24
Yevgenia enjoyed her solitary life in Kuibyshev.
Never had she felt such a sense of lightness and freedom – even though she still had no residence permit or ration-card and could only eat one meal a day with her coupons for the canteen. She would think all morning about the moment she would enter the canteen and be given her plate of soup.
She seldom thought of Novikov during this period. She thought more often of Krymov, almost constantly in fact – but with no real warmth.
Her memories of Novikov did not torment her; they just flared up and faded away. Once, though, far away down the street, she saw a tall soldier in a long greatcoat and thought it was Novikov. Her knees went weak and she found it hard to breathe; she felt quite disorientated by her sudden feeling of happiness. A moment later she realized her mistake and at once forgot her excitement. And then during the night she suddenly woke up and thought: ‘But why doesn’t he write? He knows the address.’
She lived alone, without Krymov or Novikov or any of her relatives. She sometimes thought – mistakenly – that this freedom and loneliness of hers was happiness.
Kuibyshev at this time was the location of many of the Moscow People’s Commissariats, newspaper offices and other establishments. It was the temporary capital, and here had come much of the life of Moscow – diplomats, the Bolshoy ballet, famous writers, impresarios and foreign journalists.
All these thousands of people lived in cramped little rooms and hotels, and yet carried on with their usual activities. People’s commissars and the heads of important enterprises planned the economy and gave orders to their subordinates; extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassadors drove in luxurious cars to receptions with the architects of Soviet foreign policy; Ulanova, Lemeshev and Mikhailov delighted the audiences at the ballet and the opera; Mr Shapiro, the representative of the United Press Agency, asked the head of the Soviet Information Bureau, Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky, awkward questions at press conferences; writers wrote radio broadcasts or articles for national and foreign newspapers; journalists wrote up material gathered from hospitals into articles on the war.
But the everyday life of these people from Moscow was quite transformed. Lady Cripps, the wife of the extraordinary and plenipotentiary ambassador of Great Britain, ate supper in a hotel restaurant in exchange for a meal-coupon, wrapped up the left-over bread and sugar-lumps in newspaper and carried them up to her room; representatives of international news agencies pushed their way through the crowds of wounded at the market, discussed the quality of home-grown tobacco and rolled sample cigarettes – or else stood and waited, shifting their weight from foot to foot, in the long queue for the baths; writers famous for their hospitality discussed world politics and the fate of literature over a glass of home-distilled vodka and a ration of black bread.
Huge institutions were squeezed into cramped little buildings; the editors of the most important Soviet newspapers received visitors at tables where, after office hours, children prepared their lessons and women did their sewing. There was something strangely attractive in this coming together of the weighty apparatus of State with the bohemianism of the evacuation.
Yevgenia Nikolaevna had considerable difficulties over her residence permit. The head of the design office where she had got a job, Lieutenant-Colonel Rizin, a tall man with a soft voice, began complaining from the very first day about the responsibility he was assuming in taking on someone still without a permit. He gave Yevgenia a statement confirming her new post and sent her to the police station.
There a police officer took Yevgenia’s passport and documents and told her to come back in three days’ time.
When the day came, Yevgenia walked along the half-dark corridor. Everyone waiting their turn had that look on their faces peculiar to people who have come to a police station to enquire about passports and residence permits. She went up to the window. A woman’s hand with dark red fingernails held out her passport and a calm voice announced: ‘Your application has been refused.’
She took her place in the queue waiting to speak to the head of the passport section. The people in this queue talked in whispers; now and then they looked round as the secretaries with their thick lipstick, boots, and quilted jackets walked up and down the corridor. A man in a light overcoat and a cloth cap, the collar of his soldier’s tunic just showing beneath his scarf, strolled down the corridor. His boots squeaked. He got out his key and opened the door – it was Grishin, the head of the passport section. Yevgenia soon noticed that, as they finally approached Grishin’s door, people always looked round behind them, as though about to run away at the last moment.
While she waited in the queue, Yevgenia heard her fill of stories about people who had been refused residence permits: daughters who had wanted to live with their mothers, a paralysed woman who had wanted to live with her brother, another woman who had come to Kuibyshev to look after a war-invalid . . .
Yevgenia entered Grishin’s office. Grishin motioned her to a chair, glanced at her papers and said: ‘Your application has been refused. What can I do for you?’
‘Comrade Grishin,’ she said, her voice trembling, ‘please understand: all this time I’ve been without a ration-card.’
He looked at her unblinkingly, an expression of absent-minded indifference on his broad young face.
‘Just think, comrade Grishin,’ she continued. ‘There’s a Shaposhnikov Street in Kuibyshev. It was named after my own father – he was one of the founders of the revolutionary movement in Samara. How can you refuse his daughter a residence permit?’
His calm eyes were watching her; he was listening.
‘You need an official request on your behalf,’ he said. ‘Without that I can do nothing.’
‘But I work in a military establishment,’ said Yevgenia.
‘That’s not clear from your documents.’
‘Does that help, then?’
‘Possibly,’ admitted Grishin reluctantly.
When she went in to work next morning, Yevgenia told Rizin that she had been refused a residence permit. Rizin shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
‘How idiotic,’ he murmured. ‘Don’t they realize that you are doing war-work? And that you’ve been an indispensable member of staff since the very beginning?’
‘Exactly,’ said Yevgenia. ‘He said that I need an official document certifying that this office comes under the People’s Commissariat for Defence Industry. Please write one out for me. I’ll take it to the police station this evening.’
Later that morning Rizin came up to Yevgenia and explained apologetically: ‘The police must first send a request. Without that I can’t write such a document.’
She went to the police station in the evening and waited her turn in the queue. Hating herself for her ingratiating smile, she asked Grishin to send an official request to Rizin.
‘I have no intention of sending any such request,’ Grishin replied.
When Yevgenia told Rizin about Grishin’s refusal, he sighed and said thoughtfully: ‘I know, get him to ask me by telephone.’
The following evening, Yevgenia had arranged to meet Limonov, a man of letters from Moscow who had once known her father. She went to the police station straight after work and asked the people in the queue to let her see the head of the passport department ‘just for a minute, to ask one question’. They all just shrugged their shoulders and looked in the other direction. Finally Yevgenia gave up and said angrily: ‘Very well then, who’s last?’
That day the police station was particularly depressing. A woman with varicose veins shouted, ‘I beg you, I beg you!’ and then fainted in Grishin’s office. A man with only one arm swore obscenely at Grishin, and the next man also made a commotion; the people in the queue could hear him shouting: ‘I won’t leave this spot!’ In fact he left very quickly. While all this noise was going on, Grishin himself couldn’t be heard at all. He didn’t once raise his voice; it was as though his visitors were shouting and making threats
in an empty office.
She sat in the queue for an hour and a half. Grishin nodded to her to sit down. Once again hating herself for her ingratiating smile and hurried ‘Thank you very much’, Yevgenia asked him to telephone her boss. She said that Rizin had been uncertain whether he was permitted to give her the necessary document without first receiving a written request, but had finally agreed to write one out with the heading: ‘In answer to your telephone inquiry of such and such a day of such and such a month.’
Yevgenia handed Grishin the note she had prepared in advance: in large, clear handwriting she had written Rizin’s name, patronymic, telephone number, rank and office; in small handwriting, in brackets, she had written, ‘Lunch-break: from 1 until 2.’ Grishin, however, didn’t so much as glance at this note.
‘I have no intention of making any requests.’
‘But why not?’
‘It’s not my responsibility.’
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Rizin says that unless he receives a request, even an oral one, he is not permitted to make out the necessary document.’
‘In that case he ought not to write one.’
‘But what can I do then?’
‘How do I know?’
It was his absolute calm that was so bewildering. If he had got angry, if he had shown irritation at her muddle-headedness, Yevgenia felt it would have been easier. But he just sat there in half-profile, unhurried, not batting an eyelid.
When men talked to Yevgenia, they usually noticed how beautiful she was – and she knew it. But Grishin looked at her just as he might look at a cripple or an old woman with watering eyes; once inside his office, she was no longer a human being, no longer an attractive young woman, but simply another petitioner.
Yevgenia was conscious of her own weakness and the sheer massiveness of Grishin’s strength. She hurried down the street, nearly an hour late for her meeting with Limonov but not in the least looking forward to it. She could still smell the corridor of the police station; she could still see the faces of the people in the queue, the portrait of Stalin lit by a dim electric lamp, and Grishin beside it.
Limonov, a tall stout man with a large head and a ring of youthful curls surrounding his bald patch, greeted her joyfully.
‘I was afraid you weren’t going to come,’ he said as he helped her off with her coat.
He began asking her about Alexandra Vladimirovna.
‘To me, ever since I was a student, your mother has been the image of the courageous soul of Russian womanhood. I write about her in all my books – that is, not literally, but you know what I mean . . .’
Lowering his voice and looking round at the door, he asked: ‘Have you heard anything about your brother Dmitry?’
Then their talk turned to painting, and they attacked Repin. Limonov began making an omelette on the electric cooker, saying he was the finest omelette-maker in the country and that the chef at the National restaurant in Moscow had been his pupil.
‘How is it?’ he asked anxiously as he served Yevgenia, and then added with a sigh: ‘I can’t deny it. I do like eating.’
How oppressed she was by her memories of the police station! In this room full of books and periodicals – where they were soon joined by two witty middle-aged men who were also both lovers of art – she could not get Grishin out of her mind.
But the word, the free, intelligent word has great power. There were moments when Yevgenia quite forgot about Grishin and the depressed-looking faces in the queue. Then there seemed to be nothing else in life but conversations about Rublev and Picasso, about the poetry of Akhmatova and Pasternak, about the plays of Bulgakov . . .
But when she walked out onto the street she at once forgot these intelligent conversations. Grishin . . . Grishin . . . No one in the flat had asked whether or not she had a residence permit; no one had demanded to see her passport and its registration stamp. But she had felt for several days that she was being watched by Glafira Dmitrievna, the senior tenant, a brisk, over-friendly woman with a long nose and an unbelievably insincere voice. Every time she met her and looked at her dark sullen eyes, Yevgenia felt frightened. She thought that in her absence Glafira Dmitrievna was stealing into her room with a duplicate key, searching through her papers, reading her letters and taking copies of her applications for registration.
In the corridor Yevgenia walked on tiptoe, and she always tried to open the door without making a noise. Any moment Glafira Dmitrievna might say: ‘What do you think you’re doing? Infringing the law! And I’m the one who’ll have to answer for it!’
The next morning Yevgenia went into Rizin’s office and told him about her latest failure at the passport bureau.
‘Help me get a ticket for the steamer to Kazan. Otherwise I’ll probably be sent to a peat-bog for infringement of passport regulations.’
She spoke angrily, sarcastically, not mentioning the necessary official document.
The tall handsome man with the quiet voice looked at her, ashamed of his timidity. She was aware of his tender, longing gaze, his insistent admiration of her shoulders, the nape of her neck, her legs. But the law governing the movements of incoming and outgoing papers was evidently something not to be trifled with.
That afternoon Rizin came up to Yevgenia and silently placed the longed-for document on her drawing paper. Equally silently, Yevgenia looked up at him, tears in her eyes.
‘I made a request through the secret section,’ said Rizin. ‘I didn’t think anything would come of it and then I suddenly received the director’s approval.’
Her fellow-workers congratulated her, saying, ‘Now at last your torments are over.’ She went to the police station. People in the queue nodded at her – she’d already got to know some of them – and asked: ‘How’s it going?’ Several voices said: ‘Go to the front of the queue. You’ll only be a minute – why should you have to wait two hours again?’
The office desk and safe, painted brown in a crude imitation wood design, no longer seemed quite so gloomy and official. Grishin watched as Yevgenia’s quick fingers placed the necessary paper before him; he gave a barely perceptible, satisfied nod.
‘Very well, leave your passport and papers and in three days you can collect the documents from the registry.’
His voice sounded the same as ever, but there seemed to be a friendly smile in his bright eyes.
As she walked home she thought that Grishin was a human being like anyone else – able to do something helpful, he had smiled. He wasn’t really heartless at all. She felt quite uncomfortable at all the harsh things she had thought about him.
Three days later she went up to the window. A woman’s hand with dark red fingernails handed back her passport with her papers folded carefully inside. Yevgenia read the neatly written statement: ‘Residence permit refused on grounds of having no connection with the living space in question.’
‘Son of a bitch!’ said Yevgenia loudly. Unable to restrain herself, she continued: ‘You’ve just been making fun of me, you bastard!’ She was shouting, waving her unstamped passport in the air, turning to the people sitting in the queue, wanting their support but seeing them turn away from her. For a moment the spirit of insurrection, the spirit of fury and despair, flared up in her. Women had screamed like this in 1937 – as they waited for information about husbands, sons and brothers who had been sentenced, ‘without right of correspondence’,1 to the dark halls of the Butyrka, to Matrosskaya Tishina, to Sokolniki.
A policeman standing in the corridor took Yevgenia by the elbow and pushed her towards the door.
‘Let go! Leave me alone!’ She pulled her arm free and pushed the policeman away.
‘Cut it out, citizen!’ he said warningly. ‘You’ll get ten years.’ For a moment there seemed to be compassion and pity in the policeman’s eyes.
Yevgenia walked quickly towards the exit. Out on the street, people jostled her – all of them registered, all of them with their ration-cards . . .
That night she dreamed of a fire: she w
as bending over a wounded man lying face down on the ground; she tried to drag him away and understood without seeing his face that it was Krymov. She woke up feeling exhausted and depressed.
‘If only he’d come soon,’ she thought, and then muttered: ‘Help me, help me.’
It wasn’t Krymov she wanted to see so desperately, but Novikov – the Novikov she had met that summer in Stalingrad.
This life without rights, without a residence permit, without a ration-card, this continual fear of the janitor, the house-manager and Glafira Dmitrievna, had become quite unbearable. In the morning Yevgenia would steal into the kitchen when everyone was asleep and try to get washed before they woke up. When the other tenants did speak to her, her voice would become horribly ingratiating.
That afternoon Yevgenia wrote out a letter of resignation.
She had heard that after an application for residence had been refused, an inspector of police came round to collect a signed statement of one’s undertaking to leave Kuibyshev within three days. In the text of this statement were the words: ‘Those guilty of infringement of passport regulations are liable . . .’ Yevgenia didn’t want to be ‘liable’. Now at last she was reconciled to leaving Kuibyshev. She felt calmer; she was no longer exhausted and frightened by the thought of Grishin, by the thought of Glafira Dmitrievna with her eyes like rotten olives. She had renounced lawlessness; she had submitted.
She had written out her resignation and was about to take it to Rizin, when she was called to the telephone. It was Limonov.
He asked her whether she was free the next evening: someone had arrived from Tashkent; he told very amusing stories about how things were there and had brought Limonov greetings from Aleksey Tolstoy. Once again Yevgenia felt the breath of another life.
Although she hadn’t intended to, Yevgenia told Limonov about her attempts to obtain a residence permit.
He listened to her without interrupting and then said: ‘What a story. It’s really quite amusing. A father has a street named after him in Kuibyshev and his daughter is expelled, refused a residence permit. Very curious.’