The shop smelled stale and claustrophobic. I dressed quietly. Mitya was still asleep as I inched open the iron door and walked out into the shadowy street.
Later that day Mitya came to the hostel to find me. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me searchingly.
“I’ve brought you something,” he said at last. “We’re going to stay together, aren’t we?”
I peered inside the bag he’d given me. There lay a set of peach-colored North Korean lingerie (size: medium).
15
International Women’s Day
The cleverness of priests overcomes the cleverness of snakes, but the cleverness of women overcomes the cleverness of priests.
On International Women’s Day, I bumped into Yakov with his new girlfriend, inspecting the roses for sale in glass cases outside the station. She was called Katya, a dewey-eyed, sweet girl from Voronezh, who accepted Yakov’s particular view of himself unquestioningly. The flower sellers were doing a busy trade; clusters of men stood waiting, counting out rubles in their hands. It was important to buy flowers for the woman in your life on March 8. You’d never hear the end of it otherwise.
The girls in Room 99 had explained it all to me. On International Women’s Day, Soviet women bask in their menfolk’s love and gratitude. In the morning, as it is a holiday, they lounge in bed instead of going out to work. Their husbands, with much cursing and clattering of pans, cook breakfast for the family; by ten o’clock they proudly serve their wives a charred and shriveled egg. Beside the woman’s plate will be a bunch of flowers and a little gift, a bottle of scent perhaps, or a pair of tights, which she will exclaim over until the children, scarlet with fury, insist that their mother make them their proper breakfast.
Later the real celebrations begin. A Soviet woman’s days are usually taken up with dressing the children and taking them to school, arriving at the office on time, nipping out of work at lunchtime to buy something for dinner, and again in the afternoon—if they can sneak away without being reprimanded—to try and find cough medicine for the little one. They’ll leave work at the stroke of six so they can pop into several more shops to check if there is anything good on offer, and into the market where they see some cheap eggs. They’ll pay the electricity bill at the post office and collect their reheeled shoes from the cobbler, since they’re passing; then they’ll dump their shopping at home and pick up a bucket to fill with those cheap eggs from the market. By the time their husbands have arrived home, they will have given the flat a vacuum, dusted, and put two lots of dirty clothes on to soak (always advisable if you’re washing everything by hand). On International Women’s Day, therefore, they go back to bed after breakfast and sleep like squirrels.
Their husbands, meanwhile, meet up with friends and express their feelings for their wives in the simplest and most sincere way they know: by drinking themselves into a stupor with toasts. “To our beloved ladies—where would we be without them?” Late at night they return home and tell their wives they love them. All in all, it’s not a bad day for the women of the former Soviet Union.
Yakov had spotted the flowers he wanted. “Fourteen of the red carnations, please.”
“Fourteen!” exclaimed Katya, thrilled. “But shouldn’t it be one less or more?” Even numbers of flowers are given only at funerals.
“I have to give a few to the girls in Room 99,” he explained. “There,” he said, dividing up the bunch and handing her five flowers with his warmest smile. “S prazdnikom, congratulations, darling.”
Katya’s face fell and she was quiet as we walked together to the hostel. In Room 99 we found the girls painting their nails dark orange and gossiping.
“S prazdnikom,” we greeted each other. Yakov passed out the carnations, three for each of the girls. “Nina’s making blini,” reported Tanya, taking the flowers for both of them and putting them on the table without much evidence of gratitude. “They’ll be ready soon, so stick around.”
“I certainly will,” said Yakov, squeezing in between Liza Minnelli and Katya and draping an arm around each of them. He was in fine spirits.
Nina opened the door with one foot, talking over her shoulder. “Tell Yuri too,” she called. “Here, golubki, my doves,” she said, advancing with a full frying pan. “Take, eat these blinis, in celebration of being women.”
“You too, Yakov,” added Liza, giving him a look from under her eyelashes that could have fried pancakes. Katya giggled nervously.
Yuri and Emily arrived and we covered blinis with thick sour cream and red caviar and drank champagne, as families did all over Voronezh. Sometimes poverty is hard to measure.
After a bit Tanya started telling us about the affairs she’d had with mafiosi when she was working as a secretary in the police department of her hometown, and about the six parrots in her parents’ apartment who were all called Gosha. Liza Minnelli put on some music and began to dance Liza Minnelli—style, still looking at Yakov, and then he told her she was tense, and took her over to the window and made her visualize a path through a sweet-scented forest with a little breeze… Tanya told some story about going to the forest with Yakov that I can’t remember, but that sent Emily into a fit of silent, breathless laughter, which, as always, made the rest of us laugh. And Katya sat on the bed saying nothing.
“Have some champagne,” Yuri offered. But she refused.
“Oh, give it to me,” Tanya demanded. “I’ve known Katya for years, she’s happy just to sit there like a cabbage.”
Katya bit her lip. “I can’t drink,” she said quaveringly, “as Yakov knows very well. I’m having a baby.”
There was a pause. “We haven’t decided that,” said Yakov, leaving Liza Minnelli by the window.
“What’s to decide? I’m not having an abortion.”
Liza Minnelli glared at them both. “You’re pathetic,” she spat, and walked out.
“Well—” said Yuri into the silence. “Let’s drink to the baby. Congratulations.”
The next time I saw Katya was at the Easter service, a few weeks later. Mitya refused to come; the new religious freedoms had not changed the fact that he, like most Russians, was an atheist. The church, however, was crowded with people of all ages: from the babushkas in black who had worshiped here for decades to the young women half hidden behind scarves, recent and passionate converts. The majority, however, were there just for Easter, which promised to be a spectacle. At midnight would come the great awakening; until then the priests were still in mourning black, the candles were extinguished, the iconostasis gleamed modestly through the murky light. The crowd jostled and shifted with excitement. Everyone had dressed up and bought candles for the service; at home a feast awaited them, with twelve toasts and the kulich, a cake of sweet cream cheese the shape of a sand castle.
“I’d like to be baptized,” Katya said. “Just so that I can cross myself, you understand. I can’t even cross myself if I see something nasty. I think it would be good for the baby, don’t you?”
“Aren’t you nervous about having a baby?”
“A little,” she confessed, frowning. “But my mother’s going to help. We’re going to live with her at the beginning.”
At a quarter to midnight, the priests disappeared behind the iconostasis and reappeared almost immediately in golden robes stiff with embroidery. The bishop of Voronezh stepped out in front, his strong old face thrust forward purposefully. He lit the candles of the few people close to the altar, and in a cloud of incense, followed by his priests, he led the procession once around the interior of the church. The excitement was building. The flame from the bishop’s candle had by now spread from hand to hand back through the crowd; three hundred faces, lit from beneath, glowed and shone in the sudden heat. Those at the front were able to follow the priests, but where we were the crowd heaved and buckled, and twice I watched, unable to move, as a candle passed too close to a tangle of hair. Katya looked over her shoulder at me desperately.