Operation White Birch – Part 4.1
Come back next Saturday for Part 4.2!
Hello there, old and new subscribers, Summer's here, enjoy!
“Good luck, kid”, said Baranov's driver Pyotr with a smirk.
We were waiting outside Ms. Lebedev's flat, on the top floor of the House on the Kotelnichevskaya Embankment, facing the Moskva River, my hands encumbered with the mahogany tea caddy I'd been ordered to deliver personally to her.
The door opened and a lovely, smiling old lady ushered us in.
“Katya, your guests are here!”
And there she was, Katya, a.k.a. Ekaterina Lebedev, People's Artist and Merited Artist of Russia, a talented and celebrated actress, with an over 20-year long career in Soviet theatre and cinema, also famous in our small circle for being Baranov's official lover.
She appeared, swishing in a long, peacock blue silk velvet robe, a tall, platinum blonde woman in her early 40's, whose cheekbones had more than a hint of Mongolian warrior to them, a vision of such tremendous beauty that put me in a state of shock and awe. Well, quite.
She shot a beaming, professional smile at Pyotr, then slowly moved her head towards me, looking me up and down, then staring me straight in the eye, as if she wished to incinerate me with the icy blue fire of her gaze. She grabbed the mahogany tea caddy from my hands.
“Pyotr, come and have a nice cuppa with me in the living room, while Katya and this sweet girl have a chat in the boudoir. I'll bring your teas there”, said the old lady, gently nudging Ms. Lebedev's magnificent shoulder.
After leaving the mahogany tea caddy on her bedside table, Ms. Lebedev sat on a birch bench at the foot of her bed, and lit a cigarette. I was standing against the window, from which a dancing whiteness of snowflakes flooded a soft light into the dark room.
She kept staring at me, and the red tip of her cigarette, glowing amidst its smoke and the steaming glasses of tea, made her look like a beautiful, hungry monoculous dragon.
Finally, she said: “I am aware that Lt. Col. Baranov doesn't entrust that bleeping tea caddy to any random person. So what is it that makes you so special? Are you his little dish on the side? ARE YOU?!”
My heart was skipping several beats and, rather dramatically I admit, I thought that I wouldn't make it out of her bedroom alive.
“That cheating bastard! That son of a bitch! And it's not the first time, oh no, there have been plenty of little sluts like you before, do you think you are the one and only? There's never a one and only with him, with men like him, with men.”
After this outburst, she seemed to cool down a little bit. “I'm sorry I called you a slut, kid. But this is the first time he doesn't bring the tea caddy to me himself. And I'm no better than you and the others. His wife left him because of me. I'm the worst of all, if anything.”
“I'm so sorry to upset you, Ms. Lebedev, I didn't mean to. I didn't even know that he was married or engaged to another woman, to me it looked like he hadn't had sex in a while, when we ... I mean, it's like he's just got out after a long stint in jail ...” I panicked, realising too late that I might have said too much.
But Katya laughed. “Oh, you're so right! It is exactly like you say. You have to wait for the second or – more often than not – the third round for him to take notice that his lady friend may want to join in in the party.”
“I don't think I caught your name, kiddo”, she said and, when I told her, she finally mellowed: “Oh, is it really? That was my very first Shakespearian role! Look, I'll show you something, sit down here with me”, she stood up and took a big book out from a shelf.
It was a photo album in dark blue Morocco leather, emblazoned with her name in golden letters, in the Old Church Slavonic calligraphy.
“Don't I look dashing, in my Venetian Renaissance lawyer gown? They said that my performance showed a maturity well beyond my years, I was 22 at the time. Not my first heroine role though, that was Natasha Rostov, yes, her exactly from Tolstoy's War and Peace.”
“Please, Ms. Lebedev, tell me more.”
“I was 16, still studying at Drama school, and I wanted that role so much I could have died. And there was another reason. The great actor Pavel Orlov had already been chosen to play the part of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, and I was so desperately in love with him, I'd be damned, if he had to romance a Natasha other than me.”
“I remember Pavel Orlov from that romantic comedy/propaganda film A Patriot's Love is a Joy Forever1, he looked so handsome in it!”
“He so did, didn’t he? I'd have walked through fire for him. But my teacher warned me that I was too tall, blonde and well-nourished to play Natasha. So I went home, and told my consternated mother that no kind of food was to pass my lips, until at least the day of the official auditions, and I meant it. I spent the following 10 days studying my part, singing, rehearsing, not eating, trying not to faint, drinking tea with no sugar, and having arguments with mum, whenever she tried to pour a dash of milk into my glass.
When the big day arrived, I had much less chubby cheeks and my eyes looked bigger, sparkling with a passionate flame. (It was pure and simple hunger, but I like to think that they were also burning with my love for the Art.) I had smeared my head with my dad's black shoe polish, which caused another argument with mum, who then blackmailed me to eat a small bowl of kasha, or she wouldn't let me leave the house. I wolfed down my semolina porridge, and hurried to the auditions. My hair was a complete mess, but at least I could pass for a brunette, and acted and sang my heart out, and ... I got the part!
Now, having War and Peace adapted as a drama play isn't half a joke, and that meant rehearsing 8 days a week, 25 hours a day. One Saturday night, Orlov took me for dinner to a Caucasian restaurant, where he was bemused and amused by the quantity of food I could scoff down, while talking and laughing incessantly. He wouldn't let me touch a drop of alcohol though, and he just drank a small glass of Georgian red wine.
We then went to his flat, he put on a record of Gypsy romances, took my face between his long, beautiful hands, and then kissed me on the forehead, just like my dad would have done.
‘I'm sorry, Katya, I can't do this. You're a great, charming, funny young woman, but I'm not in love with you. I can't love you, I can't love anyone, for that matter. Love is just not on the cards for me.’
I knew what he was going to add, or, rather, not add. I knew that teenage boys and girls would engage in same sex love-making, something I had done myself with my friends during the long summer nights at the Young Pioneer camp2, when they used to switch off the lights at 9:00 in the evening, and no one wanted to go to sleep. But I thought that grown-ups wouldn't do that anymore, because they married. I was so naïve!
I burst into tears, I told him I didn't care, that I wanted to marry him, no matter what, and I was willing not to have sex in my whole life anymore, if only I could be with him forever, working with him, sharing everything but a bed with him. I loved him so much! But he did and said the right thing. Marriage is a serious matter, you go into it with someone you truly love and who truly loves you.”
“Eventually, I made peace with that, and we went on to enjoy a huge success with our play. It was the start of my career. In the meanwhile, I had fallen in love with the actor playing Count Pierre Bezukhov who, on the other hand, was very much into women, so much so that I left him, the love-rat, just before we tied the knot, a couple of years later.
Orlov now lives in Paris, where he doesn't have to play the heart-throb anymore. We're still friends.”
It was snowing heavily by then. Ms. Lebedev suggested that Pyotr the driver and I would stay over for dinner, since Auntie Valya, the old lady, had cooked a lavish meal, expecting Baranov to spend the rest of the night there.
Part 4.2 will land in your inboxes next Saturday, July 5th. I hope to meet you all again next week!
Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, you can share it, leave a comment, or buy me a tea. I'd be very grateful to you, I'd appreciate it more than I can express!
There’s no Soviet movie titled A Patriot's Love is a Joy Forever. Our loss, I guess. At the moment, the storyline is all in my head.
What are Young Pioneer camps? Read more here. In the Summer of 1982, I was invited to Orlyonok, together with 8 other Italian kids and our chaperone. Quite the experience!
Bread and Roses is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Bread and Roses that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
This story surprised me a little, Portia, because I wasn't really aware of how well you can write. I simply read down a little and I came to this fine paragraph:
"She appeared, swishing in a long, peacock blue silk velvet robe, a tall, platinum blonde woman in her early 40's, whose cheekbones had more than a hint of Mongolian warrior to them, a vision of such tremendous beauty that put me in a state of shock and awe. Well, quite."
And after that War and Peace sprang into my mind, and that whole world you were already evoking, even you mentioned it further down. I'll tune in next week for Part 4.2!
Ekaterina Lebedev is obviously a diva and a legend. Love her!