Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

Mashenka

This story dates back to the fondly remembered bygone days of old when one could still buy something at stores like Balaton or Yatran without special sale coupons and when some of our Stargorodian girls still went to Moscow in search of husbands. It wasn’t like they all enjoyed unmitigated success there, but some got lucky, and a few got really lucky: Marinka Kuzmina, for example, now lives in Detroit and sends her old friends from Stargorod’s telegraph office sentimental letters about her little boy Christopher and her little girl Natasha.

Mashenka G., unlike her proactive girlfriends, resisted the idea of going to Moscow for a long time. Trapping some poor slob in a shotgun marriage, to be completely frank, rather disgusted Mashenka, and, being an honest and pure-hearted girl, she naturally dreamed of a mate who would be both an intellectual and young and handsome, and if he absolutely had to happen also to be rich, then only a little, because everyone knows money can’t buy happiness. So it was that all her friends from the bookstore where she worked had already made their pilgrimages, but Mashenka kept holding back, waiting for something. Of course, she was tempted by the stories of Moscow theaters and beautiful stores. Some girls even managed to meet apparently good guys, and the way they told it, things sounded perfectly simple and not at all shameful as some impotent prudes would have it, but... Mashenka was a dreamer; Mashenka wore her hair in a long braid and was a bit old-fashioned.

Lyudka was another story – Lyudka the whirlwind, Lyudka the lucky one. She ruled over the bookstore’s glamorous fiction section, while Mashenka was supposed to guide potential readers to “political literacy.” Lyudka seemed to know every other person in Stargorod, and still, somehow, she had cast Mashenka G. as her best friend, and it was Mashenka who was the first to hear about Lyudka’s adventures and suitors, it was with Mashenka that Lyudka shared all her plans and aspirations, and it was Mashenka from whom Lyudka came to ask permission to have an abortion (it’s not like she could ask her parents). Better than anyone else, Lyudka knew how to have fun in Moscow: she had some family connections (kept active with regular doses of hard-to-find titles that gathered dust on Stargorod’s provincial shelves) at the Soviet Hotel (no less!), so she always had a place to stay, albeit not a cheap one. But who counts money on a trip to Moscow? The whole point is to save up and then blow it all, so you have stories to tell!

It was Lyudka, of course, who finally convinced Mashenka to go. The girls secured a pair of advance return tickets for Sunday (two French novels for the railway ticket office), met at the station on Friday night, and early on Saturday morning were inspecting their “luxury” singles at the Soviet Hotel (which used to be “The Pit,” where, as Gilyarovsky⁴ assures us, the rich Russian merchants so loved to burn their money in the old days).

The girls spent the day shopping. They didn’t find the biggest items on their respective lists (Mashenka was after a winter coat and had 300 rubles set aside for this purpose in her make-up case, and Lyudka wanted a pair of crème-colored Austrian boots), but there were other bits and pieces – Moscow always makes a dent in one’s budget. They wrapped up their shopping excursion with a meal at the “Crystal Room” restaurant on Kalinin Prospect, where two rather persistent hucksters attempted to insinuate themselves into the girls’ company but were told, in no uncertain terms, to get lost by the fearless Lyudka. Happy and well-fed, the girls rolled out into the frosty Moscow air, where the swirling flakes of the first snow only added to their celebratory mood, and, despite the fact that 150 rubles had already been spent, it was decided to go hunt for tickets to the Bolshoi.

Neither the great heaving mass of people nor the buses filled with foreign tourists intimidated Lyudka. She parked Mashenka at one of the columns in front of the theater, and instantly vanished, gone to look for scalpers.

Mashenka was standing at the doors of the Bolshoi theater! Natasha Rostova’s debutante ball was nothing compared to this. Of course, Mashenka dreamed of being inside, where everything swirled and gleamed, and she couldn’t take her eyes off the doors, which was why she did not hear it when someone addressed a question to her.

He stood there with a bouquet of pale yellow roses, dressed in a double-breasted coat with a white scarf, and wore a large Seiko watch with a built-in calculator on his delicate wrist. His happy blue eyes openly sized up Mashenka, and were now inviting her to the theater.

“You see, my girlfriend stood me up – would you mind taking her place?”

Mashenka agreed on the spot, and he gave her the flowers. When Lyudka emerged from the crowd a second later, she instantly grasped the situation, nodded approvingly, winked, and cooed by way of blessing: “You go ahead, kids, I’ll head home – it’s not my night.”

Lyudka was a real friend.

The ballet was magnificent! The theater – everything there was magnificent! They had second-tier seats, not very far from the stage at all, and in the intermission Andrei (that was the young man’s name) bought her champagne. He was a person of style and manners, polite and solicitous, but Mashenka could also sense he could be passionate. He said he studied Philosophy at Moscow State University, but he wasn’t one of those nerdy softies – his Dutch suit (one of those with a tiny rooster on the pocket) fit snugly around his manly shoulders, and his handshake was firm, which is rare these days, and his blue eyes could go from piercing to bottomless in an instant, but never dangerous. It was easy to be with him.

After the show they had some more champagne, then Andrei bought another bottle, “just in case” and they got a cab back to the hotel. And in the cab – they kissed!

Andrei was duly impressed with their rooms at The Soviet, behaved graciously, and Mashenka made him come along to Lyudka’s room. There, they had a bite to eat – Lyudka prudently made a batch of sandwiches when she came home and bought some éclairs and mineral water from the buffet downstairs (she also had a bottle of cognac she had brought from Stargorod) – and spent the rest of the night talking and laughing. Andrei asked the girls to tell him about Stargorod, swore he’d pay them a visit the very next weekend, wrote down the address, and entertained them with tricks he could do with his electronic watch: it had a whole set of memory functions, and a phone book... and, heavens, the champagne went straight to Mashenka’s head, and everything was just so easy and fun. When Andrei guided Mashenka into her room, God knows, she did not resist.

Everything was easy and fun, and she didn’t even see her friend wink at her conspiratorially when they parted.

In the morning, Andrei rose early, took a shower, dressed, then came and sat down at the edge of the bed, kissed Mashenka, and asked kindly:

“Did you have a good time?”

“Of course!” Mashenka reached to touch him, but Andrei politely guided her hand aside.

“And you know all good things come at a price, don’t you?”

“Of course. And what’s the price?” Mashenka asked readily, going along with this new game.

“300 rubles.”

“All right, go ahead and grab my make-up case. There’s three hundred in there exactly, I was saving it to buy a coat.”

She watched him as he opened her purse, dug in her make-up case, pulled out and counted the money and put it in his pocket.

“Well, then – Ciao, principessa!”

And he left.

Lyudka found Mashenka at the edge of her wits. Who could blame her – a part of her still waited, hoped the joke would play itself out in some surprising, beautiful way, that he would come back... but another part knew what happened.

Lyudka assessed the situation on the spot. She hugged the wailing Mashenka and shoved her, almost by force, into the shower. Then she packed them both quickly, and led her fooled friend out of the hotel. Lyudka hailed a cab, and they rode somewhere for a while, until they were in a shashlyk cafe in a small park somewhere. Only there did Lyudka allow herself to laugh.

“So, Prince Charming cleaned you out, didn’t he!”

“Stop it!” Mashenka wanted to jump up and leave, but her friend held her down.

“You silly thing!” Lyudka just couldn’t stop laughing. “Look at this!”

Next she produced out of her purse the super-computer watch Andrei had showed off the night before.

“I got up early in the morning – I wanted to give it back to him, but now – oh, Mashka! this is just too funny! – it’s like he sold it to us. Don’t you worry about a thing, we’ll sell the watch – I know the people – and get a coat like you’ve never had before! Furs! I bet we’ll get at least six hundred for it!”

Afterward, they went on a long walk around Moscow and Lyudka comforted Mashenka as best she could, and by the time they boarded their train it seemed she had succeeded.

On the train (Lyudka traveled only first-class, sleeping car), the girls had tea with biscuits and then turned off the lights. In the dark, they sat together on one birth, hugging each other, Mashenka whispering breathlessly, in a happy voice, and Lyudka giggling, and then they fell asleep.

4. Vladimir Gilyarovsky, a journalist, best known for his reminiscences about life in the pre-revolutionary Moscow, Moscow and Muscovites, published in 1926 (in English from Russian Life books, 2013).