The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [58]
Stevie saw Masha look to Vadim. Was it for permission?
‘Stevie, I think, would be interested in your book, Masha Ivanovna.’
Masha addressed Stevie. ‘You have been to Russia before I’m guessing, you speak Russian well. Perhaps you have noticed we are sliding slowly towards hell.’
But even as she pronounced her sentence, Masha smiled, showing small, white pointed teeth. Her eyes suggested energy, not defeat.
‘Despite everything I am optimistic. Aggressively so. I try hard to build optimism because pessimism is too easy, too self-fulfilling. It is not a prophecy I want to be responsible for realising. I want instead to create hope, because that is what people live for.’ Masha smiled again, her hand fluttering in an arc. ‘Hope and the trivial, tangible things—things like hot, sweet tea, a piece of gossip, an admiring glance from your husband, maybe a new magazine, birthday parties.’
There was a tiny silver samovar in the corner. Masha stood and went over to fill three glasses of tea. She spooned in enthusiastic amounts of sugar as she continued.
‘Living on a human scale cannot be done on ideas. That was the real flaw of communism. The texture of life was neglected and it became threadbare and joyless. There was never enough of anything and everyone was afraid of everyone else. It ground away at us. Every day was all about the great Rodina—the Motherland. All sacrifices—and there were many—were in her name. For the party members, certainly, there were material benefits—trips overseas, imported shoes, food, anything— equality was in name only. But for everyone else, the return on everyday sacrifices was supposed to be ideological satisfaction and that is not something you can hold in your hand.’
She passed a glass to Stevie, one to Vadim, and continued. ‘Yes, ideas underpin everything, but they express themselves in the details of our lives and this is how we understand them and consume them. The worst things in the world have been done in the name of ideas divorced from their human consequences.’
Masha sat back down and stirred her tea into a whirlpool, her tiny brass spoon tinkling like a tooth-fairy’s wand.
For such a diminutive woman, thought Stevie, she certainly packed a punch. Her face was familiar, the elfin smile, the eyes behind the big glasses . . . but Stevie couldn’t place it.
‘My project is a drop in the sea, the smallest thing. It is a book.’
Masha paused to blow gently on her tea. ‘In it I record the personal stories of ordinary individuals, the events big and small that have shaped them; I record the feel of their lives. Every time I do that, I feel I am returning just a little of the power and dignity that a monolithic, despotic government takes away from every private life: the right to go quietly about your business, pursue your dreams, build a future free from interference.’
Masha turned her gaze to Stevie. ‘Our country is not a machine and its citizens are not interchangeable, expendable moving parts. Someone needs to remind the powers of that. When you know the details of someone’s story, it is much harder to treat them with contempt.’
‘It’s a bit like humanising yourself to your captors so they won’t kill you,’ Stevie added quickly, having burned the tip of her tongue with the tea. She was inspired by Masha’s energy, felt that she wanted to join her somehow.
‘Perhaps you are right.’ Masha nodded. ‘The president has our whole nation hostage, and others besides. Perhaps he will come to hear of the stories of these simple people and see that they have souls and hopes and people who love them deeply. I believe contempt is what allows leaders to repress and dehumanise and destroy their own people. The concentration camps and the gulags of last century’s history did just that, reduced people to a cipher, stripped them of what it means to be a man or a woman or a child. A number can be erased without a second’s thought.’
Masha could see the Russia around her changing once again. The trauma of the years under the Soviets