The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  Grandpa was a professor of linguistics and knew eleven languages, plus seventy dialects of the Caucasus, for which he had created alphabets based on the Latin script to replace the old Arabic-based ones. For some remote villages he had to invent a written language. He is believed to have developed the theory of phonemes, in 1923, and the mathematical method in linguistics. Recently, the Independent newspaper referred to him as the Father of Alphabets. In the twenties he wanted to convert Cyrillic into the Latin script. He was an authority among Slavists, linguists, and mathematicians.

  Grandpa Kolya was over six feet tall and wore size 12 shoes: both my feet could fit into one of his overshoes. He spoke very little. When his ex-wife wanted to instill another wicked idea in him, she tapped on his back and asked, “Kolya, may I come in?”

  After he was fired and denounced, his favorite occupation became leafing through antique maps of Europe. He had been the deputy director of the Institute of Oriental Studies, an academic star. Now he didn’t have a penny; pupils and colleagues had abandoned him. He spent his days in an armchair in the hallway, smoking shag, writing on scrolls of gray paper in a perfect calligraphic hand, and leafing through his favorite maps, showing tiny villages—in his mind, he was walking the old routes.

  Grandpa was fired because he wasn’t quick enough to praise Stalin’s article “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics.”

  He couldn’t sleep. At night, lying high on his metal-mesh bed, he would slap his knees, hard, and scream obscenities at his enemies. He could smoke two packs of shag a night, whispering and occasionally screaming his useless damnations. In our tiny room, one could slice the smoke with a knife. I learned to sleep with my head clutched between my elbows.

  My grandfather had lost everything. He had been elected a corresponding member at the Academy of Sciences; he lived like any prominent, well-off professor, supporting his ex-wife and his youngest daughter, who was ill with Graves’ disease, and also another family of his: a fat, red-haired woman named Fanya and her daughter, who lived in the same building. He would go to their home for Sunday lunch and then rest there. I tagged along, because of the food. After lunch, I tucked him in on the couch for a nap.

  One Sunday, Fanya served cherry compote for dessert. I had never tasted anything so delicious and just kept on eating; in the end I consumed the whole jar. The same night I was taken to the hospital with acute appendicitis. They put me on a table, secured my hands and feet, and gave me a mask with ether. The gas was tearing at my lungs, and I fought and begged them to let me have one breath of air, just one, and they did, but then they finished the torture, and I went under.

  I was flying through a wide tunnel. Its walls were punctured by thin, burning rays of white light that felt like a lashing rain. I flew through those poisonous white needles, my ears filled with an unpleasant swishing sound. I was flying toward a patch of brightest light—a full picture of clinical death, as described by survivors . . .

  Trying to Fit In

  Besides bookcases, Grandpa’s room contained a full bed, a huge mahogany desk, an armchair, a tall filing cabinet, and a square dinner table.

  My mother had slept under that table since 1943. It had one enormous drawback: five inches above the floor, its legs were connected with a thick plank, so that one had to sleep with her feet either over that plank or under it, which was extremely uncomfortable. That’s why my mother arranged a bed for me in the common hallway, on top of Grandpa’s trunk. I went to sleep there eagerly; I had never slept alone before. I spent two nights on the trunk, listening to the rustling of electric meters, one per room. Then, under the stepmother’s leadership, other neighbors removed the trunk and replaced it with an enormous wardrobe. I returned to Mama’s side, under the dinner table. It was our little home. On the table, we kept utensils and foodstuffs; underneath, around the mattress, our clothes were piled up.

  But the stepmother couldn’t leave us alone. Soon she had another idea for how to improve our life. One day she showed up with movers: she had decided she needed the table for her summerhouse. Mama wept and tried to catch our falling things. A tough street kid, I grabbed one of the legs and wouldn’t let go. Our universe was collapsing. Stepmother stood in the doorway, issuing commands in a military voice. The pleased neighbors strolled up and down the corridor, observing this scene. The table was removed. We sat among our things in an empty space, as though after a bombing.

  My mother didn’t break under this blow. She finished crying, took in the newly empty space with fresh eyes, measured it with a tape measure, and soon bought us a little desk and a bed—and they fit! The bed had a secret: one section folded, becoming a seat for the desk during the day, and at night it turned back into a bed. Now I could do my homework sitting up, like normal people. The bed wasn’t very wide: thirty inches for the two of us, and I wasn’t tiny anymore. In the evening, happy that I could lie down, I tossed and howled with joy; at night I kicked and turned and Mama complained about my sharp elbows. We slept together for seven more years, until I completely grew up, and then Mama bought me a folding cot, which, miraculously, also fit. My happiness couldn’t be described. I had my own bed!

  I will mention just one more episode with the evil stepmother. I was in my grandfather’s bed with a high fever; the apartment was empty except for the stepmother. In my fever I thought the ceiling and the walls were collapsing in on me. I ran out of the terrible room and flew down the hallway, looking for any living soul, and came upon the stepmother. She heard me out, grabbed me by the shoulder with her bony hand, walked me back to the room, shoved me into the bed, and then locked the door from the outside. I screamed and threw myself at the door for hours. How long it lasted, who opened up for me, I don’t remember.

  My terror that day could be compared only to what I felt during the children’s play I saw in Kuibyshev. I must have been quite small. The play featured King Bone, a Russian fairy-tale character. For a while he was hiding under the stage, but then the secret trapdoor lifted and he appeared in an unearthly green light, rising slowly to his full height: a skeletal old man, covered with moss and jangling chains. My desperate cries filled the theater. After that he came to me in my dreams several times. In one dream I saw myself walking on an empty street, at dawn, past a row of squat yellow houses, and in the window above one door I saw the familiar green light. The door was about to open; I sprinted down the sidewalk and caught up with a passerby. “Excuse me, sir,” I asked him cleverly, “but shouldn’t we end this terrible dream?” And then I woke up.

  Later, in a film by Luis Buñuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, I saw a similar scene—a soldier’s dream. He was also walking past low-rise buildings, in a city of the dead, and one of the entrances was filled with crumbling soil. In one of my fairy tales, “The Black Coat,” a girl runs through an empty street in a city where she alone is alive.

  Children's Home

  I had to be enrolled somewhere; at the very least, I needed to start school. So the moment came when my mother made some biscuits for the road and sent her daughter to Bashkiria, to a facility for sickly children, in the company of a woman traveling in the same direction.

  We traveled for several days. I was offering my soggy biscuits to everyone on the train. From the station we walked for a long time. It was fall. I remember a golden forest with its smells of fallen leaves and smoke, and the fragrance of fresh water and algae coming from the river.

  The school, a two-story former palace, stood on the high bank of the river Ufimka, outside the town of Ufa. (In those days, orphanages, boarding schools, and children’s centers occupied former palaces. Monasteries were used as mental asylums, prisons, and juvenile colonies.)

  On learning that I could read and write, the staff placed me in second grade. I was issued a notebook. For the first time I held a real pen. I dipped it into the inkwell and began to spell. The teacher came up to me. “Why are you writing in the middle of the page? You need to start from t
he top.” I tore out the page and on the next one wrote “Class Work” and the date, again in the middle, like a dissertation title. Again the teacher told me to start at the top. Once more I started in the middle. The teacher’s patience was exhausted; I was transferred to first grade.

  The river Ufimka in the fall.

  There, I quickly became an academic star, which didn’t stop me from behaving in the same manner as at the summer camp. Once more, I was expelled from the Young Pioneers.

  When I fell ill with strep, I was sent to the infirmary, which was also called the “isolation ward.” I was lying on a very clean white cot, dizzy with fever, locked in, completely alone, terribly scared. What joy it was to see a little white mouse sitting under the adjacent bed! I gave it the piece of bread I was saving under the pillow. She took it with her front paws, sat down on her tail like a squirrel, and started nibbling.

  Later, we were preparing for the New Year’s pageant. Our teachers were all Leningrad residents who were evacuated along with the children during the blockade. They gave us a full-scale theatrical show. I was dressed as a gypsy, in full skirts and a floral shawl, plus a necklace of Christmas-tree beads over my skinny chest. First we sang kneeling on the floor, swaying and waving, and then I danced solo, swirling my skirts.

  I knew well the life of a gypsy camp from my time in Kuibyshev. Every summer, after the Volga stopped flooding, gypsies set up tents on our bank and made stew in pots over a fire. It was the stew that attracted us. Fires were burning; a bear with a ring in its nose was roaring on a chain; filthy kids were running everywhere, dressed in overalls with holes between the legs—a brat squatted, did his business through the hole, stood up, and kept on running. I can no longer remember how they danced, but at the children’s home, during the concert, I danced just like they did.

  That performance brought me my first suitor—a blond second-grader, the well-mannered son of a teacher. I treated him as a young lady should, and we never even had a scuffle.

  I had no clothes to wear outside. I wrote to my mother, and a miracle happened: a large box arrived containing felt boots and a coat lined with faux fur, with an ink spot on the hem, the legacy of my second cousin. Ecstatic, I ran outside and swirled and ran around on the icy pond. The felt boots were magically warm and comfortable. I didn’t notice how my foot fell through a little hole in the ice. I was sitting there, yelling, for some reason, “Hurray, Comrades,” so no one noticed right away that I’d become one-legged. When they pulled me out, it was too late: the new boot had sunk all the way to the bottom.

  By spring there were fewer children left, and in May everyone was gone. The facility for the weakened children was closing for summer vacation or even shutting down for good—recent years had been plagued with poor harvests and famine. The teachers left. My little suitor left, too. Manya, who was in the same classroom, also went home. She was fourteen but so weak she couldn’t hold a pen, and was sent to the first grade. She was extremely thin and walked poorly; she had huge black eyes.

  Our palace emptied and was shut down. Only the custodian remained, with her boyfriend; they lived in the groundskeeper’s house, and I lived with them. They spoke Bashkirian; I still remember how to count in that language.

  The couple gathered snowdrops in the woods, to sell at the market in town. I went along, to make myself useful. I had to find a place in that strange suspended life. We set out at first light. In huge forest meadows we looked for little white stars in the thick grass, so dark it seemed blue. We plucked unopened buds, whole baskets of them.

  The custodian and her lover talked between themselves, and I could understand them, having lived eight months in Bashkiria. They were saying that my mother had abandoned me and that I would be sent to an orphanage as soon as there was an official decision about me. I didn’t believe them. Later I learned that it was just another family trait—we are always late, for everything.

  During the day I explored the local woods. There one could visit the famous Pugachev’s Cave. The entrance was a narrow crack. Behind it, rumor held, lay huge underground chambers. I circled that crack for days, but something always stopped me—instinct told me to stay away from tight, narrow spaces. On one of my rambles I came across a cabin. An elegant lady was sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. I asked for a smoke, and she gave me one. Very professionally I imitated a smoker—I didn’t even cough. The lady watched me with interest. How did a beauty like her end up in the middle of the woods?

  I told her my usual fibs about being an orphan and all alone in the world. She would have adopted me, I’m sure, had I stayed in the woods.

  I Want to Live!

  Finally someone came to take me home. I was ten by then, with a year of school behind me. It was a long journey. Along the way, my initial companion vanished and was replaced by others. For several days I stayed in someone’s house, slept on the floor. The mother pitied me and expressed a wish to keep this incredible orphan who invented such outrageous stories.

  But I didn’t let her adopt me. I disliked her immediately, seeing her as someone who wanted to steal my mother’s property. I belonged to my mother with every cell; I worshipped her; the memory of her face kept me warm, metaphorically speaking, in the life of a virtual orphan that I led, despite having a living father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and a whole pack of cousins. I had one objective in life: to live with my mother.

  When I finally reached Moscow I was immediately shipped off again, to another summer camp, again for three months, for another painful attempt to socialize me.

  At the children’s home I was a recognized star and an A student. Here I was immediately demoted: first from head of a squad, to which I was elected for my fantastic enthusiasm and perfect behavior in the first few days (I think); then, as usual, from the Young Pioneers. The reason wasn’t hard to guess: constant scuffles, zero discipline, and so on. My handkerchiefs, sandals, ribbons, combs, and socks I didn’t see after the first week. As punishment, I was soon transferred to the younger squad. There I immediately joined in a general scuffle, took a good beating, and continued in my usual wild manner.

  My only consolation was in art. I signed up for the choir, the theater, the drawing class, and the dance class. With my talents I hoped to achieve recognition by the camp society—postwar children who grew up in conditions of total famine and old-school discipline. But I can’t remember a single case in which a child was respected for her singing and drawing. At the camp, singers and actors were treated with contempt, as in the Middle Ages. The campers respected what is usually respected in an individual: a disdainful attitude, silence, composure, readiness for anything—in other words, strong character. Self-respect also counted, but first and foremost came primitive physical strength.

  My reputation rested on one skill: after lights-out I told “scary” stories. I remember one night at my beloved children’s home: I couldn’t stop spinning my scary yarns, everyone was already asleep, and suddenly I fell into a panic—I realized for the first time that someday I would die. I was convulsing in my bed, screaming, “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, I want to live!” The lights went on, everybody was up, the grown-ups were holding me down, and I fought them and screamed terribly.

  I had already seen death once, from our balcony in Kuibyshev. There was a truck parked right underneath; in the back, on sky-blue pillows, lay a dead girl, dressed like a doll. I had wept all night.

  The last photograph of Ilya Veger, my great-grandfather, in November 1948. Children would address him as “Father Frost.

  The next time I wept like that was in the fall of 1949, after my return from the camp. My mother told me that Dedya, my great-grandfather, had died a year earlier. Dedya died in 1948,

  eleven years after his children Lena, Asya, and Zhenya were sentenced to “ten years without the right to correspondence.” Several times he walked over to Lubianka, the NKVD’s headquarters, to file a complaint: Ti
me has passed; where are my children? Before every visit to Lubianka he would say good-bye to everyone. He wrote several letters to Stalin in which he condemned the head of the NKVD. Then one day while going to get milk, he was waiting at the streetlight and somehow fell under a passing bread wagon. At the trial, the woman driver claimed that Dedya was bent over before lunging himself under the wheels—he must have been pushed violently. The official statement concluded that Dedya was intoxicated. The wretched NKVD idiots couldn’t think of anything better. Dedya had never had a drop of alcohol.

  I saw him off as best I could, by howling voicelessly in a dark corner in the hall, as though performing a ritual. I will never see you again; how can it be; I will never see you again, Dedya, my Dedya.

  I felt that he could hear me.

  Snowdrop

  In fourth grade I followed around Svetlana Govorova, our star pupil. She embodied my unattainable ideal. She studied music. She could play Tchaikovsky.

  My obsession had one practical goal: to get Govorova to play Tchaikovsky on the school’s grand piano. How I adored Tchaikovsky! “Snowdrop,” especially, but also “Troika,” both from The Seasons. Govorova’s stubby fingers danced over the keys, and I quivered like a bloodhound, staring over her shoulder at the music I couldn’t read. But I could read the little poem by Maikov, printed on the same page, which I tried to sing along with her playing. Govorova objected, correctly, that “Snowdrop” wasn’t a song to be sung, that the poem had nothing to do with the music, and when I tried to sing it anyway, she simply stopped playing. What torture it was to watch helplessly as she covered the keyboard, stood up, resettled her braids, smoothed down her dress, and sailed off without a glance!