Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,15

Moscow from thirteen to eighty. Cultural opportunities previously reserved for the ruling classes were being made available at no cost to all comrades. Institutions of higher learning had been ordered to open their doors to factory workers and peasants.

Zita nudged his arm. “He is my father. The commissar is my father. Leonid Kuznetsov.”

Impossible, Miklós thought, that this dry stick of a man was Zita’s father. She, however, regarded the man fondly and kept looking at Miklós and once even nudged his arm to make sure he was appreciating Commissar Kuznetsov’s brilliance. Russia could no longer rely on foreign trade for essential commodities, Commissar Kuznetsov pronounced. Russia must ensure a reliable domestic supply of coal for power generation and trains, turf for hearth fires, gold for monetary stability, sulfur for matches. Salt, a substance vital to life, from now on would be mined by Russian workers in quantities sufficient to meet the needs of the Soviet Republic.

To hell with Russia’s enemies, he said. Russia needs no one.

He received a standing ovation. He stood with his head bowed, and then he composed himself, this thin, plain, unremarkable-looking man, and made his way to the table where his daughter was sitting. He gave Miklós a cold, incurious stare. Zita said how nice it had been to meet Miklós. She gathered up her things and went with her father to the hotel lobby. Miklós followed behind them, discreetly, and watched as they went out onto the pavement and got into a waiting limousine. In Moscow there was no gas for streetlamps, supplies of coal and wood were in short supply, and yet the Kuznetsovs traveled in a chauffeur-driven German car.

At the Hotel Lux, Miklós asked around: Could anyone tell him where he might find Commissar Kuznetsov and Comrade Kuznetsova? Everyone warned him to stay away from the Kuznetsovs, who had a reputation for being one day this kind of socialist, the next another kind of socialist altogether. The pair of them, père et fille, could fall into a Moscow latrine and come up smelling of attar of roses. Anyway, if it was the daughter he was interested in, he was told, Kuznetsov allowed no one near her.

At the First House of Soviets—in the temporarily repurposed National Hotel, the seat of government while the Kremlin was under repair from damage sustained in the war—he presented his press card. He would like an appointment to interview Commissar Kuznetsov. This was denied. He walked on Prechistensky Bulvar, where, he’d heard, Kuznetsov had an apartment, hoping he’d see Zita. But nothing, no sign of them. Had they left Moscow? Should he look for Zita in Petrograd? Then, when he had reached a feverish pitch of longing to see her, even from a distance, just to know that she was all right, she came into the lobby of the Hotel Lux. She was wearing the astrakhan coat and carried a satchel over her shoulder, and her head was uncovered, the tips of her ears red from the cold. He had been talking to another journalist and broke off in the middle of a sentence when he saw her. She told him her father had taken her to a dentist, who had yanked out the rotten tooth with pliers. It was not pleasant, but here she was. She had two tickets to a performance of King Lear at the Moscow Art Theater, and since her father had been called to an emergency meeting of the war cabinet, she wondered if Comrade Andorján would care to accompany her.

That evening they joined an audience of factory workers, schoolteachers, and minor bureaucrats, all smoking cheap tobacco and reeking of damp wool and unwashed flesh. Even if not everyone in the audience was familiar with Shakespeare’s play, they recognized the brutality, enmity, intrigue. When Gloucester was blinded, Zita reached for Miklós’s hand.

He thought: I will live in Moscow, to be near her. Or I will bring her with me to Berlin.

But the cold, gray light, the darkness, the shifting late-winter ice on the Moskva River seemed purposively manufactured by the Bolsheviks to conceal and confound. Again, Zita disappeared. His temporary visa was running out; he could not get an extension and had no choice but to return to Berlin, where he wrote to her at the First House of Soviets. His letters went undelivered, were lost in the mail, or Zita Kuznetsova chose not to reply.

Three years later, in March 1922, he saw her on Unter den Linden. He knew her at once and