Chinese traders waved bags and briefcases sewn from patchworks of colored scraps, calling, “Buy, buy! Latest fashion!”
“Fresh pi-i-ies! Get yer fresh pies he-e-ere!” called a woman wearing a dirty apron over her heavy cloth coat. Nearby, students fumbled in their pockets for a few kopecks to buy something to eat, dancing from leg to leg and shivering in the cold.
Old women measured out sunflower seeds with wooden tumblers and poured them into their customers’ pockets. This was a risky trade: the citizens of Moscow consumed enormous amounts of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells all over streets, and the Moscow Soviet had recently threatened to impose huge fines on anyone selling the snack. But as usual in Russia, the severity of the official laws was tempered by the casual attitude of the populace toward them.
Magda snapped some pictures of various wares spread out on oilcloths on the ground—children’s books, underwear, cigarette lighters, and strings of beads. It was frustrating not to have a movie camera to film the street barbers who shaved their customers’ with lightning speed; something she could never capture with a photograph.
Soon she came across a very exotic sight: braids of hair of all colors—from bluish-black to auburn and golden. These days, peasant women from the villages cut off their hair to sell to fashionable city women to make artificial chignons.
A young street urchin in a torn hat with earflaps ran up to Magda, stretching out a bony hand, blue with cold. This was just what she had been looking for. She reached into her bag and took out a raisin bun.
“Here,” she told the boy. “Take this!”
The boy, amazed at this unheard-of generosity, took a step backward and sat down in the snow. Then he tucked the bun under his shirt, put his fingers in his mouth, and gave a piercing whistle. A moment later, a whole flock of children dressed in indescribable rags had gathered around Magda.
She began to hand the children some of the treats she had brought beforehand in the café of the Metropol Hotel. They chattered excitedly and tugged at her skirt. The scene attracted some openly disapproving glances from passersby.
A man in a sheepskin coat came up and tried to explain something to Magda, but one of the street children lobbed a piece of broken brick at his back. He spat angrily and went on his way.
Magda took out a carefully prepared “crib” and read aloud in Russian: “I would like to find out how you live. I want to take photographs of your house.”
The boy in the hat with earflaps grabbed Magda’s arm. “Come on.”
They set off with the mob of street children streaming off after them. The children led Magda to a crumbling tower in the fortress wall. Here, street cleaners were piling up pieces of ice chipped from the pavements, together with trash and horse manure, into an enormous mound of waste. After clambering over the mound, Magda found herself facing a small opening covered with a metal grating, leading into a cellar. Grayish blue smoke drifted out from inside.
A girl of about nine pulled away the grating and was first to dive into the damp, black hole.
The boy in the hat with earflaps poked Magda in the back. “Go!”
She looked around at the children who smiled back at her. Looking at their unkempt figures, their runny noses, and filthy faces, she shuddered, seized with a painful sense of pity. What lay in store for these wretched youngsters?
Bending double, Magda squeezed her way into the damp-smelling crawl space, but her clothes caught on something. She lost her balance and went sprawling onto a heap of broken bricks.
I was coming out of the store with a bag of groceries when suddenly a street urchin with a crutch threw himself under my feet. He fell into the snow and sent up a howclass="underline" “Help! I’m being trampled underfoot!”
While I was helping him to his feet and apologizing, his little friends grabbed my groceries and ran off in all directions, and the invalid suddenly lifted up his crutch like a cudgel and came straight at me.
“What did I just hear you say about the Soviet authorities?” he yelled. “Citizens, this bourgeois scum should have got what’s coming to him long ago. He just called Lenin a bastard!”
The lad took me for a Nepman and thought that I would take fright and run off. I explained to him that he had just disgraced his country horribly in front of a foreign journalist. Now I would have to write a report about how workers in the Soviet Union were prevented from going about their business and were even subject to attacks by children.
The young defender of Lenin was hugely embarrassed to hear this. “Tell you what. You come back to our base, and we’ll give you your stuff back,” he promised, leading me after his fugitive comrades.
As we walked back to his den, he introduced himself to me as Tsar Pest and told me a little about his life. His parents had taken to drink, and he had refused to go into an orphanage because, as he explained it, all those places were run by “bourgeois do-gooders.”
Until a year or so ago, Tsar Pest had earned his keep by running around attics and rooftops stealing clothes and bed linen from washing lines, but one day, somebody had caught him at it and thrown him down a flight of stairs, breaking his leg. The break had healed badly, and he had walked with a crutch ever since.
He had earned his nickname thanks to his cocky attitude, his belligerent character, and his extraordinary love of power. He told me that he had more than a dozen “minions” over whom he enjoyed absolute authority. They aided and abetted all his criminal activities and were obliged to bring him something valuable every day. In exchange, he allowed them to sleep in a cellar under the Kitai Gorod wall and protected them from the police or from other street gangs.
To cut a long story short, today, I made the acquaintance of an underage feudal lord.
Tsar Pest led me to the cellar where his “minions” were hiding out. Their lair was like the home of prehistoric cave dwellers: broken brick battlements above and a stone floor below covered with straw, and on the walls, smutty drawings done in lamp black. Right in the middle of the floor stood an iron stove and a big chest labeled “Froot” into which the kids put their catch at the end of every day.
Tsar Pest kept his word and gave me back my groceries, except those that had already been eaten. He also offered me his girlfriend, a hideous girl of about twelve who was clearly pregnant. All the time I was in the den, the girl was sitting next to the stove draped in an old theater poster, sniffing at some faded artificial forget-me-nots plucked from a funeral wreath.
When I turned down his girlfriend, Tsar Pest showed me some women’s clothing that was clearly not of Soviet provenance.
“Buy some of this, and you can give it to your girl,” he said.
In the pile he offered me, I noticed a battered rust brown Kodak camera case—and then it struck me: I was looking at the belongings of Magda Thomson. I recognized the dress she had been wearing on the day I met her.
When I asked Tsar Pest where he had found the stuff, he flared up and told me to mind my own business. He didn’t need to tell me though. It was quite clear that he had robbed poor Magda.
I decided it would be a good idea to return her possessions, so I proposed playing Tsar Pest at cards for them. He agreed, quite unaware of what a devious opponent he was about to face. As a young man, I had quite a passion for card tricks, and in my time, I mastered a few techniques that would earn me a battering with a candelabra if I ever tried them out in a casino.