The Road (23 page)

Day and night the interrogations went on in the Lubyanka, in Lefortovo,
and in the Butyrka. Day and night trains transported prisoners to Komi, to Kolyma, to Norilsk, to Magadan and the
Bay of Nogayevo. Every dawn the bodies of those shot during the night in prison basements were taken away in trucks.

Did Marfa Domityevna realize that the fate of a young adviser at the Soviet embassy in London, that the fate of his pretty wife, arrested while she was still breast-feeding her little daughter, before she had even completed her singing course at the conservatory—did Marfa Domityevna realize that these fates had been determined by the signature, at the foot of a long column of names, of a former Petersburg factory worker by the name of Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov? He was still signing list after list, dozens and dozens of these enormous lists of enemies of the people, and the black smoke was still pushing its way up from the crematoria of Moscow.

3.

One day, as the cook was lighting a cigarette, Marfa Domityevna heard her muttering behind their mistress’s back, “And that’s the end of
your
days as tsaritsa!”

Evidently the cook knew something that the nanny did not.

What Marfa Domityevna would remember from these last days was the silence that entered the house. The telephone no longer rang. There were no guests. In the mornings, Nikolay Ivanovich did not summon his deputies, secretaries, assistants, adjutants, and messengers. His wife no longer went out to work; she lay on a sofa in her dressing gown, yawning, thinking, reading a book, and sometimes smiling a little, walking from room to room in silent nighttime slippers.

The only person to make a noise in their home was little Nadyusha. She cried, laughed, and clattered her toys about.

One morning an old woman visited the mistress of the house. Not a sound came from the room where the two women sat together; it was as if neither were saying a word. The cook walked up to the door and put her ear to the keyhole.

Then the two women went to see Nadya. The visitor’s clothes were all patched and worn—and she seemed too frightened even to look around her, let alone to open her mouth.

“Marfa Domityevna,” said the mistress of the house, “let me introduce you.
This is my mama.”

Three days after this, Nadya’s mother told Marfa Domityevna that she was going to the Kremlin hospital for an operation. She spoke quickly, in a loud, somehow false voice. She said goodbye to little Nadyusha, looking at her distractedly and giving her a perfunctory kiss. Standing in the doorway, she glanced quickly toward the kitchen, put her arms around Marfa Domityevna, and whispered in her ear, “Remember—if anything happens to me, dearest Nyanya, you’re the only family she has. She has no one else in the whole wide world.”

As if she knew they were talking about her, the little girl sat quietly on her little chair, looking at them with her gray eyes.

Nikolay Ivanovich did not take his wife to the hospital himself. Instead, she was taken by one of his adjutants, a stout general carrying a bouquet of red roses. They were accompanied by Nikolay Ivanovich’s personal bodyguard.

Not until the following morning did Nikolay Ivanovich come home. Without even looking in on Nadya, he sat in his study for a while, writing and smoking. Then he called for his car and left.

After this came a great number of events that shook, and eventually shattered, the life of the household, and in Marfa Domityevna’s memory these events all got muddled together.

First, Nadyusha’s mother, the wife of Nikolay Ivanovich, died in the hospital. She was not bad or unkind, and she cared about the little girl; nevertheless, she was
a strange person. That day Nikolay Ivanovich came home very early. He asked Marfa Domityevna to bring Nadya to his study. Father and daughter gave some tea to her plastic piglet and put her little doll and the bear to bed. Then Nikolay Ivanovich paced about his study until morning.

And then came a day when this short man with gray-green eyes, Nikolay Ivanovich Yezhov, did not come home at all.

The cook sat on her late mistress’s bed, then went to Nikolay Ivanovich’s study and made a long telephone call, smoking her master’s cigarettes.

Men came, some in uniform and some in plain clothes. They walked about in their coats, treading their dirty boots and galoshes all over the rugs and the bright-colored runner that led to the room of little orphaned Nadyusha.

That night Marfa Domityevna sat beside the little girl and did not take her eyes off her. She had decided to take Nadya back home with her and she kept thinking about how, after getting off the train at Yelets, they would find a cart going to her home village. Then her brother would come to greet them and Nadya would cry out in delight at the sight of the geese, the calf, and the cockerel.

“I’ll see to it she gets enough food, I’ll see she has proper lessons,” thought Marfa Domityevna, and a sense of motherliness filled and brightened her virgin’s soul.

The NKVD men were busy all night long, noisily searching the apartment, sending books, linen, and cutlery flying to the floor.

These new people had the same tense, crazed eyes that had by then begun to seem normal to Marfa Domityevna.

Only little Nadyusha, yawning sleepily as she got up for a wee, seemed quiet and peaceful. And Stalin looked down from the portrait in his usual calm way, without curiosity, keeping his slightly narrowed eyes focused on what had to be done, on what was indeed being done at that very moment.

In the morning a man with a red face arrived. He was stout, like a child’s top, and the cook called him “Major.” He went through to the nursery. Wearing a starched apron embroidered with a red cockerel, Nadya was slowly and seriously eating her oatmeal porridge. “Put some warm clothes on the girl,” he ordered, “and pack her things.”

Trying not to show her agitation, Marfa Domityevna asked slowly, “Why? Where is she going?”

“We’re placing the child in an orphanage. And you must get ready to leave too. You will receive the rest of your pay, along with a train ticket, and you will return to your village.”

“But where’s my mama?” Nadya asked suddenly. She stopped eating and pushed away her little bowl with the blue border.

But no one answered her—neither Marfa Domityevna nor the major.

4.

Exemplary cleanliness was observed throughout the rooms, corridors, and toilets of the hostel for the State radio factory’s female workers. The bed linen was starched, there were covers on all the pillows, and the windows were hung with lace curtains. The girls had clubbed together and bought them with their own money.

On top of many of the bedside lockers stood little vases with beautiful artificial flowers—roses, tulips, and poppies.

In the evenings the girls read books and newspapers in
the Red Corner, sang in the choir or went to the dance group, or watched films and amateur theatricals in the Palace of Culture. Some girls went to evening classes in dressmaking or did courses to prepare them for entrance to an institute of higher education; others were studying in the evening faculty of the electromechanical school.

The girls seldom spent their annual leave in the town. The secretary of the factory Party committee rewarded outstanding workers with a free holiday in one of the trade-union houses of recreation. Other girls went back to their home villages and stayed with their families.

It was said that some girls had been behaving too freely in the houses of recreation, staying out late at night and failing to take due care of their own well-being, and that the young men had been gambling and getting drunk, and getting up to no good during the rest hour after lunch.

Apparently some boys on holiday from the mechanical factory had broken into a kiosk and made off with a crate of beer and six bottles of vodka. They had downed all this in the music room and used foul language when the head doctor hurried in to see what the singing and shouting was about. The boys were expelled from the house of recreation and the factory Party committee was informed of their bad conduct. A criminal case was brought against the three ringleaders and they were each sentenced to two months of forced labor in the workplace.

Never did anything like this happen in the radio factory hostel.

Ulyana Petrovna, the hostel commandant, was known for her strictness. There was one occasion when a girl brought a boy into her room and, with the agreement of her roommates, let him stay the night.

Ulyana Petrovna hauled the girl over the coals in public and had her thrown out of the hostel the following day.

But Ulyana Petrovna was not only strict; she could also show kindness. The girls turned to her for advice as if she were a close relative. They knew they could trust her; it was not for nothing that she had been chosen several times as a deputy to the district soviet. With her in charge of the hostel, there was no drunkenness, no debauchery, no late-night singing to the accompaniment of an accordion.

After the rough, harsh ways of the orphanage, radio-fitter Nadya Yezhova was very happy to be living in this exemplary hostel.

Her years in orphanages had been the hardest years of her life. The worst time of all had been during the war, in an orphanage in Penza; even the other children, who had not led the spoiled life that she had led, found it hard to swallow down the soup made from rotten maize flour that was served day after day for both lunch and supper. They were only seldom issued with clean clothes or bed linen—there was not enough of either, and there was too little soap and too little firewood to do laundering at all regularly. The town soviet had ruled that the orphanage children were to wash twice a month in one of the bathhouses, but this ruling was not observed. The two main bathhouses were usually occupied by soldiers from reserve units and there were silent, surly lines outside the old, small bathhouse beyond the railway station from dawn until late in the evening. And no one, in any case, much liked washing in this bathhouse; chilly winds blew through cracks in the walls, the damp firewood gave off more smoke than heat, and the water was barely warm.

In Penza Nadya had felt cold almost all the time—in the dormitory at night and in the classroom, where they had lessons and where they made shirts for soldiers. She even felt cold in the kitchen, where she sometimes helped the cook remove worms from the maize flour. And the harshness of the staff, the malice and spite of the other children, and the constant thieving that went on in the dormitories were as unbearable as the cold and hunger. A moment’s inattention—and anything from bread rations to pencils, underpants, or kerchiefs would vanish into thin air. One girl was sent a parcel; she locked it up in her little bedside cupboard and went off to her lessons. When she returned, the lock looked the same as ever, but her parcel was gone.

Some of the boys went to food shops and bus stops and picked people’s pockets. One of these boys, Zhenya Pankratov, even took part in an armed attack on
a cash collector.

Life in the orphanage did, of course, improve after the war. Nevertheless, when Nadya finished her seven years of compulsory schooling and was sent to work in a factory, she felt she had arrived in paradise.

Nadya now found it hard to believe that she could have cried all night long after hearing that the orphanage authorities were going to send her to this factory. It was because of her singing teacher that she had got so upset. Her singing teacher had said to her several times, “With a voice like yours you should go to the conservatory—you could be a concert singer!” At first the authorities truly had intended to send Nadya to a music college, but then some kind of additional clarification had unexpectedly arrived from Moscow—and Nadya had been sent to the radio factory.

She had wept during her last night at the orphanage. No one, she had thought, could be more unhappy than her. Not once had she lived in a Moscow or Leningrad orphanage; she had always been sent to the most out-of-the-way places. Many of the girls received letters and parcels from relatives. But in all her life Nadya had never received a single letter; nor had anyone, even just once, sent her apples or shortbread.

All this had made her grow silent and sullen, and the other children had teased her and said she was mute.

Now, in this exemplary hostel, she began to understand that she was not so unfortunate as she had thought.

She had a good job. It was clean, relatively light work, and it was well paid; and the Komsomol committee had promised to send her on a course to improve her qualifications. She had a good winter coat and several beautiful dresses. She even had a crepe satin dress that had been specially made for her in the fashion atelier; Ulyana Petrovna had signed the authorization form herself. The girls on the shop floor and in the hostel respected her, seeing her as steady and self-reliant. Along with other girls from the hostel she went to the cinema and to dance nights at the club. There was a boy called Misha whom she liked; she was always glad when he asked her to dance. He was as quiet as she was; when he escorted her back to the hostel, they usually walked all the way in silence. He lived some way off, on the far side of the goods station, and he worked as a goods-wagon mechanic in the depot.

And her life of long ago was now something she could barely remember. The gleaming black car, the luxuriant flower beds at the dacha, her walks through the Kremlin with Nyanya, Mama’s affectionate absentminded face, the voices and laughter of Father’s guests—it was as if all these things, rather than having a place in her memory in their own right, were only recollections of some other, more distant recollection. It was as if they were echoes that had been repeated many times and were now dying away in the mist.

This current year was going especially well for Nadya Yezhova. She had been accepted as an evening student in the electromechanical school, and she had been given a prize of six weeks’ pay for overfulfilling the work plan. Misha’s boss at the depot had promised him a room in a new building being constructed by the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and Nadya and Misha had decided to marry. Nadya dearly wanted to have a child and she was happy that she was going to be a mother.