The Girl from the Metropol Hotel Read online

  I followed up with verse for the school paper’s special edition, in honor of Constitution Day. It wasn’t real poetry, of course, the kind that spills out of a dying person like blood and becomes the stuff of ruthless jokes. No, my creation was beyond mockery and could only bring respect. The Soviet people are the strongest in the world, it went, and they want peace for every nation—six lines in all. “Your own work?” the beautiful teacher inquired, and her corset squeaked.

  A new pair of rubber boots arrived from home. In the electric light of the girls’ latrine, at night, I memorized spelling rules. My new powerful voice was now part of the school choir and I was chosen to dance, too, in a swift Moldavian circle dance—the school was preparing the New Year’s program. Then we were to go home.

  That meant never again would I see my tormentor, my Tolik—your name is like sweet warm milk; your face shines over me like a sun; your eyes are full of indolence and lust.

  In the dark corners Tolik showered me with obscenities loudly and clearly. Six inches shorter but straight and firm as an arrow: a high-strung consumptive boy keen on his target. Everyone at school became used to the sight of a tall girl splayed between Tolik’s arms. Each night I dreamed of his face.

  The girl pulled on her new boots and slowly walked through the snowy park to meet her mother—her time in paradise was up; they were going home. At the winter palace, among crystals and corals of frozen trees, Tolik was living through the final hours of his reign.

  This was after the New Year’s concert, where I performed solo in front of the choir, then swirled in a wild Moldavian circle dance. (For you alone, my Tolik.) Tolik performed, too: it turned out he had a beautiful, clear soprano and he delivered a song about Soviet Motherland and her brave sons the aviators to the accompaniment of a grand piano. He was visibly nervous and the absence of his cynical smirk was so striking that people clapped uncertainly, surprised at their king’s concern with his audience.

  Then there was dinner, followed by the main attraction: a formal dance. In the early 1950s children were taught the orderly dances of the aristocratic finishing schools—polonaise, pas de quatre, pas d’Espagne—and now a slow pas de quatre was announced, ladies ask gentlemen. Tolik had recovered from his stage fright and was exchanging smirks, directed at me, with his entourage. I walked up to him. Our icy fingers entwined and we curtsied and bowed woodenly across the floor. Tolik was thrown off track by my public sniffling and didn’t even crack jokes. Instead, after the dance, he respectfully walked me over to my nook behind a pillar. I retired to the dortoir and wept there until the girls returned. There was no more ambiguity, no more heady interrogations in dark corners: Tolik clearly didn’t know what to do with me anymore.

  I was picked up last, as always. We crawled along the white highway, under dark skies, dragging my poor suitcase. The dortoir windows were throwing farewell lights on the snowy road.

  I never saw Tolik again, but I heard his silvery voice on the phone. He called me at home, in Moscow.

  My grandfather’s daughter from his second marriage, who occupied the next room in our communal apartment, yelled that I must come to the phone. “For you,” she announced with her customary bug-eyed look. “Some guy.”

  “What guy—there’s no guy . . . Hello?”

  “It’s Tolik, remember?” the high voice sang out.

  “Oh, it’s you, Lena,” I said, greeting Tolik, with a significant glance at the daughter and my mother, who’d also come into the hall. “It’s Lena Mitiaieva from school, Mom.”

  Uncle Misha, unmarried and a radiologist at the KGB clinic, decided to join the party and now stood in his blue army long johns between the black draperies of his doorway. The apartment’s entire population was now in the hall, minus the Kalinovskys, minus my grandfather’s second wife, minus my grandfather, who was smoking shag in bed, minus the janitor, Aunt Katya.

  The idea was that everyone was waiting to use the phone.

  “It’s me, Tolik,” continued the voice.

  “No, Lena, I can’t tonight—they are going to the movies, Mom”—an aside to my mother.

  “What movies—it’s late,” my mother answered quickly, while Uncle Misha and the daughter seemed to be waiting for more.

  My love, my holiest secret, was calling me and I had to speak to him in front of everybody!

  “No, Lena, why?” I kept repeating vaguely, because Tolik on the other end was persistently inviting me to join him right away at the Grand Illusion for a movie. I was in a mental swoon and kept on mumbling nonsense for my listeners’ benefit. The listeners had guessed the truth, of course, and now wanted to see me squirm.

  Azure skies, turquoise dusk, pas de quatre, my tears, his icy fingers all vanished, and remained in paradise. Here was another story—here I was a fifth-grader with a chronic cold and torn brown stockings. The world of crystals and corals, of miraculous deliveries, of undying love—that world couldn’t coexist with the communal apartment and my grandfather’s room in particular, full of books and bedbugs, where my mother and I (officially homeless) were allowed to sleep in a corner under his desk. My Tolik, my little prince, my dauphin couldn’t possibly be standing in a dark, stinking phone booth near the grimy Grand Illusion.

  I didn’t believe Tolik, and rightly so, for I could hear coarse voices in the background and hoots of laughter. Again, the circle of dirty smirks was tightening. But this time I was far away.

  “Neighbors want the phone,” I concluded indifferently (choking back tears). “’Bye, Lena.”

  Tolik called again after that, inviting me to go skating or to see a movie. “No, Lena, why?” I mumbled miserably. “What do you mean, why?” giggled back shameless Tolik.

  Clearly Tolik, that prime chaser, had figured out how to use my unhappy love for his dark purposes. But—the circle of animal faces had never crushed the girl; it remained behind, among the tall trees of the park, in the enchanted kingdom of wild berries.

  Gorilla

  Nobody noticed her—she was just a skinny kid, kicking the ball with the neighborhood boys. Girls from the good families, the beautiful Albina, Olga, and her sister Irina, were gathering their bloom quietly, with dignity. They lived in the two-story house behind the little girl’s apartment building. A murder took place in that house some years before, a man was killed; some said it was Albina’s father. He opened the door, apparently, to a stranger, and was shot. The rear house was famous for its endless cellar believed to run across Chekhov Street, but no one was brave enough to check, except for the little girl.

  Among the children in the courtyard was Shchenik, a handsome boy who went to a music school and always carried around his accordion. He sported little sideburns and almost a pompadour, like the future Elvis Presley. But the little girl ignored him and played in the dust obliviously, and the only young man she was in contact with, and tried to avoid, was the scary Garik, nicknamed Gorilla, who always wanted to push her, to grab her, to twist her braids. Once when, sweaty and out of breath from playing, she waited for the elevator, it happened: Gorilla swept in, grabbed the girl, and dragged her into the operator’s little nook, empty for the day. He kept pressing her into the wall with his body, while the girl bleated, “Mama, Mama,” but her mama was waiting upstairs; she couldn’t hear the bleating through the four massive floors.

  “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

  “Coming, sweetie, I’m right here!”

  Suddenly, a glimpse of the dear face, Mama was running toward her, and Gorilla evaporated. Mama! How could she know? How could she hear? How could she run four flights in three seconds? She couldn’t. She must have watched from the window, seen the girl, seen Gorilla, understood everything, and started running.

  Such was the charming company the girl kept until the grown children were ready to leave their nest, their courtyard. Some were destined to move up in this life, some to move down, and some to remain forever in their old courtyard,
to come back there every night from work and raise their own children there.

  In the summer, the girl played lapta in the courtyard, and in the winter went to the Dinamo skating rink, where a creep with golden tooth caps sidled up to her one evening and wouldn’t leave her alone. She switched to the TDK rink, but when she was waiting there for a ticket in a large crowd, the crowd suddenly swayed, and someone yanked on the skates she was holding and disappeared. In tears, the girl shuffled over to the police station, accompanied by a friend, the janitor’s daughter Nina, to report the theft. There they told her to come back a week later, which she did, again with Nina. The tired officer looked at her, looked at Nina, and produced a pair of beaten skates: “There, your skates have been found.”

  “But these are not mine!”

  “No? Then look for yours in here.”

  And he unlocked a huge cabinet packed floor to ceiling with skates. The girl went through every shelf, but didn’t find hers. A catastrophe. Her mother had scraped to buy those skates; she’d never afford a new pair. She began to weep; the officer lost patience: “Just take what you want!” He needed to close her file. Dying from guilt, the girl grabbed a pair of skates a size too big and skated in them until college.

  Later she understood that the cabinet contained confiscated loot: she could have chosen the best pair, and all thanks to Nina, whom every policeman treated like his own, because janitors and police are brothers and sisters. Besides, Nina was such a lovely, diligent, well-spoken child that everyone listened to her and welcomed her. It was so easy to be friends with Nina: one could just drop in on her anytime; hers was the only family in the courtyard that permitted it. They all lived in a single room, in the basement, at the end of a dirty-pink corridor so narrow two people couldn’t pass each other. In that room she lived with her mother, Granya, the building’s janitor; Granya’s boyfriend, Ivanov, a bandit; and their four-month-old daughter. The girl was on her way to call on Nina as usual, when the other janitor, a Tatar named Raya, stopped her in that horrible corridor and told her sternly not to go in there, to stay away, and quickly left.

  The girl stepped into Nina’s room, which was empty, except for the baby, who was lying naked on the table, kicking her feet. The floor in the room was wet. The girl sensed that something had happened in that room. Later, because nothing remained secret in the courtyard, the girl found out that the drunken Ivanov had raped Nina, who was fourteen. Granya didn’t go to the police right away; she waited; and then she went and reported that Ivanov kept a steel rod under his pillow and threatened to kill them all. It probably was true; Ivanov must have felt cramped living in the same room with Nina, but there was nowhere to go. Janitors and police are brothers and sisters, so Ivanov was arrested and sent to jail for a year, for now, but then what? They couldn’t just let him go, they all knew what he was really in for. So he was shanked right before his year was up; such was the price for Nina. A man went to jail for one thing, got executed for another, something that couldn’t be voiced in court out of respect for the victim.

  In the spring, the puddles dried out, the girls changed into socks, the old lime tree disappeared under the fragrant yellow fuzz, the smells of new grass and leaves filled the courtyard, and in the evenings, the little garden behind the two-story house rippled with the sound of Shchenik’s accordion.

  There, underneath the trees, the beautiful Albina, Olga, and Irina, the unapproachable daughters of good families, laughed coquettishly. Somebody’s cigarette glowed (whose?), and the accordion sang its nightingale song.

  And one night, dressed in her best, with her mother’s gauzy scarf over her shoulders, with a beating heart the girl descended from her fourth floor and with a new, graceful step glided across the courtyard into the little garden, where the cigarette glowed and laughter was ringing. Happiness awaited her there, she knew.

  They all turned around when she approached.

  With her newfound grace, the girl calmly joined their circle, and they made room for her, respectfully, as if for a young lady, their peer. They didn’t chase her away or laugh her off.

  Shchenik began to play, someone’s tossed cigarette flickered in the dark, and a young man, tall, in a gray suit, stepped out from the deep shadow. He offered the girl his hand, inviting her to dance. Her heart stopped—a prince! A prince from the magical dusky kingdom! She lifted her eyes.

  It was Gorilla.

  He stood easily next to the girl, as if he had some right to her. So, in the transparent spring air, among the aromas of new leaves and grass, to the sweet song of the accordion, she was supposed to enjoy the sight of this Gorilla? He was the promised happiness of her first spring?

  His hand continued to hang limply between them.

  “Beat it, you moron,” the girl said automatically. “Idiot.”

  Gorilla smiled his stupid smile at her, his hand still hanging.

  So the girl turned on her heel and marched back to her building and never again returned to that little corner of earth where, to the music of streetcars and accordion, every Saturday the mystery of passing from childhood into youth took place. All spring, every Saturday, the girl’s heart fluttered at the music, but she was angry and refused to come out.

  And in the fall Gorilla disappeared. The inscription “Gorilla is a looney,” scratched next to his front door, survived him, and over many years faded slowly under the Moscow rain, snow, and wind. As the courtyard rumor told it, Gorilla had found some piece of equipment, somewhere, brought it home, tried it; it made him ill; he was hospitalized.

  There are so many boys like him—boys who need to try everything, to blow everything up, to throw things into the fire, just to see what happens, to pursue and to hunt, to catch and to take away, to pull everything apart. Like many of them, Gorilla remained forever in his childhood. The girl cried and cried watching from her window the little bus and Gorilla, in his gray suit, under the falling snow, beneath the white shroud, in a coffin resting on kitchen chairs, with hands crossed, like a grown-up, Gorilla, Gorilla.

  Moscow Courtyard by Sergei V. Volkov (1989).

  Dying Swan

  My mother adored poetry. When my sixth-grade Russian teacher, nicknamed Dying Swan, gave us an assignment to compose a poem at home, my mother lit up. She kept me awake half the night—we were looking for a rhyme for “barefoot.” In the morning I copied the poem into a notebook, under Mama’s supervision, and submitted it to Dying Swan. I almost never did any homework, was a failing student, and always sat in the front row, under the teacher’s nose.

  A day later the triumphant Swan arrived to class, frothing with malice like a fire extinguisher. Leaning her voluminous hip against my desk, she expounded for the next forty-five minutes on the subject of theft, repeating the word “plagiarism,” then unknown to us.

  My head was almost touching her permanently undone zipper. Poor old Swan was a weird lady. She dyed her hair orange, but always did it wrong: her hair remained dirty white, but her scalp turned bright red, like an Iroquois in an old painting. For some reason she hated our class intensely.

  I stared mindlessly at her swaying belly folds, simultaneously composing with my deskmate a mocking ode about our crocodile of a zoology teacher, who, the day before, had made us study intestinal parasites, plunking little jars with preserved tapeworms right onto our desks. I ran out of the room, sick, and didn’t come back, for which I received an F; now I was sublimating my rightful vengeance into art.

  Swan’s tirade was interrupted by the bell. After class I approached Swan innocently and asked if she had liked my poem. She gave me a crazed look and screamed that it was about me she had just talked for an hour, about my theft! “You stole your so-called poem from the poet Agnia Barto! It’s called plagiarism!” She stormed out, shaking the class ledger, and I was left with another F, in literature.

  The poem Mama and I had composed went like this:

  All is quiet in the f
lat,

  Kids are sleeping, sleeps the cat.

  Only Tanya sits in bed.

  The subject was September 1, the first day of school. And the ending:

  Little Tommy sleeps alone

  In the attic, barefoot.

  He is black; he’s not white folk;

  And below him sleeps New York.

  In my imagination I could see that poor black American boy, pitiful to the point of tears, who sleeps in the attic of a New York skyscraper, so oppressed by capitalists that he doesn’t even attend school.

  Sanych

  Today I can admit that I loved him. I loved and worshipped my teacher like a deity.

  Rather short, always grumpy, and with a ruddy complexion and eyes almost without color, Aleksandr A. Plastinin, “Sanych,” taught literature in the final grade, which meant Soviet classics like Gorky, Fadeev, Ostrovsky—unreadable rubbish. Teaching that material must have been a daily torment for him. But he was assigned to teach the final grade, and this was his curriculum.

  Our two neighborhood schools, Women’s PS 635 and Men’s PS 170, where Sanych had always taught, were separated by an iron fence seven feet tall. It was like a magnet for both populations. On our side, on spring days, girls jumped rope, played awkward girlish volleyball, and sat around on benches, laughing deliberately loudly, transmitting scorn. From the other side came thundering sounds of an intense soccer game, hushed swearing and shuffling over the pavement during fistfights, followed by full-voiced threats and insults as both sides walked away. Across the street from the men’s school stood Vysokopetrovsky Monastery, where in complete devastation I discovered the tombstone of Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina, the mother of Peter the Great. (It was at that defiled tombstone that I fell in love with the Russian royal names Natalia, Kirill, and Peter and decided to give them to my future children. That came to pass.) On the other side of Moskvin Street stood the gypsy theater Romen; a notorious police station, later disbanded for some serious misdoings; and the Musical Theatre. That was the Moscow of 1954, which had just buried Stalin.