There was nothing for it. Hunching miserably, Tata shuffled toward her doom.

2

At the gate, Tata was met by a man with a ginger toothbrush mustache.

“I know just the person you need,” he said,\ when Tata told him she was looking for anybody who could not read and write. “Come with me.”

He took her across the yard and shown her the entrance door. “Go up one flight of stairs,” he said. “There’s only one apartment. It’s impossible to miss.”

Tata felt like a terrible fool. Luckily, she had a piece of paper with a speech on it, dictated by Julia. Without it, she would have been unable to say a word.

She reached the apartment, rang the doorbell, and when the door opened, she began to read aloud, unable to look the tenant in the eyes.

“Good afternoon, Comrade Tenant!” she said, struggling to decipher her own scribbles. “We are re-pre-sen-ta-tives from the troika of… oh, well, never mind that now…. What’s your profession?”

She looked up and froze.

“My profession? Journalist,” said Uncle Klim, smiling down at her.

“Can you read and write?” Tata heard herself saying in a small voice.

“Of course not!” came a voice from the staircase. It was the man with the ginger mustache. “Mr. Rogov, I sent this young lady up to you on purpose, so she could teach you to read and do your sums.”

Tata wished the ground would swallow her up.

“I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I just wanted to know if anybody here needed help learning the alphabet.”

At that moment, Kitty came rushing out. “Here you are!” she cried delightedly, hugging Tata.

“Won’t you come in?” suggested Uncle Klim.

Mother will hit the roof when she finds out I came to see the Rogovs without permission, though Tata helplessly. Nevertheless, she entered the apartment.

“I’ll just come in for a minute to warm up,” she said.

As soon as she stepped inside, Tata realized that Uncle Klim was no revolutionary; he was a bourgeois. His home was a bastion of materialism—there was a mirror, a grand piano, and pictures of some fancy wenches on the walls. With a father like that, no wonder Kitty had some gaps in her education.

Uncle Klim brought in a samovar from the kitchen.

“Kapitolina isn’t here, so we’ll have to fend for ourselves,” he said. He put down a dish of candy on the table. “Help yourself.”

Tata gasped. Her mother always squirreled away sweets, and only once in a blue moon would she nibble on a toffee, letting Tata have half.

Tata reached out her hand to the dish, but at that moment, she remembered how all the children at school had been urged to eat only the right candies—the ones in ideologically sound wrappers which were called things like “Internationale,” “Republican,” or “Lives of the Peasants Then and Now.”

But all Uncle Klim had were candies, their wrappers decorated with a picture of a girl bobbing a curtsey.

Tata looked at Kitty who had already put a candy in her mouth.

“How many can I have?” she asked, despising herself for her lack of character.

“As many as you like,” Uncle Klim said.

Tata drank some delicious tea, ate candies and cookies, and began to feel that she was developing bourgeois tendencies.

“Let’s see what books you have,” she said, looking at Klim’s bookshelves. “Anna Karenina, poetry… some sentimental rubbish! That’s harmful literature. Self-indulgent drivel.”

Uncle Klim looked at her with unfeigned curiosity. “So, what reading do you consider good for the soul?”

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” snapped Tata. Then she added, not entirely truthfully, “I’m interested in politics, not fiction. At the moment, our class is reading Lenin’s speech to the third Young Communist Congress. I don’t suppose you’ve ever inoculated yourself with the germ of revolution.”

Uncle Klim burst out laughing and said that he would write down that phrase in his notebook; it would be useful for one of his articles. This ought to have pleased Tata; after all, it isn’t every day adults want to make a note of your words. But she had an uneasy feeling the conversation was not going well.

“Come on. I want to show you something!” said Kitty, and, grabbing Tata by the hand, she led her into the other room.

Tata was amazed to see that Kitty had a bedroom to herself, and more toys than Tata had ever seen in her life. Kitty reached under the bed, brought out a colored magazine with a picture of a bourgeois lady on the cover, and settled down on the rug.

“Let’s play. You can be her, and I’ll be her.”

One picture in the magazine showed the beach and some scantily clad girls, the other—a bride and groom at a wedding table laden with cakes.

“Let’s eat all those!” said Kitty, beaming. “Yum-yum!”

Tata decided to take charge. She announced that they would play at a communist wedding.

“I’ll be the secretary of a Young Communist organization, and you can be a worker bride who is getting married to… how about this teddy bear?”

Kitty shook her head. “No, he’s too young for me. We bought him yesterday.”

Tata spent a long time trying to pick out a potential husband: Kitty’s rag horse, a wooden duck on wheels, and a progressive worker from the Liberated Labor factory whose portrait was in the paper. Eventually, Kitty agreed to marry a giraffe painted on her bedroom wall.

Tata read out a report about the new way of life in the Soviet Union and presented the newlyweds with a blanket from the women’s union and a pillow from the factory management.

Uncle Klim knocked at the door. “Tata, I’ve been called out on business urgently. Would you mind staying here with Kitty?”

“Of course not,” she said.

He pulled on his coat. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Be good!”

“We will,” promised Tata, a brilliant plan already taking shape in her head.

3

About thirty journalists were crowded into the press room. They sat around a long table, typewriters at the ready.

“What can it be at this time of night?” muttered Seibert irritably, yawning.

“I expect they’ve signed yet another report on the unbreakable alliance between the USSR and Afghanistan,” replied Klim. He was sure they had all been brought here for nothing, for some story that presented no interest whatsoever to the world’s news agencies.

Still, the journalists allowed themselves to dream of larger-than-life heroes and dangerous villains.

“We really are a bunch of vultures,” said Seibert, looking around at his colleagues. “We feed off battles, plagues, and disasters. The more dead bodies, the happier we are.”

At last, Weinstein came into the room. “Are you ready? This is the front page of tomorrow’s Pravda.” He began handing out mimeographed sheets to the journalists. “Familiarize yourselves with the facts and wire the story to your agencies as quickly as you can. All the censors are in situ, so you can start right away.”

Klim scanned the text quickly. It was a report from the prosecutor of the Supreme Court about the discovery of a large clandestine counter-revolutionary organization in the Shakhty region in the south-east of Russia. The counter-revolutionaries, most of them engineers and technical specialists, had deliberately caused fires and explosions in mines. They had embezzled money allocated for construction, driven up costs, and spoiled production. Their objective was to reduce the USSR’s defense capabilities in the event of a military attack. The coordinators of the plot were White émigrés from Russia who had close ties with German industrialists and Polish intelligence.

The journalists were dumbstruck. They had joked for years over the Bolsheviks’ fears of some foreign power invading the Soviet Union. A poverty-stricken rural economy with almost no transport to speak of and no easily navigable waterways—what a prize! But if there really had been a plot, did that mean that the journalists had missed a trick?

Klim looked at the figures again. Of course, it was possible to fabricate some sensational crime and make a worldwide scandal out of it—it was just the sort of thing that could be expected from the Soviet secret police. But how could you fake the collapse of coal mining in an entire region?

The journalists all began to ask questions at once.

“How many people have been arrested?”

“A few hundred,” said Weinstein. “The case is seen as one of national importance, and the most dangerous of the saboteurs will go on trial in Moscow.”

Seibert was more agitated than anyone else. “Which German firms are suspected of financing the plot?”

“That’s a state secret for now,” Weinstein said. “There will be an open session of the panel of the Supreme Court, and we’ll find out the facts then.”

Seibert, stunned, turned to Klim. “It looks as if there’ll be no shortage of dead meat.”

The room filled up with the clatter of typewriters and the ringing of carriage bells.

Weinstein walked up to Klim and bent down to speak into his ear.

“This is your chance to improve your record,” he said. “Just make sure you get everything down honestly and objectively.”

Klim nodded without looking at him. The world seemed to have been turned upside down. A few minutes ago, everything had seemed clear: the Bolsheviks were ham-fisted cynics who blamed all their own ills on nonexistent foreign enemies. They used propaganda, lies, and the abuse of power as weapons and fed on ignorance and superstition of the majority of their countrymen. But now, everything seemed more complicated and more terrible. There was no rational explanation for what had happened in the Shakhty region. Why had the conspirators acted as they had? What was their objective?