Galina was amazed at the change that had taken place in her. Until recently, she had heartily condemned foreign capitalists and their evil ways and been certain that the triumph of communism was all she needed to be happy. But no sooner had she gone to work for Klim than all her former convictions had vanished like smoke. She could not help herself: she realized now that she liked elegant manners, sophisticated tastes, intelligent conversation, and even something as vulgar as money.
Klim did not think himself rich and kept talking about how he could not afford this or that. He had no idea what real poverty was, of how it wore you down, day after day, year after year, to scrimp and save all the time—even when it came to buying bread.
Now, Klim was dreaming of buying an automobile so that he could race Seibert to the main telegraph office with his dispatches. Meanwhile, Galina could not save enough money to buy mittens for her daughter.
“Ask the master for a bit extra,” Kapitolina had advised her. “He’s kind. He won’t refuse.”
But Galina did not want to ask Klim for anything. She needed more than a crumb thrown her way in charity now and again. What she needed was a husband to drag her out of the morass she had fallen into years ago.
She and Klim were now on friendly terms, and Galina began to work toward a private plan. She would help Klim make a brilliant career for himself in Moscow, making herself indispensable so that when his contract with United Press expired, he would marry her and take her and Tata in with him.
“It’s essential that Weinstein singles you out as a ‘friendly journalist,’” she advised Klim. “Then the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs won’t be afraid to help you. In Moscow, everything comes down to connections. If they see you as one of them, you’ll become a real expert on Soviet affairs because you’ll get to talk to all the right people.”
“Even Stalin?” Klim asked.
“Even Stalin.”
Galina surmised that the quickest route to Klim’s heart was through Kitty. He loved his daughter and felt guilty that he was unable to give her a “normal” childhood.
Kitty was desperate to go and play outside with the other children, but Klim would not let her because the neighborhood kids would tease her, calling her “slit-eyed.” However proudly Soviet papers wrote of the “inseparable friendship of nations,” it was a different story in Moscow’s yards and children’s playgrounds. There was too much that was different about Kitty: her race, her clothes, and the foreign expressions she used when she spoke. All this aroused both curiosity and dislike among strangers, and invariably, some child or adult would start to pick on her when she went outside.
The casual racism they encountered every day drove Klim into a rage.
“Idiots,” he would fume. “They don’t understand that difference is a wonderful thing! Kitty knows games they’ve never even heard of. She can tell stories and show them things. She can let them play with her toys, but all they want to do is shove her into a snowdrift and laugh in her face.”
Galina would nod in agreement. When the occasion presented itself, she told Klim that her own daughter, who was twelve, would be happy to play with children of any nationality. She was determined to introduce Kitty to Tata and do everything she could to encourage a friendship between them.
As a matter of fact, Galina was ashamed of her daughter. Tata was ugly and not very bright. Almost all the girls in her class at school were homely—they had grown up in the years of civil war and suffered from poor nutrition and constant bouts of illness. But even compared to them, Tata was puny—she was a whole head shorter than other girls her age, and with her straggly ginger braids, her snub nose, and her ear-to-ear grin, she looked like an underfed gnome.
But the girl’s character was worse still. Tata would have tried the patience of a saint. She was lazy, disrespectful toward her elders, and always answering back. Sometimes, she would come out with such rubbish that it drove Galina to distraction.
Galina had hoped that the school would sort Tata out. However, it turned out that rather than teaching children geography or Russian, schools now taught them to fight the “relics of the Tsarist past.” As Tata saw it, the first of these relics was her mother.
“Your religious belief brings our whole family into disgrace,” she said, imitating the tones of her teacher. “As for keeping cactus plants on the windowsill, it’s a bourgeois habit that should be stamped out once and for all.”
Tata rejected everything her mother loved: comfort, convenience, beauty, and gentleness. Often, Galina would be pushed to breaking point, but even if she beat Tata, there was nothing she could do to knock some sense into the girl.
“You can kill me,” Tata would yell, “but I will never give up on our radiant vision! And you can be sure that my comrades will avenge me!”
What comrades? Who would avenge what? Galina had given her daughter a spanking because Tata had not turned off the light in the lavatory, and at a residents’ meeting, they had been given a public reprimand.
Like her mother, Tata lived in a fantasy world, but whereas Galina dreamed of love, her daughter dreamed of partisan brigades, of heroic deeds, faraway journeys, and world revolution.
Galina had told her daughter that she worked as a secretary in the OGPU. If Tata had found out what her mother actually did, she would have had a fit. At school, it was hammered into them that a good person should be humbly dressed and as simple as a spade. Any attempt to ask spiritual questions or to strive for intellectual development or even good manners was regarded as “bourgeois.” And everything bourgeois was regarded as not only foolish but also evil and treacherous, the mark of a secret desire to destroy everything on earth that was real or alive.
It was out of the question to bring Tata to the house on Chistye Prudy: she had never in her life even seen a private apartment, and Galina was afraid it would be too much of a shock for her daughter. It was better to start gradually.
Tata herself suggested the solution to this problem. When Galina hinted that she knew somebody who had come from Shanghai, Tata jumped up in excitement. “Is he a revolutionary? A real live revolutionary?”
“No,” Galina said. “He’s a journalist.”
“Oh, I see! It’s a state secret.”
Up until quite recently in Tata’s school, they had been discussing the heroic struggle of the Chinese proletariat. The children had held political arguments and debates, learned some words in Chinese, and collected money to help the striking workers. Tata now believed that there were only two sorts of people in China: revolutionaries and imperialists. An imperialist could not have come to the USSR, so Klim Rogov had to be a freedom fighter for the workers.
Galina invented a quite plausible story about how Klim had to hide his true identity to win the trust of the bourgeoisie and bring its secrets to light. Just now, he was working with foreign journalists in Moscow and was obliged, like it or not, to adapt himself to their corrupt tastes.
When Tata found out that Klim Rogov had a little Chinese daughter, she was overjoyed. She loved to boss other children around, but she was too small and plain to be taken seriously by her peers and preferred to play with younger children.
“Mother, can Kitty come and play with me?” Tata whined. “Please? I’ll do the washing-up for a whole week without being asked.”
Galina “grudgingly” agreed to her daughter’s request, but first, she made Tata swear not to pester Uncle Klim with questions about his revolutionary activities.