A Room on the Route

by Godfrey Blunden

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Historical Thrillers; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Vintange paperback reprint. Fiction: life in the USSR.

Release date: January 1, 1951

Publisher: Bantam Books

Print pages: 406

Sample

Mitka was very proud of his English. During the day as we drove back to Moscow (we had been to Istra) we would remember words, and phrases, and make sentences in which he could use them.

“You have many Russian words in your English,” he said.

“I never heard of it,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” Mitka said. “I have heard them in your speech with the other Capitalists.”

“What words?”

“You say trollybus. Yes. I have heard you speak of the tanka and the machina. Just now you say telephona and airrport. They are Russian words.”

“Russian inventions,” I said, “like the Metro.”

“True,” Mitka said. “It is monumental.”

“You must learn a lot.” I said, “listening to us.”

“Many words of interest,” Mitka said.

Every few hundred yards (Intourist had driven us out to the scene of some atrocities at Istra) the bus would lurch into a snowdrift, the wheels would race and the vehicle would shake as though about to fall apart. When we had come through a drift, Mitka would look at me with a grin of triumph. “Son of a bitch,” he would say, “son of a bitch.” Like most Russians he commanded a vigorous profanity, but he was proudest of his ability to swear in English.

We had joined the old Leningrad post-road and we were now approaching the city.

“Would you like to meet one who can speak English as yourself?” Mitka said.

“Many Russians speak English,” I said.

“But this one is different. She speaks only as the English.”

“A woman?”

“I will take you tonight.”

“After supper.”

“Okay,” Mitka said. “It is arranged. But it is only for you. I make you this possibility because you have a good mouth. A good mouth is very necessary.”

“I shall not mention it to the other Capitalists,” I said.

“You could bring something,” Mitka said.

“Vodka, for example?”

“It helps all speech,” Mitka said, “even the English.”

That evening in Moscow I went for a walk. There was no moon, but the white streets shone luminously. In the boulevard which the “A” trolly car traverses, Mitka was waiting for me. We walked together without speaking. I wore my heavy leather overcoat and my fur cap pulled down over my ears. In the gloom I felt people brush past me, but the fresh snow made everything quiet. We turned off the boulevard and went down several side streets and then Mitka drew me into the shadow of a doorway and we waited there for some minutes while Mitka lighted a cigarette. I said nothing. I knew that Mitka was waiting to see if we were being followed. Then Mitka took me by the elbow and we crossed the street and stepped into a dark hallway. The outside gloom was cut off and we were in darkness. The hallway smelled cold with the smell of close living and mahorka and resinous pinewood. Mitka had moved away from me and I heard him knocking at a door. Mitka called. An old voice answered. There was shuffling behind the door and presently it was opened and a crack of light split the hallway like a flashlight beam. Mitka pushed the door open and we stepped in. There was no one, to meet us. Mitka bolted the door. Then he took me by the arm again and led me into a small room.

It was a very small room, about six feet wide and twice as long. It was neat and clean. A bed with an embroidered coverlet was at one end of the room. Near it was a small table with a white cloth. There were two old, elegant chairs and an old-fashioned sofa. The walls of the room were hung with photographs. Some of the photographs were sepia prints of family groups, but others were more recent studies and were of the same subject: a young man with dark hair and a brooding expression. The room was warm with the heat from a tiny stove in which some sticks of pinewood crackled as they burned. A small silver samovar was steaming. There was no one in the room when Mitka and I entered, but my attention was taken by a sewing basket which lay on the sofa and by a toy elephant made out of cloth with shoe buttons for eyes: it was a cheerful elephant.

A woman entered the room. She smiled at me and held out her hand. She gripped my hand firmly and shook it. I saw that she was a Jewess, about forty, I thought. She said her name was Rachel.

“You observe,” she said, “we have not the place to entertain. Please sit down.”

She spoke correct English, but with a marked accent, as though she had learned it from someone who had never been to England or America.

“Mitka told me you spoke English like an Englishwoman,” I said.

“Not me,” the woman said. “I understand how is my English. Mitka meant for you to meet Lizavetta Petrovna. Our Lizavetta speaks very good English. She speaks also French. But there are not the possibilities for the practice of French.”

“Lizavetta Petrovna is of the former people,” Mitka said.

“It is not necessary to say that.” The woman spoke quickly in Russian to Mitka. Her dark brows, above the large brown eyes, were drawn into a frown. She had dark shining hair. A Roman nose, rather than a Jewish nose, but the haughty sensual lips, the round shoulders, the high full breasts were Jewish.

“It is nothing,” Mitka was saying. “He is a reliable spy.”

“There is not such a thing,” Rachel said.

“Ah, you Old Bolsheviks, you make me tired,” Mitka said.

. The woman stepped quickly up to Mitka as though she were about to strike him.

“Listen,” Mitka said, “would I bring him here if he were not a good one? Besides he brings vodka.”

“Vodka! Vodka! You would do anything for Vodka,” the woman said. She seemed suddenly distraught, her large eyes opening wide beneath the black brows.

I acted as though I had just understood the word and brought the liter of vodka from my overcoat pocket, setting it on the table. Rachel suddenly left the room. I looked at Mitka.

“Pay no attention,” he whispered, “it is all arranged. Rachel Semyonovna was formerly political. Yes, even a’ big apartment in the Zmoskvorechye. But … you understand. …”

Mitka shrugged his shoulders.

“Gondevay,” he said with an expression of infinite sadness.

“What is this ‘gondevay’?” I said. “Is it one of your Anglo-Russian words?”

“Certainly,” Mitka said.

“What does it mean?”

For answer Mitka laid a thick forefinger at the base of his neck and made a sudden surprising sound like a pistol shot. He grinned.

Presently Rachel came back with the woman called Lizavetta. They were smiling and they brought dishes which they put on the table. There was a salad of sauerkraut, a dish of hot potatoes, black bread and small hard pretzels. There was also some red caviar which I recognized as some I had given Mitka earlier in the week. I saw that they had laid out their entire week’s ration.

The woman called Lizavetta looked younger than she probably was. She had fine ash-blonde hair which was braided tightly around her head. Her eyes, slightly tilted at the corners, were clear grey with large dark irises. Her complexion was fair and clear. She had the straight nose and the slightly raised cheekbones of the pure Slav. Her figure was buxom, but at the same time spinsterish. She was neatly dressed. Her teeth were even and very white, but one eyetooth was broken. Her hands were small with short nails and hard fingers.

“So,” she said, “you have come to Moscow.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is the war.”

Lizavetta said nothing. I complimented her on her English. It was natural and unstrained, but curiously old-fashioned.

“It is not remarkable,” Lizavetta said. “My governess was an Englishwoman. At the School for the Daughters of Noblemen there was a Miss Graham for the English lessons. Rachel and I often talk in English for the sake of practice. When we are alone.”

“I also talk to them in English,” Mitka said.

Lizavetta laughed lightheartedly.

“Yes. You have heard?” she said. “Mitka speaks English. It is a very original English.”

“It is the English taught in the schools by teachers who have never been outside the country,” Rachel said.

“But, Darling Rachel,” Lizavetta said, “it is good that they learn something. Did not Karl learn English that way?”

Suddenly Lizavetta looked sad, as though she regretted her last words.

“Karl is Rachel’s son,” she said. “You see his picture there.”

She pointed to the photographs of the young man with the brooding expression. I glanced at Mitka. He made, with his mouth, a motion as though he were about to utter the sudden surprising sound of a pistol shot.

“You have never traveled?” I asked Lizavetta.

“Dear me, no,” she said, laughing. “But tell me, how are you enjoying Moscow? Dear Moscow! How do you like our theater?”

We drank vodka and we ate little scraps of caviar while we talked about the theater in Moscow; about the Bolshoi being closed because of the bomb which hit the foyer, about the excellent performances of the ballerinas, Bank and Lepishinskia. I spoke of the Moscow Art Theatre and Madame Chekova in her husband’s play, The Cherry Orchard.

“Ah, Chekov,” Lizavetta said. “How wonderful! Are you not an admirer of Chekov?”

“And Ostrovsky,” I said, “at the Maly Theatre.”

“Of course,” Lizavetta said, “Truth is Good, but Luck is Better.”

Although she was no longer young, Lizavetta Petrovna had youth. I had a vision of her as a girl at a country-house ball in one of the long calm summers of the first decade of the century. A young girl in a white dress and a colored scarf over her tightly braided blonde hair, one who played Chopin, smoked a cigarette, daringly rode astride; gay, and a little fey with the foreknowledge of those times: a Turgeniev girl. It was an illusion.

I pointed to the jolly elephant.

“There are children here?” I said.

“No, it is Lizavetta’s work,” Rachel said.

“You understand, I make toys for children,” Lizavetta said. “I make them out of old rags and buttons. That is I how we live.”

“Once it was I who brought food and found the house,” Rachel said, “now it is Lizavetta. Every day she makes a new toy. The peasants who are now richer than aristocrats buy the toys for their children. That is how we have potatoes and cabbage. The peasants are rich today.”

“Do you like my elephant?” Lizavetta said. “Look at his eyes. It is an elephant who will never forget, is it not?”

“Where did you learn to sew?” I asked.

“In 1937 I learned to sew,” Lizavetta said. “But when I was young we did embroidery. So it was not difficult.”

“She sews very beautifully,” Rachel said. “Observe the stitches. Think of it: while she was doing her embroidery I was learning to throw hand grenades. In the Civil War I was a guerilla.”

“Rachel Semyonovna is from Odessa,” Mitka said, as though it explained everything.

“It was my ambition to kill a Czarist general,” Rachel said. “Lizavetta’s father was a general. And then we had the Revolution. That was nothing. But the Civil War, that was another thing. I cannot tell you the things I saw. I have lived and marched with the Red Army and I saw much death and many ways of dying.”

Rachel spoke very proudly. When she had finished speaking, we were silent for a moment.

“We found her in a barn,” Rachel said, looking at Lizavetta, who was gazing down in her lap, the light shining on her tight braids of fair hair. “She was a poor frightened one and I took her with me.”

“And her parents?” I asked.

“Dead,” Rachel said.

“It was all for the best,” Lizavetta said.

“Ah, don’t let us have any of the dialectic,” Rachel said. She turned to me. “The dialectic is Russian because it denies all responsibility. Do you understand? After all, we find in the end that materialism is another God.”

“It is often written about,” I said.

Rachel looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

“But, Rachel darling, just think,” Lizavetta said. “Where would I have been without you? And where would you have been without the Revolution?”

Rachel did not answer for a moment. She appeared to be momentarily lost in thoughts of another kind. Then she repeated quietly:

“Without the Revolution, where? In some ghetto, I suppose, like a thousand generations of my forefathers.”

Rachel continued to be lost in abstraction. Lizavetta drew the conversation back to the theater. I spoke of the new plays Front and The Kremlin Chimes, but I saw they did not believe in them. So we talked of older authors; talked of Kuprin and Goncharov and of the defeat of inertia in the national character—the incomparable Russian conversation.

“Our only living poet is Pasternak,” Lizavetta said. “It is a pity you do not understand Russian for he is untranslatable. Even more than Pushkin. His poetry is metaphysical poetry and it is very beautiful.”

“Has he survived the war?” I said.

“Who knows?” Rachel said. “Already people are forgetting his name. He has not been the one to write anthems and win prizes.”

“There are many anthems today,” I said, “but none so good as the ‘International.’ And much pageantry. I was at the Easter celebrations. And I have seen the Guards Divisions kneel and kiss the flag and swear fealty to the Fatherland. And the Cossacks wear their old costumes on parade.” I asked Lizavetta: “Do you like the new epaulettes?”

“They are beautiful,” Lizavetta said.

“Epaulettes!” Rachel said. “That is what they shot her father for. He was too proud to change his coat. We killed thousands because their coats bore the mark where an epaulette had been.”

“But I do think it is good for the boys of difficult social origin,” Lizavetta said. “They always looked so incongruous in the uniforms of peasant soldiers and they suffered so much for it. But now the new uniforms suit them so well it does not matter if they have the bearing of aristocrats even in the third generation.”

“Are there so many?” I said.

“Yes,” Lizavetta said, “inside and outside Russia.”

“She is being stupid,” Rachel said. “It is an idea they all have. The new chauvinism has no relation to the old.”

“Have you brothers in the Red Army?” I asked.

Lizavetta looked quickly at me. “No, but I have a brother in America,” she said.

“At last we come to it,” Rachel said. “So it is out. She has a brother in America. She could send him a message by this foreigner.”

I looked at Mitka. He was pouring himself a short glass of vodka. His round face showed no interest in the conversation. I looked at Lizavetta. Her head with the braided hair was bent down, like that of a child who has done wrong. Her fair skin was flushed at the temples.

“But, Rachel darling,” she said in Russian, “I must.”

“And if the foreigner’s airplane should crash and they should find the address on his body?” Rachel replied.

“Then I do not care,” Lizavetta said.

Rachel turned to me. “Lizavetta’s brother went to America many years ago. She has a great curiosity to tell him of this new Russia that is coming.”

“Don’t you write to him?” I said.

“It is not an intelligent question,” Rachel said.

I offered at once to send such a letter to America for Lizavetta. Written in English, I thought, it could go in the Legation bag. Or one of the newspaper correspondents could take it out for me.

“There will be no letter,” Rachel said.

She came over to me and sat beside me on the sofa. Her taut proud bearing had relaxed. She was a good deal more than forty, I thought.

“You are a foreigner,” she said. “You cannot possibly know. You cannot understand. No one will ever know, for all the witnesses have been destroyed too. We only are left.”

Rachel stopped talking and looked at Lizavetta.

“I thought my son Karl was dead,” she said, at last. “But now I know he is alive. Do you understand? I know he is alive. That is why we must do nothing; because I must be here to look after him. We must do nothing.”

“I am very sorry,” I said, “but I don’t understand at all. Is your son getting some leave? I thought Red Army men never got leave.”

Lizavetta looked up.

“You will have to tell him now,” she said.

“My son was sent to a prison camp,” Rachel said. “I thought him dead. But now I know he is alive. So we must do nothing.”

Lizavetta spoke. “But, Rachel dear, nothing ill will come of it. You are alarmed over nothing. Mr. Ferguson will take the address and there will be nothing on it to show where it came from. All that he will do is to tell my dear Losha that we are alive and well.”

I looked at Mitka. I thought I detected a faint shrug of his stout shoulders. He was pouring another glass of vodka.

“Certainly,” I said, “I shall take the address and when some reliable friend is going to the United States I shall ask him to tell your brother you are well.”

An expression of gratified pleasure entered Lizavetta’s face. It won my full regard.

“You will come again and we will give you the address,” she said.

With Mitka at my side I stepped out of the dark hallway into the street. It was snowing lightly. We walked down several alleyways to a broad street which I guessed was Boulevard A. At the corner of Gorki Street, by the Pushkin statue, Mitka touched my arm. We were alone in the quiet luminous gloom,

“I go,” he said.

“Thank you for the evening,” I said. “It is a rare thing to meet Russian people. I think your Miss Lizavetta very charming.”

“For a foreigner you are an intelligent spy,” Mitka said.

“But I am not a spy,” I said.

“That also is intelligent,” he said.

“Well, goodnight,” I said.

“Goodnight.”

Rachel lay in her bed in the little room trying to sleep. She lay there more quietly than if she had been sleeping, her eyes wide open in the darkness, thinking of her husband, sensing him close to her, his body beside her own, not daring to test the illusion by touch or movement, hoping, hoping for the feel of his rough hand and his warm breath.

All that was Ivan Romantsiev was there in the mind of Rachel at that moment.

His existence was as real as it had been during his living life, for in Rachel’s mind, there was no vision of his death, nor even the fact of his dying, to give this existence finality. For that matter there was no vision, fact or idea of his death anywhere—no cross, no garlanded red star, no helmet on a stake, no identity disc or Party card, no record in book or ledger, no line drawn through name or number, no erasement —nothing anywhere of fact, but only the broken bootless body, the shell of his existence, lying anonymously with unnumbered others in a mass grave somewhere in the western steppe.

But at this moment Ivan Romantsiev was alive and real in the mind of his wife; and because there was nothing any longer that could be added out of his experience to make her knowledge of him fuller and clearer, at this moment his existence had probably reached its farthest pitch and in succeeding time could only diminish as the material of Rachel’s memory perished.

The burgeoning in the dense competitive life of the Southern Ukraine at the beginning of the century: yellowing wheat-fields, fruit trees, girls with colored kerchiefs around their heads, wild strawberries, fresh butter, vodka and honeycakes, the husks of sunflower seeds everywhere in the dusty streets; market places full of peddlers with tin kettles, wandering minstrels, drunken peasants, bearded Kirghiz horsetraders, Tajdiks in karakal hats, dark-visaged Circassians, Tartars from the Krim, white-faced aristocrats in fine carriages; down the roads ragged tramps, cloaked horsemen, a general in a coach, a traveling circumcisionist; villages with blue-domed churches and old women burning candles, kulak usurers, epidemic-ridden factories, foreign exploiters; the rotting tenement where he had been born, the dormitory shared with a score of others, the prostitute who lived behind the screen in the corner near the door, his old mother strong and vociferous, his taciturn father; the smell of rancid goose fat, garlic, fresh birch-wood, mahorka, unaired clothes, the smell of lice and typhus and typhoid … the small ragged Ivanchick, the bright mischievous child, saying, as his parents spoke sympathetically of the prostitute lying long abed that morning—the child Ivan saying, “Ah, the poor one had a difficult client last night.” And being soundly beaten for his precocity.

That was Ivan Romantsiev: he was the thick heavy life of the Ukraine, its color and ruthlessness, its humor and style. In the darkness Rachel smiled to herself, thinking. …

Thinking of the ragged child become a youth, sharp-witted, the strong peasant body balanced easily on the soles of his feet, the cap worn rakishly, the young baritone voice forming; the pupil at the knee of the old schoolmaster, the wizened little man, of whom Ivan often spoke afterward, who lived in squalor and neglect, a disciple of Bakunin and Kropotkin, with his small circle of youthful inteligants in imitation of the great and because of a belief in progress; suddenly Ivan’s vision widening, the world of ideas, of men of action, of the People’s heroes, the dismissal of Fate, the dispersal of superstition, the idea of history shaped by man himself; the quick Russian mind, the true proletarian mind, knifing through the old compromises, rationalizations, resistances, through the sloth of Russia, to the one clear issue; the young body trembling eager to close the issue in action, the excitement of conspiratorial meetings, the never-to-be-forgotten first thrill of risking his liberty in a cause. Then a Prince had come to the town, bringing foreign friends on a hunting trip, and the Okhrana, who watched everything, had found it expedient to move the old schoolteacher and his pupils.

How proud Ivan was of having been, at the age of fifteen, a Siberian exile! The log-cabin settlements on the Lena River far north of Kakutsk and, in the cabins, the endless discussions through the long winter nights, the theories of Kautsky and Plekhanov, his first hearing of the Communist Manifesto; shaking hands with men who had made the Revolution of ’05, “Here is a new Comrade. How young he is! Look at his hands! Here is one who has worked. A true member of the proletariat.” Social Democrats, Social Revolutionaries, Maximalists, Anarchists, Syndicalists, all talking the day and night through, the small silent Dugashvili faintly remembered, the kindly Sverdlov firmly remembered; at length the impatience with inaction and confinement and the escape across the taiga, a thousand miles of swampland, mosquitoes, dense fir forests, to the thin line of railway; in the railway carriage the peasant lad and the aristocrat facing each other, the man knowing the boy to be an escaped prisoner, coolly eying him, the boy feeling the rising passion to murder, the aristocrat shrugging his elegant shoulders and turning to read a literary periodical; the fur buyers who hid him under the seat, the hundred adventures across and through Russia to the open world.

For Ivan Romantsiev, the youthful exile, there had been all the world to travel in, everywhere food and work, everywhere Comrades believing in progress and the overthrow of oppression, libraries in which to read, parks in which to sleep, farms on which to work, ships to take him to England and America, languages to learn, English, French, German … the young jaunty Russian, always smiling, always ready to turn a hand to this or that, ready to sing, to dance, to make love. …

Rachel thinking of this now in the little room, thinking how many times he would have made love in those years, thinking of this with amusement and pleasure, because it was not so good as it is with me—you have said so, haven’t you, and you never lie.

Then there had been the first World War, the collapsing imperialisms, the great moment approaching: and Ivan making the long illegal journey across Germany into Rumania and thence into Russia, at last to his own town, to the tenement, to the dormitory; and his old mother taking a stick to him, so expressive in her joy, and Ivan laughing, and his mother wailing, “What is become of a woman when she can no longer beat her son.” And Ivan giving his mother money, many rubles, and being abused for it, and threatened again with beating, and explaining he was neither thief nor wastrel, but a Revolutionary: and the old woman quickly crossing herself and her face clouding with grief; Ivan looking through the squalor of his town now diminished by eyes widened in the world beyond, watching the conscription of the peasants, the wounded already drifting back, noting the desperate fear which underlay the corruption of the bureaucracy and the priesthood, seeing how it would soon all be swept away in a storm of violence such as had never been imagined. And then his arrest: the charge of larceny, the confession of identity to avoid a felon’s fate, and Siberia again. …

All this existing in knowledge and feeling in the mind of Rachel, now tossing in her bed in the little room. It was the fault of the foreigner who had visited them that evening—whom she had demanded Mitka find and bring to them—the talk of the Civil War, and the disturbance of remembrance deep within the heart.

Remembering now her adoration for her father, the stern, bearded man, firm head of a poverty-stricken family, the life of the ghetto, peel-papered rooms, peddlers, fortunetellers, Jewish festivals, the Talmud, chanting in the Synagogue; remembering the merciless whipping received from her father, her mother crouching distracted behind the door, her own screams in-bitten, the lash falling more heavily for that, and then flying out, her mother pressing a kopeck into her hand as she flew by, going to the cliffs by the sea and contemplating suicide—at twelve years of age how merciful death can be—standing there in pain, humiliation, wounded pride, feeling the impress of the coin in her hand, feeling it more strongly and finally yielding to it, a coin to spend. … That was the end of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur and all that.

Odessa became a place of reconnaissance and adventure; literature from the secret places of the catacombs, the residue of the Narodnaya Volia, Maiakovsky, novels of Revolutionary heroines, flaming stories of injustice and oppression, now keeping always with her tiny pictures of her heroines, Vera Figner, Sophy Perovskia. In two years the Revolution an actuality and Odessa in ferment: the Young Revolutionary League, White officers sitting in the cafes, police everywhere watching, the “Plot,” the grand demonstration of Revolutionary solidarity: they would go to the cafes and at a given signal each would draw a pistol and fire it in the face of an officer, and continue firing until they were themselves dead; picturing to herself this moment of supreme exaltation. But, later, secretly grateful to the Comrade political organizer from the Central Committee who dismissed the Plot as one having anarchist tendencies and one which would provoke unnecessary reprisals.

The young delegate from the Central Committee had been very handsome, quietly experienced, calm, but with mischievously humorous eyes. She had come close to him that day the police raided the meeting place of the Young Revolutionary League, the excitement rippling through the building, the men coming in looking for places to hide their weapons for they said the police were shooting everyone on whom they found arms, the young delegate from the Central Committee coming in last with a small Browning automatic in his hand, looking quietly for a place to hide it, and she going up to him and saying, “Let me have it, Comrade. I will hide it here, see, they will never search a young girl.” And feeling the small, heavy pistol against her stomach, the grip still warm from his hand, and the muzzle cold; feeling it slide down to rest between her legs, and his brief grateful smile, and nod of comradely appreciation. That was her first meeting with Ivan Romantsiev. Later she returned the pistol and he went away on other business.

French sailors had come to Odessa wearing little blue hats with red pompons, and she had leaflets to distribute. “Comrade, read about the People’s struggle for Liberty,” running, dodging, a wrist gripped, her man’s cap knocked off her head, “Ah, une petite apache!” and laughter, then a young Comrade coming back and fighting for her, both fighting, scratching, biting, kicking, the sailors now angry, the gendarmerie arriving, boy and girl thrust against a wall facing sailors with rifles, the rifles raised and pointing at them, the young comrade very sick, herself thinking “I shall die. Let me live one day longer. But it is good to die for one’s country. No, it is terrible. I don’t want to die.” Then, for courage, turning to the boy Comrade: “Comrade, are you a member of the Party?” . . .