The Man Who Was Saturday

‘What sort of meeting?’ Calder asked when she had gone.

‘You know perfectly well.’

‘The feminist movement?’ Calder frowned. ‘But why? I realise women get a pretty raw deal here. Divorce, abortion, exploitation …. But why do you care so much?’

She told him.

She was nineteen now, her father had left her mother when she was three. He met a girl at a summer camp on the Black Sea organised by the snow-plough factory where he worked and came home only to pick up his belongings.

The babushka, Katerina’s grandmother on her father’s side, left too and her mother had to quit her job as a waitress in the National Hotel to look after her daughter.

Her family helped financially and the State helped but she had to move into an apartment block of ‘boxes’ near the docks at Khimki Port. She got a job in a canteen there and paid a neighbour to look after Katerina during the day.

She tended to Katerina in the evenings and worked late into the night cooking and cleaning and mending.

A docker moved in briefly. He beat her up and stole her savings from under the mattress. Where else?

Her mother became bitter towards men. The bitterness was infectious.

Apart from visits from a family friend – ‘Yury Petrov, a pirate,’ Katerina said fondly – and an expedition to his home in Siberia this state of affairs lasted for thirteen years.

Then she met Sasha at the Central Soviet Army Drama Theatre on Kommuny Square and everything changed.

A miracle.

‘He sang his way into our hearts,’ Katerina told Calder. Her eyes were moist. ‘A wonderful man.’

‘But a chauvinist.’

‘Beyond redemption,’ she said happily.

‘Don’t you think the big-heartedness of Russian men outweighs their faults?’ They were both speaking English now.

‘You don’t understand: it’s injustice I’m fighting. I lived with it for thirteen years; it’s part of me. Just as it’s part of your Judy Goldsmith. When her father left home her mother lived for three years with five children in a chicken-coop. Now Judy Goldsmith is president of the National Organisation for Women, but I bet she still dreams she’s living in a chicken-coop.’

‘And you want to become president of something like that?’

‘Doubtful, after what happened today.’

‘The meeting?’

‘I burned down the hall,’ she said.

Sasha made his ceremonial entry from the kitchen carrying a dish of chicken cutlets and singing:

A circle for the sun

Sky all around

That’s what the little boy drew

Carefully sketched on his paper

Wrote underneath the corner.

Sasha paused. Children had materialised from another room. They stood like a choir poised for song. Sasha winked at them. Piping voices joined his baritone:

Let there always be sunshine

Let there always be blue skies

Let there always be Mummy

Let there always be me.

Then everyone fell on the food. Chicken and meat dumplings and beef stewed with sour cream and borsch. The men, Katerina’s mother admitted, hadn’t made such a hash of it.

‘So,’ Katerina said, spearing a meat dumpling with her fork, ‘do you feel as if you’ve been accepted?’

‘Marvellous people.’

‘That song – the chorus was written by a four-year-old boy. Sentimental people, the Russians.’

‘What would Sasha do now if I told him I was a defector?’

‘Throw you out on your ear.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that it can take more courage to defect than to stay in your own country?’

‘You didn’t defect,’ she said, ‘you ran away,’ voice suddenly frosted.

The noise around him seemed to swell. Chink of cutlery against china, laughter, talk, the strummed notes of the guitar. The arm-wrestlers had called it a day, neither vanquished, the poet was asleep curled up like a bulky foetus. Sasha had his arm round the shoulders of Katerina’s mother.

He thought: ‘I’ll never belong.’

He heard her voice distantly. ‘… told you my story. Isn’t it time you told me what happened?’

He concentrated. ‘Not yet. Not here.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think I drank some animal killer by mistake.’

Would Sasha really throw him out? Of course. The Red Army Choir rang with patriotism. The Twilight Brigade took a different view. Their motto was Samuel Johnson’s: Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Calder felt like an island. He told Katerina that he was leaving.

‘So soon?’