Without a word, Klim grabbed the bundle and took it back up the stairs.
“Acquisition of material objects is like a swamp!” Tata cried. “It swallows you up! You live among all your vases and serviettes and don’t even notice how your own mind is in the grip of a hostile psychology!”
“Go home now, please,” Klim said to her over his shoulder. “And don’t dare show your face here again.”
“Daddy!” yelled Kitty, rushing after him.
Klim let her into the apartment and slammed the door.
The apartment had been completely ransacked. Cinema posters were torn off the walls, curtains pulled away from the windows, and books lay all over the floor. It looked as if it there had been a raid by the police.
Klim felt himself shaking with fury at Tata. The girl needed to see a nerve doctor—there was clearly something wrong with her!
All the same, it occurred to him that a twelve-year-old girl should not be walking around Moscow on her own so late at night.
He went out to the stairs and called out to her, “Tata!”
But she was no longer on the stairs, and there was no sign of her in the yard either.
Klim went back to the apartment. Taking the sniveling Kitty in his arms, he sat down with her on the divan.
“I know you wanted the best for me,” he said. “But look around you: are things better now or worse than they were?”
Kitty put her arms around his neck and burst into loud sobs. “Do you want me to go and stand in the corner?”
“No, I want you to come and wash your face and then go to bed. You didn’t raid your own room, did you?
“No-o! I didn’t want to give away my horses.”
“Well, you see! You mustn’t take other people’s things without asking them.”
Kitty nodded. “I understand. We mustn’t take any of your things, but we can take Elkin’s things. He’s a Nepman and a criminal element.”
“Who told you that? Is this Tata again?”
“Ye-es…”
“Don’t listen to her.”
Klim did not know what to do. Kitty was surrounded on all sides by barbarism and stupidity. Whether she liked it or not, it was starting to affect her.
He had to put a stop to the friendship with Tata. The raiding of the apartment was the thin end of the wedge. The next thing he knew, there would be denunciations to the authorities or worse.
When Tata got home, her mother was already asleep, and she was able to climb unnoticed into her wardrobe. The next morning, she did not breathe a word about what had happened but ran off to school.
She was furious with Uncle Klim; he had no right to inflict such damage on Kitty’s young mind!
If Tata were an adult, she would have insisted on removing Kitty from her father’s care and having her brought up by the Young Pioneer organization. Then Kitty could grow up to be a true Bolshevik.
But what could Tata do now as a little girl who had not even been accepted into the Pioneers?
After classes, there was a meeting of the school editorial committee, and Tata was given the task of putting together a Stengazeta, a newspaper in the form of a poster, to mark thirty-five years of literary work by Maxim Gorky.
She was entrusted with a large piece of white paper and some watercolor paints—hugely precious items.
“Look after those,” Vadik warned her. “That’s the last we have. If you do the job well, I’ll give a good report on you to the Young Pioneers.”
Tata promised to be as careful as she could.
As soon as she got home, she set to work. She wrote out the title “To Gorky from the Young Pioneers,” and neatly pasted some articles by school reporters below it. It looked very good indeed.
There was a little room left in the bottom left-hand corner, and Tata decided to use it to make an important suggestion:
We, Pioneers and inovators, suggest that instead of greeting one another with the words “Good moning” we should use the greeting “Good Lenin.”
Comrade Tata Dorina is collecting signaturs in support of this reform.
The door opened, and Tata’s mother came in. She grabbed Tata by the collar, dragged her out from behind the table, and smacked her hard upside the head.
“What did you do that for?” wailed Tata.
“I’ll give you ‘what for,’ you little brat!” her mother yelled. “Tell me why you ransacked the Rogov’s apartment?”
Tata took a step back. “Uncle Klim is a class traitor…” she began in a trembling voice. “He’s supposed to be educated, but he has portraits of filthy bourgeois all over his walls—”
“I’ll give you ‘filthy bourgeois’!”
Her mother looked around her, eyes wild. Her gaze fell on the poster.
“No, Mother, please!” squealed Tata, but it was too late. Her mother tore the poster to pieces, threw them to the floor, and stamped on them. “That’ll teach you to touch things that don’t belong to you! Out of my sight!”
Tata darted into the wardrobe. She heard her mother collapse onto the bench and weep bitterly.
“You fool!” her mother said in between sobs. “I hope you’re satisfied! He said to me he won’t let Kitty come to our house anymore because you’re a bad influence.”
“What?” Tata, in her astonishment, peeked out of the wardrobe.
“Shut that door this minute!” shouted her mother. “Or I swear, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you!”
Tata buried her face in the mattress. How could she go to school now? What would she tell them about the poster?
And what a beast Uncle Klim had turned out to be! An informer and a villain! How could he forbid children to play with one another? Didn’t he feel sorry for his own daughter?
Tata felt that Kitty had become the most darling person in her life. She remembered how the two of them had been sitting on the windowsill in the evenings, playing that everything around them was different.
They had made believe that the dilapidated houses were beautiful glass and concrete buildings, the woodsheds were smart kiosks, and the linen hanging in the yard was the flags of different socialist republics. A milkman carrying a frost-covered churn on his sled was a famous Arctic explorer and researcher. Mitrofanych, one of the tenants of their apartment, had walked up to the milkman, and Kitty had wanted him to be a polar explorer too, but Tata disliked him. So, she had made him one of the sleigh dogs.
Then the girls had gone off on their own expedition beyond the fence to look for the Tunguska meteorite.
Had all this really come to an end?
17. THE MOSCOW ART THEATER
Oscar’s journey had been a success. He had satisfied himself that his wife really was a rich heiress and instructed lawyers in Berlin and Stockholm to sort out her papers.
Now he had to think of how to get his precious wife over the border. There were Bremers in Germany, and they had got wind of the fact that Oscar had his eye on the family fortune and were demanding he produce Nina with proof that she really was Baroness Bremer.
Oscar sorted out documents for Nina at the American Embassy without too much difficulty. Now all he had to do was to get an exit visa from the OGPU.
As soon as his train got in to Moscow, he drove to the Lubyanka to see Comrade Drachenblut who was the head of the OGPU’s Foreign Section.
A swarthy secretary showed Oscar into a spacious office with portraits of communist leaders on the walls. Although it was still afternoon, the windows were covered with heavy drapes with tiny holes in the material that let in thin rays of light. A lamp with a green shade lit up a desk littered with papers and intercoms.