The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  My scheme to sing “Snowdrop” hinged on the word “rehearsal.” Our fourth grade was preparing for the end-of-the-year concert, and Govorova, our strongest musician, was recruited to accompany the singers. As the lead singer, I had a right to a rehearsal, so I kept dragging Govorova to the school auditorium, to the grand piano.

  Others rehearsed there, too. My friend Natasha Korovina, along with the other athletes, was perfecting a so-called human pyramid, still very crooked. Larisa Moreva declaimed an excerpt from Gogol (she took declamation lessons at the Young Pioneers Palace; I despised her dreadful howling). I recited a French fable. The whole class screeched out “La Marseillaise,” out of harmony. I can still remember the French words.

  But I was crazy about Tchaikovsky, whose music, alas, was beyond my reach. I didn’t attend a music school. There was no piano in my house. Forget the piano; my mother and I didn’t even own a bed. Still, I persisted in my desire to sing “Snowdrop” to Govorova’s accompaniment. But Govorova was a practical person. She ignored my threatening looks and handwritten notes. A class monitor and straight-A student, she occupied the central desk, a place of honor, which she shared with our second academic star, Mila, while I sat under the teacher’s nose, together with the other outcasts. I failed every subject and never did any homework. F in math; F in history. Mama and I often didn’t sleep. Some nights we had to walk in the street for hours, when Grandpa screamed particularly loudly. At school, everything was clean; the red floors sparkled; there were flowers in every window. At home, my mother and I slept on a mattress under a table, with the armies of bedbugs. That didn’t stop me from dreaming about Tchaikovsky, but stubborn Govorova refused to play anything besides “Snowdrop,” and she wouldn’t let me sing.

  Toward December the rehearsals intensified. I was now accompanied by the stately music teacher, who asked me what I wanted to sing. “Our Homeland Hears,” I told her, though I wanted to say “Snowdrop.” Very well. I trilled: “Our Homeland hears, / Our Homeland knows, / When one of her sons / In a plane swiftly goes.”

  I no longer slept in my grandfather’s room on Chekhov Street: after several sleepless nights, Mama had rented a cot in Stoleshnikov Alley, in the apartment of a “respectable and sober” (the ad said) men’s tailor. For centuries Stoleshnikov Alley had been Moscow’s chief prostitution nest. Its families, from granny to granddaughter, plied their trade at night, crawling out like bedbugs. The Soviet government couldn’t do anything, because officially prostitution didn’t exist.

  The tailor, his wife, and their son slept in a double bed by the wall, across from an enormous window of stained glass (before the revolution this must have been an artist’s studio). Next to it, in a separate crib, slept their little daughter, who suffered from trachoma, a contagious disease that left her eyelids scarred and glued with pus. Mama and I shared a cot at the foot of the family bed, and I could see everything that went on in it. In the morning, the wife examined bloodied rags, muttering complaints about her husband.

  Mama stayed at work until late. After school I returned to Stoleshnikov by myself.

  The tailor’s son, Yurka, was a little older than I was. His entrepreneurial mind was thinking up various business schemes. The girl stayed in her crib, quietly playing with a doll, occasionally looking at us through her scarred eyelids. The tailor—their father—saw clients on Monday, took their measurements, very professionally, and received the fabric and a cash advance for the suit. Next, he immediately pawned the fabric and remained drunk until Wednesday; for the rest of the week he hid from his enraged clients, who demanded either the finished suit or the fabric and sometimes tried to break down the door with an ax. We were told not to open up.

  Stoleshnikov Alley in the late 1940s or early 1950s.

  The mother was in and out all day, visited often by a neighbor, the prostitute Lidka, who on seeing me enunciated, “Fourteen thousand.” Beneath the unwashed window, in its fairy-tale light, they held whispered conversations and exchanged mysterious packages, always tightly wrapped, which must have contained drugs. Now and then a police patrol squad stomped in, received something from the wife, and stomped out. I was eleven or twelve that winter.

  One afternoon, when no one was home, Yurka brought over a group of older kids: several boys and two girls. They all conferred excitedly and then proposed that I join them on an excursion to a nearby building. “You’ll see,” the girls promised me, “there are special birds up there—you’ll see!”

  I felt flattered: they had noticed me; they wanted my company!

  We walked side by side in the street, holding hands, laughing and talking. It was a new, exciting life. I was seeing them for the first time, but it didn’t matter—we would soon become fast friends, I thought, go to the movies together, to the skating rink, do all kinds of things together . . . No one had ever taken an interest in me before.

  “Here! Bring her along! Let her see this, too!” the boys kept saying. Yurka’s head bobbed among them.

  They needed me!

  We took a right on Petrovka Street and walked into the corner entrance behind the Red Poppy restaurant.

  I saw a dark, narrow staircase. The boys crowded in front, not looking back, only laughing quietly. The girls closed ranks. One was clutching my hand; the other followed on my heels.

  The boys reached the top floor and continued to climb.

  “Almost there,” the girl holding my hand reassured me.

  “This way!” said the leading boy to the girl behind me. I let her pass. It was dark. The only light came from the attic. Someone was laughing up there. The other girl still held my hand. Suddenly I felt uncertain, even a little nauseated. Delicately I slipped my hand out of the girl’s sweaty paw and scurried downstairs.

  For some reason they didn’t chase after me. They probably hadn’t worked it out yet, what to do in such cases. They let me escape.

  It was already dark.

  I couldn’t go back to Stoleshnikov, so I walked over to Stanislavsky Street and hid in the building where my favorite teacher, Elizaveta Georgievna Orlova, lived with her husband, an army officer, and two sons. I sat outside her door for a long time. Luckily, no one saw me.

  I returned to the tailor’s at bedtime. Mama was waiting up for me. We ate, then crept into our cot. The family was sleeping in their communal bed. Yurka was lying quietly in his usual spot by the wall.

  Like most children, I was afraid to share my secret fears with Mama. I just cried and begged her to return to Chekhov Street. I knew they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  I understood later that their tribe grew by initiating new females into the trade. Those two girls were also going to the attic for a reason.

  Who was waiting for me there? A paying customer, that’s who. Lidka wasn’t spending time at the tailor’s to chat about the weather. Fourteen thousand rubles was a huge sum then.

  We left Stoleshnikov the next day, carrying our suitcase and blanket, like refugees. Arriving at the communal apartment where my grandfather lived, we rang the bell for a long time. Finally, one of the tenants, Misha Shilling, unbolted the door for us. Terrified of the other neighbors, we tiptoed down the hall and noiselessly pushed open the door to Grandpa’s room.

  Inside, it was dark and full of tobacco smoke. Grandpa was smoking shag in his torn armchair, spitting out occasionally.

  He had been recently fired from everywhere. At night he bellowed and punched the wall with his fist. He had nothing to live on, nowhere to go.

  Crouching under the table, we unrolled our blanket. Good to be home.

  On New Year’s Eve, in crisp brown ribbons (washed the night before and rolled wet around the hot water pipe), I sang proudly about the Homeland and her sons the aviators in front of the whole class.

  Next, Govorova played “Snowdrop.” I hid in the wings and sang softly, for the last time:

  Early spring (antique postcard; detail).


  A little blue snowdrop

  In fragile spring snow—

  The first dream of happiness

  After a winter of sorrow.

  I was choking on tears.

  First dreams—that’s what it was.

  Our wretched lives.

  The Wild Berries

  A mother brought her girl to a boarding school for sickly children and then left. That girl was me.

  The school stood over a large pond. All around it stretched an autumnal park with meadows and paths. Enormous trees seemed cast in gold and copper; the scent of fallen leaves made the girl dizzy, especially after the city’s stench. The girl was in fact on a former gentleman’s estate. The stately wooden manor had classical pillars, arched ceilings, and upper galleries; the girls’ dormitory, called here a dortoir, was a former drawing room and featured a grand piano.

  After the Socialist revolution, this building was going to be used by children with tuberculosis—children of the proletariat. It so happened that very soon, by the time the girl was in fifth grade, all Soviet citizens had become proletariat, lived in communal apartments, rode packed trams, and waited in line for a seat in public cafeterias. (They also waited for bread, potatoes, shoes, and, on rare occasions, a luxury item like a winter coat; in communal apartments, workers stood in line to use a bathroom, too.) A well-organized line meant fairness; one only had to wait long enough, and the girl had successfully waited for her turn at Forest School—that was the name of the facility.

  This is 1948, soon after my return from the children's home. I'm wearing a new blouse with glass buttons! Mama plaited my hair and took me to the photo studio. But we are still homeless.

  I cannot describe the girl’s appearance. Appearances cannot reveal inner life, and the girl, who was twelve at the time, led a constant inner monologue, making decisions literally each second—what to say, where to sit, how to answer—with a single purpose: to be like the other children, to avoid being kicked and shunned. But, at just twelve, the girl wasn’t strong enough to watch her every step, to be at all times a model of neatness and moderation. She wasn’t strong enough and so she’d run through the rainy autumnal park in torn stockings with her mouth open in an excited yelp, because, you see, they were playing hide-and-seek. (Between classes, too, she’d stampede the hallways, snot nosed, hair undone, always fighting; what a sight.)

  At the boarding school, away from home, the girl was expected at the very least to keep track of her most necessary belongings, such as stockings: one was right there, by the bed, the other, God knows where. Handkerchiefs disappeared first, followed by her (right) mitten and scarf. As for pens, pencils, and erasers: a week into the school term no one in her class had theirs. Or take rubber boots: without them the girl couldn’t walk through muddy puddles in the park nor enter the dining hall, and she lost one and now had to shuffle in her teacher’s oversize castoff behind everyone in class, like a pariah.

  That happened at the time when it was so important for the girl not to look worse than others, especially since there was this boy, Tolik—they were the same age but he was six inches shorter and of unspeakable beauty: a chiseled nose with freckles, endless thick eyelashes around starry eyes, plus a perpetual coy smirk. The girl was too tall for him, but this young god radiated his charm evenly and meaninglessly a hundred yards around like a tiny nuclear reactor. When he arrived in the dining hall the space around his table would light up and the girl felt a surge of merriment—Tolik’s here!—and Tolik’s eyes would grow larger as though under a magnifying glass as he scanned his kingdom. Heads turned to him like sunflowers to the sun, thought the girl, stabbed in her very heart. There was a swelling right above it, the size of a young wild berry. Every child at Forest School had such swellings. Once, the girl was presented with a heavenly vision of Tolik, who’d just walked in and was immediately jostled by another boy. “Watch out for my breasts, moron,” Tolik whimpered clownishly. His hand was cupped over his left nipple. Him, too! the girl cried out silently. His breasts hurt, too, not just mine, not just the girls’! He’s one of us—we’re going through the same stage, together. The girl shuffled into the dining hall—always the last one, kept back by the infernal boot.

  In a commune no one is entitled to private meals; it’s considered hoarding. Everything must be shared with other children, even poor biscuits from home. After a childhood of collective care the girl had lost her sense of privacy and individual property. The commune also dislikes when one of them acts differently: always comes late or wears mismatched boots. The girl became an outcast in her class. She began to fall behind on purpose, to avoid scornful looks, and one October night at the end of the second week she fell so far behind the other girls that she found herself alone among the boys. Dark shadows blocked her path, cutting her off from the girls and their teacher far ahead, pulling her in a circle the way a pack of wolves pulls in its prey.

  I stood surrounded on the edge of the park. The other girls, protected and safe, were barely visible now.

  I screamed after them. I bellowed like a tuba, like a siren.

  The boys nearest to me grinned stupidly. (Later, in my grown life, I’d always recognize that dumb, dirty smirk, a companion to base, dirty deeds.) Their arms were wide open, ready to grab me. Their fingers were moving and their wild berries probably hardened at that moment. I stood still, directing my scream at the girls; some of them looked back and continued to walk away, faster. I kept increasing the volume.

  What would they do to me?

  They’d have to tear me to pieces and bury the remains of their chase, but only after they were finished doing all that could be done to a living person who’d become someone’s property.

  But for now they just wanted me to shut up.

  Something made them pause when they were only five feet away. I hurled myself through their ring and flew across the meadow, losing my boot in the mud. At the door I overtook the last of the girls. She heard me thumping and looked around: on her face I saw the same dirty, complicit smirk. I tumbled inside. I was red and swollen from crying but wasn’t asked a single question as to what might have caused all that yelling back in the park. Those girls knew what had lain in store for me, somehow. Maybe they’d all shared a past in the caves, where their female ancestors were chased down and used. (How quickly can children regress to a primitive life, accept its simple truths! Common fire and women; collective meals shared equally: the leaders get more, the weak get less or nothing. Sleep together on a filthy floor; grab food from a single pile; pass around a cigarette butt; not be disgusted with others’ fluids; dress in identical rags . . . )

  That night the girls were quiet in a strange, contented way, as though their hunger for justice had been sated. They didn’t know yet that I’d escaped. What would they do if I had come back alive but broken, soiled?

  The word for such a person was “excreted.” The girl knew excreted kids in her schoolyard. The excreted were up for grabs, outside the commune—anyone could abuse them in any way they wanted. The thing to do was to stalk them everywhere they went and then slam them into a wall in plain view. All excreted had the look of dumb cattle; two or three stalkers always tailed them. Only constant adult presence could have saved them from abuse, but one can’t expect adult presence on each path, on each corner.

  The next day was like any other. I fished my boot out of the mud and tried to hobble livelier. The boys greeted me as always (slugged on the neck, shoved into a puddle), while other girls were watching like hawks for anything out of the ordinary. But no one hollered, no one pointed fingers at me, and eventually it became clear that nothing had happened: I must have escaped. Things went back to normal.

  Only one person at the sanatorium, Tolik, sensed that something had in fact happened. Tolik was a prime chaser: his hunter’s instincts were by far the sharpest in the pack. He began stalking me. In dark corners his starry eyes frisked my body while his buddies gua
rded the perimeter glumly, not sharing his smirk: this chase wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t courtship, it was something else, something the girls couldn’t find a name for and only shrugged their shoulders at. I alone understood that Tolik followed the whiff of shame still clinging to me.

  Other kids left the girl alone: she’d won her place in the sun, so to speak, with her powerful lungs and refusal to cave in. It turned out that she was blessed with an exceptionally strong voice—she could bellow as low as a hippo and as high as a drunken cat—and that newfound talent would kick in at a moment of danger. In addition, she’d pushed herself academically, and it mattered at Forest School, which wasn’t just any public summer camp where a child was measured by her ability to get up on time. Good grades were considered an honest achievement here—you couldn’t get an A by punching noses—and if a teacher read your composition in front of the class, that wasn’t something to sneer at.

  I’d mainly spent my childhood waiting in line at public cafeterias and in our communal apartment’s kitchen, where academic excellence didn’t matter to my survival. Now, pitted against a hostile tribe, I feverishly applied myself to writing a composition about autumn. My final draft piled azure skies upon turquoise dusk, bronze upon gold, and crystals upon corals, so the astonished teacher—a consumptive beauty in an orthopedic corset—passed my opus around to the other teachers and then read it out loud to the entire class—the same class that had nearly destroyed me.