Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,16
sprinted across the street to speak to her before she disappeared, as she had in Moscow. Her face was wet with rain; her shoes were soaked. “Fräulein Kuznetsova,” he said. “Do you not remember me?” “Should I?” she said, staring at him. “I wrote to you,” he said. “You didn’t get my letters?” She shrugged slightly. “I got them,” she said. He tried to hide his dismay at her pallor, the shadows under her eyes, her thinness. She let him take her satchel, heavy with books, and agreed to have coffee with him. He took her to a café where a faulty coal stove was poisoning the air with fumes. He ordered strudel filled with meat and potato. She finished everything on the plate. “How long have you been in Berlin?” he asked.
“Not long. Five months.”
“You left Russia?” he said.
“Yes, obviously, since I’m here,” she said. “No one is in Russia if they can help it. Lenin’s ‘transitional phase’ of pure capitalism is killing Russia. Gangsterism is rampant, and the black market flourishes; people are burning chairs and tables to keep warm. You know Lenin requisitioned the entire grain harvest for export? The last time my father and I saw a play at the Moscow Art Theater, the actors were so weak from malnutrition they could only whisper their lines. My father said, ‘Commissar Lenin, you need to understand something. People require a thousand calories every day to stay alive and more if you want to get any work out of them.’ No response from the great man. The next day, Lenin had my father detained at the Butyrka prison—not the worst prison in Russia; he was allowed books, paper and ink, medical attention. When he was released, Lenin embraced him like a brother. Lenin,” she said, and paused. “Lenin has grown paranoid, unpredictable,” she said. “Do you know what the great man says, these days? He says intellectuals are shit, the nation’s excrement. Can you imagine?”
They were living, Zita and her father, in a district of Berlin where thousands of Russian émigrés had settled: Mensheviks, Bolsheviks, Whites, Leninists, Trotskyites, all of whom had brought the old animosities and grievances with them. It was worse than Moscow, she said. Her father had wanted to settle in Paris, in Russian Montparnasse, where he planned to contact Aleksandr Kerensky, but then he remembered Kerensky despised him, and instead they had remained in Berlin. She told Miklós she was finishing a degree at the Berlin University. She had written a monograph on Rosa Luxemburg, published in a socialist magazine. “Did I tell you I want to write her biography one day? I am beginning work on it. It is to be factual and poetic at the same time.” She picked up crumbs from the table and licked them off her fingers. He got a waiter to bring her a piece of raisin cake. She wrapped it in a handkerchief to take to her father. He gazed at her bent head, his eyes filling with tears. How could he part with her? He longed to take her in his arms. He wanted to see her to her apartment, but she said it was not far and he must have other things to do. No, he said, nothing. Dear, immovable, stubborn Zita Kuznetsova. But he, too, could be stubborn. He waited with her at a tram stop. She told him she was going to England, to study at Oxford. It meant leaving her father, and she worried about him; he was frail, he had a heart condition. Would Miklós look in on him while she was away?
That summer, Miklós shopped for Commissar Kuznetsov, prepared meals for him, played chess with him. They began using first names. Leo would seem to be drowsing at the chessboard, and then he’d snap awake, raise his eyes, and with thin trembling fingers capture a bishop, a knight. Checkmate, he would say, with satisfaction, making a slight clicking noise with his teeth. He’d been born in Saint Petersburg, he told Miklós. His parents were middle class; there were three sisters; he was the youngest child; he’d studied law; his career began in the legal department of the imperial railway. His political awakening came late, as he began to see how wealth defied gravity and flowed ever uphill into the hands of the banks and moneylenders, into the already fat purses of the monarchy. Never into the hands of those who needed it simply to sustain life. He began to think: