Shadow Pass (16 page)

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.

“Off you go now.” Babayaga rested her hand on her granddaughter’s forehead. “Time for bed.”

When the little girl had gone, Pekkala sat back in his chair. “I
have a present for you, Babayaga.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two small votive candles and set them down in front of her. He had bought the candles at the Yeliseyev store on his way home that day, knowing that she liked to burn them when she prayed beside her icons.

Babayaga picked one up, smelled it, and closed her eyes. “Beeswax,” she said. “You have brought me the good ones. And now I have a present for you.” She went into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room only by a curtain of wooden beads, and reappeared a moment later with a battered brass samovar. Steam puffed from the top as if from the smokestack of a miniature train. She returned to the kitchen to fetch one glass in an ornate brass holder and a small, chipped mug, which Pekkala recognized from its pattern of interwoven birds and flowers to have been made by the old firm of Gardner’s. The firm had been founded in Russia by an Englishman, and Pekkala had not seen or heard anything of it since the Bolsheviks took over. The mug was quite likely, he imagined, Babayaga’s most treasured possession. She set before him a dish of rock sugar and another dish in which lay the twisted black grains of smoked tea. Laying out the tea was done as a gesture of politeness, allowing the guest to strengthen the tea if he thought it was not brewed correctly. But, out of politeness, Pekkala did not touch it. He merely bent down and breathed in the slightly tarlike scent of pine-smoked tea, which he doubted Babayaga could afford.

She poured him a cup, taking the strong-brewed tea from the pot at the top of the samovar and diluting it with the water stored in the lower section. Then she handed it to him. “That glass belonged to my husband,” she said.

She told him that every time, and every time Pekkala took the glass from her with the reverence it deserved.

Babayaga produced a lemon from the pocket of her apron, and a small silver knife, with which she carved a slice and held it
out to him, her thumb pressing the sliver to the blade. And when he had taken it, she held the blade in the steam coming out of the samovar, so that the silver would not tarnish from the lemon juice.

“The Tsar was very fond of pine-smoked tea,” said Pekkala, squeezing the lemon into his drink.

“Do you know what people say, Inspector? Those of us who can still remember the way things used to be? They say the spirit of the Tsar sees through that emerald eye of yours.”

Pekkala reached up to his collar. Slowly, he folded it back. The eye came into view like that of a sleeper awakening. “Then he must be looking at you now.”

“I should have worn a nicer dress.” She smiled and her face turned red. “I miss him. I miss what he meant to our people.” Then her smile suddenly vanished. “But not her! Not the Nemka! She has much to answer for.”

Pekkala traveled to the mansion of Mathilde Kschessinska. He did not present himself at the front door, which might have drawn attention. Instead, he went around to the quiet street at the back of the mansion and let himself in through the gate which the Tsar himself used when he came to visit Madame Kschessinska
.

The private door, just beyond the gate, was overgrown with ivy, making it difficult to spot. Even the brass doorbell had been overpainted green to camouflage it
.

Pekkala glanced back to the street, to see if anyone had seen him come in, but the street was empty. A rain shower had passed through about an hour before. Now a pale blue sky stretched overhead. He pressed the doorbell and waited
.

It was only a few seconds before Madame Kschessinska appeared. She was short and very slight, with a softly rounded face and bright, inquisitive eyes. Her hair was wrapped in a towel in the manner of a turban and
she wore a man’s silk brocade smoking jacket, which probably belonged to the Tsar. “I heard the gate creak,” she began, but then she breathed in sharply, realizing it was not the Tsar. “I thought you were somebody else.”

“Madame Kschessinska,” he said, “I am Inspector Pekkala, the Tsar’s personal investigator.” He reached up to his lapel and turned it over, revealing the badge of his service
.

“The Emerald Eye. Nicky has often spoken about you.” Suddenly she looked afraid. “Oh, no. Has something happened? Is he all right?”

“He is perfectly well.”

“Then what brings you here, Inspector?”

“May I come in?”

She hesitated for a moment, then swung the door wide and stood back
.

Pekkala followed her into a well-lit house, on whose walls hung numerous framed programs and posters from the Imperial Ballet. In the front hall, peacock feathers sprouted from a brass umbrella holder like a strange bouquet of flowers. Tucked in among the feathers, Pekkala noticed one of the Tsar’s walking sticks, throated with a band of gold engraved with the Imperial crest
.

They sat in her kitchen, which looked out onto a small garden where a willow tree draped its leaves over a wooden bench
.

She served him coffee and toast with apricot jam
.

“Madame Kschessinska,” Pekkala began, but then words failed him and he gave her a desperate look
.

“Inspector,” she said, reaching across the table and touching the tips of her fingers to the gnarled bumps of his knuckles, “whatever this is, I am not in the habit of killing messengers who bring bad news.”

“I am glad to hear you say it,” replied Pekkala. Then he explained why he had come. When he got to the end of his story, he pulled out a handkerchief and wiped drops of sweat off his forehead. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I would never have troubled you with this if I could have found a way to refuse.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kschessinska. “She knows about me. She has known about me for years.”

“Yes, I believe she does. It is also a mystery to me.”

For a moment, Kschessinska seemed lost in thought. Then she brushed her hand across her mouth as an idea occurred to her. “How well do you get along with the Tsarina?”