woken up and put on a plane with long metal benches. We flew for a long time, bouncing through turbulence. We arrived in the morning. I was dressed in new brown sandals, underwear, a camisole, a bright red dress, a new plaid coat. I felt like Cinderella at the ball, completely out of my element. A new life was beginning. There was no room in it for me.

  The Metropol Hotel

  Moscow that day was chilly and cloudy. A light fog obscured Sverdlov Square. The sun wasn’t out yet. I was tired and cold; my mother never stopped holding my hand.

  We crossed the empty Okhotny Market and walked over to the Metropol Hotel, where my great-grandfather Ilya—Dedya�
��was waiting for us. I was amazed there were so few cars at the intersection: I grew up watching American trophy movies and expected to find myself in New York, with its rivers of cars. But we arrived in postwar Moscow.

  In the Metropol, Dedya occupied a private room. That’s where I was brought from the maternity ward, where I spent the first years of my life. It was my home, sort of.

  But by that point, after the war, after the separation, I had become an unmanageable, wild child, a real Mowgli. Today they would have called me asocial. In Kuibyshev we led the life of pariahs, untouchables. “Enemies of the people” wasn’t an empty phrase. We were enemies to everyone: to our neighbors, to the police, to the janitors, to the passersby, to every resident of our courtyard of any age. We were not allowed to use the shared bathroom, to wash our clothes, and we didn’t have soap anyway. At the age of nine I was unfamiliar with shoes, with handkerchiefs, with combs; I didn’t know what school or discipline was. I couldn’t sit still; I read books at a fantastic speed crouching on the floor. I swallowed food instantly, using my hands primarily, and licked the plates clean. Bedbugs and lice bit my arms to bloody scabs; my hands and feet were gray and cracked, the cracks filled with pus. My nails were black, like a monkey’s. Only my eyes and hair must have remained the same. But my hair had been shaved.

  View of Moscow's main thoroughfare after the war.

  This is what my mother received after four years.

  Naturally I didn’t fit with the Metropol establishment. In the morning my mother left for work. Dedya also went out on business. I was left alone. I got bored. I rummaged through Dedya’s desk and came across a jar of silver half-rubles. Below, in the courtyard, brats were running around, screaming. From the windowsill I began to throw silver coins at them; each coin caused a new explosion of howling and fighting.

  The next day I donned Dedya’s peaked cavalry cap, which reached down to my chin, lifted his saber off the wall, saddled the toy wooden horse I found in the room (it had belonged to my young great-uncle Serezha, who was a pilot), and proceeded to gallop down the gleaming hallways, screaming, “Hurray, comrades, attack!” Imagine an enormous cavalry cap on top of a wooden horse and a huge saber bouncing off the beautiful floor. I was very small and thin; later, in the children’s home, I was called Matchstick Muscovite.

  Mumsy

  Angry words must have been exchanged, and I was promptly removed from the Metropol. Dedya’s wife and other relatives asked us out. At first my mother took me to the house of our almost relative, a tiny old woman with a crooked back who lived in the summerhouse area called Silver Forest. Everyone called her Mumsy; she was a person of enormous kindness. She had raised the husband of Dedya’s youngest daughter, Lena; both were shot in 1937. She earned her living making women’s clothes. Her most popular creations were brassieres: a client of hers had brought one from France; Mumsy copied it and began supplying the neighborhood with homemade lingerie.

  Even though we were not related, Mumsy took me in without a word. The house was full of people, including her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. But I didn’t have time for introductions: I wanted to hear what my mother was telling Mumsy, but they went inside. After making secret arrangements, my mother kissed me—her dimples appeared—and left.

  I had carefully memorized the route from the bus stop to the house and a little later escaped out the gate and found my way back. My plan was to reach a subway station and ask how to find the “Lazar Kaganovich station.” But I was wrong. I remember a small crowd of sympathetic people who were trying to convince me that the entire subway system was named after Lazar Kaganovich. They even walked me over to the Sokol station and showed me the inscription on the entrance: “The Sokol Station of the Moscow Subway System Named in Honor of Lazar Kaganovich.”

  I felt as if I were in the fairy tale about Aladdin, where all doors were marked with the same sign. Damn that Kaganovich, I thought. People were talking about calling the police and welfare services. Luckily, I fished out a name, “Metropol Hotel.” People laughed with relief and led me to the subway, and someone even convinced the guard to let me in for free. I must have told the credulous Muscovites God knows what about myself—that I was an orphan and hadn’t eaten for six days. A little later I showed up, victorious, at the Metropol, like Tom Thumb, who couldn’t get lost. Mama gasped upon hearing that I was at Dedya’s again. Dedya’s wife must have gasped, too. I was removed from Dedya’s and promptly packed off to a summer camp.

  Summer Camp

  There was no running away from there. First, we traveled by boat; then, against the setting sun, we traversed an immense meadow through the ringing of mosquitoes and the aroma of wet grass. We were dragging suitcases and satchels; many of the kids were older than me, bigger and stronger. It was useless to memorize the route. For the first time I found myself in a place I couldn’t escape from.

  The rules of the wild courtyard where I grew up were simple: run, grab, swallow, hide; meet a punch with a punch; if someone calls you, don’t go. Camp regulations couldn’t be more different. Here, some of the amazing facts were: four daily meals; clean sheets; a personal towel; a common bath once a week; a real latrine, instead of squatting in a corner; a trough for washing feet before bedtime; and marching in a column everywhere: to the cafeteria four times a day; to the bedroom twice; to the parade ground twice on regular days and once extra on holidays; also, to the woods.

  Very quickly it was discovered that I didn’t belong to the Young Pioneers, so I was inducted, very solemnly, and given a red tie. Soon, equally solemnly, to the sound of drums, I was expelled. I don’t remember what for, exactly; probably for constant scuffles and completely uncivilized behavior. They didn’t even know that I had never attended school!

  I lost all my things as soon as we arrived. The only clothes that survived was my parade uniform: a white blouse and a black skirt on suspenders. They must have been at the bottom of the suitcase. The button for one of the suspenders disappeared immediately. I tucked the suspender under my skirt, and it dragged behind me like a tail, often wet, because it rained a lot that summer. Naturally I was mocked.

  Overwhelmed by these difficulties, I even made myself an idol to pray to: a little branch stuck in the soil in front of a pine tree, which I adorned with flowers that soon wilted. I prayed to my idol fervently, on my knees. In Kuibyshev, I had begun to believe in God; I just figured out one day that God exists. My faith expressed itself in crossing myself after yawning, as I saw an old woman do on a streetcar once.

  My previous life had taught me to be extraordinarily sparing with food. Behind my bed I was saving petrified gingerbread that my mother had given me for the road. I was saving it for a rainy day and also as a sacred connection with Mama. One day, a sanitary commission was examining our dorm and discovered my hoard, to my terrible shame. The gingerbread was in a satchel made from my old flannel underpants, and that, too, seemed to shock the commission. Oh, how miserable I was there.

  Camp nurtured in me a hatred of constant supervision and collectivism of any kind, and at the same time admiration to the point of tears at the sight of a marching squad; humility and suspicion of praise; a desire to make myself inconspicuous and simultaneously to participate in all talent-based activities—to draw, to dance, to recite from the stage, to act, to make theater costumes from nothing.

  Summer of 1949. Camp. One of the suspenders is still attached.

  For the camp carnival I dressed up as a clown: a bushy wig (made with gauze and bits of hemp pulled out from the walls of a wooden barracks), a red nose painted with beet juice, and a ladle pinched from the kitchen to represent a clown’s umbrella. I was strolling and prancing under my ladle, hoping to receive the first prize—an unlimited supply of cranberry juice. But no one even noticed me. So I decided to go and look for that juice on my own—it must have been somewhere!—and in the dark corner by the kitchen discovered a huge barrel. The ladle came in handy; I scooped up the red
liquid and took a gulp, rejoicing that no one was chasing me away because I hadn’t won the prize.

  The liquid turned out to be filthy water in which they had washed beets and other vegetables for lunch. The disgusting taste of dirty beet tops. Another lesson of communal life: Do not attempt to look for free stuff by yourself. Also: Where there is no crowd, there’s nothing worth having.

  Camp also developed in me an exaggerated sense of fairness, a love of strikes and protests, a need to insist on my position, and a proclivity for small-time mischief, like stealing a cucumber from a state-owned patch. Children’s honor code forbade self-promotion, hoarding, snitching, and stealing personal property (state property didn’t count; no one stole anything else).

  At the end of the summer I was returned to my mother with an empty suitcase, dressed in a skirt with two tails—all the buttons were gone.

  Chekhov Street. Grandpa Kolya

  Our next port of call was the home of my mother’s father, Nikolai Yakovlev, my grandpa Kolya, at 29 Chekhov Street, Apartment 37. There, too, figured an evil stepmother with a daughter. A wizened hag of forty-five, the stepmother was our endless nightmare. Every month she dragged Mama to court, trying to kick us out.

  Grandpa had a private room, but it was half the size of Dedya’s, about 120 square feet, with fifteen-foot ceilings. The bookcases containing his library, five thousand volumes, reached all the way to the ceiling. There was a separate bookcase for the Bibles—the largest, of white pigskin with silver clasps, was too heavy to lift. There was an original edition of Boris Godunov. There was Eugene Onegin; the bookseller who bought it from us believed that it had once belonged to General Yermolov, one of the defeaters of Napoleon’s army. The secret trip to the bookseller took place because that year I had had a series of sinus infections from which I couldn’t recover, and Mama wanted to take me to the Baltic. In the entire library I could read only one book: The Description of the Land of Kamchatka by Stepan Krasheninnikov. It had the sour smell of old paper. The other 4,997 volumes were in foreign languages: for example, the complete works of Goethe illustrated with Gustave Doré’s nightmarish figures with horns.