Magnitogorsk
January 1934
She told the story in bits and pieces over several days. Mostly she was telling it to Shaimat, as he was her most frequent companion at meals.
He was right that she could have gotten larger servings at the Engineers’ Dining Room. Indeed, when she was really hungry, she would go take a meal there. But there, all conversation was in English. She would always end up at a table with Engineer Overstreet, as he was known here. And Bob Overstreet knew enough of her story that he knew better than to pry. But the other Westerners were as inquisitive as Shaimat. And in certain cases these men’s endless verbal probing was clearly intended to lead to probing of a different sort. Even if Aurora had found these middle-aged middle managers attractive, she’d have avoided them as carefully as she stayed away from lice. It wasn’t the fear of getting pregnant. The doctors in North Dakota had told her she’d never get pregnant again. It was all of the other stuff. But in Dining Room #30, mean as it was, Shaimat, the Tatar, had found ways—small, considerate gestures—to let her know that he wasn’t interested in her that way. He kept going on and on about his sister in Akyar, who was the same age as Aurora, and she took his meaning well enough.
But others would drift by, meal tickets wedged between stumps of fingers, and occasionally, if some word or phrase in Aurora’s story piqued their interest, they would sit down and listen. Aurora didn’t mind. Of course they were curious about her. It was only natural. Better for her to take soup and bread with them from time to time and talk openly about her story than to act as if she had something to hide.
Which she did, of course. But she’d gone over this in her head during the voyage across the Pacific, the train ride across Siberia, and she was confident she could tell the story in a way that added up. No one here could gainsay her version, unless they put the whole resources of the OGPU to work digging up newspaper clippings and police reports scattered across half of America.
Shaimat, normally careful not to make the slightest contact with her, was kicking her under the table. As he was doing it with a valenok made of half-inch-thick wool, she didn’t really take note of it for a while. Then she snapped out of it and looked down the table into the staring blue eyes of Tishenko. The Agitator. He seemed agitated.
“Many of the comrades are fascinated by your story,” Tishenko said, speaking clearly and just a bit deliberately, as he did not want to get ahead of the stenographer.
It was safe to assume that the cream of the Soviet stenographic crop had been skimmed off by important ministries in Moscow and Leningrad. Anyone holding down that job in the Special Department of Blast Furnace #4 in Magnitogorsk might not have won a lot of prizes and medals. That, and her fingers were cold; the Special Department’s office was warmer than most places, but you could still see your breath. Tishenko was seated behind an item of furniture too humble to be called a desk. It was one cold night away from being kicked apart for kindling. But it had a lot of papers on it and conferred on him a kind of authority that he did not have when striding around in the open air yelling at people. The stenographer, a woman barely older than Aurora, was a column of blankets and scarves, steaming at the top, interrupted near the middle by two small red hands, one supporting a notebook and the other taking down shorthand with a pencil about an inch and a half long.
“As I understand it,” Tishenko continued when the pencil stopped moving, “it all started when Comrade Shaimat expressed curiosity as to why your Russian was so excellent.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Aurora said.
“He may not be aware that you work as a translator for Engineer Overstreet—at least, when you are not volunteering for Workers’ Shock Brigade actions at two in the morning.” The tone in which Tishenko mentioned this detail made it clear to Aurora that he found it a very odd thing for her to have done. So odd, in fact, as to be suspicious.
Now, Aurora had always known that she would at some point come under suspicion and be asked questions. In a way it was surprising that it had taken this long. She’d been here for weeks. Even so, the awareness that it was happening right now caused her scalp to burn.
But everyone came under suspicion at one point or another and was obliged to explain themselves. How could it be otherwise, when the Soviet Union was hemmed in by implacable enemies? Not just surrounded but infiltrated? She reckoned it was like having medical checkups. The doctors would ask certain questions, perform tests just to be sure that everything was normal. On everyone. Not just sick persons. Her mother had ignored a mole on her scalp until it was too late, and look where that had gotten her.
Every bureau in the vast apparat of Magnitogorsk had a “special department” like this one. Everyone knew that the job of the special department was to be the eyes and ears of the OGPU. Still referred to by many by its former name of Cheka. Aurora tried to settle herself down by thinking that this was like having a nurse in every school: not a doctor as such, and not sitting in a hospital or even a clinic. Just a representative of the medical profession who knew enough to keep an eye out for trouble. Everyone probably ended up explaining themselves to the likes of Tishenko from time to time. Obviously he’d talked to Shaimat, and probably some others.
“If he knew that you were an interpreter, and if he were capable of reading some of the glowing accounts of your performance that I have seen,” Tishenko continued, resting a gloved hand gently on a neat stack of documents, “he might have asked a different question. Namely, why is your English so good? The story has become common knowledge of how you came to Russia as a toddler, almost pre-verbal, and were raised there. So it’s not surprising that you speak Russian like a native. But how, during those years, could you have learned English so well?”
“It might help to explain that, Comrade Tishenko, if I could be so bold as to offer a slight correction.”
“By all means, go ahead!” Tishenko sputtered.
“I was born in America in early 1916. My mother brought me to Petrograd four years later. I was already speaking English as well as any normal American four-year-old.”
“Nineteen-sixteen, you say.”
“Yes.”
“But it was in 1917, during the February Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, that the crew of the battleship Aurora mutinied and took up arms for the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolution.” In his element now, rattling off revolutionary lore.
“Indeed.”
“It has been assumed by everyone that you are named after that famous ship. That you must, therefore, have been born after February 1917.”
“You might say it is a half-truth. When I was born—in 1916, in Montana—my mother named me Dawn.” She said the word in English.
“Don? Like the river?”
Aurora spelled the word out for the stenographer. “It is an English word meaning daybreak. Like zarya here. And like Zarya, it can also be a girl’s given name.”
“I see.”
“But when my mother brought me to Petrograd, they wanted to give me a Russian name. Zarya would have made sense—but because the memory of the Revolution was fresh in everyone’s minds, they chose Aurora. So, I was named after the battleship in a sense—but I was born before it became famous.”
The lengthy pause that followed wasn’t just to let the stenographer catch up. Aurora got the impression that this was more new information than Comrade Tishenko was used to ingesting in a whole week.
“We’ll have to correct your file,” he said. “So, you are eighteen years of age. Not sixteen, as we had thought.”
“In another few weeks I will turn eighteen, yes.”
“And somewhere in a file cabinet in Montana there is a record of your birth under the name Dawn.”
“Presumably.”
“Last name Artemyeva?” For Artemyev had been her father’s surname.
“Bjornberg. My mother’s maiden name.”
Tishenko raised his eyebrows.
“Complicated situation,” Aurora said. “My full name was recorded on the birth certificate as Dawn Rae Bjornberg.”
“So you’re telling me that you have two altogether separate legal identities. Two sets of papers. Dawn Rae Bjornberg, an American from Montana, and Aurora Maximovna Artemyeva, Russian, from Leningrad.”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What does that mean?!” Tishenko demanded. She got the impression that the man was exasperated not so much by the twists and turns in the story as by the sheer volume of explanatory paperwork that this was going to entail.
“Dawn’s dead.”
“What?!”
“I killed her off. So that I could come here. So that I could make a clean start.”
A lengthy pause now caused Aurora to question whether she was really as fluent in Russian as was claimed by those glowing reports under Tishenko’s glove. Had she miscommunicated? She raised her hands, pantomiming the operation of a tommy gun. “Dawn Rae Bjornberg died in a shoot-out with police. A bank robbery gone wrong in Fort Sickles, North Dakota. Her body was consumed in the ensuing fire.”
Still Tishenko just sat there with his mouth open, displaying several gaps in his gums where the dentists of Magnitogorsk had applied the one therapeutic procedure they knew of.
“You know of Bonnie and Clyde?” she asked.
“Da!” exclaimed the stenographer, to the great surprise of both Tishenko and Aurora. She tucked her pencil stub into the palm of her hand and imitated the tommy-gun shooting gesture.
Tishenko, it was safe to say, had not heard of Bonnie and Clyde. His face reddened. He had made up his mind that Aurora and the stenographer were having a little fun at his expense. “We’ll revisit the ‘death’ of Dawn Rae Bjornberg later,” he announced. “I am more interested for now in making sense of your early life and your unusual fluency in both languages. You have explained to my satisfaction why your Russian is so good. But by your account you were only four years old when you left America. Your command of English can’t have been very advanced at such an age. But I am informed”—his eyes darted down to another document—“that many in the American compound are under the impression that you are American born and bred.”
“My mother spoke English to me for as long as she remained in Petrograd.”
“But she divorced your father and returned to the United States in the middle of 1921.” Another document. The man was more systematic than an Agitator had any right to be. Either that, or someone had fed him all of this stuff. Probably that. “You’d have been only five.”
“For three years, it is true, I heard and spoke very little English,” Aurora admitted. “But then”—she let her eyes wander curiously over his makeshift desk—“as you might be aware, my father was assigned to travel to America to resume his career organizing workers.”
Tishenko nodded. “The two of you took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok and from there traveled on a freighter to Seattle.”
“Exactly.”
“Beyond that, not much is recorded of your father’s movements until the events of summer 1932 in Washington, D.C.—eight years and a whole continent away! He was in Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“And you were with him.”
“No.”
“No?! You were only eight years old, who—”
“My mother. And her people.”
“They organized workers in the American west,” Tishenko said confidently.
Aurora’s turn to sit with her mouth open, displaying fully intact dentition.
“Or—” Tishenko began uncertainly.
It was at such moments that Aurora was reminded that her face had considerable power over men’s minds. She made a note of it.
“Is that what my father claimed?” Aurora asked.
She could just see it: Maxim Artemyev talking to a room full of Bolshevik theoreticians, trying to relate the story of how he’d spent his time and their money in places like Butte, Spokane, Telluride, and Tacoma in terms that they would understand. Of course he would call that “organizing workers.” A bunch of riots and lynchings was more like it.
“There’s a split,” she said. “Chicago’s in the middle. East of there, big cities, factories, steel mills. Work forces that came over from Europe recently. Those people you can organize, yes. They get orders from the International in Moscow and”—Aurora snapped out a salute—“that’s how my father started. Before the war. But west of Chicago it’s all different. Ranches, mines, timber camps, fishing boats. That’s where people work. They are different. They are . . .” She spent a few moments trying to think how to get this through Tishenko’s head. “Cossacks. And even when they are engaging in revolutionary struggle, they do it in the style of Anarchists. They don’t take orders from anyone. My mother was one of those. She met my father when he was out west trying to get some women out of prison in Spokane.” She decided to skip over some of the details, such as how they were being forced into prostitution.
“Before the war,” Tishenko said. “Before he was inducted into the American Army.”
“Yes. He did a few short jail stints and finally they shipped him off to the trenches hoping the Germans would finish him off.”
“Very well. But let’s get back to your story, Aurora. You’re saying you spent the years 1924 to 1932 among the ‘Cossacks’ of your mother’s people?”
“Yes. Eastern Montana and Wyoming.”
“And they were doing what? Fomenting anarchy? Cattle ranching?”
“Robbing banks and playing polo.”
“What?!”
“That’s how I learned to play polo.”