The Secret History of Moscow Page 6

  The low bar, covered in round traces of glasses forming a complex fractal pattern, held up an impressive battery of variously shaped and sized bottles, bearing homemade labels with careful handwriting and simple but expressive ink drawings.

  The man behind the bar looked young-no more than thirty-five; his muscular forearms shone with droplets of water from recent dishwashing. He wiped his hands on the towel tucked into his belt, and smiled at Galina. He had a thin face, and his eyes looked at the new guests attentively through a pair of wire-rimmed round spectacles perched on a long arched nose. He nodded at Galina and smiled wider, showing white uneven teeth. “New recruit,” he said in strongly accented Russian. “Welcome home, dear. Can I get you anything to drink?"

  "Stop flirting with the broad,” said Sovin, and pulled Yakov, suddenly shy and blushing, in front of the bar. “That's your relative, or so he claims. I'll leave you to your tender reunion as soon as you get me a beer on the house."

  David watched Yakov over the rim of his spectacles as he poured Sovin a generous glass of amber beer from one of the bottles. “All right,” he said after Sovin shuffled off in the direction of one of the tables, where two old men played checkers. “And who exactly are you?"

  5: David

  "I am your grandson,” Yakov said. “I think.” He couldn't quite accept that this man, barely older than Yakov, was removed from him by two generations.

  David's eyebrows steepled sharply and his face paled. “Oh no,” he whispered. “Tanya was pregnant?"

  "Grandma Tanya.” Saying these words brought to memory a tall stout woman with the strong voice of a schoolteacher and long-held suffering in her eyes. “She was pregnant with my mom. When you didn't come home, she thought that the NKVD got you. She packed a bag the same night and caught a train to Serpuhov; she had relatives there."

  David nodded. “Smart. How is she?"

  Yakov was not very good at telling people that someone they cared about died. No matter how much practice in bearing bad news his line of work threw at him, he still stammered and averted his eyes. “Dead,” he said, studying the patterns on the surface of the bar. “Twenty years. I remember her though."

  "So do I,” his grandfather said. “I am so sorry."

  "She thought you were dead. She wrote to the NKVD, but they wouldn't tell her anything. In the sixties, they finally sent her a letter of apology-the standard form they sent to all families of those repressed.” Yakov chewed his lip, remembering the letter his grandmother kept in a small cigar box with happy Cuban women on the lid. Photographs and letters, some yellowed, some new. Photographs of baby Yakov and his mom, passport photographs of his grandmother looking resolutely into the black eye of the camera as if it were a gun. One photograph of his grandfather, making a silly face, smiling. So yellow and brittle, she didn't let Yakov touch it, especially since his fingers were usually covered with sticky goo of one origin or another. But she let him look. And letters from her grateful students, birthday cards from relatives in Serpuhov, diplomas, dry flowers, and that one letter on government letterhead. Posthumously cleared of all charges, it said. Rehabilitated. Even now, Yakov tasted the bitterness of the word on his tongue, doubly now, when the man exonerated in the letter stood before him, absentmindedly wiping a beer glass.

  David nodded. The glass clanked out of his hands and rolled across the rough surface of the bar, obviously whittled from the trunk of a glowtree. He caught the glass and straightened it. “All right,” he said. “Let's sit down and talk."

  Yakov made an apologetic wave to Galina and Fyodor, who sat at the table with Sovin and his ancient friends. They waved back, probably glad to have the relief of sitting down with a beer and not worrying for a bit.

  David settled at a small table tucked away in the remote end of one of the pub's arms, by a triangular window that allowed in some light from the trees outside, and the view of a row of backyards, overgrown with pale weeds. He brought two glasses and a bottle with him, and poured as soon as Yakov sat down. “Well,” David said, “let me start with my version of the story."

  * * * *

  David was born in 1900 in Lancashire, outside of Manchester, in a place not so different from the underground town-there was little light, and coal dust hung in the air, giving everything a dusty, black-and-gray look. When it rained, black water slid like sooty tears down the windowpanes of the cotton mill where David's mother worked; he started when he was ten, and by fifteen he was involved with a trade union.

  By the time he turned seventeen, the cotton industry had finished its migration overseas, and David left Lancashire to look for a job. He worked as a laborer at the docks and at the hops farms; at night, he read. His connection with the labor unions continued, and by the age of twenty-two he developed an over-inflamed sense of adventure and social justice.

  He traveled to Melbourne, Australia-not entirely voluntarily, as he hinted. There, he joined the nascent Communist Party of Australia and started a socialist newspaper, which caught the attention of the authorities somewhat earlier than he believed just, and that of his intended audience-not at all. His link to the illegal Industrial Workers of the World led to criminal charges.

  "You have to understand,” he told Yakov and touched his hand with tentative warm familiarity. “In those days, it took a lot to be considered an undesirable person in Australia. A lot. And I only wished that my political activity had done someone some good, for all the trouble it caused me.” He sighed. “Anyway."

  The socialist newspaper landed him in jail; by the time he got out, he was a persona non grata in a large segment of English-speaking world.

  "So, what brought you to Moscow?” Yakov asked.

  "I decided to go to the source, to the place where it actually existed. To learn, so I could understand it better, to explain to people-look, I've seen it, I know. I thought after I had seen socialism, with some first-hand knowledge, I'd be able to persuade them better. And if I were good enough, it was only a matter of time before capitalism in Britain toppled."

  "It sounds-naïve,” Yakov said.

  David nodded. “That's what everyone here said. Jackdaws have more sense than I. Even the bloody fairytale things laugh at me. So be it. Maybe I am stupid. But if I weren't, I would've never met your grandma. What do you have to say to that?"

  Yakov had nothing, and David continued.

  Tanya, he said, was the only woman, the only person who interested him more than reading Das Kapital. He first saw her on the bus he took to work every morning, and he threw himself into courtship with his usual single-minded sense of purpose that always got him into trouble. Ironically, for the first time in his adult life he stayed away from politics; but politics wouldn't stay away from him.

  Poverty in his new country did not faze him; he was used to poverty, and found that it seemed less tolerable when it was coupled with the wealth of a few. The language barrier, however, presented a challenge. He got a job at a meat-processing facility-it required minimal talking, and the physical exertion helped him think. At night he read as usual, switching for the time to Russian textbooks. And he waited for the mornings, when he would get on the bus and watch the girl with serious eyes and a high ponytail, until she got off a few stops later, by the school. She usually read textbooks on the bus, and he guessed that she was a schoolteacher; one day, he worked up the courage to sit next to her and ask about the pronunciation of a word in the Russian grammar text he carried with him.

  "Which word was it?” Yakov interrupted. It seemed suddenly important, to know what was the word that brought them together.

  "Saucepan,” David said. “I know, not terribly romantic, but it is a difficult word."

  It was spring when they first spoke; by the beginning of summer, they saw each other every day off the bus. By fall, they were married.

  Tanya kept her maiden name. David was progressive enough not to mind, but he wondered since it was certainly not traditional. He finally asked her.

  She looked at him with h
er deadly serious dark eyes. “Understand, David. This is not a safe time for foreigners. He (she never mentioned Stalin by name, out of real fear or a superstitious reluctance to attract the attention of malevolent forces by summoning them by name) is insane. Do you know how many people disappear every day? Do you know that you're a suspect just by being a foreigner?"

  "But I'm a communist,” he argued.

  "You're a fool,” she corrected. “If you want me to, I'll take your last name. Just know that sharing the last name usually means sharing the fate."

  "I thought you'd die for me,” he joked.

  Her face remained serious, and he wasn't certain that she got it. “No. I would promise to you that I would, if there weren't a real risk of that coming true."

  Now he couldn't decide whether she was joking.

  He moved to her apartment, shared with a messy middle-aged man, with a propensity to mutter to himself and leave his saucepans soaking in the communal kitchen. Tanya never said anything to him, but David was not so tolerant. “Please clean up after yourself,” he told the neighbor in his best Russian.

  The man only scowled and mumbled something. “I do what I want,” he said out loud as he was exiting the kitchen. “You raise stink again, I'll make sure that you're gone."

  He told Tanya about the incident, but instead of laughing with him at the crazy neighbor, she cried. She sat on their bed with the nickel headboard, covered by her mother's quilt, and wept. “David,” she said. “You have to understand. You have to be nice to people. You can't afford a single enemy."

  "Why me?"

  "Because you are a foreigner. He gave power to the worst people, don't you get it? You're too good to rat someone out, and you think that everyone else's the same way. Even the Russians turn each other in, but with you-Maybe we should go to my aunt, to Serpuhov. It's easier to hide in the provinces."

  David was not inclined to hide; soon after, he learned that an English-language newspaper needed correspondents, and he applied and got the job by virtue of his ability to read and write English. To his surprise, there weren't many takers for that job, and he admitted that his wife's paranoia seemed commonplace. Worse, the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach told him that she was right.

  It was winter when they came for him. He worked at the office until late, and the long blue shadows of the street lamps stretched across the street. He walked home from the bus station-a five-minute walk, but that day it was cold enough to make him hasten his step and rub his ears as he hurried home. The snowdrifts, their delicate blues accented by deeper purple shadows, flanked the street, and the windows in the apartment buildings glowed with yellow warmth.

  There were two men waiting by the entrance and he would've paid them no mind if it hadn't been for the scattering of cigarette butts in the defiled dirty snow-they'd been there a while. Then he noticed their black trench coats and a black car with no plates idling by the curb. His heart spasmed in his chest and he forgot about the cold. He only had mind enough to thank the God he didn't believe in for keeping them outside, away from Tanya. He couldn't bring them in, but he wasn't ready to surrender. He kept walking past, his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets. His face grew numb from the stinging cold.

  "Hey!” he heard behind him.

  He ran, his thin-soled shoes slipping on the long ice slicks, treacherously hidden under the fresh snow; the pursuit panted behind, and he couldn't look back. He only hoped to gain another block, to lead them further away from home, and yet realized that it was an empty gesture-they knew where he lived. Still, his legs pumped, his feet slid, and his throat burned from the chilly air he gulped by the mouthful.

  A shot rang out in the crisp air, and he ducked and careened, not slowing down. His spectacles slid off his face and he had presence of mind enough to catch them and shove them into his pocket-he couldn't risk trying to put them back on while running.

  He rounded the corner, and almost fell but caught his footing. There were lights and frozen trees, hazy, haloed against the glow of the streetlamps. He could not see very well without his glasses, and when he saw the gaping doorway, dark, promising safety, he ran toward it. His arms outstretched, he was almost in its safe embrace, when more shots tore the air. He felt a sting in his back and a dull tearing pain in his shoulder blade; he made a desperate dive for the doorway when it fractured in front of him, and as he went through he realized that his poor eyesight had fooled him-he had mistaken the storefront window for the door. The window showered jagged glass on his face and hands, stinging them like a million bees. Then a cool air blew into his face, and a tree glowed above, and twelve white jackdaws descended upon him, cawing.

  * * * *

  Yakov finished his drink. David looked at him, as if expecting something.

  "She never remarried,” Yakov said. “Grandma, I mean."

  David nodded. “Neither did I. Still, I wish I knew… About your mother."

  "There isn't much to know,” he said. His mother was ordinary-not a sort of person who lived an exciting life; even her hardships lacked exoticism. She was born three years before the war, and remembered it vaguely-the hunger, the fear, the dull torments of ordinary souls who were never offered a chance for heroics. She was someone one needed to know to appreciate, and David lacked that. “She's a good person,” he finally said. “You would've been proud of her. Like grandma was. Her name's Valentina; she's going to be fifty-three. She works all week, and on weekends she goes to take care of your and grandmother's grave. She made sure to bury her in Moscow, next to you."

  David looked perplexed. “I have a grave? Why?"

  "I don't know,” Yakov said. “I never asked."

  David slumped, his head resting on his folded arms. “I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Only it is strange. To learn that you have a grave and a daughter who's fifty. I heard about men finding out that they had kids they didn't know about-only not fifty years later. I wish I could talk to her, to tell her…"

  "Tell her what?"

  "That I'm sorry. I'm sorry it happened this way, and I'm sorry I survived. I know I wasn't supposed to. If only I had had my glasses on-I wouldn't have tried to run through that window."

  Yakov understood what his grandfather wanted-for-giveness. “You've done nothing wrong,” he said. “You were fucked either way."

  David shrugged, unconvinced. “I suppose."

  Yakov didn't know what else to say. He'd seen this before, people who survived catastrophes. They could not enjoy life knowing that others had died-survivor's guilt, they called it. He'd seen it in his grandmother-she left Moscow, saving her unborn child. Yet, the guilt of abandoning her husband was never far below the surface. The letter on the government letterhead made it worse.

  Perhaps there was a reason for it, he thought. Those who ended in this no-man's land underground: perhaps they were allowed to live for a reason. “You were spared,” he said out loud. “Surely there is a point to that."

  "Perhaps. But if there is, I sure don't know what it is. Nobody here does, and some have been around for centuries.” David sat up and shook his head, smiling. “Listen to me babble. Why don't you tell me about yourself?"

  "I was born in Serpuhov,” he said. “We stayed there until the eighties, and then moved to Moscow. After grandma died. Now I'm a cop."

  David seemed amused. “Indeed. Interesting choice. Are you in the Party?"

  Yakov shook his head vehemently. “No way. They told me I'd never get promoted, but so be it."

  "Married?"

  "I was. Didn't work out.” He tried to think of something to say, but he had trouble baring his soul to strangers, even if the stranger in question was his own grandfather, unaged since 1937. “Look, we just got here, and the whole thing is a bit much."

  "I understand,” David said. “You'll get used to it. Anything I can help you with?"

  "Yes,” Yakov said. “See that girl?” He indicated Galina with a subtle tilt of his head. “Her sister's missing. And a bunch of other people. T
hat crazy guy led us here, and I was just looking for those who are missing. They turned into birds."

  "Ah,” David said. “Birds? That would be one of the old ones messing around. Berendey is your best bet. He's usually in the forest, but you can't go there-he has a strict no-people policy. But stick around-he comes by every now and again to get a drink. Meanwhile, go to your friends, and I'll ask Sovin to answer whatever questions he hasn't covered yet."

  Yakov obeyed. He felt a little relieved that his grandfather didn't offer him to stay with him, to talk more; both needed time to absorb the meeting.

  "All right,” Sovin said and looked over them, as if surveying troops. “All ready? Come with me, and I'll put you up for the night."

  "I'm not tired,” Yakov said.

  "You will be soon.” Sovin clapped his shoulder. “Buck up, son. Tomorrow's a new day, and we'll find your bird-people."

  * * * *

  When the young people left with Sovin, David worked the bar until it was time to close, going through the usual movements of opening the bottles and pouring beer and an occasional glass of mulled wine for the habitually cold rusalki. The denizens of the underworld noticed his subdued state, and knew better than to attempt bantering.

  His mood cast a pall over the Pub's ambience, and he wanted to apologize to everyone, but resisted. The guilt was his alone and he had no right to fish for reassurance with his apologies. He waited for the place to clear, and put away the glasses for the domovoi to clean. He spread a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and left a saucerful of milk for the kikimora and whatever other house spirits breathed shyly behind the dark paneling of the walls and the wainscoting. He used to be annoyed at the absence of brownies or other English spirits, but with time he grew to love their Slavic equivalents, as pointless and skewed as they usually were. “Seriously,” he muttered. “What sort of culture invents a spirit whose only purpose is to throw onions and shriek at night? It's just stupid."