72 The Last Idyll
M
oscow drew us like a magnet all the time—we went there for gossip, news, money . . . Each time, remembering where we were, we raced for the last train back to Kalinin, fearful of getting stranded for an extra night in the forbidden city. Occasionally people offered their seat in the train and talked with me in an oddly compassionate way. M. happened to mention this to Piast, who laughed in his peculiar way (it was like a horse whinnying) and said: "That's because they think she's the one, not you." At that time I wore a leather jacket, and Piast meant that I got all this sympathy because I was taken for an exile. As so many people in Moscow avoided us like the plague precisely on this account, the kindness of these working people was an unexpected bounty. The leather jacket, incidentally, was of secondary importance, since I got the same sort of consideration without it.
In the train M. and I always argued about whether or not to take a cab in Kalinin. I thought it was better to go home from the station on foot and save money for another day's upkeep in our Kalinin refuge. M. took the opposite view: one more day in Kalinin made no difference and we would still have to go back to Moscow again "to arrange things." This was a variation on the constant theme in the last year of his life that things "can't go on like this." We talked on such lines all the time in Kalinin, but there was nothing we could do by way of "arranging things."
Every time our argument was resolved quite simply. There were only two or three horse cabs at the station. This was one of the few remaining forms of private enterprise, but most cabbies had already been forced out of business by taxes and "liquidated as a class." They were immediately besieged by a large crowd and quickly drove off with the most enterprising clients, so we had no choice but to walk home.
On the bridges across the Volga and the Tmaka there was always a biting wind—the wind of exile and persecution. On the edge of the town where we had rented a room the streets were impassable because of mud in the fall, and in the winter we floundered helplessly in the snow. People lived here only if they didn't have to go out to work. . . . M. got very breathless and kept on saying we should have taken a cab. I trudged along behind him.
When we knocked on our door, it was opened by our landlady, Tatiana Vasilievna, a tall, gaunt woman of about sixty. Looking at us sullenly, she asked whether we were hungry. She looked sullen not because we had wakened her in the middle of the night, but because that was just her manner. We told her we had had a meal in Moscow before leaving and were not hungry. She disappeared into her part of the house and came back in a few minutes with a jug of milk and the remains of her own dinner—some fritters, potato and cabbage. That winter she had slaughtered their pig, and she brought us a little pork as well. "Eat," she said, "it's all our own stuff, we didn't have to buy it." Our women never count the cost of their own work—anything that grows in the garden or any livestock they keep is "our own stuff," which they look on as a gift of God.
While we ate, she would stand beside us and ask how we had fared in Moscow, whether we had managed to get work, or permission to return. We talked quietly so as not to waken her other two lodgers,, a married couple from Leningrad—also forced to live beyond the hundredth kilometer—who slept behind a wooden partition which did not quite reach the ceiling. The husband had once been a secretary to Shchegolev, and, after serving his sentence in a camp or in exile, was now sitting things out in Kalinin. When we first knocked on Tatiana Vasilievna's door on the advice of passers-by, the man from Leningrad had come out when he heard our voices, and he at once recognized M. Seeing us vouched for in this way, Tatiana Vasilievna let us have the room—a great stroke of luck for us. Here it is always as difficult—if not more so—to find a room as I imagine it must have been in Western Europe just after the war when all the towns were in ruins after the bombing.
Tatiana Vasilievna lived with her husband, who was a steelworker. She ruled the household with a firm hand, and her husband, a kind and gentle man, gladly left everything to her. To preserve appearances, however, Tatiana Vasilievna always consulted him, and before renting the room to us, she had invited us in for tea and said it would depend on what her husband said. He had no objections and said it was "up to the missus." He and M. soon became good friends and found common ground in their passion for music. On his silver wedding anniversary his sons (they had done very well in the Air Force, and one of them had even been presented to Stalin) had given him a phonograph and a pile of records—most of them Komsomol and army songs then in vogue. The old man was not overimpressed by this "caterwauling," as he called it, and preferred the few records
that M. had managed to get hold of—the Brandenburg Concertos, a piece of church music by Dvorak, some early Italian things and Mussorgski. It was very difficult to obtain records then, and this was a quite haphazard selection, but both M. and our host got enormous pleasure out of them. In the evenings, whenever we were in Kalinin, they held "concerts," while Tatiana Vasilievna served us tea from the samovar with homemade jam. M. always wanted to have the tea brewed in his own way, and he told us that the first thing Shev- chenko always bought when he had any money was a pound of tea. At tea M. generally looked through the newspaper—as a regular factory worker, our landlord was able to subscribe to Pravda.
As we now discovered, people talked much more freely and openly in working-class homes than in intellectual ones in those savage times. After all the equivocations of Moscow and the frantic attempts to justify the terror, we were quite startled to hear the mercilessly outspoken way in which our hosts talked. We had been conditioned to hold our tongues, and once, when M. made some evasive remark, Tatiana Vasilievna looked at him pityingly and said: "What can we do with you? You've all been scared out of your wits."
The parents and grandparents of Tatiana Vasilievna and her husband had also been factory workers and, as she told us with some pride: "We are hereditary proletarians." She remembered the political agitators they had hidden from the police in Czarist times and her comment on them was: "To think of the things they said, and look what's come of it all!" Both she and her husband were scathing about the show trials in Moscow: "See what they're doing in our name," said our host once, throwing down the newspaper in disgust. He understood what was going on as "a fight for power among themselves." They were both furious that all this went on in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat: "They're just making fools of us with that stuff about the working class. They say the power belongs to us, but just try and interfere, and they'd soon show us our place." I told them the theory that classes were "guided" by parties, and parties by leaders. "That's very handy," said the old man. Both of them still clung firmly to their "proletarian conscience."
This family was faced, as always in Russia, by the problem of "fathers and sons." The old couple were not exactly overjoyed by the fact that their children had done so well, and didn't think it would last. As Tatiana Vasilievna put it, "There's lots of us down here at the bottom of the ladder and you're more likely to last, but once you get up top, you can really have a bad fall." The old man went even further—he didn't trust his sons and never said anything in their presence. "They'll go and report you as soon as look at you," he grumbled, "that's what children are like nowadays." But it was only after we'd got to know them really well that we learned what it was that troubled them most about their sons.