The Girl from the Metropol Hotel

by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

  Victory celebration in Moscow.

  The Officers' Club

  I spent more and more time on the streets.

  The first time I ran away I must have been seven, soon after the victory.

  In early June I spent several days in the wild. I didn’t sleep in Strukovsky Garden: around there, all the usable spots had been defiled; through the cracks in the band shell I could see feces and mold. But I did find a spot—in the director’s office at the Officers’ Club.

  Along with other kids, I had learned long since to get in past the guards of the Officers’ Club to watch movies and learned to collect bread crumbs from the club’s bread wagon after the driver and the cook took the last crate to the kitchen and the horse was resting with one hoof on tiptoe—that was when we, hungry children, climbed inside the wagon, where the smell of bread was indescribable, and scooped up crumbs off the floor.

  The club’s inner yard and main building were surrounded by sheds and garages. Guards chased away pigeons by throwing them bread crusts that landed on the tin roof of the shed and got stuck there, so the pigeons couldn’t swallow them. Children from the nearby courtyards climbed onto that burning hot roof to look for dried crusts.

  The only way to get to the roof was by standing on tiptoes on the edge of a huge barrel of tar. I don’t know who left that barrel there—it was a perfect trap for hungry children. The bread crusts! For me, hunger was stronger than danger, and I always waited for the moment when the boys were not circling the barrel.

  In the summer, the tar melted, seeped through the cracks, and formed an ugly black puddle around the barrel. Naturally I landed in it—somebody had pushed me.

  I sat in the disgusting mess, trying not to cry. On all sides brats were squealing with laughter. I couldn’t get up and only waved my hands slowly, watching them turn into black glass. A passerby finally unglued me, swearing the whole time. Accompanied by wild laughter I dragged myself home, trying not to touch my hair. At home, my poor relatives scrubbed me off the best they could, in the absence of soap or hot water. But my panties were ruined, and it was my only pair. I learned to tie my camisole between my legs.

  All in all, by the standards of the time I had a relatively normal childhood. Courtyard friendships; hide-and-seek; cops-and-robbers. When we weren’t running around wildly, we buried “treasures,” placing shards of colored glass into a hole in the ground, covering them with a piece of clear glass, and then piling some dirty courtyard sand on top. We hunted for other kids’ “treasures,” guarding our own. In the courtyard I was mocked for my Moscow expressions, all those “the fact is” and “as you can see.”

  My closest and dearest companion was a dog, Damka. We would roll around, I would hug her skinny neck, we would jump and chase each other, or I would throw her a stick. But one day she ran away from me at a fantastic speed, dragging what looked like a bloodied hair comb: the kitchen workers at the club must have thrown away a rack of ribs. I ran after her, but for the first time she snarled at me. The time for jokes was over; Damka took food seriously, like the rest of us.

  I tried to convince my aunt and grandmother to “give birth to at least a puppy, or at the very least a kitten.”

  One winter my dream came true, and I brought home a famished cat. It was New Year’s Eve. The cat was sitting on the landing, waiting, meowing, and I let her in. Our kerosene lamp was burning on that special occasion, and the light was indescribably festive and beautiful. I was hugging my little Mura, who was meowing timidly. We waited till midnight to fetch the neighbors’ trash, then celebrated with what they had discarded. The cat ate everything, it turned out, even herring heads and potato peels. After the meal, Mura and I walked in a circle around our Christmas tree: a fir branch stuck into a tin can. The cat walked clumsily on her skinny hind legs, and I held her by her front paws and belted out, “Beautiful dancers of a lovely cabaret,” in harmony with the army major’s gramophone. We had a holiday!

  Then she meowed to be let out and ran off, never to return.

  • • •

  My whole life took place in the summer. Several times I actually managed to climb onto that cursed roof and find a bread crust. I couldn’t jump down because of the barrel, so I dashed through the club’s courtyard, past the guards. For us, the club offered an irresistible draw: in the evenings they showed trophy American movies with Errol Flynn and Deanna Durbin.

  We watched every movie, hiding between showings behind the doors and especially in the drapes. One night I hid after the last show and stayed until everyone left. Then I flew down the empty hallways, as though in a dream, looking for a place to sleep, and found one: the director’s office, where the felt couch scratched my cheek all night. I was about to fall asleep, but the night was very bright—it was June, and suddenly my sleepy eyes fell on the picture on the opposite wall: Marshal Voroshilov and Stalin appraising the troops in Red Square. For the first time I was terrified by a work of art.

  Marshal Voroshilov and Joseph Stalin (second and third from the right) presiding over the May Day parade in 1926.

  The Courtiers' Language

  During the day, like many unsupervised children, I begged in the streets. I tolerated hunger reasonably well; we’d been starving for a long time. Granny lay in bed swollen like a mountain, although according to my aunt she did go occasionally to the port to help unload cargo ships, for which she received a bottle of raw spirits that could be exchanged for bread. Aunt Vava once brought home a handful of beet salad; another time it was plum jam, which I licked off her palm all at once like a little animal, understanding that it was my one and only chance to try it. For decades the smell of plums made me ill.

  Our power had been shut off, but from time to time we managed to buy kerosene for the lamp and Primus stove. At the store we were helped after everyone else, for some reason, and had to wait for hours. Since then, I have associated the smell of kerosene with light and happiness. We could cook something on our stove. We could light the lamp, and the solemn, golden light flooded our room from the back of the couch.

  I could tolerate hunger, but I couldn’t tolerate lack of freedom. Fearing for me—a little girl from an educated family out and about in a city full of riffraff, not to mention a completely wild courtyard—my aunt and grandmother explained that gypsies had stolen a child, and under this pretext they forbade me to go out. I immediately disappeared, returning days later with an innocent explanation: I had been stolen by gypsies, and recovered by the police.

  Aunt and Granny exchanged worried remarks over my head, using the so-called courtiers’ language, the secret code of the underground revolutionaries. They didn’t know that I had long since deciphered it. In that code, consonants were divided into two groups, and letters from the first group were substituted for letters from the second group; same with the vowels. So I could understand all their worries and fears, their plans and intentions, their bitter laments. But I didn’t care, didn’t believe them, and ignored their fears; my goal was to escape.

  And that is how I spent the warm months of the war—flying about the city, begging, posing as an orphan: “No mommy, no daddy, please help.”

  The Bolshoi Theatre

  One evening I was circling the Opera House. Inside, the lights were shining. A festive crowd was flowing in, and I could hear beautiful music. Plus it was warm inside. I couldn’t get in through the main entrance, but I noticed a steep metal ladder that hugged the opera’s wall—it must have been used by the light technicians and other staff.

  Outside, it was drizzling and getting dark, with black clouds filling the sky. I started climbing the slippery ladder, barefoot, trying not to look down. Reaching the top, at least five floors above the ground, I rapped on the metal door: “No mommy, no daddy, please, Comrade, take pity on an orphan! I’m so cold, just five little minutes, just to listen to the music, please, dear Comrade . . .” The dark abyss and freezing wind must have added a note of genuine
despair to my stock number: the door opened up and the kindly lighting technician allowed me into the warm darkness, flooded with the sounds of the orchestra.

  I found myself on a little balcony next to the hot, smelly lights. Right below me, so close I could touch it, something magical, bright, and colorful was taking place—there was a palace among fake lilac bushes, with a balcony directly underneath mine, and on that balcony a beautiful pink lady was singing in a gentle voice, “My dear friend, I’m listening . . .” That night I listened to Rossini’s Barber of Seville, performed by the evacuated Bolshoi Theatre. The next night I climbed the ladder again and rapped on the metal door, howling and frozen in my sundress, but wasn’t let in.

  View of the Opera House in Kuibyshev.

  I crawled back home like a punished dog. At least it was warm there. My whole life I remembered that duet between Rosina and Count Almaviva.

  Later, when I came home from my wanderings, Granny and Aunt no longer interrogated me, and pretended to believe my tales about gypsies. They were probably relieved that I was alive and didn’t want to scare me away for good with questioning. Some nights they fed me cabbage soup, made from crushed leaves that Vava picked off the ground at the marketplace at the end of the day. “That’s for your goat, right?” the seller women asked her, probably trying not to get upset. My aunt, a recent student of the military academy, burst into tears over those dirty, crushed cabbage leaves. Late at night, as usual, I was sent to the kitchen to retrieve our neighbors’ garbage.

  Down the Ladder

  One day I must have spun such wild tales that after a whispered conversation in their secret language, Aunt and Granny came to a decision and immediately enforced it, locking the door from the inside and leaving the key in the keyhole.

  They did it for a good reason. At a certain age every girl had to take her place in the courtyard’s hierarchy. This usually involved being passed around behind the sheds. The older girls didn’t discuss the process openly, only exchanged hints, pointing with their chins in that fearful direction.

  I understood nothing. I didn’t sense the danger, not yet. As thin as a skeleton, I was pummeled regularly but not yet used in that way. With time the older kids would have subjected me to the same fate, even if only to teach me a lesson, so that I would learn my place.

  Suddenly denied freedom, I danced and sang across the room over to the door, ostensibly to demonstrate my prowess to my bedridden grandmother, and tried to grab the key—but was stopped by a pair of loving hands.

  I thought for a bit, then stepped out on the balcony and looked down. We lived on the third floor—I couldn’t jump. Terribly scared, I reached for the next balcony and then for the fire escape—a rickety worm-eaten ladder with missing rungs. Hanging by my fingertips, I felt my way down to the last rung. Five feet above the ground, the ladder ended. I flopped on my backside, then sprang back up. I was free! It was a bright, sunny day. I was prepared: I had my entire wardrobe on—camisole, sundress, plus a cotton vest, given to me by a kindly neighbor who also occasionally fed me bread.

  Trembling with happiness, I strolled under our balcony, until I saw my aunt’s completely gray head (she was thirty-two). I stared into her huge, dark blue eyes. “How did you get down?” she shouted, trying to gain some time, hoping that Granny would somehow crawl down the stairs on her swollen legs and catch me. “Jumped off the balcony!” I lied, just in case, and skipped off.

  For good, as it turned out. I saw them again nine years later: I was eighteen, and they didn’t recognize me. “Who is it?” my tiny grandmother whispered.

  The terrible guilt I felt.

  Literary Sleep-Ins

  In the winters before my escape, my grandmother was educating me and keeping me from running away using her special talent: she could recount from memory the Russian classics, word for word.

  A graduate of the elite Bestuzhev Institute for Young Ladies, my grandmother possessed a fantastic memory. Her former husband, my grandfather Nikolai Yakovlev, was a famous professor of linguistics who knew eleven languages. But I, their offspring, didn’t even attend grade school, for lack of shoes. From April to October I ran barefoot, and winters I stayed indoors. Still, I learned how to read—from the newspapers that our neighbors left in the trash. I could recite from memory excerpts from my grandmother’s favorite bedside tome, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Short Course, in which she had underlined the most obnoxious lies. The whole book was covered in red pencil.

  There were two other books in the house: A Room in the Attic by Vanda Vasilevskaya, which left no impression, and a biography of Cervantes by Bruno Frank. In that book, there was a description of a crystal decanter with red wine standing on a table in what I remember was a prison cell. Red shadows fell on the white cloth. Nothing like that existed in my world. There was no red and no white. But still it was present in my childhood life—that’s what matters. I remember those shadows! And that tablecloth, white and thick like old snow, with heavy folds along the corners. I could see that scene as though I lived in it. The room with thick wooden beams. Small, low windows aglow from the setting sun. Green fields outside. That’s how I imagined, for some reason, a Spanish prison.

  My grandmother also owned a volume of Mayakovsky’s poems—probably in memory of his courtship, of his youthful love for her, when he called her baroquely the Blue Duchess, in the spirit of reigning poetic style. Roman Jakobson had brought Mayakovsky to the Moscow Linguistic Circle, introducing him as a genius he had discovered. There Mayakovsky met with my grandmother for the second time. Before that he had courted her when they were both teenage members of the Party. At the circle, according to family legend, Mayakovsky proposed, and my grandmother refused him. And by 1914 she and Nikolai Yakovlev already had a daughter, my aunt Vava.

  When Granny returned to Moscow in 1956, after her rehabilitation, her sister Asya, who had also returned from the labor camp and exile, asked her: “So, you refused to marry a poet and married a professor instead. How did that work out?”

  Our literary sleep-ins took place in the wintertime.

  Our usual position was in bed, Granny towering over my bone-thin body like a mountain—so swollen from hunger was she. We covered ourselves with every rag we owned, and for days on end she recited classics from memory, primarily Gogol—Dead Souls, Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. She had one weakness: she lavished too much attention on the descriptions of meals and innocently inserted mysterious items like borscht and bacon. When she explained what they were, I salivated like Pavlov’s dog.

  She also read Gogol’s “The Portrait” and Viy, which scares me to this day. “The Portrait,” a story of a young artist compelled by a mysterious portrait to sell his talent, left me dazzled. To this day I considered its subject, bartering one’s gift for the worldly glory, the most important among humanity’s collective tales.

  My Performances. Green Sweater

  In the summertime I begged. I didn’t beg by holding out a hand on street corners, no. I performed, like Édith Piaf.

  Usually I looked for a quiet spot near the sheds, where children and grandmas liked to congregate, and then began my program. They were cheesy, lowbrow numbers beloved by washerwomen and lumpen proletarians: “In a Clearing near School”; “Along the Dewy Track”; “On Berlin’s Cobblestones.” Tango tunes I skipped; the most popular tango of the time, “The Tired Sun,” I hated with a passion. Every night they played that record in Strukovsky Garden; to its sound, the wounded shuffled over to dance, the village women peddled flowers at the gate, the endless sunsets finished burning, the tired sun indeed set behind the Volga, and later we would step over flower heads stuck on a wire. For a long time I racked my brain—why the wire? That’s how they kept broken daisies together.

  (I was so fed up with “The Tired Sun” that I wrote it into the script for an animated film by Yuri Norstein, The Fable of Fables, about our shared postwar childhood. That film is bro
adcast every year on Victory Day.)

  Then, like a parrot, I rattled off the record that our neighbor, the army major, played every night in his room. First the “Scottish Drinking Song”—“Come fill, fill, my good fellow!”—followed by the finale, the potpourri from the musical Silva.

  Beautiful dancers of a lovely cabaret,

  You were created for pleasure alone.

  To you the doubts of love are unknown.

  I usually stumbled on “unknown,” but still.

  If my repertory ran out but the circle of children and grandmas seemed numerous enough, I quickly switched gears to recite Gogol’s “The Portrait.” The children were stunned. One time, someone gave me a slice of black bread. Another, a shy little boy approached and said his mama wanted to see me. Instinct warned against visiting strange apartments, but the other children were curious, too, and talked me into going. We all walked up the dark stairs, a door opened, and a woman with a face wet with tears offered me a green open cardigan that I put on immediately. Everyone rejoiced at my acquisition and looked me over with pride, as if I were their successful creation.

  I never “toured” that courtyard again. We avoid places where we’ve endured pain, but the opposite is true, too. Extreme kindness can be repaid only with ingratitude. What if the miracle won’t repeat itself and life’s greatest consolation—remembering the kindness shown to us—disappears? Those little faces won’t be there, and the green sweater won’t be offered. This way, they are always with me. The crowd of hungry children, the dark stairs, the open door, the outstretched hand, and someone’s mother, crying, her face invisible against the light.