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Chapter Eight
 mitri's mother, Tatiana Andreevna, had to climb twenty-five steps to reach her room on the fourth floor of the People's Building Three, 109 Kalanchevskaya. Before the Revolution, the building had been a cheap hotel. The steps were greasy and slippery from the slops the other tenants had thrown out. Tatiana had fallen four times since coming to live there three years ago. Two years ago, a fall broke her left shoulder. Once inside her room, she took off her dress and underthings. She summoned all her courage. She looked on the wall for a picture in a gilt frame. It was Zina's watercolor of Dmitri painted to look like Giotto's portrait of Dante. In the background, where another man was standing in the Giotto work, Zina painted a person that looked like Aleksandr Blok. Dmitri and Blok were dressed as in Dante's time. Every time Tatiana looked at that picture, she was filled with good humor. But that particular time, it was as though she had looked into the monstrous maw of the abyss. She turned her gaze away in terror.
Tatiana stood in front of the mirror attached to her cherry dresser. Dmitri had hauled the dresser, along with two old wicker chairs, and the brass bed that Tatiana shared for 17 years with her late husband, Pavel, in an old truck from Stary Gorod to that building. The porter had helped Dmitri carry everything up the twenty-five steps. After a few minutes standing in front of the mirror, Tatiana sat down on the bed and cried for a long time.
When she finished drying her eyes, she closed them so hard that they began to burn and throb. She didn't want them to ever open again. She wanted the eyeballs to burst. She never again wanted to see what she had just seen in the mirror when she looked at her naked breast. She hadn't examined herself like that for some time. She was afraid to. When she bathed, she didn't look, or hardly touch herself there. But that day, October 3rd, all day at the School for the Children of the Revolution where she taught, she was determined to find courage to look for only the second time since she had discovered the loathsome big reddish lump on her left breast. And to her horrified amazement, the lump had grown larger, the shape and color were different! She was devastated anew. An icy fear gripped her heart, and would not let her go.
When she found it, she was astounded that it had somehow seemed to appear without any warning, overnight, as it were. The morning she found it while getting dressed for work, Tatiana immediately went out of her room and walked the streets all day in a daze. She almost lost her job over it because she never reported to the school that day, or the next. For days after the discovery, she tried to convince herself that she was somehow mistaken about what she had seen. For days Tatiana tried to forget what she had seen. That went on for weeks. She told not one. One day after school, she had decided to confide in her friend and colleague, Sofya Konstantinova. Tatiana waited for Sofya outside her classroom. Sofya was talking to a student at the blackboard, but as the wait grew longer, Tatiana became more nervous and unsure of her decision. She was ashamed at what had happened to her as though it was somehow her fault. Suddenly Tatiana lost her courage. She left the school without a word to Sofya.
 he wind was too chilly. Clouds covered the sun completely, ending the hide and seek the warming rays were playing with the contents of the yard at 120 Novokirovskaya. The wrens used their beaks like picks to break up the rocks of black bread that Zina threw out into the yard from the porch steps. Sasha was wrapped up in a blanket with a little cap on his head . He weighed over nine pounds, but looked small in the black buggy. He was awake, crying. Zina angrily took her easel apart. The picture she was working on lay on the ground next to her. "Amateur", it shouted back at her, "Second-Rate"; not "Artist", but "Art Student!" She could not make it look like she felt. Her creative energy wilted in front of it. It was the hand that failed her. The hand had done something entirely different from what her heart, her heart filled with pain, had told it to do. She bowed her head in defeat. Zina stepped on her picture with her left boot. She dug her sharp heel into the paper several times until she destroyed it. It was a self-portrait of Zina as the Titan Prometheus, the Tarot's Hanged Man - naked, and shackled upside down to the barefaced cliff. Unlike Prometheus on the card, who had a serene expression on his face, the expression of Zina's likeness was as tortured as her position. Behind her, a landscape of craggy rocks and a setting sun casting a bloody glow over her body. Above her, the vulture was approaching.
A large piece of lined notebook paper, secured to the ground by a small rock was next to the ruined watercolor. On that paper was a stanza in Greek followed by a Russian translation prepared for Zina by Evgeny Uchitelnitsky from the drama, Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. Zina read the translation,
"Then the blood eagle, winged hound of Zeus
Will tear from you great shreds of liver
Each day without fail for his foul supper."
Zina left the buggy and the easel at the front steps and carried Sasha up onto the sun porch. On the sun porch, the cot that Zina had been using while she was in the late stages of her pregnancy was being occupied by her father, S. A. Ostavlyavich. He was sitting on the cot next to Obyomov. They both had their backs against the wall between the windows directly across from the porch door. They had their arms around each other. Each had a bottle of vodka. They were loudly singing an old folk song, "From the Volga to the Don." They were both very drunk.
Zina's hatred for her father grew to Homeric proportions. The sun porch had become his room. He had turned it into a filthy mess. The door between the porch and the rest of the apartment had to be kept open to allow warm air from the stove in the pantry to circulate out there. As a result, Ostavlyavich's stench had circulated into the rest of the apartment, a smell that could put a pig to shame. The small toilet room had to be shared with him. Since he drank nearly all day, he was in there all the time, unless he didn't make it on time and soiled his pants. That was common. Scraps of half-eaten food were everywhere. Zina wouldn't do his laundry, and he didn't do it either. Obyomov was there nearly every day as well as other drunkards. And sometimes, a woman about Ostavlyavich's age named Feodosiya, whom he called his "girlfriend".
Zina didn't usually come onto the porch anymore. If she went into the yard, she did so by coming out the front of the house and going around the right side where there was enough room to walk to the back. The house to the left was so close against 120 that walking to the back was impossible. However, that day, Ostavlyavich did not come home the night before. By the time just after noon that Zina decided to take Sasha outside and try to paint, he still was not at home. She was surprised to find Ostavlyavich and Obyomov on the porch when she came up the steps from the yard.
When Ostavlyavich and Obyomov caught sight of Zina through their blurry eyes, they called to her to join them in their merriment. Sasha began to cry again from the stuffy, smelly air, and all the yelling.
If I had that pistol in my hand right now...., thought Zina. Dmitri won't be home for more than an hour.
Ostavlyavich was trying to get off the cot. He couldn't. His head fell back against the wall. Obyomov was more successful. He stood up.
"Lovely lady, here, a drink for new times sakes. Yes! And why not," He laughed vulgarly.
Zina turned with Sasha and went through the porch door and down the steps. She walked around the side of the house to the front, and stood there a few minutes. It felt to Zina as though the temperature had grown colder by 20 degrees. She held her sobbing son to her chest and began to cry as well. What was she to do? A wave of wind had suddenly whipped up, she had no choice but to go back inside. She walked back around the side of the house. She summoned all her strength. She took a deep breath. She went inside.
 ina left home on Sunday, June 10th, 1916. She had finished her studies for the year the day before at the St. Sofya Cathedral School for young women. She woke at dawn, washed, dressed, ate some black bread and drank some fermented mare's milk, took what she was taking with her and was off. She didn't even check her father's little room next to the kitchen to see if he made it back to the apartment after drinking all night. There was nothing to feel sorry about or say goodbye to! She was going to Moscow! A week before she had taken her little dog, Muffet, to a 10-year old boy who lived in an apartment across the street. She had given Muffet to him, and he was exceedingly glad. Zina cried all that night and day long at school the next day. But on June 10th, there was nothing but going to Moscow.
Zina was going to Moscow with Rudolf, "and those guys." Rudolf Dubrosov was 17, "the elder statesman," as Zina called him. He was burly, mature in his physique, and a know-it-all. He had "experience." "But his heart is soft and sweet," Zina wrote in her diary soon after they first met in 1914. Countless times, she wished she would have met Rudolf earlier so she could have told him about Choir Master Podly and what he did to her years before. Then Rudolf could have taken Podly by the neck and squeezed it until the loathsome creature's Adam's apple had popped. But Zina had told no one about Podly. And she probably would not have told even Rudolf.
"Those guys" were two guys, both 15 years old, both younger than Zina: Igor Molodny and Lev Krachinykh. Igor had been in the children's choir with Zina at the cathedral. He was the funny one, always playing pranks, teasing, and goading everyone into an uproar. He was tall, even taller than Rudolf, but thin. He had red hair and freckles all over his long face punctuated by gray eyes. Igor was always getting into trouble from his constant tomfoolery. He was expelled from the school countless times. Then finally when he was 11, Children's Choir Master Podly had had enough of his mischief, and had permanently expelled him from the choir.
Lev was the daredevil, a fearless youth who would never back down from any challenge. He could climb every tree, leap from any height, fight any boy, and live to tell about it. And he never embellished his stories, never told tall tales. All the children who knew him, or had heard of his exploits respected the fact that everything was true.
Zina regarded Rudolf and "those guys" as her best pals. She loved being with them. She wasn't close to any girls from the school. When she announced on her 16th birthday on April 11th that as soon as school was out, she was leaving Novgorod forever and going away to Moscow, Rudolf and "those guys" vowed that they would accompany her. They even gathered-up their monetary resources and bought her a one-way train ticket. It would be a great adventure! Perhaps Rudolf would even lie about his age and join the army. But mostly, he bragged, he was going to meet "some Moscow women, and teach them a thing or two." "Those guys" would live it up like anything, drink vodka in Red Square, and demand to personally speak with Tsar Nikolay II about all the injustices and poverty in their dear country.
Zina loved the feeling of being on a fast moving train. She loved to feel the powerful movement of the train beneath her, and the pounding of the wheels upon the tracks. She and Lev tried to walk through the cars as fast as they could, challenging the rocking cars to toss them into some stranger's lap. Often they fell. Often the conductor would demand that they return to their seats. Passengers would complain, usually only the women, especially about "that girl." The men didn't seem to mind having Zina fall into their laps. When the train was not very crowded between the Bologoye and Vysni stations, Zina and Lev walked through the third class coaches and back again as much as they liked.
When the train was very crowded and people were clogging the passageways, Zina sat and chattered away with Rudolf and "those guys" or else in more reflective moments, she contemplated her future, her new life in Moscow as a 16 year-old runaway from home, with no money, a bagful of clothing, a sketch pad, and a few charcoal pencils - she didn't even have any color.
The train pulled out of the Novgorod station just after 8:30 in the morning. It pulled into Moscow's Belorussia Station at 4:55 p.m. The trip of slightly less than 250 miles took 8 1/2 hours! Stops along that very busy line were almost every 30 miles. Bologoye, Valdazh, Vysni, Volochek, Kalinin, Klin were the "big names" stops, with even smaller ones in between. By 5:00 p.m. on June 18th, there was still plenty of daylight left. The four young people from Novgorod set off in the direction of the Kremlin after deboarding the train. It was a distance of about 2 1/2 miles to the Kremlin from the Belorussia railroad station. Rudolf had been to Moscow once before, the previous year with his father. The plan was to find somewhere to sleep on the infamous Arbat, particularly in the neighborhood known as "the catacombs." They could stay in a flophouse, or an abandoned building.
"The Arbat is swarming with kids like us, good kids, adventurous kids, who are out on a spree, or just down on their luck," said Rudolf as they walked with some trepidation along the broad Leningradsky prospect. The reality of what they all chose to do had finally hit them as they faced that great city head-on. They tried to keep up their bravado, but the longer they walked and the more they saw along the way, the harder it was not to cry out what they were all secretly thinking: "Oh, my God. This is Moscow, and we are at its mercy!"
Zina was the only one of the four to end up staying in Moscow. She never returned to Novgorod. "Those guys," Igor and Lev, stayed on for a few weeks. Then, Igor called his father, and the angry man, a tanner by trade, took the train to Moscow and brought his son and Lev home. There would be Hell to pay for "those guys." Rudolf and Zina stayed together over the summer in various small filthy rooms, by themselves, or with others. The runaway children and homeless persons' situation in Moscow was monumental in those war years. Rudolf found some work loading and unloading goods at the various railroad yards around the city. It kept he and Zina eating, but it wasn't steady work and sometimes they had to go without food. Zina made a few kopecks making sketches of people in Red Square. And by other means unknown to Rudolf. In late August, Zina was befriended by Anya Drugo, one of a small group of people who were dedicated to looking out for and trying to help some of the runaways and homeless people of the Arbat. Anya quickly got Zina a permanent job at the Electro Works, which was then almost exclusively making munitions parts for the war effort. It was located a little east of Sokolniki Park. Anya got Zina a decent place to live nearby, sharing space with other women from the factory. By September, Rudolf had turned 18 and decided to present himself for Army service. He survived the war and stayed in the Red Army, hoping to make a career as a soldier. Unfortunately, during the Civil War, he died from head injuries when the Whites bombed his transport train outside of Kiev in 1920.
By the war's end in 1918, and the first year anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Zina was working with an artist and sculptor's guild loosely attached to the Fine Arts Department at Moscow University. Anya Drugo introduced Zina to a sculptor who was a guild member, and she was soon hired. She ordered supplies, helped to mount exhibitions, and sold art objects at the Guild's Fine Arts and Crafts store. The Guild was located in an old warehouse on the Arbat down the street from the Red Rooster Cabaret. Zina continued to draw and to paint, and her work, too, began to be noticed. It was quite advanced. Her pictures did not show viewers what to see, rather, what they would see if they were able to do so. The paintings' colors seemed to have showered down from the solar disc itself, and then scattered, where no surface homogeneity had time to reform. Absences were like light, presences as shadows, encounters as packed as an egg in an uneasy plurality. She was also noticed for her good looks and the reputation she has acquired as a young, talented, independent woman. "The kid from Novgorod," she was called. She looked younger than 18. She was at the Rooster every evening with Anya Drugo and her crowd. Zina loved the night life and entertainment, the artists, and the wide variety of social types, good and evil, that the Rooster attracted. Zina was not in love, but was involved in the casual sexual relationships that were vogue in those days. She was continually pursued by suitors from both sexes.
One of the people most infatuated with Zina was a lesbian who worked at a high level administrative position in the Education Ministry. She was expected to go far in the Ministry. That was particularly true since the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, as the new regime attempted to show the world that Soviet citizens were "new" men and women, equal, godless, and unprejudiced by gender, or sexual orientation. At first, that woman was content to admire Zina from afar at the Red Rooster, and at the Guild. Soon, however, she made Zina's acquaintance, and continually made her interest known in spite of Zina's constant emphatic rejections of her advances. That woman's pursuit of Zina by means of letters, gifts, phone calls, and even by the offering of monetary reward for Zina's favors continued into late 1918 and then abruptly stopped. The lesbian was promoted to Moscow Director of Education, Research Division in December of that year. The woman's name was Olga Borisovna Shpion.
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