She was utterly impractical; she was unable to cook or wash and when she went to the shop for some matches, the assistant always hurriedly tore off the coupon for her monthly allowance of sugar or meat.
Children nowadays were quite unlike her charges of that earlier period which she referred to as 'peacetime'. Everything was different, even the games. The 'peacetime' children had played with hoops; they had played diabolo with varnished sticks, and catch with a painted ball kept in a white string-bag; whereas today's children played volleyball, swam the crawl, and played ice-hockey during the winter in skiing trousers, shouting and whistling all the time.
These children knew more than Jenny Genrikhovna about alimony, abortions and dishonestly acquired ration-cards; about senior lieutenants and lieutenant-colonels who had presented other people's wives with the butter, lard and tinned foods they had brought back from the front.
Yevgenia liked to hear the old woman reminisce about the years of her childhood, about her father, and about her brother Dmitry whom Jenny Genrikhovna remembered particularly well; he had had both diphtheria and whooping cough.
Once Jenny Genrikhovna said: 'I can remember the last family I worked for in 1917. Monsieur was Deputy Minister of Finance. He walked up and down the dining-room saying, "Everything's ruined, estates are being burnt, factories have ground to a halt, the currency's collapsed, safes are being robbed." And then the whole family split up – the same as you. Monsieur, Madame and Mademoiselle went to Sweden; my own pupil joined up with General Kornilov as a volunteer; Madame wept and kept saying, "We spend day after day saying goodbye, the end is near." '
Yevgenia smiled sadly and didn't respond.
One evening a police inspector called and handed Jenny Genrikhovna a note. The old woman put on a hat with a white flower and asked Yevgenia to feed the cat; she said she was going first to the police station and then to work and that she'd be back the next day. When Yevgenia came back from work, she found the room in chaos. Her neighbours told her that Jenny Genrikhovna had been arrested.
Yevgenia set off to make inquiries. At the police station she was told that the old woman was being taken to the Far North with a trainload of Germans.
The next day the inspector and the house-manager came round to collect a sealed basket of old clothes and yellowed letters and photographs.
Yevgenia went to the NKVD to find out how to send the old woman a fur coat. The man behind the window asked: 'Are you a German yourself?'
'No, I'm Russian.'
'Go home then. Don't waste people's time by asking unnecessary questions.'
'I was just asking about winter clothes.'
'Don't you understand?' said the man in a terrifyingly quiet voice.
That evening she overheard people talking about her in the kitchen.
'All the same, I don't like the way she's behaved,' said one voice.
'I think she did well,' answered a second voice. 'First she got one foot in the door; then she informed the appropriate authorities and had the old woman taken away; and now she's got the room for herself.'
'It's more a cubby-hole than a room,' said a man's voice.
'She's no fool,' said a fourth voice. 'A man would do all right with her around.'
The cat came to a sad end. First people argued about what to do with him while he sat sleepily and dispiritedly in the kitchen. 'To hell with the damned German,' said the women. Dragin, of all people, said he was willing to provide a share of the cat's food. But without Jenny Genrikhovna the creature wasn't to survive long; he died after being scalded with boiling water by one of the women, perhaps accidentally, perhaps not.
24
Yevgenia enjoyed her solitary life in Kuibyshev.
Never had she felt such a sense of lightness and freedom – even though she still had no residence permit or ration-card and could only eat one meal a day with her coupons for the canteen. She would think all morning about the moment she would enter the canteen and be given her plate of soup.
She seldom thought of Novikov during this period. She thought more often of Krymov, almost constantly in fact – but with no real warmth.
Her memories of Novikov did not torment her; they just flared up and faded away. Once, though, far away down the street, she saw a tall soldier in a long greatcoat and thought it was Novikov. Her knees went weak and she found it hard to breathe; she felt quite disorientated by her sudden feeling of happiness. A moment later she realized her mistake and at once forgot her excitement. And then during the night she suddenly woke up and thought: 'But why doesn't he write? He knows the address.'
She lived alone, without Krymov or Novikov or any of her relatives. She sometimes thought – mistakenly – that this freedom and loneliness of hers was happiness.
Kuibyshev at this time was the location of many of the Moscow People's Commissariats, newspaper offices and other establishments. It was the temporary capital, and here had come much of the life of Moscow -diplomats, the Bolshoy ballet, famous writers, impresarios and foreign journalists.
All these thousands of people lived in cramped little rooms and hotels, and yet carried on with their usual activities. People's commissars and the heads of important enterprises planned the economy and gave orders to their subordinates; extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassadors drove in luxurious cars to receptions with the architects of Soviet foreign policy; Ulanova, Lemeshev and Mikhailov delighted the audiences at the ballet and the opera; Mr Shapiro, the representative of the United Press Agency, asked the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, awkward questions at press conferences; writers wrote radio broadcasts or articles for national and foreign newspapers; journalists wrote up material gathered from hospitals into articles on the war.
But the everyday life of these people from Moscow was quite transformed. Lady Cripps, the wife of the extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador of Great Britain, ate supper in a hotel restaurant in exchange for a meal-coupon, wrapped up the left-over bread and sugar-lumps in newspaper and carried them up to her room; representatives of international news agencies pushed their way through the crowds of wounded at the market, discussed the quality of home-grown tobacco and rolled sample cigarettes – or else stood and waited, shifting their weight from foot to foot, in the long queue for the baths; writers famous for their hospitality discussed world politics and the fate of literature over a glass of home-distilled vodka and a ration of black bread.
Huge institutions were squeezed into cramped little buildings; the editors of the most important Soviet newspapers received visitors at tables where, after office hours, children prepared their lessons and women did their sewing. There was something strangely attractive in this coming together of the weighty apparatus of State with the bohemianism of the evacuation.
Yevgenia Nikolaevna had considerable difficulties over her residence permit. The head of the design office where she had got a job, Lieutenant-Colonel Rizin, a tall man with a soft voice, began complaining from the very first day about the responsibility he was assuming in taking on someone still without a permit. He gave Yevgenia a statement confirming her new post and sent her to the police station.
There a police officer took Yevgenia's passport and documents and told her to come back in three days' time.
When the day came, Yevgenia walked along the half-dark corridor. Everyone waiting their turn had that look on their faces peculiar to people who have come to a police station to enquire about passports and residence permits. She went up to the window. A woman's hand with dark red fingernails held out her passport and a calm voice announced: 'Your application has been refused.'