Miss Klara

The Georgian Irakly Meladze, the son of a rich merchant in Vladikavkaz, who had come to St Petersburg on his father’s business in January, was having dinner that evening at Palkin’s. He was, as always, without any reason, quite gloomy in appearance; short, slightly stooped, lean and strong, with a low forehead overgrown almost down to the eyebrows with coarse, reddish hair, his face shaved and a dark-brick colour; he had a nose like a yataghan, brown, sunken eyes, small, wiry hands with hairy wrists, fingernails sharp, strong and round; he wore a blue suit of excessively fashionable provincial cut, and a light-blue silk shirt with a long tie which was sometimes golden in tint, sometimes pearly. He was dining in a large, crowded hall to the accompaniment of a noisy string orchestra, feeling with pleasure that he was in the capital and in the midst of its rich winter life – shining outside the windows was the Nevsky of the evening time, and onto its lights, and onto its incessant and thickly pouring stream of trams, flying cabs and cabmen fell snow in large flakes, lilac from the lights. After drinking two glasses of orange-blossom vodka with an hors d’oeuvre of fatty eel, he was intently eating a runny hotpot, but kept on casting glances at a mighty brunette who was dining at a table nearby and seemed to him the height of beauty and smartness: a gorgeous body, a high bust and steep hips, all fitted tightly into a black satin dress; on her broad shoulders was an ermine boa; on her jet hair a magnificently curved black hat; her black eyes with arching false lashes shone imperiously and independently, her thin, orange-painted lips were proudly compressed; her large face was white as chalk with powder… As he was finishing a wood grouse in sour cream, Meladze shook his head and beckoned a flunkey towards him with a bent finger, indicating her with his eyes:

“Tell me, please, who’s she?”

The flunkey winked:

“Miss Klara.”

“Let me have the bill quickly, please…”

She was already paying too, after elegantly drinking a cup of white coffee, and having paid and carefully counted the change, she unhurriedly rose and walked smoothly to the ladies’ toilet. Going after her, he ran down the staircase, covered with a well-worn red carpet, to the exit onto the porch, he hastily put his coat on there in the doorman’s room and started waiting for her on the porch in the thickly falling snow. She emerged with her head tilted imperiously, wearing a roomy seal-fur coat, with her hands held in a large ermine muff. He blocked her way and, bowing, removed his astrakhan hat:

“Please allow me to accompany you…”

She paused and looked at him in genteel surprise:

“It’s a little naive on your part to address a lady you don’t know with such a proposal.”

He put his hat on and, offended, mumbled:

“Why naive? We could go to the theatre, then have some champagne…”

She shrugged her shoulders:

“What persistence! You’re evidently a visitor from the provinces?”

He hastened to say that he had come from Vladikavkaz, that he and his father had a large commercial business there…

“So it’s business in the daytime, but you’re bored in solitude in the evening?”

“Very bored!”

As though she had thought something over, she said with affected carelessness:

“Well then, let’s be bored together. If you want, come to my place, we can find some champagne there too. And then we’ll have supper somewhere on the Islands. Only beware, all that won’t come cheap for you.”

“How much will it be?”

“At my place fifty. But on the Islands, of course, it’ll cost more than fifty.”

He gave a fastidious grimace:

“Please! That’s not an issue.”

The cab man, plastered in snow and continually smacking his lips in time with the horse’s knocking against the front of the sledge, conveyed them quickly to house number 15 on Ligovka. On the fourth floor the weakly lit staircase went right up to a single door to a completely self-contained apartment. Both had been silent on the way – at first he had shouted excitedly, boasting about Vladikavkaz and of having put up at the Northern Hotel, in the most expensive room, on the ground floor, then he had suddenly fallen silent, holding on to her wet sealskin now by the waist, now by her broad backside, and he had already been in torment, thinking only of the latter; she had hidden her face from the snow with her muff. They climbed the stairs in silence too. She unlocked the door unhurriedly with a Yale key, lit up the whole apartment with electric light from the entrance hall, took off her fur coat and hat, shaking the snow off them, and he saw that her big hair, shot with a sort of raspberry colour, was brushed flat with a centre parting. Containing his impatience and now his anger at her slowness, and sensing how hot, stuffy and remote this solitary apartment was, he did try to be courteous all the same and, taking off his things, said:

“How cosy!”

She replied indifferently:

“But a little cramped. Every convenience, a gas cooker, a wonderful bathroom, but only two other rooms: the reception room and the bedroom…”

In the reception room, carpeted in beaver, with old, soft furniture and plush curtains at the doors and windows, a lamp on a tall stand burned brightly under a pink horn-shaped shade, and in the bedroom adjoining the reception room there could also be seen, beyond the door, the pink light of a lamp on a bedside table. She went through to the bedroom, having put a shell ashtray out for him on an occasional table covered with a velvet tablecloth, and she shut herself in for a long time. He grew more and more gloomy, smoking in an armchair beside the table, looking sidelong at Klever’s Winter Sunset, which hung above the couch, and at another wall, at a large portrait of an officer who had a greatcoat from Nicholas I’s time thrown over his shoulders, at his half-whiskers. Finally the door from the bedroom opened:

“Well then, now we’ll sit and have a chat,” she said, coming out of it in a black dressing gown embroidered with golden dragons, and wearing pink, backless, satin slippers on unstockinged feet.

He glanced greedily at her bare heels, which looked like white turnips, and she, catching his glance, grinned, went somewhere through the entrance hall and returned with a bowl of pears in one hand and an opened champagne bottle in the other. “My favourite, pink,” she said, and went away again; she brought two glasses, filled them to the brim with lightly fizzing pink wine, clinked glasses with him, took a sip and sat down on his knees, choosing one of the more yellow pears from the bowl and immediately taking a bite out of it. The wine was warm and sickly sweet, but in his excitement he drained the glass and, with wet lips, jerkily kissed her plump neck. She pressed a large palm smelling of Chypre eau de cologne to his mouth:

“Only no kisses. We’re not schoolchildren. And put the money here, on the table.”

Pulling his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and his watch from his waistcoat, she put the one and the other on the table and, while finishing the pear, spread her legs. He grew bold and threw open the dressing gown with its dragons on her large, full-breasted, white body with thick, black hair below the wide, undulating stomach. “She’s already old,” he thought, glancing at her porous, chalky face, thickly sprinkled with powder, at her cracked orange lips, at the ugly false eyelashes, at the wide, grey parting in the middle of the flat hair the colour of shoe polish, but already going completely berserk at the size and whiteness of that bare body, the round breasts, the red nipples of which were for some reason very small, and the soft backside that lay heavily on his knees. She gave him a painful smack on the hand and stood up, flaring her nostrils:

“Impatient as a little boy!” she said angrily. “Now we’ll drink another glass each and then we’ll go…”

And she took hold of the bottle proudly. But with eyes that had filled with blood, he threw his entire body at her and knocked her off her feet onto the floor, onto the beaver. She dropped the bottle and, narrowing her eyes, with all her might gave him a cruel slap in the face. He started moaning sweetly with his head bent down, protecting himself from any new blow, and he fell upon her, grabbing her bare backside with one hand and unbuttoning himself quickly with the other. She sank her teeth into his neck and, throwing her right knee up, struck him with it so terribly in the stomach that he flew under the table, but he leapt up immediately, caught the bottle up from the floor and, as she half-rose, cracked her on the head. With a hiccup she fell onto her back, throwing out her arms and opening her mouth wide – blood flowed from it thickly. He grabbed the watch and wallet from the table and dashed into the hall.

At midnight he was sitting in an express train, he was in Moscow at ten in the morning, and at one o’clock he boarded a train for Rostov at the Ryazan Station. After six in the evening the next day, by the buffet bar at the station in Rostov, he was arrested.

17th April 1944

“Madrid”

In the late evening, by the light of the moon, he was walking along Tverskoy Boulevard, and she was coming towards him at a stroll with her hands held in a small muff, nodding her little round astrakhan fur hat, which was tilted a little to one side, and humming something. On coming up to him, she stopped:

“D’you wanna share my company?”

He took a look: small, snub-nosed, with rather broad cheekbones, eyes shining in the nocturnal half-light, a nice smile, timid, her little voice pure in the quiet, in the frosty air…

“Why not? With pleasure.”

“And how much will you pay?”

“A rouble for love, a rouble for pin money.”

She thought about it.

“Do you live far away? If not, then I’ll come, I’ll still have time to walk for a bit after you.”

“A stone’s throw. Here on Tverskaya, the Madrid rooms.”

“Ah, I know! I’ve been there half a dozen times. This card sharp took me there. Jewish, but terribly kind.”

“I’m kind too.”

“I thought so. You’re nice, I liked you at once…”

“So let’s go then.”

On the way, continually throwing glances at her – an uncommonly sweet girl – he began asking her questions:

“Why is it you’re alone?”

“I’m not alone, there’s three of us always go out together: me, Mur and Anelya. We live together too. Only it’s Saturday today, and they were picked up by shop assistants. But nobody’d picked me up the whole evening. I’m not picked up very much, they prefer the plump ones, or else they have to be like Anelya. She may be thin, but she’s tall and cheeky. Drinks an awful lot and can sing like a gypsy. She and Mur can’t stick men, they’re in love with each other like I don’t know what, they live like man and wife…”

“Right, right… Mur… And what’s your name? Only don’t lie, don’t make something up.”

“I’m Nina.”

“There you go, lying. Tell the truth.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Polya.”

“You can’t have been on the streets long?”

“I have, for a long time now, ever since the spring. But why keep on asking questions! Better give me a cigarette. You probably have really good ones, look what a raincoat and hat you’re wearing!”

“I will when we arrive. Smoking in the cold’s bad for you.”

“Well, that’s up to you, but we always smoke in the cold and no ’arm done. Now it’s bad for Anelya, she’s got consumption… Why are you clean-shaven? He was clean-shaven too…”

“Are you still on about the card sharp? He really has stuck in your memory!”

“I remember him even now. He’s got consumption too, but smokes like I don’t know what. Burning eyes, dry lips, sunken chest, sunken cheeks, dark…”

“And the wrists hairy, ugly…”

“That’s right, that’s right! Oh, do you know him?”

“Now then, how could I possibly know him?”

“Then he went away to Kiev. I went to see him off at the Bryansk Station, and he didn’t know I was coming. I arrived, and the train had already started. I ran after the carriages, and he’d just put his head out of the window, he saw me and began waving, started shouting that he’d soon be back again and would bring me some chopped dried fruit from Kiev.”

“And he hasn’t come back?”

“No, he’s probably been caught.”

“And how did you find out he was a card sharp?”

“He said so himself. He had a lot of port to drink, got sad and told me. I’m a card sharp, he says, no different to a thief, but what can I do, I’ve got to keep the wolf from the door… And you’re an actor, maybe?”

“Something of the sort. Well, here we are…”

Beyond the entrance door a little lamp was burning above the desk, but there was no one there. On a board on the wall hung the keys to the rooms. When he removed his, she whispered:

“How ever can you leave it? They’ll rob you!”

He looked at her, becoming more and more cheerful:

“If they rob me, they’ll go to Siberia. But what a delightful little face you have!”

She became embarrassed:

“You keep on making fun… For God’s sake, let’s go quick, after all, taking someone to your room so late isn’t allowed, is it?…”

“It’s all right, don’t be afraid, I’ll hide you under the bed. How old are you? Eighteen?”

“You’re an odd one! You know everything! Nearly eighteen.”

They went up a steep staircase, over a worn carpet, and turned into a narrow, weakly lit, very stuffy corridor; he stopped and put his key in a door, and she rose up on tiptoe and looked to see what number it was:

“Five! He was staying in number fifteen on the second floor…”

“If you say just one more word to me about him, I’ll kill you.”

Her lips wrinkled in a contented smile and, swaying a little, she went into the hallway of the lighted room, unbuttoning her little coat with an astrakhan fur collar as she went:

“You left and forgot to put the light out…”

“It doesn’t matter. Where’s your handkerchief?”

“What do you want it for?”

“You’ve gone red in the face, but your nose is cold all the same…”

She understood, hurriedly took the little ball of a handkerchief from the muff and wiped herself. He kissed her cold little cheek and gave her back a rub. She took off her hat, gave her hair a shake and, standing up, began pulling the overshoe off one of her feet. The overshoe would not yield and, almost falling over from the effort she had made, she grabbed hold of his shoulder and gave a ringing laugh:

“Oh dear, I almost went flying!”

He took the coat off her little black dress, which smelt of the material and her warm body, and he pushed her gently into the room, towards the couch:

“Sit down and give me your foot.”

“No-no, I’ll do it myself…”

“I’m telling you to sit down.”

She sat down and stretched out her right leg. He went down on one knee and put the leg on the other one, while she bashfully pulled her hem down over her black stocking:

“What a man you are, honestly! They really are awfully tight…”

“Be quiet.”

And quickly pulling off the overshoes, one after the other, together with her shoes, he threw the hem back from her leg, gave the bare flesh above her knee a firm kiss, and stood up with a red face:

“Listen, I wanted to treat you to some port first, but I can’t, we’ll have a drink later on.”

“Why can’t you?” she asked, standing on the rug with her little feet in nothing but stockings, touchingly reduced in height.

“A complete idiot! I can’t wait – understood?”

“Shall I undress?”

“No, get dressed!”

And turning away, he went over to the window and hurriedly lit a cigarette. Beyond the double glazing, which was frozen over at the bottom, the streetlights shone palely in the moonlight, and the bells on the grey horses could be heard jangling as they rushed by up Tverskaya… A minute later she called to him:

“I’m already lying down.”

He extinguished the light and, undressing any old how, he hurriedly lay down under the blanket with her. Trembling all over, she pressed up against him and whispered with a happy little laugh:

“Only for God’s sake don’t blow on my neck or I’ll start shouting for the whole building to hear, I’m terribly ticklish…”

An hour or so later she was fast asleep. Lying next to her, he gazed into the semi-darkness, mixed with the dim light from the street, thinking with irresolvable bewilderment: how on earth can it be that she’ll go off somewhere towards morning? Where? She lives with bitches of some sort above some laundry or other, she goes out with them every evening, as though to the office, to earn two roubles underneath some swine or other – and what childish unconcern, simple-hearted idiocy! I think I’ll “start shouting for the whole building to hear” too, out of pity, when she gets ready to leave tomorrow…

“Polya,” he said, sitting up and touching her bare shoulder.

She woke up in fright:

“Oh Heavens! Please forgive me, I fell asleep quite by accident… Righ’ away, righ’ away…”

“What, right away?”

“I’ll get up and dress righ’ away…”

“No-no, let’s have supper. I’m not letting you go anywhere until the morning.”

“What do you mean, what do you mean! What about the police?”

“Nonsense. And my Madeira’s no worse than your card sharp’s port.”

“Why is it you keep on reproaching me with him?”

All of a sudden he put on the light, which shone harshly into her eyes, and she buried her head in the pillow. He pulled the blanket off her and began kissing the back of her head, and she started kicking her legs joyously:

“Oh dear, don’t tickle!”

He brought a paper bag of apples and a bottle of Crimean Madeira from the window sill, took two glasses from the washstand, sat down on the bed again and said:

“There, eat and drink. Or else I’ll kill you.”

She took a good bite out of an apple and started eating, washing it down with Madeira and reasoning:

“What do you think? Maybe someone will kill me. That’s the way our business is. You go Heaven knows where, with Heaven knows who, and he’s either drunk or crazy, he throws himself at you and strangles you, or knifes you… But what a warm room you have! You sit all naked and it’s still warm. Is this Madeira? I do like it! How can you compare it with port – that always smells of cork.”

“Well, not always.”

“No, honestly, it does, even if you pay two roubles for a bottle, it’s all one.”

“Well, let me pour you some more. Let’s clink glasses, drink and kiss. Down in one, down in one.”

She drank, and in such haste that she choked and began coughing, and, laughing, let her head fall onto his chest. He lifted her head and kissed her wet, delicately compressed little lips.

“And will you come to the station to see me off?”

She opened her mouth wide in surprise:

“Are you going away too? Where? When?”

“To St. Petersburg. But not for a while yet.”

“Well, thank God! I’m only going to come to you now. D’you want that?”

“I do. Just to me alone. You hear?”

“I won’t go to anyone, not for any money.”

“That’s right! And now – sleep.”

“I need to go somewhere for a minute…”

“Here, in the bedside cupboard.”

“I’m ashamed in full view. Put the light out for a minute…”

“I’ll put it out completely. It’s past two o’clock.”

In bed she lay on his arm, all pressed up against him again – but quietly now, affectionately – and he began talking:

“Tomorrow you and I will have lunch together…”

She lifted her head animatedly:

“Where? I was at the Tower once, it’s past the Triumphal Arch, so cheap they’re simply giving it away, and the amount they give you – it’s impossible to eat it all!”

“Well, we’ll see where. And then you’ll go home so that your bitches don’t think you’ve been killed – and I’ve got things to do too – but come back here to me by seven, and we’ll go and have dinner at Patrikeyev’s, you’ll like it there – there’s an orchestrion, balalaika players…”

“And then to the Eldorado – yes? There’s a wonderful film on there now, The Fugitive Corpse.”

“Splendid. But now – sleep.”

“Righ’ away, righ’ away… No, Mur’s not a bitch, she’s terribly unfortunate. I’d have been done for without her.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s Dad’s cousin.”

“So?”

“My dad was a coupler at the goods station in Serpukhov, he had his chest crushed there on the buffers, and Mum had died while I was still small, so I was left alone in all the world, and I came to her in Moscow – but it turns out she’s not been working as a chambermaid in rooms for a long time already. I was given her address at the address bureau, and I came to her at the Smolensk Market by cab with my basket. I look, and she’s living with this Anelya and going out with her in the evenings to the boulevards… Well, and she let me stay with her, and then persuaded me to go out as well…”

“And you say you’d have been done for without her.”

“And where ever would I have gone alone in Moscow? Of course, she’s ruined me, but did she wish me any evil? There’s no point even talking about it. Maybe, God grant, I’ll find some job in rooms too, only I certainly won’t give the job up, and certainly won’t let anyone near me, the tips will be enough for me, and with all found too. Now if it was here, in your Madrid! What could be better!”

“I’ll have a think about it. Maybe I will fix you up somewhere with such a job.”

“I’d bow down at your feet!”

“To make the idyll absolutely complete…”

“What?”

“No, nothing, I’m only half awake… Sleep.”

“Righ’ away, righ’ away. I just got caught up thinking about things some’ow…”

26th April 1944