Red Moth

In a tiny, windowless room

In a tiny, windowless room on the fourth floor of NKVD Headquarters, three women sat on empty filing crates, drinking tea out of green enamel mugs.

‘Of course he hasn’t called you!’ exclaimed Corporal Korolenko, stamping one foot and grinding her heel into the floorboards, as if to crush an insect which had strayed into her line of sight. ‘I saw what he did, down there in Lubyanka Square. He kissed you and then he turned around and ran away! What did you expect?’

‘Shut up, Korolenko!’ bellowed Sergeant Gatkina, waving her hand through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘If your brains were the size of your backside, you would be running this country by now. But you know nothing.’ She leaned across and bounced her fingertips off the corporal’s forehead. ‘Nothing!’ she said again. Turning her back on the bewildered corporal, Gatkina leaned towards Elizaveta, who sat very still on her crate, mug of tea clutched in both hands, looking frail and worried. ‘Now, my dear,’ said Gatkina, in a very different voice from the one she had used on the corporal, ‘what you need to do is make piroshky.’

‘Pastries?’ Elizaveta’s voice quavered between fear and confusion.

‘Yes!’ Gatkina was deafening in the cramped space. ‘I like the ones filled with green onion and egg, or salmon and rice if you can get it.’

‘But why?’

Gatkina raised one finger. ‘It is a test. You make the piroshky and, while they are still warm, you put them in a bag with a thermos of tea and you bring them to this major. Tell him you have brought this meal but that you cannot stay. Sergeant Gatkina, the bitch that is me, has ordered you back to work.’

‘I give him the pastries and then I leave?’

‘Yes.’ Gatkina paused. ‘And maybe no.’

‘Comrade Sergeant, I do not understand you at all.’

‘You tell him you have to go, yes?’

Elizaveta nodded.

‘And if he says thank you and goodbye, then you know it is finished. But if he asks you to stay, because no man with a heart would just say goodbye to a woman who has brought him fresh piroshky, then you know you are not finished, after all.’