by Sam Eastland
His one-room apartment was sparsely furnished, with a fold-up army cot, which took up one corner of the room, and a collapsible table at which he ate his meals and wrote up his reports. There was also a china cabinet, slathered with many layers of paint, its current incarnation being chalky white. Pekkala had no china, only enameled cups and saucers, and only a couple each of those, since he rarely had any guests. The remainder of the cabinet was taken up with several dozen cardboard boxes of .455-caliber bullets belonging to the brass-handled Webley he wore when he was on duty and for which ammunition was difficult to come by in this country.
Pekkala had survived on so little for so long that he could not get used to doing otherwise. He lived like a man who expected at any moment to be given half an hour’s notice to vacate the premises.
Tucking a handkerchief into his collar, Pekkala brushed his hands against his chest and was about to begin his meal when a floorboard creaked in the hallway. He froze. A moment later, as he heard a knocking on his door, an old memory flickered to life in his head.
He stood outside the Tsarina’s Mauve Boudoir, his hand raised to rap on the door.
To the Alexander Palace maids, passing by with bundles of laundry, or trays of breakfast china, or feather dusters clasped like strange bouquets of flowers, he seemed to be frozen in place.
At last, as if the strength required for knocking on that door was more than he possessed, Pekkala sighed and lowered his hand.
Ever since the Tsarina had sent for him that morning, Pekkala had been filled with uneasiness. Alexandra usually stayed as far away from him as she could get.
Pekkala did not know why she disliked him so intensely. All he knew was that she did and that she made no secret of it. His only consolation was that he was far from alone in finding himself out of favor with her.
The Tsarina was a proud and stubborn woman who made up her mind very quickly about people and rarely changed her opinion afterwards. Even among those whom she tolerated, very few could count themselves as friends. Aside from Rasputin, her only confidante was the pouty, moonfaced Anna Vyrubova. For both of them, remaining in the Tsarina’s good graces had become a full-time job.
Now she had summoned Pekkala, and he had no idea what she wanted. Pekkala wished he could turn and walk away, but he had no choice except to obey.
As he raised his hand again to knock on the door, he caught sight of a sun wheel carved into the top of the doorframe. This crooked cross, its arms bent leftwards until it almost, but not quite, formed a circle, was the symbol the Tsarina had chosen as her own. It could be found carved into the doorframes of any place she had stayed for any length of time. Her life was filled with superstitions, and this was only one of them.
Knowing there was nothing to be gained by postponing this meeting any longer, Pekkala finally knocked.
“Come in,” ordered a muffled voice.
The Mauve Boudoir smelled of cigarettes and the dense fragrance of pink hyacinth flowers, which grew in planters on the windowsills. The lace curtains, a mauve color like everything else in the room, had been drawn, turning the light which filtered into the room the color of diluted blood. The dreary uniformity of its furnishings and the fact that the Tsarina never seemed to open the windows combined to make the space unbearably stifling to Pekkala.
Adding to his discomfort was the presence of an entire miniature circus made out of thin strands of glass, gold filigree, and pearls. There were more than a hundred pieces in all. The circus had been specially commissioned by the Tsar from the workshops of Karl Fabergé; it was rumored to be worth the lifetime salaries of more than a dozen Russian factory workers.
The fragile figures—elephants, tigers, clowns, fire-eaters, and tight-rope walkers—were balanced precariously on the edge of every flat surface in the room. Pekkala felt as if all he had to do was sigh and everything would come crashing to the floor.
The Tsarina lay on an overstuffed daybed, her legs covered by a blanket, wearing the gray and white uniform of a nurse of the Russian Red Cross. Ever since casualties had first started pouring back from the front in the late summer of 1914, the Great Hall of the Catherine Palace had been turned into a hospital ward and the Tsarina and her daughters had taken on the role of nurses to the wounded.
Soldiers who had grown up in thatch-roofed, dirt-floored Izba huts now woke each day in a room with golden pillars, walked across a polished marble floor, and rested in linen-sheeted beds. In spite of the level of comfort, the soldiers Pekkala had seen there did not look comfortable at all. Most would have preferred the more familiar surroundings of an army hospital instead of being showcased like the glass circus animals, as the Tsarina’s contribution to the war.
There were times when, in spite of her hostility towards him, Pekkala felt sorry for the Tsarina, particularly since war had broken out. No matter how hard she worked, her German background had made it almost impossible to make any gesture of loyalty to Russia without the gesture backfiring upon her. In trying to ease the suffering of others, she had succeeded only in prolonging it for herself.
But Pekkala had come to realize that this might not have been entirely by accident. The Tsarina was drawn towards suffering. An odd nervous energy surrounded her whenever the topic turned to misfortune. Attending to the wounded had given new purpose to her life.
Now, with Pekkala standing before her, the Tsarina gestured towards a fragile-looking wicker chair. “Sit,” she told Pekkala.
Hesitantly, Pekkala settled onto the chair, afraid that its legs would collapse under his weight.
“Pekkala,” said the Tsarina, “I believe we have gotten off to a bad start, you and I, but it is simply a matter of trust. I would like to trust you, Pekkala.”
“Yes, Majesty.”
“With that in mind,” she said, her clasped hands pressing into her lap as if she had a cramp in her stomach, “I would like for us to work together on a matter of great importance. I require you to conduct an investigation.”
“Of course,” answered Pekkala. “What do you need me to investigate?”
She paused for a moment. “The Tsar.”
Pekkala breathed in sharply. “I beg your pardon, Majesty?” The wicker seat creaked beneath him.
“I need you,” she continued, “to look into whether my husband is keeping a mistress.”
“A mistress,” repeated Pekkala.
“Yes.” She watched him closely, her lips tight in an awkward smile. “You know what that is, don’t you?”
“I do know, Majesty.” He also knew that the Tsar did, in fact, have a mistress. Or, at least, there was a woman who had been his mistress. Her name was Mathilde Kschessinska and she was the lead dancer of the Imperial Russian Ballet. The Tsar had known her for years, since before his marriage to the Tsarina, and had even bought her a mansion in Petrograd. Officially, he had broken off ties with her. Unofficially, Pekkala knew, the Tsar kept in contact with this woman. Although the full extent of their relationship was unknown to him, he knew for certain that the Tsar continued to visit her, even using a secret door located at the back of the Petrograd mansion so that he could enter undetected.
Pekkala had always assumed that the Tsarina knew everything about this other woman. The reason for this was that he did not believe the Tsar to be capable of keeping any secret from his wife. He lacked the necessary guile, and the Tsarina was far too suspicious to allow an affair to continue undetected.
“I regret,” said Pekkala, rising to his feet, “that I cannot investigate the Tsar.”
The Tsarina appeared to have been waiting for this moment. “You can investigate the Tsar,” she told him, as her eyes lit up. “The Tsar himself gave you the right to investigate anyone you choose. That is by Imperial Decree. And what is more, I have the right to order this investigation.”
“I understand, Majesty, that technically I am permitted—”
“Not permitted, Pekkala. Obliged.”
“I understand—” he continued.
She cut h
im off again. “Then it is settled.”
“Majesty,” pleaded Pekkala, “what you ask, I must not do.”
“Then you refuse?” she asked.
Pekkala felt a trap closing around him. To refuse an order from the Tsarina would amount to treason, the penalty for which was death. The Tsar was at army headquarters in Mogilev, halfway across the country. If the Tsarina wished it, Pekkala could be executed before the Tsar even found out what was wrong.
“You refuse?” she asked again.
“No, Majesty.” The words fell like stones from his mouth.
“Good. I am glad we are finally able to see”—the Tsarina held out her hand towards the door—“eye to emerald eye.”
THE KNOCKING CAME AGAIN, BUT THERE WAS SOMETHING UNUSUAL about it. The knuckles were striking far too low against the door.
At first Pekkala could make no sense of it, but then he smiled. He stepped over to the door and opened it just as the child on the other side was about to knock again. “Good evening, Talia.”
“Good evening, Comrade Pekkala.”
Before Pekkala stood a girl about seven years old, with plump cheeks and a dimple in her chin, wearing a khaki shirt and dress and the red scarf of a Young Pioneer around her neck. In a fashion popular among girls in the Communist Youth Movement, her short hair had been cut in a straight line across her forehead. Smiling, she gave him the Pioneer salute: the knife edge of her outstretched hand held at an angle in front of her face, as if to fend off an attack.
Conscious of how much he towered over the girl, Pekkala got down on one knee so they were looking each other in the face. “And what has brought you here this evening?”
“Babayaga says you are lonely.”
“And how does she know that?”
The child shrugged. “She just does.”
Pekkala glanced back at his dinner—the lumps of bread and the bowl of watery cheese. He sighed. “Well, Talia, it just so happens that I could use a little company right now.”
Talia stepped back into the hall and held out her hand for him to take. “Come along, then,” she said.
“One moment,” Pekkala said. He pulled on his coat which, although it had been cleaned, still looked the worse for wear after his journey across the proving ground.
Joining the girl out in the corridor, Pekkala caught the smell of evening meals—the fug of boiled potatoes, fried sausages, and cabbage.
They held hands as they walked down the pale green hallway with its ratty carpet to the apartment where Talia lived with her grandmother.
Until six months ago, Talia had lived with her parents in a large apartment in what had once been called the Sparrow Hills district of the city but had since been renamed Lenin Hills.
Then, one night, NKVD men arrived at their door, searched the house and arrested her parents. Until the time of their arrest, both had been model Communists, but now they were classed as Type 58. This fell under the general heading of “Threat to National Security” and earned them each a sentence of fifteen years at the Solovetsky Labor Camp.
The only reason Talia and her grandmother even knew this much was because Pekkala, having been their neighbor for several years, agreed to make inquiries on their behalf. As for the precise nature of the parents’ crime, even the NKVD records office could not tell him. Stalin had confided in Pekkala that even if only two percent of the arrests turned out to be warranted, he would still say it had been worth arresting all the others. So many people had been brought in this past year—over a million, according to the records office—that it was not possible to keep track of them all. What Pekkala knew, and what he could not bring himself to tell the grandmother, was that more than half of those people arrested were shot before they ever boarded the trains bound for Siberia.
Their family had once been farmers in the fertile Black Earth region of the Altai Mountains. In 1930, the Communist Party had ordered the farm to be merged with others in their village. It was called “collectivization.” The running of this collectivized farm, or kolkhoz, had then been given over to a party official who, with no farming experience of his own, ran the collective into the ground in less than two years. The collective broke up and Talia’s family had drifted, as had many others, to the city.
They began working for the Mos-Prov plant, which supplied most of the electricity to Moscow. The husband-and-wife team immediately joined the Communist Party and rose quickly through its ranks. Before their arrest, they had been rewarded with special rations like extra sugar, tea, and cigarettes, tickets to the Bolshoi Theater and trips to the Astafievo resort outside the city.
According to Babayaga, the father had often spoken about the merits of perekovka: the remolding of the human soul through forced labor in the Gulag system. Pekkala wondered what he thought now that he was in one. Like many good Communists, the man probably believed that he and his wife were simply victims of some bureaucratic error which would soon be corrected, at which time they could return to their old lives; any suffering he endured now would be rewarded on some distant day of reckoning, when errors were set straight.
Although the parents might have been innocent of any charges brought against them, it did not mean that they had been arrested by mistake. They might have been denounced by someone who wanted their apartment or who envied their marriage or whose seat they had taken on the bus which brought them to work. The accusations were seldom investigated and even the most preposterous stories served as justification for arrest. One man had been arrested for blowing smoke rings which, in the eyes of his accuser, seemed to bear a resemblance to the outline of Stalin’s face.
Pekkala suspected that the reason for their imprisonment had nothing to do with them at all. It was probably only the result of quotas imposed upon the NKVD, ordering them to arrest so many people in each district per month.
It was after the parents went away that Talia came to live with her grandmother. The girl’s real name was Elizaveta, although she never used it and had chosen for herself instead the name of a witch from an old Russian fairy tale. The witch lived in the forest, in a house which turned round in circles at the top of two giant chicken legs. In the fairy tale, the witch was cruel to children, but Pekkala knew the little girl was lucky to have a woman as kind as Babayaga looking after her. Talia seemed to know it, too, and her name became a joke they shared between them.
The first thing Pekkala noticed when he walked into their apartment was what Babayaga called a Patriotic Corner. Here, portraits of Stalin, as well as pictures of Lenin and Marx, were on display. Other pictures, of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Pyatakov, had been removed after the men in question were accused of counter-revolutionary activity and liquidated.
The Stalin corner was always on display, but in a closet by the bathroom the grandmother kept small wooden paintings of saints. Each icon had little wooden doors which could be opened so that the icons could stand on their own. The wooden doors were inlaid with pieces of mother-of-pearl and curls of silver wire which looked like musical notes in the black wood.
Following their arrests, Talia’s parents had been dismissed from the Communist Party and her membership in the Young Pioneers revoked. In spite of this, she continued to wear her uniform, although only inside the building where she lived.
“Here he is, Babayaga,” announced the little girl, swinging the door to their apartment wide.
Babayaga sat at a bare wood table. In one hand, the old woman held an outdated copy of Rabotnitsa, the women’s journal of the Communist Party. In her other hand, she clasped a pair of nail scissors. Her eyes squinting with concentration, she cut out pieces of the paper. In front of her, strewn across the table, were dozens of tiny clippings. “Now then, Pekkala,” she said.
“What are you cutting?”
Babayaga nodded at the clippings. “See for yourself.”
Pekkala glanced at the neat rectangles. On each, he saw the word Stalin, sometimes in large print, others in letters almost too small to read. Nothing else
had been cut out—only that one word. “Are you making a collage?” he asked.
“She’s making toilet paper!” trilled Talia.
The woman put down her scissors. Neatly, she folded the newspaper. Then, with crooked fingers, she gathered up the clippings. Rising from the table, she went over to a wooden trunk in the corner. It was the kind of trunk which might have stored blankets in the summer months, but when Babayaga opened the lid, Pekkala realized that it was entirely filled with paper clippings of Stalin’s name.
“I heard a story,” said Babayaga, as she tossed the clippings in, letting them fall like confetti from her fingertips. “A man was arrested when the police came to search his house and found a newspaper in the toilet. Stalin’s name was in the paper, of course. It is on every page of every paper every day. But because Stalin’s name was on the paper, and because”—she twisted her hand in the air—“of the purpose of the paper, they arrested him. Sent him to Kolyma for ten years.” She smiled at Pekkala, folds of skin crimping her cheeks. “They won’t get ahold of me that way! But just in case”—she pointed to a laminated cardboard suitcase by the door—“I always keep a bag packed. If they do find a reason, at least I’ll be ready to go.”
What saddened Pekkala about this was not that Babayaga kept the suitcase ready but that she believed she would live long enough in custody to make use of whatever it contained.
“I understand,” he said, “why you might want to cut Stalin’s name from the paper, but why are you saving all the clippings?”
“If I throw them away, I could get arrested for that, too,” she replied.
Talia sat between them, doing her best to follow the conversation. She looked from Babayaga to Pekkala and then back to Babayaga again.
Once or twice a week, the old woman sent for Pekkala, knowing that he lived alone.
Babayaga was lonely, too, but less for human contact than for the days before the Revolution, when the world had made more sense to her. Now she lived like an overlapping image seen through a pair of broken binoculars—half in the present, half in the past, unable to bring either into focus.