Julia dug Tata in the ribs. “Say something!”
“Do you know that in 1920, six hundred and forty-five Russians out of every thousand couldn’t read?” began Tata, stammering. “And now the figure is only four hundred and fifty-six.”
“And do you know when you’re not wanted?” barked the fireman and stamped his foot at the girls.
The troika fled outside.
“It’s all your fault!” Julia said and gave Tata a cuff around the head.
It was getting dark over the boulevard, and the sound of a brass band could be heard from behind the trees. Despite the cold weather, the rink on Chistye Prudy was crowded with skaters.
“What do you think? Shall we keep going?” asked Tata, her teeth chattering.
“She said she wasn’t afraid to go ‘round houses on her own,” said Julia to her friend. “Didn’t she?”
“Yes, she did!” Inessa nodded.
Tata was taken aback. “What do you mean ‘on my own’? Vadik said that the three of us should work as a team.”
“She’s a ‘fraidy cat,’” snorted Inessa scornfully. “When we go camping, she’ll probably start crying for her mommy.”
“I’m not afraid!” Tata protested. “I can go ‘round houses on my own!”
“Well, let’s see you do it then,” taunted Julia. “Do you see that house with the turret? Go and find out if there’s anyone living there who can’t read or write.”
There was nothing for it. Hunching miserably, Tata shuffled toward her doom.
At the gate, Tata was met by a man with a ginger toothbrush mustache.
“I know just the person you need,” he said,\ when Tata told him she was looking for anybody who could not read and write. “Come with me.”
He took her across the yard and shown her the entrance door. “Go up one flight of stairs,” he said. “There’s only one apartment. It’s impossible to miss.”
Tata felt like a terrible fool. Luckily, she had a piece of paper with a speech on it, dictated by Julia. Without it, she would have been unable to say a word.
She reached the apartment, rang the doorbell, and when the door opened, she began to read aloud, unable to look the tenant in the eyes.
“Good afternoon, Comrade Tenant!” she said, struggling to decipher her own scribbles. “We are re-pre-sen-ta-tives from the troika of… oh, well, never mind that now…. What’s your profession?”
She looked up and froze.
“My profession? Journalist,” said Uncle Klim, smiling down at her.
“Can you read and write?” Tata heard herself saying in a small voice.
“Of course not!” came a voice from the staircase. It was the man with the ginger mustache. “Mr. Rogov, I sent this young lady up to you on purpose, so she could teach you to read and do your sums.”
Tata wished the ground would swallow her up.
“I’m sorry,” she said, blushing. “I just wanted to know if anybody here needed help learning the alphabet.”
At that moment, Kitty came rushing out. “Here you are!” she cried delightedly, hugging Tata.
“Won’t you come in?” suggested Uncle Klim.
Mother will hit the roof when she finds out I came to see the Rogovs without permission, though Tata helplessly. Nevertheless, she entered the apartment.
“I’ll just come in for a minute to warm up,” she said.
As soon as she stepped inside, Tata realized that Uncle Klim was no revolutionary; he was a bourgeois. His home was a bastion of materialism—there was a mirror, a grand piano, and pictures of some fancy wenches on the walls. With a father like that, no wonder Kitty had some gaps in her education.
Uncle Klim brought in a samovar from the kitchen.
“Kapitolina isn’t here, so we’ll have to fend for ourselves,” he said. He put down a dish of candy on the table. “Help yourself.”
Tata gasped. Her mother always squirreled away sweets, and only once in a blue moon would she nibble on a toffee, letting Tata have half.
Tata reached out her hand to the dish, but at that moment, she remembered how all the children at school had been urged to eat only the right candies—the ones in ideologically sound wrappers which were called things like “Internationale,” “Republican,” or “Lives of the Peasants Then and Now.”
But all Uncle Klim had were candies, their wrappers decorated with a picture of a girl bobbing a curtsey.
Tata looked at Kitty who had already put a candy in her mouth.
“How many can I have?” she asked, despising herself for her lack of character.
“As many as you like,” Uncle Klim said.
Tata drank some delicious tea, ate candies and cookies, and began to feel that she was developing bourgeois tendencies.
“Let’s see what books you have,” she said, looking at Klim’s bookshelves. “Anna Karenina, poetry… some sentimental rubbish! That’s harmful literature. Self-indulgent drivel.”
Uncle Klim looked at her with unfeigned curiosity. “So, what reading do you consider good for the soul?”
“There’s no such thing as a soul,” snapped Tata. Then she added, not entirely truthfully, “I’m interested in politics, not fiction. At the moment, our class is reading Lenin’s speech to the third Young Communist Congress. I don’t suppose you’ve ever inoculated yourself with the germ of revolution.”
Uncle Klim burst out laughing and said that he would write down that phrase in his notebook; it would be useful for one of his articles. This ought to have pleased Tata; after all, it isn’t every day adults want to make a note of your words. But she had an uneasy feeling the conversation was not going well.
“Come on. I want to show you something!” said Kitty, and, grabbing Tata by the hand, she led her into the other room.
Tata was amazed to see that Kitty had a bedroom to herself, and more toys than Tata had ever seen in her life. Kitty reached under the bed, brought out a colored magazine with a picture of a bourgeois lady on the cover, and settled down on the rug.
“Let’s play. You can be her, and I’ll be her.”
One picture in the magazine showed the beach and some scantily clad girls, the other—a bride and groom at a wedding table laden with cakes.
“Let’s eat all those!” said Kitty, beaming. “Yum-yum!”
Tata decided to take charge. She announced that they would play at a communist wedding.
“I’ll be the secretary of a Young Communist organization, and you can be a worker bride who is getting married to… how about this teddy bear?”
Kitty shook her head. “No, he’s too young for me. We bought him yesterday.”
Tata spent a long time trying to pick out a potential husband: Kitty’s rag horse, a wooden duck on wheels, and a progressive worker from the Liberated Labor factory whose portrait was in the paper. Eventually, Kitty agreed to marry a giraffe painted on her bedroom wall.
Tata read out a report about the new way of life in the Soviet Union and presented the newlyweds with a blanket from the women’s union and a pillow from the factory management.
Uncle Klim knocked at the door. “Tata, I’ve been called out on business urgently. Would you mind staying here with Kitty?”
“Of course not,” she said.
He pulled on his coat. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Be good!”
“We will,” promised Tata, a brilliant plan already taking shape in her head.
About thirty journalists were crowded into the press room. They sat around a long table, typewriters at the ready.
“What can it be at this time of night?” muttered Seibert irritably, yawning.