Kharkov Girl

Katya

We girls all used to smoke in the street then, if we were smoking smuggled cigarettes. Papirosi were safer in the office or where the MVD – and worse – might notice. I remember a packet of 20 GDR-bought Juwel that my brother brought back from Sperenberg near Berlin. I smoked these behind the canteen of the middle school, minus the two I had to give the janitor. He had asked for worse, in the past. My brother had been a pilot during his military service. I never saw him after he went to work for Aeroflot. Moscow was a long way from Kharkov, anyway. Nobody was Russian or Ukrainian or even Tatar. Not out loud, at least. Everyone was Soviet. We were all equal. If you perceived a difference between you and your friend, the kommissar’s daughter, you kept it to yourself. Certainly, I did.

My family was Russian. You wouldn’t get a job flying a Tupolev-144, as my brother had, if you weren’t. Sacha, from the Bureau of Productivity, told me once that the Amis called this aeroplane “Concord-ski”. Like so many rumours, this turned out to be true. That would have been a comfort to Sacha in the Gulag, had he known. Tyotka Marina used to make my clothes. I brought her postcards that my brother sent from Paris or London. He wrote nothing that the NKVD might object to, but the initials of each word of the first sentence in my first letter sent to Moscow had spelled out одежда.. Clothes. My brother chose his picture postcards carefully. They always showed young girls standing in front of landmarks or riding shiny bicycles and I wanted to look like someone who might do that one day. My Aunt Marina copied the clothes that the capitalist girls wore.

And so my skirts were shorter, my blouses tighter and the boys stood closer, while the girls did not. When I left the Technicum I went straight to work in the Department for Agricultural Norms. In the livestock department. I had never seen a real cow in my life.

There was a bar that all the shop assistants from GUM went to when they finished selling nothing to people who had queued for half a day. It sold домашнее пиво – home brew - that an ex-sailor made in the cellar of the block he lived in. 1972 had seen an anti-alcohol campaign which did exactly what such things always did: encourage the ingenuity of the working class. I used to go to meet Мальчик-с-пальчик.,“Tom Thumb”. He had this nickname because… well, birth control was difficult to come by and Tom Thumb was very dextrous, so therefore more than popular.

It was the winter of 1975. The wind blew bitter snow from the east. Friday had finally arrived and I was wearing my boots. My brother Anton had sent them with a friend from Moscow who had arrived for his mother’s funeral, a few days before. No-one had boots like these, not in Kharkov. Tom Thumb liked them too. I bought a “правда” from a kiosk by the railway station. It was a risk, everyone knew the one-armed man was an informant. However, I believed that the old man would never guess that the boots had come from the other side of the world. He would be too busy looking at my legs, of course. I had no foreign cigarettes, only rolling tobacco. I tore a strip of paper from an article entitled “Several Collectives Meet Quotas” and began rolling a cigarette. Evidently many collectives had not met their quotas. There would be a shortage of cheese next year, my boss had met with the Kommissars over that. There was a shortage of most things every year.

I lit my papiros using a match. I had a Zippo, but I could hardly use that. Even the old man at the kiosk would know that it was not a product of the great Soviet manufactory effort. Of course he would, it worked, even in the wind. Anyway, in the bar, which pretended to be a restaurant although there was never anything to eat, I met up with Tom Thumb and this is the story he told me…

Tom Thumb

“It was when I went to the dacha, a while back. It’s nothing great, my uncle got it for a favour to the local party secretary, that’s all. First time he let me use it. I expect he’ll let me know what I can do for him, sometime. Anyway it’s out on the shore of Lake Chaika. Of course, I went up there with someone. It was a weekend, the last warm one we had. What? No, I didn’t think of taking you. What would your mother have said? No, I mean she knows your mother, they were at school together. We took her car. Well, her husband’s; A Moskvich-408, I had to push it for the last kilometre. I had one bag, she had 3 suitcases. I’d watched her sit on them before I carried them down from her apartment to the car.

We abandoned the car at the front of the small cabin. She stood outside the door while I emptied the trunk and carried all the bags to the stoup. The log walls looked old and mossy but the roof looked intact. I took the rusted key from my pocket and opened the door. Yelena pushed the door wide and walked into the centre of the one-room dacha. I dragged the luggage in and shut the door. Yelena was looking into the corners at the cobwebs near the ceiling. Then she looked at the bed.

“Afterwards she lit a cigarette. A real one, like those ones your brother gets for you that you think no-one knows you smoke. No, I’m not telling you what we did together. What do you think I am? I lit a fire in the pot-bellied stove. Yelena asked if she should get dressed and I said no. I went out to look at some of the traps my uncle uses. There were a couple of rabbits that I skinned outside before sticking them in an iron pot with a potato I’d found in an old sack by the tool shed. I put the whole thing on the top of the stove by the pipe that took the smoke out through the roof. She said she liked a man who cooks and we passed the time while the rabbit stew cooked.

“I fed her with a spoon and she fed me with her fingers. I counted the crows’ feet by her eyes and divided the total by the number of times she had cried out someone else’s name since our arrival. The answer was one. We both fell asleep before it was dark through the window.

“There must have been a noise. We sat up, facing each other. Wide-eyed in shock. Yelena shivered, though it wasn’t cold. I got up, went to the window, looked out at the gibbous moon over the trees of the forest. We both started when an owl hooted close by. I told her I’d get dressed and have a look around outside. She nodded and pulled the animal fur around her shoulders, but she stayed sitting upright on the bed. The moonlight edged the leaves with silver and the wind made them whisper the names of ghosts. I heard a wolf howl and the owl answered him and swooped close to my head. The lake water was still as death. The car was where Yelena and I had left it. I considered getting in and driving away, although I knew it would take me an hour or more to get it started.

“When I entered the cabin, Yelena was not alone. An old man stood beside the bed. The woman was shrinking away, still covered in the fur blanket. The man carried a bandura, which we are no longer allowed to call the kobza. He plucked the strings and I noticed that he was blind. He asked our pardon for his intrusion and said that if we permitted him to stay the night. he would tell us his story and, if we liked, he would sing for us too. While Yelena put on some clothes, I gave the old man the leftovers of the rabbit stew. When he finished, Yelena and I sat together on the bed, whilst the Kobzar sat on a low, three-legged stool, plucked the kobza’s strings and began to tell his story...”

Kobzar

‘You are surprised. Of course I can speak Russian. I sing in Ukrainian, that’s all. We all did. We earned our money thanks to the generosity of people at village fairs or farmer’s markets until the kolkhozi took over and there were no markets and we were not welcome at the fairs. In the hills, in villages, we lingered, playing for food and kvass until narrow eyed men in poorly cut suits came to whisper in the elder’s ear. I trained at the school in Poltava. Indeed, Gospozha, I am very old. I was a member of the Kharkiv Tsexh. The Kharkov Guild of Kobzars. Maybe you know the building, if it is still there.

‘There was a rumour. The Soviets had invited Kobzars and Lyrniks to a meeting. They gave it the kind of name they always give such things. Something that sounded academic. “Ethnographic Conference” or some such. Of course, the Guild was long gone by that time. We were to assemble. “Were to assemble”! There is no poetry in the Soviets. Ah, I don’t mean to offend, of course. Yes, we were summoned to Piatikhatky. A recreation centre. For the NKVD, as we used to call them then. Yes, the KGB.

‘I met with several lyrniks on the road. No-one mentioned the other rumours surrounding Piatikhatky. We hadn’t much to do with the intelligentsiya. What had intellectuals to do with us? We were optimists. We believed that the Soviets intended to come to some compromise and end the persecution of we itinerant musicians. Of course we did: you cannot murder culture after all. As we headed towards the “conference”, others joined us.

‘We were met on the edge of the recreation centre’s land. There must have been good hunting for Kommisars and other important folk entertained by the NKVD: I could hear wolves and where there were wolves, there were deer and other prey. There were fifty or so of us. Mostly Lyrniki. I had counted ten Kobzars: by their voices, since you ask. The Lyrniki had always helped the blind Kobzars. I felt we were two branches on the same tree. Khashvili, a Lyrnik from my home village, told me that the ten NKVD were in uniform like the units attached to the Red Army. They carried rifles slung over their shoulders. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.

‘We Kobzars put a hand on the shoulder of the man in front. Khashvili whispered, "They are not taking us to the buildings." I kept walking, until my hand felt no shoulder beneath it. I heard the crunch of rifle butts on flesh and bone. I felt a shove in the small of my back and I was falling, falling. I may have been unconscious for a while. A voice I did not recognise said, “It’s a gully – no - a ravine. Some died in the fall, or were unlucky with the rifle butts. Or maybe they were lucky.”

‘”Why?”

‘“I won’t be climbing out, never mind a blind Kobzar.”

‘Many died of exposure, the first night. On the third day, the Lyrnik brought me blood to drink and we ate some raw flesh. He told me he was going to build a stairway of bodies and that we would walk out of the ravine under our own steam. On the fourth day, he led me by the hand out of the dying place. Then he handed me a Kobza that was not mine, but was still intact. I felt a push in my back and a track under my feet. What happened to the man, I do not know.’

Tom Thumb

I fell asleep, Katya. In the morning the blind man was gone. Yelena was spooked. The car started second time and she didn’t speak to me all the way home. Do you think it’s true? The blind man’s story? Why didn’t they just shoot them? What? You don’t think such things happen, I suppose.

No, stay. Later, we can…

Katya

I left him, still talking about what we weren’t going to do later. Or indeed again. No one liked an informant, but you had to look after yourself. I phoned someone, a gossiping girl whose breath sucked in as I mentioned Tom Thumb’s name. She phoned someone else and before long someone heard the story and – well – things took their course. Tom was missed, by some more than others. Not by Yelena, I supposed. My mother mentioned that she had disappeared. “We weren’t friends, you know,” she shook her head. “But, still...”