She had never heard of it, and no one she asked about it then had heard of it, this world that had been hidden within the Soviet world, down deep within it, this Dickensian world with no Dickens to make things right, to tie up all the ends. It was real, though; in Russian novels of that time she would later find them mentioned, “ragamuffins” or “urchins” in the background of scenes, you knew who they were if you had been taught to look for them, they were the besprizornye. And she found them in the writings of others who went there in the 1920s to visit and see the Revolution for themselves; Langston Hughes saw besprizornye and recorded them, and so did Averell Harriman, and Theodore Dreiser, who watched a little dirty girl trying to get on a Black Sea steamer, watched her carried off screaming by the huge genial sailors who deposited her on the docks, and carried her off again when she snuck on again, and again. Stevedores taking up hay, crates of geese, boxes of canned goods. Her bare legs kicking and the Red Army soldiers guarding the dock laughing.
Millions. The children of fathers dead in the Great War, whose mothers couldn’t keep them, or who were separated from their families when their villages were overrun by advancing or retreating troops as the fighting moved eastward. Children evacuated by train from the front, carried far to the east, losing their families at stations or crossings: the trains stopped for hours, for days, parents got off and went to look for food, and the trains were ordered to depart while they were away, and the parents never saw their child again, who might fetch up as far east as the Urals, holding a smudged and illegible form. Children left behind when their parents died of typhus, which spread rapidly among refugees pressed into unheated barracks or shipped back and forth by train. Children orphaned in the Revolution and the civil war that followed, their parents killed by the Reds or the Whites, shot for hiding grain or concealing livestock or aiding the enemy; children lost when families again fled before one army or the other. Children sent out by the authorities from starving northern cities, Petrograd, Moscow, to the Ukraine and the Crimea, where there might be food and warmth at least: eight thousand were remanded by the Bolsheviks to Poltava, and then when the White forces took the city and the Reds retreated, the White army was left with the children.
It never stopped. After the civil war there was famine, and millions died. “Millions died”: one by one, though, each in his own way, in his house or church or by the roadside to somewhere; children sitting with their dead parents, unable to go farther, their bellies swollen from eating grass. The multitudes driven from their land by collectivization, sent to the east to make new farmlands or die; many lingered or hid, tried to return to their old homes, failed along the way, their children having become practiced beggars and thieves, and so able to live. And always there were the children of those condemned by the state, arrested, taken away: their children were shunned, sometimes given up by parents or grandparents, maybe in the hope that without the taint of their father’s crimes they could survive. My father was an engineer: there was a purge of engineers, “bourgeois specialists,” accused of “wrecking,” many tried and shot: Falin might have been eight or nine then.
“We all knew of them then, besprizornye,” Gavriil Viktorovich told her. “They were a constant threat, a grief, a fear. Papers talked much of them. Other children were afraid of them, yes, and mothers frightened their children with them—don’t lag behind and be lost with besprizornye.”
Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his eyes, looking backwards; his full soft mouth and the red-rimmed liquid eyes made it seem he wept.
“I went in 1927 with my parents and many other families from Moscow to Crimea on vacation,” he said. “There is a place on that railroad line where one can begin to smell the sea, and often tracks become covered with windblown sand, and train must stop so that they can be cleared. I and my little fellows, you know, all in our holiday clothes, climb down from train to collect shells that were always in the sand. Then we rushed away frightened. Under the carriages we had been riding in were these other children, dark figures, hardly human they seemed, five, ten, a dozen, more. We children ran. Besprizornye! Besprizornye! We were afraid and thrilled.”
“Maybe one of them…”
“Among so many thousands.” He shook his head.
“It means without something,” Kit said. “Besprizornyi. He told me. More than homeless. Without…”
“Without guardian, unsheltered, not cared for.”
“Yes.”
“There was talk, back then, that perhaps to be besprizornyi was good training for socialism: that such children would be toughened by life, by having to rely on others; that to have all bourgeois social conventions overturned or taken away meant they would make new, cooperative ways of living. Maybe besprizornye would make good Communists.”
He smiled in a way that made Kit feel far from home. “Did you think so?”
“Oh, I had no thoughts of such things; I was so young. But a man who thought so was Felix Dzerzhinski.”
“The secret police chief.”
“Yes, he. Whose statue in Moscow was not long ago pulled down. The hugest of them all, the one we all saw.”
“Yes. I saw it too.” Like Falin’s poem: The finger that pointed Onward driven into earth to point Endward instead.
“‘Iron Felix’ he was called. There is more than one person in Falin’s poems named Felix, always people of great power and, and—moral ambiguity, you would say. Of course his name means Happy, or Happy One. Yes, Dzerzhinski took great interest in besprizornye. There had been then established for them many detskie doma, children’s homes; detdoma we always called them. Most were very poor places, no staff or materials or even beds.”
“He told me. He said he nearly starved in one, and ran away.”
“But Cheka—that was first secret police organization of Dzerzhinski—set up its own detdoma. Camps and schools too. Well funded. Often children who escaped from other homes, who refused help, were selected for these.”
“Like reform school.”
“Well. What was said was that Cheka recruited from these schools: chose the most toughened and strongest and most willing children to become Chekists. Children who had already on the streets learned lessons that they must learn. That we all were to learn.”
He went to the burdened shelves and without searching or pondering drew out from the clutter a handful of magazines and papers tied in red-and-white string. He picked at the knot with trembling fingers; Kit wanted to help, but knew she mustn’t.
“We were all besprizornye,” he said. “The whole society. We were all torn away from all common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them; had to make our lives without what we had been born with, families, institutions, protectors. But it did not make us New Man, entirely social. We pretended. But we became instead nation of individuals, of atoms; only thing left to us, instinct for self-preservation. All against all.”
“He said that,” Kit said. “Falin.”
Gavriil Viktorovich had undone the bundle, and laid it before her: thick periodika, and gray sheets with typewritten lines almost invisible, and a small pamphlet on cheap paper.
“He said so,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “He said long ago, in his poems. These, The Gray Gods.”
It was so small. Falin’s body, shrunk in death or in time. She thought of her mother lifting from a cardboard box the drawings and stories and maps that Ben had made, that she had helped to make, their land.
“Our hope is to publish all, as it was—I think—meant to be; one tale, or novel in verse maybe you would say, though consists of many fragments. I have tried to transcribe, to edit.”