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‘Vodka then. Yubileinaya.’
‘You’re a connoisseur.’ She poured him a shot of vodka and a glass of mineral water and pointed at the zakuski. ‘You have to eat or the vodka burns holes in your stomach.’
Calder inspected the snacks. Glistening mounds of black, golden and red caviar, slices of smoked salmon, pickled mushrooms, gherkins, blinis, salamis and salads tossed with sour cream, brown and black bread.
He selected a couple of gherkins, tossed back the vodka, drank some mineral water and snapped his teeth into a gherkin.
‘You’ve done that before,’ she said.
‘Many times.’
‘We have a saying that drinking is the joy of Russia.’ She drank some white wine.
‘Then everyone must be very happy.’
‘It’s also a problem,’ she said. ‘Crime, absenteeism, divorce – drinking is usually the culprit. Even children in the kindergartens have been found drinking alcohol.’ She poured him another shot of vodka.
Calder noticed a stocky man, black hair needled with grey, pushing his way through the throng towards them. He skirted a poet tearfully reciting, stepped over two guests arm-wrestling on the floor and stopped beside Katerina. He carried himself like a soldier.
Katerina introduced him as her step-father. He clasped Calder’s hand and crushed it. ‘My name’s Alexander,’ he announced in Russian. ‘Sasha to you. My home is your home and now you must drink or else I shall be offended.’ He laughed hugely. ‘And now a toast. Silence!’ He waited until the only sound was the sobbing of the poet. Raising his glass he proposed a toast: ‘To Anglo-Soviet friendship and our guest from the United States.’
For a frozen moment everyone stared at Calder. He sensed no hostility in the concentrated gaze. But what was all this about? He had left America five years ago.
The stares dissolved, heads tilted. There was some scattered applause.
Sasha tapped his throat with one finger. ‘Pah, it is good to drink is it not, Gaspadeen Calder?’ He refilled their glasses with Yubileinaya. ‘Where do you live in America? I have only been to New York. With the choir, you understand.’
‘Sasha was in the Red Army Choir,’ Katerina explained and, turning her back to her step-father for a moment, whispered: ‘I didn’t tell them who you are.’
‘Boston,’ Calder said.
‘Ah. I pahked my cah in Hahvahd Yahd. How is that?’
‘Spoken like a true Bostonian,’ Calder said in Russian. The vodka was beginning to reach his socks. He smeared caviar on a finger of toast and ate it.
‘Sadly I had to return from New York before I could visit anywhere else. There was, ah, a little trouble ….’ Sasha winked theatrically. ‘But my voice stayed with me. Later I will sing to you.’
Katerina said: ‘The kitchen first. Have you forgotten what day it is?’
‘Ah, the most terrible day of the year. But if we don’t play their little game, Gaspadeen Calder, then we shall be denied our creature comforts for the other 364 days of the year.’ He winked again, with the other eye this time. ‘Isn’t that right, dochka?’ He pinched Katerina’s cheek and thrust his way back to the kitchen.
Katerina sighed. ‘Another male chauvinist.’
Beside them the arm-wrestlers, hands locked, veins bulging from their necks, grunted. In another corner a young man with long pale hair began to strum a guitar.
‘So I’m just visiting, huh?’
‘I couldn’t say you were a defector. My step-father wouldn’t have let you in. And not a single person in this room would have raised his glass to you.’
‘And you?’
Katerina sipped her wine. ‘You won’t find anyone in Russia who has much time for someone who ….’
‘Betrayed their country?’
She shrugged. ‘Deserted.’
‘Then why did you invite me here?’ He held up one hand. ‘Don’t tell me – you felt sorry for me.’
‘Because you worry me. You know, you left the West because you were disillusioned. That was the reason, wasn’t it? And now you seem to be disillusioned with the Soviet Union. I thought I’d show you what life here can be like.’
Calder gestured with his empty glass around the room. ‘Your friends certainly know how to enjoy themselves.’ It was the first time he had been inside a home like this; all the other invitations had been arranged – safe, tame, dull Communists. ‘It’s a bash.’
‘Would you find people enjoying themselves like this in Boston?’
Here we go, he thought, the equation. There was no escape from it. He said: ‘Sure you would.’ In his shared apartment near Fenway Park in his long-ago student days, for instance.
The arm of one of the wrestlers almost touched the floor, then sprang back again. The poet, to whom no one was listening, petulantly threw his glass against the wall.
A small woman with dimples and bright brown eyes said: ‘Is this the gentleman you were telling me about, Kata?’
Katerina introduced her mother.
Her mother said: ‘His glass is empty, Kata. Fill it with the demon. And don’t forget to eat, Gaspadeen Calder. We have a saying in the Soviet Union. Food on an empty stomach makes a full grave.’
Calder had long decided that Russians made up their sayings on the spur of the moment. ‘A wise proverb,’ he said graciously as she handed him cucumber salad and sour cream on a side-plate.
‘And what are you doing in Moscow, Gaspadeen Calder?’
Hurriedly, Katerina said: ‘He’s a writer. He’s writing an article for an American magazine.’
‘The National Geographic,’ Calder said, looking Katerina straight in the eye.
‘And how do you like our city?’ her mother asked. ‘Beautiful, no?’
‘Noble,’ Calder said. ‘Especially the Kremlin and the metro stations. They put ours to shame.’
Creases of pleasure appeared at the corners of her mouth. ‘We are very clean people, we Russians. Orderly and exuberant. Nothing by halves. And we look after our old people,’ she added.
Why don’t Intourist and Novosti introduce foreigners to people like this? Calder wondered. Instead visitors were forced to listen to actors reciting tired scripts, and taken to brochure showplaces instead of wooden villages clustered round a pump, to escape the dreaded condemnation: ‘Primitive.’
Not that the West managed much of a PR job: most Russians still thought London was a nineteenth-century stew.
Katerina’s mother said: ‘Soon we will eat and see what sort of a mess our men have made of it,’ sounding very indulgent towards male inefficiency. ‘And you, Kata, what have you been doing with yourself today?’
Calder sensed maternal worry: at the Institute it was common knowledge that Katerina was into Women’s Lib. What surprised everyone was that she was allowed to keep her job.
Katerina told her mother that she had been to a meeting. She didn’t elaborate and, although there was transparently more to it than that, her mother accepted the compromise and departed for the kitchen to see what sort of a hash the menfolk were making of supper.
‘What sort of meeting?’ Calder asked when she had gone.
‘You know perfectly well.’
‘The feminist movement?’ Calder frowned. ‘But why? I realise women get a pretty raw deal here. Divorce, abortion, exploitation …. But why do you care so much?’
She told him.
She was nineteen now, her father had left her mother when she was three. He met a girl at a summer camp on the Black Sea organised by the snow-plough factory where he worked and came home only to pick up his belongings.
The babushka, Katerina’s grandmother on her father’s side, left too and her mother had to quit her job as a waitress in the National Hotel to look after her daughter.
Her family helped financially and the State helped but she had to move into an apartment block of ‘boxes’ near the docks at Khimki Port. She got a job in a canteen there and paid a neighbour to look after Katerina during the day.
She tended to Katerina in the evenings and worked late into the night cooking and cleaning and mending.
A docker moved in briefly. He beat her up and stole her savings from under the mattress. Where else?
Her mother became bitter towards men. The bitterness was infectious.
Apart from visits from a family friend – ‘Yury Petrov, a pirate,’ Katerina said fondly – and an expedition to his home in Siberia this state of affairs lasted for thirteen years.
Then she met Sasha at the Central Soviet Army Drama Theatre on Kommuny Square and everything changed.
A miracle.
‘He sang his way into our hearts,’ Katerina told Calder. Her eyes were moist. ‘A wonderful man.’
‘But a chauvinist.’
‘Beyond redemption,’ she said happily.
‘Don’t you think the big-heartedness of Russian men outweighs their faults?’ They were both speaking English now.
‘You don’t understand: it’s injustice I’m fighting. I lived with it for thirteen years; it’s part of me. Just as it’s part of your Judy Goldsmith. When her father left home her mother lived for three years with five children in a chicken-coop. Now Judy Goldsmith is president of the National Organisation for Women, but I bet she still dreams she’s living in a chicken-coop.’
‘And you want to become president of something like that?’
‘Doubtful, after what happened today.’
‘The meeting?’
‘I burned down the hall,’ she said.
Sasha made his ceremonial entry from the kitchen carrying a dish of chicken cutlets and singing:
A circle for the sun
Sky all around
That’s what the little boy drew
Carefully sketched on his paper
Wrote underneath the corner.
Sasha paused. Children had materialised from another room. They stood like a choir poised for song. Sasha winked at them. Piping voices joined his baritone:
Let there always be sunshine
Let there always be blue skies
Let there always be Mummy
Let there always be me.
Then everyone fell on the food. Chicken and meat dumplings and beef stewed with sour cream and borsch. The men, Katerina’s mother admitted, hadn’t made such a hash of it.
‘So,’ Katerina said, spearing a meat dumpling with her fork, ‘do you feel as if you’ve been accepted?’
‘Marvellous people.’
‘That song – the chorus was written by a four-year-old boy. Sentimental people, the Russians.’
‘What would Sasha do now if I told him I was a defector?’
‘Throw you out on your ear.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you that it can take more courage to defect than to stay in your own country?’
‘You didn’t defect,’ she said, ‘you ran away,’ voice suddenly frosted.
The noise around him seemed to swell. Chink of cutlery against china, laughter, talk, the strummed notes of the guitar. The arm-wrestlers had called it a day, neither vanquished, the poet was asleep curled up like a bulky foetus. Sasha had his arm round the shoulders of Katerina’s mother.
He thought: ‘I’ll never belong.’
He heard her voice distantly. ‘… told you my story. Isn’t it time you told me what happened?’
He concentrated. ‘Not yet. Not here.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I think I drank some animal killer by mistake.’
Would Sasha really throw him out? Of course. The Red Army Choir rang with patriotism. The Twilight Brigade took a different view. Their motto was Samuel Johnson’s: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Calder felt like an island. He told Katerina that he was leaving.
‘So soon?’
