had been brought in this past year—over a million, according to the records office—that it was not possible to keep track of them all. What Pekkala knew, and what he could not bring himself to tell the grandmother, was that more than half of those people arrested were shot before they ever boarded the trains bound for Siberia.
Their family had once been farmers in the fertile Black Earth region of the Altai Mountains. In 1930, the Communist Party had ordered the farm to be merged with others in their village. It was called “collectivization.” The running of this collectivized farm, or kolkhoz, had then been given over to a party official who, with no farming experience of his own, ran the collective into the ground in less than two years. The collective broke up and Talia’s family had drifted, as had many others, to the city.
They began working for the Mos-Prov plant, which supplied most of the electricity to Moscow. The husband- and-wife team immediately joined the Communist Party and rose quickly through its ranks. Before their arrest, they had been rewarded with special rations like extra sugar, tea, and cigarettes, tickets to the Bolshoi Theater and trips to the Astafievo resort outside the city.
According to Babayaga, the father had often spoken about the merits of
Although the parents might have been innocent of any charges brought against them, it did not mean that they had been arrested by mistake. They might have been denounced by someone who wanted their apartment or who envied their marriage or whose seat they had taken on the bus which brought them to work. The accusations were seldom investigated and even the most preposterous stories served as justification for arrest. One man had been arrested for blowing smoke rings which, in the eyes of his accuser, seemed to bear a resemblance to the outline of Stalin’s face.
Pekkala suspected that the reason for their imprisonment had nothing to do with them at all. It was probably only the result of quotas imposed upon the NKVD, ordering them to arrest so many people in each district per month.
It was after the parents went away that Talia came to live with her grandmother. The girl’s real name was Elizaveta, although she never used it and had chosen for herself instead the name of a witch from an old Russian fairy tale. The witch lived in the forest, in a house which turned round in circles at the top of two giant chicken legs. In the fairy tale, the witch was cruel to children, but Pekkala knew the little girl was lucky to have a woman as kind as Babayaga looking after her. Talia seemed to know it, too, and her name became a joke they shared between them.
The first thing Pekkala noticed when he walked into their apartment was what Babayaga called a Patriotic Corner. Here, portraits of Stalin, as well as pictures of Lenin and Marx, were on display. Other pictures, of men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and Pyatakov, had been removed after the men in question were accused of counter- revolutionary activity and liquidated.
The Stalin corner was always on display, but in a closet by the bathroom the grandmother kept small wooden paintings of saints. Each icon had little wooden doors which could be opened so that the icons could stand on their own. The wooden doors were inlaid with pieces of mother-of-pearl and curls of silver wire which looked like musical notes in the black wood.
Following their arrests, Talia’s parents had been dismissed from the Communist Party and her membership in the Young Pioneers revoked. In spite of this, she continued to wear her uniform, although only inside the building where she lived.
“Here he is, Babayaga,” announced the little girl, swinging the door to their apartment wide.
Babayaga sat at a bare wood table. In one hand, the old woman held an outdated copy of
“What are you cutting?”
Babayaga nodded at the clippings. “See for yourself.”
Pekkala glanced at the neat rectangles. On each, he saw the word
“She’s making toilet paper!” trilled Talia.
The woman put down her scissors. Neatly, she folded the newspaper. Then, with crooked fingers, she gathered up the clippings. Rising from the table, she went over to a wooden trunk in the corner. It was the kind of trunk which might have stored blankets in the summer months, but when Babayaga opened the lid, Pekkala realized that it was entirely filled with paper clippings of Stalin’s name.
“I heard a story,” said Babayaga, as she tossed the clippings in, letting them fall like confetti from her fingertips. “A man was arrested when the police came to search his house and found a newspaper in the toilet. Stalin’s name was in the paper, of course. It is on every page of every paper every day. But because Stalin’s name was on the paper, and because”—she twisted her hand in the air—“of the purpose of the paper, they arrested him. Sent him to Kolyma for ten years.” She smiled at Pekkala, folds of skin crimping her cheeks. “They won’t get ahold of me that way! But just in case”—she pointed to a laminated cardboard suitcase by the door—“I always keep a bag packed. If they do find a reason, at least I’ll be ready to go.”
What saddened Pekkala about this was not that Babayaga kept the suitcase ready but that she believed she would live long enough in custody to make use of whatever it contained.
“I understand,” he said, “why you might want to cut Stalin’s name from the paper, but why are you saving all the clippings?”
“If I throw them away, I could get arrested for that, too,” she replied.
Talia sat between them, doing her best to follow the conversation. She looked from Babayaga to Pekkala and then back to Babayaga again.
Once or twice a week, the old woman sent for Pekkala, knowing that he lived alone.
Babayaga was lonely, too, but less for human contact than for the days before the Revolution, when the world had made more sense to her. Now she lived like an overlapping image seen through a pair of broken binoculars—half in the present, half in the past, unable to bring either into focus.
“Off you go now.” Babayaga rested her hand on her granddaughter’s forehead. “Time for bed.”
When the little girl had gone, Pekkala sat back in his chair. “I have a present for you, Babayaga.” Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out two small votive candles and set them down in front of her. He had bought the candles at the Yeliseyev store on his way home that day, knowing that she liked to burn them when she prayed beside her icons.
Babayaga picked one up, smelled it, and closed her eyes. “Beeswax,” she said. “You have brought me the good ones. And now I have a present for you.” She went into the kitchen, which was separated from the living room only by a curtain of wooden beads, and reappeared a moment later with a battered brass samovar. Steam puffed from the top as if from the smokestack of a miniature train. She returned to the kitchen to fetch one glass in an ornate brass holder and a small, chipped mug, which Pekkala recognized from its pattern of interwoven birds and flowers to have been made by the old firm of Gardner’s. The firm had been founded in Russia by an Englishman, and Pekkala had not seen or heard anything of it since the Bolsheviks took over. The mug was quite likely, he imagined, Babayaga’s most treasured possession. She set before him a dish of rock sugar and another dish in which lay the twisted black grains of smoked tea. Laying out the tea was done as a gesture of politeness, allowing the guest to strengthen the tea if he thought it was not brewed correctly. But, out of politeness, Pekkala did not touch it. He merely bent down and breathed in the slightly tarlike scent of pine-smoked tea, which he doubted Babayaga could afford.
She poured him a cup, taking the strong-brewed tea from the pot at the top of the samovar and diluting it with the water stored in the lower section. Then she handed it to him. “That glass belonged to my husband,” she said.
She told him that every time, and every time Pekkala took the glass from her with the reverence it deserved.
