Elvira Baryakina - The Prince of the Soviets

Klim looked the blushing serving girl up and down. “Do you know Moscow well?” he asked her.

“I do indeed!” she exclaimed. “It’s the best city on earth. This is the third time I’ve been. There’s so much to see!”

“Can you read and write?”

Kapitolina hung her head, her brow furrowed.

Afrikan took Klim aside. “Look at her!” he whispered, gesturing toward Kapitolina’s generous buttocks. “Time was, you’d have had to keep a fine girl like that under lock and key. But now there are no men in the village to speak of—half of them dead in the war, and nothing left but the scrapings of the pot: old men, drunks, and cripples. Without a dowry, no decent man will take a wife.”

“Is your niece good with children?” asked Klim.

“She has five younger brothers and looked after the lot of them, and not one of them died.”

“Uncle Afrikan tells me you’ll let me live in the storeroom,” said Kapitolina. “If that’s true, I’ll do anything you like: I’ll wash your dishes with my tears, whatever you say.”

“I think that would be going a little too far,” said Klim, and he asked her to make a start on the washing right way. Kitty hadn’t a single clean pair of stockings left.

It could hardly be said that things began to run smoothly with Kapitolina’s arrival in the house, but life took on added interest.

Kapitolina brought her possessions with her from the village—a huge metal-bound chest and a large icon so soot-blackened that the image of the saint it depicted was all but invisible.

“Who’s that?” asked Kitty.

“That’s my little god,” Kapitolina said affectionately. That same evening, she taught Kitty to kneel before the icon and prostrate herself before it, which Kitty enjoyed hugely.

On top of the chest Kapitolina laid a mattress that had been stuffed with old banknotes—worthless since the currency reform. During the war, her father had earned a pile of money selling straw at inflated prices, and he had hidden it all in the mattress, intending it to serve as a dowry for his daughter.

“Well, at least I can sleep like a millionaire,” she said, plumping up her treasured mattress.

From the trunk, she produced embroidery frames, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and balls of yarn and thread. Soon, the apartment began to fill up with decorative cloths and ornamental towels.

“It’s prettier like this,” she said, spreading a cloth embroidered with roosters over the typewriter.

Klim kept taking away the cloth, but the following day, there it would be again in the same place.

Kapitolina had firm ideas about domestic economy. “You should eat the stale bread before you start on the fresh,” she lectured Klim.

“But if I do that, the fresh bread will have gone stale by the time I eat it,” he objected. “Am I supposed to live on dry rusks?”

Kapitolina’s cheeks reddened with indignation. “Fine then! Let the bread rot and the house burn, and let’s all go to the devil!” she cried.

Klim did not back down, so Kapitolina would eat up the stale bread herself to not let good food go to waste. She did nothing by halves: if she was making soup, she would boil up a whole vat full of it; if she started on the washing, she would set all the linen to soak at once, not leaving a single dry sheet for the night.

“You great dolt!” Afrikan scolded her. “You donkey!”

Kapitolina would sometimes roar with laughter. At other times, she would snap back, “Stop your yelling! You’re not living in the Tsarist regime now!”

One day, hearing Snapper barking and Kitty squealing, Klim went into the kitchen to see what was going on.

“Get rid of this fool of a girl!” Afrikan demanded. “She’s just burned a pound of your coffee.”

“Informer!” Kapitolina wailed. “Why are you such a backstabber?”

“I’m not a backstabber. I’m trying to see you do things right. What did you think—that the master wouldn’t miss all that coffee?”

“Well, he didn’t miss the cup, did he?”

“What cup?” asked Klim, frowning.

Kapitolina and Afrikan both fell silent. There was a tense pause.

“The cup was on the table, and they had a fight and started running around the table,” Kitty explained. “And everything fell off. But there’s no need to get mad, Daddy. Kapitolina gave me my milk in a tin.”

Klim took some money from his wallet. “Kapitolina, go out for me and buy us some new cups.”

“Don’t go sending that great lummox out to a china shop!” cried Afrikan in horror. “She’ll break everything in sight.”

But Kapitolina was already winding the paisley scarf around her head. “Yes, sir, this minute, sir! I’ll be quick, so I will—I swear to God.”

Klim had wanted a guardian angel to relieve him of his household chores, but Kapitolina was more like a goddess of destruction. He could not use her as a courier either. She did not know Moscow, and in any case, she was not allowed to go anywhere. Anyone taking messages from a foreigner needed official permission.

Klim bit the bullet and went to the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs to ask permission to hire an assistant.

Weinstein was clearly delighted at this turn of events. “We’ll find you somebody with just the right qualifications,” he promised.

“Sir,” Kapitolina hissed and ran up to Klim on tiptoe—she believed that this was less distracting. “There’s a woman asking about a job as a courier. Her name is Galina Dorina.”

Klim told Kapitolina to let the prospective courier in, and in walked a diminutive, shabbily dressed woman with an extraordinary face. She had almond-shaped eyes the color of honey, a long thin nose, and full, pale lips. With her looks, Comrade Dorina would have been well-suited to play the role of a Christian martyr from ancient Byzantine icons.

“Good afternoon,” she said. “I’ve been sent from the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs.”

“Sit down,” said Klim, pointing to the divan, “and tell me about yourself.”

Comrade Dorina asked Klim to call her Galina. She told him that there was nothing much to say about her life. She had worked until quite recently as a filing clerk. But now, the Commissariat was laying off staff, and she was looking for a new position.

“Have you ever worked as a courier?” asked Klim.

“No, but I know Moscow well—I grew up here. And I have a good pair of felt boots. If you don’t take me on, you should ask the other candidates about their footwear. Without felt boots, you’ll find your courier ending up in bed with a cold.”

“Do you have any other skills?”

“I can type in Russian, English, and French and do shorthand.”

“Could you type something for me as a test?”

Galina sat at the typewriter like a pianist at her instrument and shot an enquiring glance at Klim. He began to dictate the first article that caught his eye from the Times: “The Soviet Union’s economic experiments are continuing to amaze the world…”

Galina clattered away confidently at the keys and, in just a few minutes, had typed out an article about the budget crisis in the USSR. Klim could not believe his eyes: there was not a single typing error in the whole text.

“And with your skills, you still want to be a courier?” he asked.

Galina shrugged. “I need any work. And I’ve heard that foreigners have their salary paid on time. Is it true?”

Klim nodded. So long as this Galina did not ask for too high a wage, there seemed little point in interviewing anyone else for the job.

As he looked at her, he noticed an ugly lilac scar on her neck, protruding from beneath the collar of her blouse.

“I see you’re looking at my scar,” Galina said. “Perhaps you’d better ask me right away how I got it. Otherwise, if I come and work for you, you’ll only keep wondering about it.”

Klim smiled. “How did you get it?” He rather liked this Galina.

“My husband was a commissar in the civil war,” she said. “The White bandits set fire to our house down. I had to carry my daughter out in my arms, but my husband died. I was badly burned.”

“How do you manage alone with your child?”

“What’s there to manage? There’s not much washing as we hardly have any clothes, not much cleaning as we live in one small room, and we don’t have anything much to cook either.”

She got up. “Well, I’ll be going now. If you would like to take me on, you can call me—I have a telephone at home.”

Klim saw her out.

In the hall, Galina pulled on a pair of huge men’s felt boots. “Goodbye,” she said.

Suddenly, she looked at Klim with a serious expression. “There’s just one thing I want to say. There’s a mistake in your paper, the Times. Socialism isn’t an experiment; it’s a necessary stage of human development.”

“Let’s look at it logically—” began Klim, but Galina interrupted him.

“We don’t need your logic! What can you and the Times possibly know about us? You’re trying to crush us, to undermine our belief in our own strength, but we don’t care! We…” Galina put her hand on her heart. “We know that there is not a capitalist army in the world that can defeat us. We shall never surrender; we shall fight to the end for our bright future.”

Suddenly, she became embarrassed. Her face reddened, and her lips began to tremble as if she were about to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’ve spoiled everything, and you won’t employ me now. I just wanted to make you understand…”

There was no need for explanations. Klim could see that Galina lived a very hard life and that all her hopes were tied up in the idea of the “bright future,” which the Soviet press continued to depict in such glowing colors. The article from the Times was challenging this belief, so Galina refused furiously to accept the facts cited by the foreign journalist.