“We didn’t have a chance,” said Magda in a weak voice. “We—I mean Friedrich has had a hard time of it. He’s a loyal supporter of Trotsky, but he was forced to denounce him. He had to sign a document saying that the Chinese revolution was failed on account of the Trotskyites, who were part of a worldwide capitalist plot. Otherwise, he could have been sent to prison.”
So, that’s why they’ve given him a Fokker Grulich, thought Nina.
She had already heard, however, that all Trotsky’s supporters had been given exactly the same choice—to betray their leader or face disgrace and persecution.
She helped Magda to bed and lay down herself but was unable to sleep. Deep down, she hoped that her English benefactress would become disillusioned with Friedrich and come with her to China. Everything would be much easier given Magda’s large, confident presence. But it looked as though that was not going to happen.
“I don’t think I can go to the parade tomorrow,” Magda whispered barely audibly. “But I really need to take some photographs. I want to put them in my book.”
“Just go to sleep, for goodness sake,” said Nina.
The bedsprings set up a doleful creaking.
“You’ll find the pass in the pocket of my coat,” Magda continued. “Please go instead of me.”
“But I’m not even a foreigner!”
“If you go in your Chinese coat, nobody will imagine for a moment that you’re a Russian. The main thing is not to open your mouth and give yourself away. Please!”
Magda stopped suddenly, leaned over the side of the bed, and was sick on the floor.
Nina was ready to agree to anything just to get Magda to calm down and go to sleep.
3. THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION
The city was shrouded in a damp mist. On every side, trucks rattled past, and soldiers marched along wordlessly in felt helmets with the ear flaps down. Armored cars crouched darkly in the lanes and alleyways, and from time to time, the sound of a horse’s whinny or the hollow echo of hooves could be heard as the Red Cavalry prepared for the parade.
Nina walked along in the crowd, clutching Magda’s camera in its case to her chest. Magda had only one roll of film left and had instructed Nina to guard it with her life.
Everybody was gawping at Nina’s ridiculous coat. One little girl was so distracted by the sight that she dropped her bunch of chrysanthemums on the ground.
Her mother immediately fetched her a clip on the back of the head. “Look after those flowers,” she scolded. “What are you going to wave at the parade if you lose them?”
At the approach to Red Square, all was excitement and anticipation as if before a battle. Huge banners and portraits of Soviet leaders swayed in the swirling mist; military instructors made their rounds of the workers’ brigades, giving instructions about the order of procession, while the shivering men hopped from foot to foot in an effort to keep warm.
Nina was also shivering, but more from anxiety than cold. She was certain that at any minute, she would be accosted by a policeman who would ask her to explain just how she had managed to get ahold of a foreigner’s pass for the tribune.
But all went well. At the Iversky Gates, Nina showed her pass and walked out onto Red Square where the unpaved ground had frozen hard during the night.
A scarlet flag fluttered above the Kremlin wall. On the ancient spires of the Kremlin towers, the golden Imperial eagles, still untouched by the Bolsheviks, gleamed faintly through the mist. At the other end of the square, on the building of the State Department Store, GUM, an enormous canvas with a portrait of Lenin with his bulbous forehead and bourgeois suit and tie was flapping and billowing in the wind. As vast, mighty, and eternal as an Egyptian pharaoh, he looked down sadly at his own mausoleum built in the shape of a truncated pyramid. It was a strange quirk of history that twentieth-century Russia had revived the customs of Ancient Egypt.
Nina mounted the tribune and sat down on a wooden seat in the corner. Nobody seemed to be paying her any attention.
Gradually, the tribune filled up with foreign guests: Europeans and Americans, Indians and Arabs, but Chinese above all. Nina even saw some familiar faces among them. They were the men with whom she had traveled across the Gobi Desert. They appeared quite unsurprised by Nina’s presence on the tribune.
The foreign guests kept up a stream of lively chatter, blowing on their frozen fingers and trying to find a good position from which to take photographs and film the parade. A tall, round-shouldered man wearing a pince-nez moved between them, switching between various foreign languages to greet his esteemed guests and ask if he could do anything to help them.
“And who are you?” he asked amiably when he came to Nina.
She acted as if she had not understood the question.
The man in the pince-nez stamped around a little longer before sitting down on the bench behind Nina.
“Who is that?” she heard him ask somebody. “The woman in the red coat?”
“I don’t know, Comrade Alov,” said a young voice. “I don’t recognize her.”
“Well, find out then,” Nina heard Alov say.
He was almost certainly an agent from the OGPU, and Nina cursed herself for having agreed so thoughtlessly to Magda’s request. What if this Alov were to ask for her documents? Or what if one of the Chinese guests told him that she was Russian?
Just then, some members of the Soviet government came out onto their tribune, and all the foreigners jumped to their feet and began to take photographs. Nina had no idea who they were, but she took some pictures too just in case they might come in useful to Magda. It was strange how small and unimposing they all looked; in their military-style suits, they resembled a crowd of provincial clerks dressed up as war heroes.
A moment later, a woman holding a folder rushed up to Alov and began to whisper to him. Nina could make out the words “Trotsky” and “spontaneous demonstration.”
“Damn!” muttered Alov. Running down the steps, he disappeared into the crowd of soldiers standing in the cordoned off area.
Nina breathed a sigh of relief. She decided to take a few more photographs and leave while the going was good.
The bells of the Spassky Tower began to peal, and the roar of thousands of voices went up from the streets around Red Square. “Hurra-a-ah! Hurra-a-ah!”
To the strains of the “Internationale,” the Soviet anthem, the first columns of demonstrators began to file out onto the square.
Announcements blared from the loudspeakers fixed to the lampposts around the square:
“Now, at the time of this celebration, greater than any in the course of human history, our thoughts are of our great leader, Lenin, who led the victorious troops of workers in their fearless attack on the bastions of capitalism!”
The government representatives smiled, saluted, and waved to the demonstrators with their leather-gloved palms.
Then a column of young people came level with the mausoleum—students, apparently. They stopped, and a moment later, a banner unfurled above their heads emblazoned with the words, “Down with Stalin!”
The orchestra fell silent, and a deathly hush descended on the square. All that could be heard was the chirruping of the sparrows that had flown in to peck at the horse manure.
“Long Live Trotsky!” shouted a young man’s voice. “Down with opportunism and party separatism!”
His comrades sent up a ragged cheer.
A moment later, policemen came running in on the demonstrators from all sides.
Nina raised her camera and took a photograph. The foreigners around her were also snapping away.
“Stop! No photographs!” shouted a voice, and Alov came bounding up the stairs of the tribune two steps at a time.