The Translator (16 page)

Probably he had started to cry, amid the endless people passing the place where he sat. Not many would have turned to listen, or pay much attention, there were just too many children like him, some crying as he was, some begging, some not moving, having stopped trying.

If someone did stop for a moment, because this boy was clean and in good clothes and still seeming to think he had a claim on their kindness, they could still do nothing but ask him where his mother was, who was caring for him: and he didn’t remember any of those encoun-ters if they happened. He remembered seeing the lean boy in a coat of no color and a shapeless cap, a teapot in his hand: how he slipped in and out among the travelers, apparently one of them and on his way somewhere (travelers everywhere then carried pots like that, to make their tea rather than buying it). But someone sitting long enough there, seeing him come and go, would come to understand he was not on his way anywhere.

He saw this boy steal a cloth bag that a mother put down, just for a moment so she could wipe the face of her crying child. It was under his coat and he was gone instantly, and then a while later he reap-peared without it, with only his teapot, stopping strangers and telling them a story, a story most of them didn’t want to hear. Now and then one gave him a small coin, at which he immediately stopped talking and looked elsewhere.

Through the day he saw Innokenti too, and studied him. He came at last and sat next to him, and took from his pocket a scrap of newspa-

per and a pinch of loose tobacco. Night must have grown late, because the station was emptying, the last trains having left or never arrived.

Teapot rolled his cigarette and then leapt up to pester the last passersby for a match. When his smoke was alight he sat again (Innokenti watching the perilous thing smolder and fume) and looked the little one over. What was he waiting for? Was he lost?

Innokenti couldn’t answer; he knew where he was, where he had been placed; how could he be lost?

Was he hungry? Yes, he was hungry.

Any money? Innokenti searched in his pockets, took out three kopeks and a lucky gold coin. Teapot took them and put them in his own pocket. He told Innokenti that in a while the stationmaster and the soldiers would go through the station and put out everybody who had no ticket. Did he have a ticket? He didn’t. He wasn’t to worry, though; Teapot would get him away in time.

They never get me, he said; he said he would go on a train to where he wanted to go, and he would go when he chose, and stay here till then.

Innokenti asked Teapot if he had a ticket. Sure he did, ten of them: and he held up his dirty hands. Innokenti later understood this joke, a common one among the kids: ten tickets, ten fingers to hold on to the rods or the ladders or somewhere else, and ride for free.

At the sound of a great door closing, Teapot leapt up, and grabbed the younger boy by his collar, and ran. They could hear the tramp of the soldiers, the shouting, and the homeless people who had hoped to sleep on the benches in the warmth pleading or cursing. Teapot led him away along the closed buffet and down a lightless passage and further downward to a locked door. A dim bulb far off showed that there was no farther they could go. Teapot put down his pot, took hold of Innokenti’s coat, and pulled it open; he felt within the younger boy’s clothes, though Innokenti tried feebly to pull his hands away, reaching into pockets and even touching his skin. He pulled a cross on a chain from his throat, and a pen from his pocket; two marbles, and a pepper-mint wrapped in paper. After he had pocketed these things he knelt 122

before the locked door and somehow pushed out one of its lower panels. He bent Innokenti’s head toward the hole, and shoved him through into the utter darkness on the other side.

For a moment he thought he would be left there. He couldn’t cry out, couldn’t move. Then he felt a push from behind: Teapot cursed him, move along, and came in after him. When he was in, he turned and put the panel of the door back in place.

Now, he said. See?

He was close enough for Innokenti to smell him. It was hot in the lightless passage. Teapot lit a match—he had matches of his own, after all—and by its light found a stub of candle hidden in the rough wall, and lit it. The darkness lightened. And Teapot pulled him along the passage.

Innokenti would later come to learn the way down, and remember it ever after: it was dangerous not to know it, maybe fatal. How he was able to do it the first time he didn’t know; only because Teapot wouldn’t let him stop, or rest, or weep, but pushed him along and smacked his head when he stopped in fear or in the paralysis of total loss. Teapot had a trick of attaching the candle stub to his hat so that he could use both hands to climb downward on narrow iron ladders, warm to the touch, into airless darkness. Had Innokenti believed in hell, or even heard of it? Only a grown-up would think that a child might think of such a thing, that he was descending into those fires.

But he heard noises too: a kind of sudden release of dragon breath, once there, again over there; and then an eerie long human whistle.

Teapot stopped at the whistle, listened, and whistled back. They reached an iron floor slick with damp. Light came from a string of bulbs in iron cages overhead, dim as candles, many broken. They walked crabwise along the passage, inches from steam pipes whose heat they could feel on their faces, that now and then at valves released that sigh or sob, and steam hot enough to scorch flesh. Duck down here; don’t touch that; now stop and listen.

More whistles to answer. Then they wiggled through a hole in the

thick rubble wall, and it was a little less stifling; Innokenti began to see other candles, and Teapot laughed and banged the lid of his chainik, and out from holes in the passage and from under piles of rags and from packing crates came white faces, girls and boys, old and young.

Got a new one, Teapot said.

Any money? said a voice, deeper, Innokenti couldn’t see whose it was. There were many children, more and more gathering, some looking at him, some uncaring. Dozens.

Nah, Teapot said. He’s just a psy.

And Teapot, who’d taken all his money and everything else he had, put his arm around Innokenti’s neck and hugged and grinned at him.

She had never heard of it, and no one she asked about it then had heard of it, this world that had been hidden within the Soviet world, down deep within it, this Dickensian world with no Dickens to make things right, to tie up all the ends. It was real, though; in Russian novels of that time she would later find them mentioned, “ragamuffins” or “urchins” in the background of scenes, you knew who they were if you had been taught to look for them, they were the besprizornye. And she found them in the writings of others who went there in the 1920s to visit and see the Revolution for themselves; Langston Hughes saw besprizornye and recorded them, and so did Averell Harriman, and Theodore Dreiser, who watched a little dirty girl trying to get on a Black Sea steamer, watched her carried off screaming by the huge genial sailors who deposited her on the docks, and carried her off again when she snuck on again, and again. Stevedores taking up hay, crates of geese, boxes of canned goods. Her bare legs kicking and the Red Army soldiers guarding the dock laughing.

Millions. The children of fathers dead in the Great War, whose mothers couldn’t keep them, or who were separated from their families when their villages were overrun by advancing or retreating troops as the fighting moved eastward. Children evacuated by train from the 124

front, carried far to the east, losing their families at stations or cross-ings: the trains stopped for hours, for days, parents got off and went to look for food, and the trains were ordered to depart while they were away, and the parents never saw their child again, who might fetch up as far east as the Urals, holding a smudged and illegible form. Children left behind when their parents died of typhus, which spread rapidly among refugees pressed into unheated barracks or shipped back and forth by train. Children orphaned in the Revolution and the civil war that followed, their parents killed by the Reds or the Whites, shot for hiding grain or concealing livestock or aiding the enemy; children lost when families again fled before one army or the other. Children sent out by the authorities from starving northern cities, Petrograd, Moscow, to the Ukraine and the Crimea, where there might be food and warmth at least: eight thousand were remanded by the Bolsheviks to Poltava, and then when the White forces took the city and the Reds retreated, the White army was left with the children.

It never stopped. After the civil war there was famine, and millions died. “Millions died”: one by one, though, each in his own way, in his house or church or by the roadside to somewhere; children sitting with their dead parents, unable to go farther, their bellies swollen from eating grass. The multitudes driven from their land by collectivization, sent to the east to make new farmlands or die; many lingered or hid, tried to return to their old homes, failed along the way, their children having become practiced beggars and thieves, and so able to live. And always there were the children of those condemned by the state, arrested, taken away: their children were shunned, sometimes given up by parents or grandparents, maybe in the hope that without the taint of their father’s crimes they could survive. My father was an engineer: there was a purge of engineers, “bourgeois specialists,” accused of “wrecking,” many tried and shot: Falin might have been eight or nine then.

“We all knew of them then, besprizornye,” Gavriil Viktorovich told her. “They were a constant threat, a grief, a fear. Papers talked much of

them. Other children were afraid of them, yes, and mothers frightened their children with them—don’t lag behind and be lost with besprizornye.”

Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his eyes, looking backwards; his full soft mouth and the red-rimmed liquid eyes made it seem he wept.

“I went in 1927 with my parents and many other families from Moscow to Crimea on vacation,” he said. “There is a place on that railroad line where one can begin to smell the sea, and often tracks become covered with windblown sand, and train must stop so that they can be cleared. I and my little fellows, you know, all in our holiday clothes, climb down from train to collect shells that were always in the sand. Then we rushed away frightened. Under the carriages we had been riding in were these other children, dark figures, hardly human they seemed, five, ten, a dozen, more. We children ran. Besprizornye!

Besprizornye! We were afraid and thrilled.”

“Maybe one of them . . .”

“Among so many thousands.” He shook his head.

“It means without something,” Kit said. “Besprizornyi. He told me.

More than homeless. Without . . .”

“Without guardian, unsheltered, not cared for.”

“Yes.”

“There was talk, back then, that perhaps to be besprizornyi was good training for socialism: that such children would be toughened by life, by having to rely on others; that to have all bourgeois social conventions overturned or taken away meant they would make new, cooperative ways of living. Maybe besprizornye would make good Communists.”

He smiled in a way that made Kit feel far from home. “Did you think so?”

“Oh, I had no thoughts of such things; I was so young. But a man who thought so was Felix Dzerzhinski.”

“The secret police chief.”

“Yes, he. Whose statue in Moscow was not long ago pulled down.

The hugest of them all, the one we all saw.”

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“Yes. I saw it too.” Like Falin’s poem: The finger that pointed Onward driven into earth to point Endward instead.

“ ‘Iron Felix’ he was called. There is more than one person in Falin’s poems named Felix, always people of great power and, and— moral ambiguity, you would say. Of course his name means Happy, or Happy One. Yes, Dzerzhinski took great interest in besprizornye. There had been then established for them many detskie doma, children’s homes; detdoma we always called them. Most were very poor places, no staff or materials or even beds.”

“He told me. He said he nearly starved in one, and ran away.”

“But Cheka—that was first secret police organization of Dzerzhinski—set up its own detdoma. Camps and schools too. Well funded.

Often children who escaped from other homes, who refused help, were selected for these.”

“Like reform school.”

“Well. What was said was that Cheka recruited from these schools: chose the most toughened and strongest and most willing children to become Chekists. Children who had already on the streets learned les-sons that they must learn. That we all were to learn.”

He went to the burdened shelves and without searching or ponder-ing drew out from the clutter a handful of magazines and papers tied in red-and-white string. He picked at the knot with trembling fingers; Kit wanted to help, but knew she mustn’t.

“We were all besprizornye,” he said. “The whole society. We were all torn away from all common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them; had to make our lives without what we had been born with, families, institutions, protectors. But it did not make us New Man, entirely social. We pretended. But we became instead nation of individuals, of atoms; only thing left to us, instinct for self-preservation. All against all.”

“He said that,” Kit said. “Falin.”

Gavriil Viktorovich had undone the bundle, and laid it before her: thick periodika, and gray sheets with typewritten lines almost invisible, and a small pamphlet on cheap paper.

“He said so,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “He said long ago, in his poems. These, The Gray Gods.”

It was so small. Falin’s body, shrunk in death or in time. She thought of her mother lifting from a cardboard box the drawings and stories and maps that Ben had made, that she had helped to make, their land.