But the girl’s character was worse still. Tata would have tried the patience of a saint. She was lazy, disrespectful toward her elders, and always answering back. Sometimes, she would come out with such rubbish that it drove Galina to distraction.

Galina had hoped that the school would sort Tata out. However, it turned out that rather than teaching children geography or Russian, schools now taught them to fight the “relics of the Tsarist past.” As Tata saw it, the first of these relics was her mother.

“Your religious belief brings our whole family into disgrace,” she said, imitating the tones of her teacher. “As for keeping cactus plants on the windowsill, it’s a bourgeois habit that should be stamped out once and for all.”

Tata rejected everything her mother loved: comfort, convenience, beauty, and gentleness. Often, Galina would be pushed to breaking point, but even if she beat Tata, there was nothing she could do to knock some sense into the girl.

“You can kill me,” Tata would yell, “but I will never give up on our radiant vision! And you can be sure that my comrades will avenge me!”

What comrades? Who would avenge what? Galina had given her daughter a spanking because Tata had not turned off the light in the lavatory, and at a residents’ meeting, they had been given a public reprimand.

Like her mother, Tata lived in a fantasy world, but whereas Galina dreamed of love, her daughter dreamed of partisan brigades, of heroic deeds, faraway journeys, and world revolution.

Galina had told her daughter that she worked as a secretary in the OGPU. If Tata had found out what her mother actually did, she would have had a fit. At school, it was hammered into them that a good person should be humbly dressed and as simple as a spade. Any attempt to ask spiritual questions or to strive for intellectual development or even good manners was regarded as “bourgeois.” And everything bourgeois was regarded as not only foolish but also evil and treacherous, the mark of a secret desire to destroy everything on earth that was real or alive.

It was out of the question to bring Tata to the house on Chistye Prudy: she had never in her life even seen a private apartment, and Galina was afraid it would be too much of a shock for her daughter. It was better to start gradually.

Tata herself suggested the solution to this problem. When Galina hinted that she knew somebody who had come from Shanghai, Tata jumped up in excitement. “Is he a revolutionary? A real live revolutionary?”

“No,” Galina said. “He’s a journalist.”

“Oh, I see! It’s a state secret.”

Up until quite recently in Tata’s school, they had been discussing the heroic struggle of the Chinese proletariat. The children had held political arguments and debates, learned some words in Chinese, and collected money to help the striking workers. Tata now believed that there were only two sorts of people in China: revolutionaries and imperialists. An imperialist could not have come to the USSR, so Klim Rogov had to be a freedom fighter for the workers.

Galina invented a quite plausible story about how Klim had to hide his true identity to win the trust of the bourgeoisie and bring its secrets to light. Just now, he was working with foreign journalists in Moscow and was obliged, like it or not, to adapt himself to their corrupt tastes.

When Tata found out that Klim Rogov had a little Chinese daughter, she was overjoyed. She loved to boss other children around, but she was too small and plain to be taken seriously by her peers and preferred to play with younger children.

“Mother, can Kitty come and play with me?” Tata whined. “Please? I’ll do the washing-up for a whole week without being asked.”

Galina “grudgingly” agreed to her daughter’s request, but first, she made Tata swear not to pester Uncle Klim with questions about his revolutionary activities.

3

At one time, the large apartment building on Bolshoi Kiselny Lane had been home to eminent doctors and lawyers. But after the revolution, they had been turned out of the building, and new tenants had been moved in—ten families to each apartment.

In the old days, if people shared a house, they would have had something in common: a similar lifestyle, a similar level of education, or similar income. But now, academics lived cheek by jowl with alcoholics, policemen with petty thieves, and aristocratic old ladies with staunch young communists.

Galina’s apartment was no better or worse than any of the others. For the most part, the residents got along, but the cramped conditions and differences in opinions would invariably end in rows.

Who had trampled dirt from the street all over the entrance hall? Who had been splitting firewood in the bathroom and cracked the floor tiles? Who had hung up their washing in the kitchen out of turn? While tenants had individual washing lines, the nails in the walls were shared by all, and it was strictly forbidden to break the rota.

On Sunday morning, Galina went to Klim and Kitty’s house to pick them up, and they took a horse-cab to her house. All the way there, she felt horribly anxious, and despite herself, she kept noticing omens: church bells were ringing, which was lucky; but then a flock of crows flew up from a fence—a bad sign. She felt sick at heart, thinking of what Klim might say when he saw how wretchedly she lived. What if Tata blurted something out? What if the other tenants started a row and disgraced her in Klim’s eyes forever?

Klim noticed how nervous she was. “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine,” he reassured her. “The main thing is for the girls to enjoy themselves.”

She smiled gratefully in answer. It was incredible how he could always guess exactly what she was feeling and thinking.

After paying the cab driver, they entered a stairwell plastered with old announcements and went up to the second floor.

The marble staircase had survived ten years of Soviet rule, but the wooden rails had long since been taken off the banisters—they had been used for firewood in 1918. Here and there, plaster was peeling off the walls, and the doors were disfigured by a rash of doorplates, bells, and wires.

“Just a minute,” Galina said as she dug in her handbag for the key.

Kitty looked at the rows of electric doorbells in amazement. “Why do you have so many?”

“We all have our own doorbells,” explained Galina. “They all play different notes, so we know straight away who has a visitor.”

The door opened suddenly and out came one of Galina’s cotenants, Mitrofanych, an archive assistant. He greeted the visitors and set off downstairs, glancing up over his shoulder as he went. Klim and Kitty had clearly made quite an impression on him.

They entered a dark corridor hung with washing. From within the apartment, they could hear the whirr of a sewing machine.

“Sasha, you can heat up that meat rissole,” a female voice came from the kitchen. “It’s on the saucer under the cloth.”

They walked along the corridor past a row of trunks. Galina told her guests that some of the residents in the apartment had domestic helpers who had come in to Moscow from the countryside. In the daytime, they did the housework, and at night, they slept on these trunks.

“Please, come in,” said Galina, throwing open the door to her room. “Make yourselves at home.”

She had done what she could to brighten up her room. The walls were hung with decorated birdhouses and little cages that contained toy airplanes instead of birds. There was a lamp made of carefully assembled bits of glass, and instead of a divan, a garden bench stood in the corner of the room with a brightly colored mattress made of a patchwork of scraps. This was where Galina slept. Tata slept in the wardrobe under the clothes, but the guests did not have to know that.

Kitty looked spellbound at the wardrobe, which was decorated with pink-nosed white rabbits.

“They’re so pretty!” she said.

“My daughter painted them,” Galina said proudly.

“Where is she?”

“Here I am!”

Tata was standing in the doorway, looking like a child from an orphanage in her blue school smock and the ugly knitted cardigan.

Tata was holding an old ginger cat in her arms, Pussinboots, a wretched, communally owned creature who was fed by each of the tenants in turn.

For a second or two, Tata stared at her guests without saying a word. Galina tensed inside. What would happen now? But all went well. Tata greeted the visitors and, ignoring Klim, walked straight up to his daughter.

“What’s your name? Kitty? That won’t do. We’ll have to think up a new revolutionary name for you. My name is Traktorina, but you can call me Tata for short. Would you like to stroke Pussinboots? “

“Yes, please!” said Kitty, delighted.

“She’s called Tatyana,” said Galina with irritation, but Klim paid no attention to Tata’s fibs.

“Let them play,” he said.

“Who’s that?” asked Kitty, pointing at a portrait of Lenin that was hung above the desk. “Is it your father?”

Tata gaped at her. “He’s not my father. Or rather, he’s everybody’s father, not just mine. He’s the leader of the workers of the world!”

Kitty looked puzzled. “That’s my daddy, right there.” She pointed at Klim. “But I don’t know that man.”

“What?” Tata was lost for words. “But that’s… that’s…”

“Why do your servants sleep on trunks?” asked Kitty, suddenly. “In our house, Kapitolina sleeps on a sack of money. If you jump on it, you can hear it rustling.”

Tata looked slowly from Kitty to Klim. “Mother!” she said in dismay. “Can I talk to you in private?”

Galina took Tata out into the corridor.