Constant Nobody

by Michelle Butler Hallett

  Jolly him along, she thought, and she gave a half-smile. —I had tutors before I left for school, and then again when I came back.

  — What do you mean, left?

  — Boarding school.

  — Your father sent you away?

  — It’s not like that. And I didn’t stay. I was a bit of a troublemaker. So I came home, and my father hired tutors. French, Spanish, Italian, German, and some Old High German. I can read some Danish, too, but it’s very difficult for me, some rock in the fog, just out of my reach. I suppose you really want to know about the Russian?

  This time, he did kiss her forehead. Then he said yes in every language he knew.

  Sweat broke out on her neck, and she forced herself to smile. —My maternal grandparents emigrated to England in 1891. Part of the Russian flu, some people said. They were academics, he a linguist and she a chemist. They only had the one child, my mother.

  He drew his lips over her hair.

  Temerity struggled to concentrate. —In the end, I learned Russian from a lovely old count who emigrated in 1917. Very aristocratic. You’d shoot him on sight.

  His lips touched her cheek, and he hesitated, giving her a chance to pull away.

  She kept still.

  He kissed her, just below the cheekbone.

  Soft.

  Then she got up, strode to the front room, turned up the radio.

  Eyes shut, face red, Kostya let out a long breath. He tugged on civilian clothes, and, still buttoning his shirt, followed her.

  She sat in the soft chair, body turned to the wall. Under the racket of a loud female voice rapping out arrest statistics, Temerity spoke in quiet accusation. —You’ve not got my papers.

  — Look, I had a bad night.

  Rubbing her cheek with the heel of her left hand, she gestured to the radio with her right. —Is that it, then? I’ll disappear?

  — I’ll get them.

  — Why couldn’t you get them last night? What in hell were you doing?

  Surname, first name, patronymic. —Paperwork.

  A recognition hit her. This menacing NKVD agent, her one link to freedom, didn’t know where to look.

  He knelt beside her. —Please, don’t cry. I’ll find them, Nadia, just give me time.

  — I’ve not got time! God’s sake, why have you done this? Why did you bring me here?

  — Spain.

  — Spain. I see. What was it, then? The sunny skies?

  — No.

  — The warm breezes, the shortage of clean water?

  — No. Listen—

  — The beautiful music of bombardment?

  — Shut up!

  She flinched.

  Still on his knees, he’d tensed and now seemed ready to leap at her. —Is this some competition for you, woman? Which of us had the worse time in Spain? You want bombardment? Try Madrid, over and over, and fucking Gerrikaitz!

  She said nothing.

  The radio report on arrest statistics finished, and another announcer introduced a short musical selection: the ‘Garland Waltz’ from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.

  Kostya stood up, grabbed Temerity’s arms, and hauled her to her feet. —Shall we dance?

  — No. Let me go.

  Kostya led with vigour and grace; he murmured near her ear. —Ah, sunny Spain, Nadia: espionage, bombardment, and gonorrhea. I know you share the first two. You can travel. I can’t. Another country? Strange dirt and foreign water can only poison me, infect me with Trotskyism or worse, imperialist Western decadence. One soaks up treason from the very air. But I got to see Spain. Another country. I got to see it. I love Russia, and I got to leave Russia. My orders to go to Spain were a gift. You dance well for someone wearing no shoes, my sweet angel of Comintern. I saw another country. In a civil war. I knew something about that, the confusion, and the fucking hunger, always hunger, everyone. And I added to it. I hurt people. I called it interrogation. Then I killed them.

  He made a misstep, corrected it.

  I lost Misha.

  He took in a sharp breath. —And then I fell in love with you.

  Her body slackened in his grip. —What?

  He tugged her along in the waltz. —I told myself love at first sight, true love, whatever one calls it, is just decoration for fairy stories. I did believe in it once. Wandering Ivan meets Marya Morevna, they fall in love, and he joins her on some difficult quest. Perhaps they even defeat Koshchei the Deathless, and then they live happily ever after. I believed it when I was a boy, and then, as a man, I forgot it. NKVD work knocks sense into you. Humans are flawed, we learned, and NKVD must root out and destroy those flaws for the good of everyone else. It’s a kind of love. Like when Arkady Dmitrievich would beat me. For my own good. He saved me, so I have to listen to him. How do I ever pay him back for saving me, hey? Or Vadym Minenkov, how can I repay him? I decide to serve them by serving my country. I do well, just as Arkady Dmitrievich predicted. Languages, he always said, your gift for languages. When he first tugged me up from the ground, I cursed him out in four different languages. Later he said he could see the future of the country in me. Why was Chekist Arkady Dmitrievich Balakirev, the Muscovite’s Muscovite, fourteen generations on his mother’s side, ten on his father’s, even in Odessa in January of 1918? Why did Arkady Dmitrievich happen to find me on the ground and think to help me up, just so I could curse him out like the bezprizornik I pretended to be? Great forces we don’t understand, Nadia, can’t understand. I surrender to that idea. I do. I submit. Arkady Dmitrievich was meant to find me, and I was meant to find you, first in Spain, then in a Lubyanka cell, and finally at Arkady Dmitrievich’s house. I love you. I am meant to love you. I submit.

  The waltz ended.

  He let go of her waist, took a step back, kissed her hand, and bowed.

  She kept still. His voice at the clinic, so cold as he ordered her to kneel. Down. Now! Yet he’d fired wide. —You’re in love with me?

  Kostya gave her an exasperated look.

  The radio announcer urged all good Soviet children to get ready for a special treat today, a recording of Comrade Prokofiev’s Petya and the Wolf.

  Temerity’s hand tingled where Kostya had kissed it, near the injection site. —And if you’d left me at this Arkady Dmitrievich’s house?

  — Let me fix up some food, yes? Then I want to tell you a story.

  As Kostya worked in the kitchen, Temerity stared at the radio.

  I never tried to charm him. God’s sake, his beautiful face…

  Prokofiev’s songbird asked the duck: What sort of bird are you that can’t fly?

  Help me.

  And the duck asked the songbird: What sort of bird are you that can’t swim?

  Kostya and Temerity ate eggs and potato in silence until Kostya pushed his plate away, and the scrape of heavy glass across the wooden table seemed too loud. —I don’t know how Arkady Dmitrievich found me. I don’t even know how Odessa fell, and I was there. Early 1918. I was twelve. First the Reds took Odessa, then the Whites, then the Reds again, and any moment the Germans might roll in. I lost track. The Germans did take Odessa, after I got out, and years later Arkady Dmitrievich showed me a photograph of how the Germans cleaned the streets of bezprizorniki. Hanged them. I knew some of those boys. The one facing the camera as he tried to keep his balance on the gallows was called Timofei, Timofei Boykov. We sat next to each other in school. One day, I had the desk all to myself, and the teacher asked us all if we knew why Timofei had not come to school. None of us knew, yet all of us knew, even the teacher, because we all saw Timofei standing in queues for hire or huddled on the corner begging for coins and cigarettes. I heard him say that the next time a man offered to pay him for a blow job he’d cut the bastard’s Achilles tendon. When I saw him again, he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he saw me, he looked so angry, like the whole mess was my fault. When I became a bezprizornik myself, Timofei got his revenge, and I took a beating. Down in the catacombs. ‘You pretended not to
see me,’ he said. ‘Your grandfather gave me cigarettes and kopeks, but you pretended not to see me!’ I hated him, and I was afraid of him, yet when Arkady showed me that photograph years later, I wanted to be sick. He was just twelve. Fucked in the mouth.

  He paused to offer Temerity a cigarette.

  She accepted, leaning closer so he could light it.

  Wincing, Kostya rolled his left shoulder, then drew on his cigarette. —Do you remember when you told me your mother died of flu? I can’t remember my mother, either. She died in the 1905 uprising. I was a baby. Her parents raised me. My grandmother died when I was eight, and then it was just my grandfather. I’m illegitimate. The patronymic gets tricky for us. My father abandoned my mother, that’s all I know. I liked to pretend he was a sailor, not a sailor in the Navy but the kind who owns a ship and has adventures, and I’d make up stories about him and how one day he’d come back to Odessa and save me. Anyway, my mother had the right to give her child any patronymic she pleased. It might be for the father, or it might be to honour a man who had helped her after she fell pregnant. My original patronymic was Semyonovich. I don’t know if that’s for my grandfather, Semyon Berendei, or if my father was a Semyon, too. When I got older, I wondered how my parents met. Were they in love, some sort of forbidden affair? Was it just one night? Did he rape her? Am I walking around because of a rapist?

  — So your name’s not really Nikto.

  — I told you, I changed it.

  — And the patronymic?

  Kostya tapped ash from his cigarette. —Arkady Dmitrievich took me to a clerk to get new identity papers. I was still dizzy and stupid with the flu. I could walk, that was all. The clerk made things difficult, asking if I’d made a thorough search for my papers. Arkady Dmitrievich got angry and asked the clerk if we should go back to Odessa and ask the occupying Germans to help us find the papers. I only wanted to vomit and lie down. I couldn’t even manage my date of birth. I said 14 April 1905, and the clerk said 26 April 1905. Arkady Dmitrievich had to explain to me Lenin had changed the calendar. The clerk kept asking my name, and Arkady Dmitrievich started shouting, and I couldn’t stop him. I was sweating, and then when the clerk asked me for probably the fifth time for my name, I said Konstantin but froze after that. Arkady Dmitrievich supplied the Arkadievich. Then the clerk started to praise Arkady Dmitrievich for getting his bastard son out of a war zone. The old man tried to explain we’re not father and son, but the clerk wouldn’t listen. He was in charge now, able to push around a Chekist, and he would not give that up. The clerk looked at me then, and demanded I give him my surname. He even made up some horseshit about the papers being invalid if someone else supplied my surname. I had to say it. I froze again. I wasn’t even sure this whole thing was happening. The clerk kept his voice steady, and the politer he sounded, the more frightened I felt. ‘Tell me your surname. Tell me your surname.’ I started to cry. I kept thinking about the orphan’s surname. I didn’t want to be a Neizvestny. But who was I? ‘Nikto,’ I said, ‘I am nikto, nikto, no one at all.’ And the clerk wrote it down. So there I was, reborn as Konstantin Arkadievich Nikto, and as we left, Arkady Dmitrievich promised me he’d have the clerk arrested.

  Temerity stroked her fingers over the back of Kostya’s hand. —So, who were you in Odessa?

  Kostya sounded impatient. —Konstantin Semyonovich Berendei. I just told you. I left it behind. Fuck, if you’d been there…When history took a shit in 1918, it made a big dump in Odessa. I only had my grandfather, and he was exhausted. We couldn’t get enough food or coal, and none of his patients could pay him, but he kept treating them. Then one night in January, it was bang-bang-bang on the door and frantic shouts for Dr. Berendei. Grandfather told me he had to leave. He walked out of the house, and I never saw him again. Then the schools shut down. I stayed in the house alone. I only left to queue for bread. I’d queue for hours. No one else in that line asked me about Grandfather or checked on me in any way. I was already invisible. After a few days of this, the baker said he could not keep a tab for me when he extended credit to no one else, and when would Grandfather come and pay? I couldn’t answer him. He was a decent man, in the end, and he broke off some of his own loaf and sent me out the back door. I bolted it down, almost choked on it. It was like eating sand. Adulterated flour. And then sleet started, and I wanted to get inside, so I ran. And of course I slipped. I fell, smacked my head off a curb, and when I got up again and back to the house, I found strangers living there. I still don’t know who they were or how they took over. A family of four, a middle-aged man the size of a bear and his two grown sons, scarred from the Great War or the Revolution or who knows what, and a cook. They had all these crates piled up outside the doors, and they’d even changed the locks. They stole my grandfather’s house. I couldn’t believe it. I would knock on the door, explain myself, ask to come inside, and they’d shout abuse at me. They wore me down. Finally I asked just to be allowed in to get a favourite book and my other warm coat. They looked about to relent, when I pointed to a painting near the beauty wall, a watercolour of the Odessa Steps. ‘My mother painted that,’ I said. ‘Look, that’s her signature in the corner.’ One of the sons picked me up and threw me off the porch. Their cook called out to me after a moment, and she gave me buttered bread on the condition that I never come back.

  I tried to ask people who knew my grandfather for help. Many had been his patients. I got nowhere. When I could get people to listen, they would shrug and remind me life was difficult for everyone now. I don’t think they believed me. Perhaps they just didn’t want to believe me. I slept outside, in empty buildings or in the catacombs. Odessa is not Moscow, but it’s cold enough. I got so dirty, and the days got so long. Adults chased me away, called me rat, thief, bezprizornik. That last one still galls me. I fell in with the other street kids. I had to. My voice cracked and dropped and whistled and cracked again, so I could hardly get a word out. One day I caught my reflection in a window and saw how my eyes had gone wide. I hardly recognized myself. I had this burnt feeling all the time, like I’d had too much sun. All that mattered was food and sleep and cigarettes.

  I counted the days. On day sixteen, I was walking by the waterfront when I saw the battleship Dobrynya Nikitich had docked. Captain Kastalsky knew my grandfather, so, I thought Captain Kastalsky would help me, surely. I’d gone aboard that ship many times. Sometimes Captain Kastalsky might visit my grandfather in his house. More often he would send word, and Grandfather would visit Captain Kastalsky. He’d take me with him. I got to know the boatswain, Shlykov. He taught me how to tie knots and curse in different languages. I always say he was my first tutor. Shlykov saw me through the fog. ‘Your coat is dirty,’ he said. ‘Brush it. And I see you’ve gotten taller.’ An officer came round to see whom Shlykov addressed like that, over the side of a battleship, and his shoulder boards seemed about to slide off his coat. Shlykov explained I was the grandson of the captain’s great friend in Odessa. Fog rose like smoke, and Dobrynya Nikitich faded in and out of sight. Sailors loaded provisions, and I almost followed them aboard until I remembered I must wait for the captain’s permission. After a long time, during which Shlykov had to carry on with his duties and could not talk with me, the skinny officer returned with the captain. Kastalsky looked faded, blurry somehow, like a bad photograph. His skin had gone grey, and his hair and beard had gone white. He stepped with new care, as though worried he might fall, until he reached the side and could look down on me. He called my grandfather’s surname, and when I answered, my voice whistled and cracked. Kastalsky peered into the fog and said, ‘Konstantin, is that you? Where is your grandfather?’

  I said I didn’t know.

  I noticed how the sleet ticked the sides of the ship, and Kastalsky stared into the fog. Finally he asked, ‘When did you see him last?’

  I told him it was a few weeks, and I expected that any moment now, any moment he’d invite me on board so I could warm up and explain.

  Then the fog closed over Kastalsk
y, and his slow footsteps receded. I called his name, over and over, but my voice cracked out, and the docks were noisy. Even Shlykov lost sight of me. ‘Konstantin, are you there? Are you still there? Take care, boy.’ A dockworker chased me away, threatened to beat me with his cargo hook, and then he called me a bezprizornik. Shlykov likely heard it. I felt my face burn, and then I leapt at the dockworker. If I’d had a knife, I’d have stabbed him. He threw me off like a rag. I got to my feet and made my way through the fog. I managed to beg a few cigarettes. The man who gave me the cigarettes lit the first one for me, and I lit the next from the embers of that one. Then I found myself at my grandfather’s house once more, and maybe this time I could explain how the house belonged to Dr. Semyon Mikhailovich Berendei.

  I should have stalked them better. I should have watched the house and learned the men’s patterns so I’d know when they might be absent. I knocked and knocked on the back door and pleaded to be let in. Then I smelled the roasting pork. Where in hell had they gotten pork? It didn’t matter. My mouth filled with froth, and when I swallowed it, I almost vomited.

  The cook dragged me inside and let me sit on a wooden stool, the one my grandfather used when he wanted to reach a book on a high shelf. I saw the woven rug and the dark spots on the beauty wall where the ikons and my mother’s watercolours once hung. The cook filled my pockets with bread and bits of pork and told me to let it cool. I begged her to let me stay.

  The men heard us. They ran into the kitchen. The father told his sons to get me out, and they picked me up, one on each side, and they threw me outside. I landed on stones and ice. I scrambled to get back up, and the two sons were staring at me, eyes huge, and their father picked up a bucket. It was wastewater from the kitchen. We had indoor plumbing in that house, so it could have been worse. Anyway, he drenched me with it, and warned me again to stay down. This time I did, and the sleet turned to snow. The soaking took the fight from me, and it seemed easier to give in. The cold started to change, and soon I felt warm. A boot nudged my ribs, very gentle. Then a hand shook my shoulder, and I cried out for whomever it was to get the hell away from me. I rubbed ice from my eyes and got them open, and I saw the boots, the hem of a long black leather coat layered under a shorter coat of fur, the amber worry beads dangling from the belt, and the peaked cap.