The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  “Usually three or four, I think. I always go home.”

  “How many women?”

  “None,” she said, looking more anxious.

  Komarov ran a hand through his greying hair. “Where does the manager live?”

  “In Yauzskaya. At seventeen Mashkov Lane.”

  They walked back around to the front of the house, where his men were still patiently waiting. He gave the address to the nearest pair, told them to pick the man up and take him straight to the holding cells on Bolshaya Lubyanka. “I need to use your telephone,” he told the woman. “In private,” he added when they reached her office door.

  As he waited for the exchange to connect him with the Zhenotdel offices, he wondered if there was a more appropriate organization he should be calling, but couldn’t think of one. It was intelligent females he needed, and who better to supply them than the women’s department?

  The woman he spoke to took some persuading. “The Cheka wants to borrow two of our workers for help with interrogations?” she asked disbelievingly, in an accent that Komarov couldn’t quite place.

  “Not interrogating, questioning. We need to question a lot of young girls—”

  “What crime have they committed?”

  “None. If crimes have been committed, they are the victims. And the crimes will have been committed by men. In such circumstances, using men to question the girls seems singularly inappropriate.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” the woman said, sounding slightly mollified. “But is there no one else? We really have no one to spare today.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  The woman was silent for a moment. “Are there no women in the Chekas?” she asked.

  “There are a few. But none I know of who could set these girls at ease.”

  “Oh, very well. I will come myself and bring a colleague if I can find one. Where are you?”

  He told her.

  “But that’s miles away.”

  “I can have a car pick you up in half an hour.”

  “Oh. All right. You know the address?”

  “I do.”

  Komarov smiled as he hung up the receiver. Outside, he gave the other two the Zhenotdel address and watched their Russo-Balt head off toward the city center, trailing a cloud of exhaust in the frigid air. After giving the manager’s assistant her office back, he found a seat in one of the old reception rooms and stared at the discolored shapes on the wall where paintings and mirrors had hung.

  He had only an hour to wait. Hearing the car arrive, he studied the passengers through the window. There were two of them, one short and slightly stocky with medium-length blonde hair and a pretty face, the other slimmer, taller, with dark reddish hair and a pale-skinned face that didn’t look Russian. Both were wearing practical clothes and Zhenotdel red scarfs around their necks.

  He went outside to meet them. “I’m Yuri Komarov, deputy chairman of the M-Cheka,” he said, offering his hand to each woman in turn. Up close, he recognized the taller of the two, an American comrade who’d crossed his path several years before. Which explained the accent on the phone.

  The other woman introduced herself as Comrade Zenzinova. “And this is Comrade Piatakova.”

  “We’ve met before,” Komarov said with a smile. He had questioned her twice in the summer of 1918. On the first occasion, it had been her relationship with the renegade Socialist Revolutionary Maria Spiridonova that had brought her to the Cheka’s attention. On the second, it had been an informer’s report of her contact with a foreign agent. In both instances she, like so many others back in those days, had received the benefit of any doubts. And apparently deserved them, given that three years later she was still devoting her life to a foreign revolution.

  “I remember,” she said. “My name was Hanley back then.”

  “Well, thank you for coming,” Komarov said. “Now let me explain the situation. This is a home for female waifs and strays. I assume it was set up by the party, but I rather doubt there’s been any political oversight. From what I’ve seen, it’s obvious that the girls are being exploited, and that a great deal needs to be done to improve the conditions. I have no evidence of worse, but I strongly suspect it . . .”

  “You think they’re being interfered with sexually?” Piatakova half-asked, half-stated.

  “I don’t know. The manager and his cronies have had the run of the place at night, and most of the girls seem frightened to death. I’m hoping you can get at least some of them to open up.”

  “How many are there?” Zenzinova asked.

  “About sixty, but I’m hoping you won’t need to question more than a few to get an idea of what’s been going on.”

  The two women looked at each other. “Then we’d better get started,” Piatakova said in her strangely accented but otherwise perfect Russian.

  All work was stopped, and the girls brought together in what had presumably once been the ballroom. Two smaller rooms on the same floor were found for interviews and the first two girls delivered to their questioners by the clearly frightened staff.

  It was almost four hours later when the two Zhenotdel women found Komarov in the manager’s office. They both looked devastated.

  “They work every hour God gives,” Comrade Piatakova told him. “Apart, that is, from a short spell in the yard once or twice a week. The rest of the time they’re either working or locked up in the dormitory.” She raised her green eyes and gave him a look he could have done without. “Or, as you suspected, warming the manager’s bed. It’s sometimes just him, sometimes a few of his friends as well. They take their pick after the girls finish their suppers.”

  “Are any of them pregnant?” Komarov asked, knowing it was the wrong response the moment he said it.

  “Probably not,” Piatakova told him. “I doubt that most of the girls have ever had a period, and given the state of their health, I don’t expect the older ones are menstruating either.”

  “How many did you talk to?”

  “I talked to four and Fanya to five.”

  “Well, they’ll all need to be questioned eventually, but first I must find people to look after them.”

  “Women, I hope.”

  “Of course. If you think of any suitable people, or of homes you can vouch for, I’d be grateful to hear. I know Comrade Kollontai was working to set up several such places in the early months of the revolution.”

  “I’ll ask,” Piatakova said. She got to her feet. “I assume your men will drive us back to Vozdvizhenka Street.”

  “Of course. And thank you.”

  She hesitated in the doorway, obviously trying to put a thought into words. “This speaks so badly of us,” she said eventually.

  “I couldn’t agree more,” he said simply.

  He listened to the car drive off. A year ago he would have had the staff taken out to the yard and shot. Everyone would have been delighted—the children seeing their abusers receive their comeuppance, his men doing what they were good at, the bureaucrats in Moscow spared all that tiresome paperwork that went with trials. But now . . .

  Things were supposed to be changing. The death penalty had been abolished, in theory if not quite in practice. And if they were ever to get the revolution back on its rightful course, then wrongdoing had to be exposed, not simply punished with a bullet in the back of the neck. The manager would certainly get one, but only after everyone in Moscow knew what for.

  That was the easy part, he thought. What kind of future lay in wait for these girls?

  He went back to the manager’s office, where the woman who’d welcomed him six hours before was weeping in a corner.

  “Where are the records?” he asked her.

  “What records?” she managed to ask.

  “The names of the girls. Their ages. Where they came from.”

  “
He never kept any records,” she said.

  Komarov sighed. Even in the bad old days, they’d tattooed numbers on orphans’ knuckles. “I’ll send someone out here in the morning,” he told the woman. “You’ll be here to show her around. And then you leave.”

  “But—”

  “Either that or join your boss in prison.”

  “But I didn’t touch anyone.”

  Komarov just looked at her.

  “You people think you own the world,” she said, covering her mouth when she realized she’d said it aloud.

  And what a world to own, Komarov thought.

  Caitlin Piatakova glanced at the clock on the wall, and saw she had only an hour before the Orgbureau appointment. The last three had flown by: since the midday arrival of the twenty-four women from Turkestan the Zhenotdel offices had been a whirlwind of color, noise, and enthusiasm. A sense of liberation was catching, Caitlin thought, and more than a little intoxicating to Muscovites, who had almost forgotten how to feel so positive. And as far as she and Fanya were concerned, the arrival of the women had certainly provided a much-needed lift of the spirits after yesterday’s hours at the refuge for waifs and strays.

  These women had literally left their men—their husbands, fathers, and brothers—two thousand miles behind them. And, for the moment at least, they all seemed exhilarated by the freedom that distance had given them. Days like this, Caitlin thought, were what she lived for. The long hours, the endless petty obstruction, the knowing smirks and outright insults—all that men could throw at them—days like this made it all worthwhile.

  They had spent the afternoon discussing the programs and material that the Muslim women would take back with them, and the Zhenotdel workers had initially feared that their visitors might prove overoptimistic about the pace of possible change. But they needn’t have worried—the latter were fully aware that changing male minds in a highly traditional Muslim culture would take time and tact. As Rahima, one of the unofficial leaders of the women, put it: “If we look too happy, they will be suspicious.”

  Rahima was only eighteen, but seemed a lot older, with a fund of common sense that provided ballast for her bubbly enthusiasm. She had married at fourteen, and her husband was one of the few Uzbeks prominent in the Turkestan Communist Party. He had allowed his wife to make the trip out of political duty, but she knew only too well that he found the whole business profoundly upsetting. “I will need to work on him day and night,” she said. “And his mother, who keeps pouring poison into his ears.”

  Caitlin glanced at the clock—it really was time to leave. She checked that the relevant notes were in her bag, told Fanya she was off, and reluctantly left all the noise and happiness behind her.

  Outside on Vozdvizhenka Street, a pale sun was struggling with a cold breeze. The Orgbureau offices were about a mile away, and with no tram in sight, she decided she might as well walk. The streets were virtually empty, and as she strode along, she rehearsed the arguments she would put to the committee. The issue in question was the setting up of Zhenotdel offices in a long list of provincial cities and towns, and the properties that the organization had carefully chosen to house them. There was no obvious reason why the proposals in Caitlin’s bag should prove contentious, provided that they were considered on merit. But it was far from certain that this would be the case. Her friend and boss, Alexandra Kollontai, had already annoyed the party leadership by strongly supporting the Workers’ Opposition faction, and the leaders might well choose to punish her by punishing the women’s organization that she headed.

  It was so frustrating, Caitlin thought. She loved Kollontai like a sister—a much older one who often seemed younger—and Caitlin could hardly fault her friend for sticking to her principles. But they had achieved so much over the last three years—women delegates and apprentices at every level, propaganda work among the peasants and now the Muslims, making Russia the first country in the world to legalize abortion . . . Only yesterday evening a woman from Petrograd had told Caitlin that 90 percent of people were now eating in communal kitchens. Not eating very much, she had added with a laugh, but communally. The link between cooking and domestic slavery was finally being broken!

  This was what Caitlin had stayed in Russia for; this was what kept her going when less welcome things like hunger and loneliness and unwelcome political developments gave cause for doubts and depression. If you looked for reasons to feel pessimistic, there always seemed one to be found—some murderous outrage by the Chekas, some new instance of official corruption, what was going on now up at Kronstadt. But they weren’t the whole truth. Good things were happening, too. The civil war was over; Muslim women were finding a voice. And who would have thought that Cheka bosses would turn into guardian angels where orphan girls were concerned?

  The question, she supposed, was, which was the rule, which the exception? Sergei seemed increasingly convinced that everything was going to hell, but she hadn’t given up hope. Far from it.

  She was five minutes early for the appointment, but the committee was apparently running late, and the male secretary primly told her to join the queue in the waiting room. “How long do you think it’ll be?” she asked him sweetly, leaning forward to read his list. As she expected, the Zhenotdel was right at the bottom.

  Swallowing her anger—why make things worse before the committee had its say?—she joined the four men in the smoke-filled anteroom. Listening to their conversation, she realized that one was there to lobby for better sports facilities in Yalta, another to enlist decorators for the party offices in his local village. After seething quietly for several minutes, she took a deep breath and set to work on editing an article for Communist Woman that had reached the office that morning.

  It was almost three hours later that she was invited into the committee room, where five comrades were seated on the far side of a long and highly polished table. She knew three by sight, including the chair, Vyacheslav Molotov. Each man had a copy of the Zhenotdel proposals in front of him, and the first objection wasn’t long in coming.

  “This hall in Yaroslavl,” one man began. “It’s currently a soldiers’ club.”

  “It’s a public bar,” she corrected him.

  “Which our soldiers use. Would you deny them a place to let off steam, after all the sacrifices we ask them to make?”

  “Of course not. But there are many other bars in Yaroslavl, and this one has several rooms on both floors that would make an ideal suite of offices.”

  “Why not just use those other rooms?”

  Are you serious? she thought but didn’t say. “I doubt that using the same building for two such different purposes would work,” she replied. “The men might feel inhibited by the presence of working women,” she added with a straight face.

  “Could the women not take turns meeting in one another’s kitchens?” another man interjected.

  She took a deep breath. “We are setting up working offices, comrades. Might I remind you that Vladimir Ilych has urged all local parties to offer assistance in this matter.” Caitlin was fairly sure he had said something along those lines, and even if he hadn’t, none of the men across the table would be certain whether or not he had.

  “Of course,” Molotov agreed. “But we have the responsibility of ensuring that the correct assistance is being offered.”

  And they took that obligation seriously. They offered a litany of objections to all but a few of the proposed requisitions, and though most were eventually sanctioned, the tone of the proceedings was appallingly paternalistic.

  “Comrades,” she almost pleaded after more than an hour had passed, “we are on the same side. Women are vital to the future of the revolution—the party says so—and the Zhenotdel is vital to the future of our women. We’re not asking for the moon, just appropriate housing for our offices and educational facilities. And we have done our research—we haven’t just picked buildings we like
d the look of. Give us some credit, please.”

  Molotov had the grace to look slightly abashed, which was just as well, because his underlings merely looked sour. “I take your point, Comrade Piatakova,” he said. “And perhaps we should take the remaining suggestions as read. But I think you would agree that the committee would not be fulfilling its duty if all suggestions were simply waved through without query or challenge.”

  “Of course,” Caitlin agreed. He sounded more like a manager than a revolutionary, she thought.

  Outside on the street she took a deep breath of the fresh evening air. She felt vindicated, annoyed, and depressed in almost equal measure. Why did it have to be so hard? How many years would it take to make men like that appreciate the central truth that improving women’s place in the world would also make life so much fuller for men?

  It was dark, the few working streetlamps like spotlights on a citywide stage. The Muslim women were going to the theater that evening—they would probably be there by now—and she had meant to go with the party. She had already seen the play, but was curious to see what their guests would make of it. After hesitating for several moments, she decided she would simply go home. The last few hours had worn her out.

  Her room was a mile and a half from the office, just south of the river and canal. A safe walk these days, even after dark, now that most of the robbers who’d plagued Moscow streets in the civil war years had been caught by the Chekas. As she strode across the Kamenny Bridge, Caitlin found herself thinking about the notorious “jumpers,” footpads who had—it was said—attached springs to the soles of their feet for bouncing away from Chekist pursuit, triumphantly waving stolen fur coats in the air. Had these “jumpers” ever been caught? Had they even been real?

  The room she’d lived in for the last eighteen months was at the top of an old mansion on Dmitrova Street, a few hundred yards south of the river.. It was cold in winter, but less noisy than those on the floors below, which were large enough to house families. She got on well enough with her neighbors, but her fluency in Russian could never quite make up for being born a foreigner.