Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes

by Walton, Caroline

  ***

  “You know Ivan’s father was a Chekist,2 my grandmother whispers to a neighbour. I don’t understand her, although I know that the man who lives with us is not my real father. I dimly remember another man, a tall figure walking through the front door with a metal basin on his head. I haven’t seen that man for a long time.

  “Ma, where’s that other man who used to live here?”

  My mother is standing in the kitchen, slicing onions with her back to me. She pauses: “He’s in prison. Forget about him.”

  “Can I send him my drawing of the Cutty Sark?”

  My mother lays down her knife on the chopping board. “He’s not allowed to receive letters,” she snaps without turning round.

  ***

  My stepfather’s belt is studded like a Cossack’s. At school they ask questions about the marks on my skin. I don’t know what to say. I’m afraid that if I tell the truth he’ll beat me again. The local Party committee summons my parents for a consultation. After that my step-father doesn’t beat me so often but instead he keeps me indoors for days at a time.

  I sit in our bay window watching my friends kick a clod of frozen horse-dung around the yard. They swoop after their ball like a flock of demented birds. Vovka Bolotin, who is crippled by polio, keeps goal with his crutch. We all envy Vovka, who wields his crutch so deftly it is almost impossible to get the ball past him.

  Nelka Ehrlich, who lives in the flat opposite ours, comes to play with my sister and me. The kitchen radio dish broadcasts my favourite song: Sailing the Seven Seas. Nelka distracts me, prancing around making faces. I hit her and grab her pigtails. My mother bursts in and pulls us apart. She slaps me but not Nelka.

  I run into the toilet, climb onto the seat, loop the washing line round my neck, tie it to a hook and jump. Black circles close in before my eyes.

  I lie on the floor looking up at my mother. Her screams hurt my ears. And my neck hurts too. But Nelka and I make it up.

  ***

  We are playing a game in Nelka’s flat when suddenly the room starts to shake and dissolve around us. Light bulbs swing, glass shatters and the sideboard topples over onto Nelka’s baby brother. The earth roars and shakes. I think I’d better go home. As I cross the landing the floor heaves again. My mother appears in the doorway with my sister in her arms. “Follow me, Vanya!” We run across the street to the factory offices, where a throng of people are hurrying down to the basement shelter.

  The door is thick like a submarine’s and has a round handle. We sit down to wait. At first we think it’s an air raid but we hear no planes. German bombers have never come this far into Russia. Then we guess that one of the munitions factories has blown up. We wait in silence, praying that no spark or ball of flame will drop on Bersol and wipe us all out.

  Nelka sits opposite me. She starts to make funny faces again. I stick out my tongue at her, but her eyes begin to bulge until they seem about to burst from their sockets. She coughs and bends her head low. A stream of vomit splashes onto the floor. As she straightens up I see a thin white worm dangling from her lips. Her chest and throat convulse and she spews the worm onto the floor. I watch it lying in the pool of sick and try to imagine it curled up inside Nelka’s guts. I want to ask her if the worm tickled but I guess it isn’t the right moment.

  When the all-clear sounds we climb up to the street. It’s covered in glass and rubble and there’s a huge piece of concrete stairwell across the entrance to our block. The windows of our flat are gaping black holes spiked with daggers of glass. We set off for my grandmother’s house on the edge of town. There is a hard frost. Behind us the red sky crackles with sparks and flames. Sounds of the town fade until the stillness is broken only by my mother’s heels clip-clopping on the cobbles.

  The next day I pass the hospital. Corpses are piled in the snow, naked and charred like the roasted pig I saw last summer at a country wedding. The TNT plant blew up just as the workers were changing shifts. Dozens were killed, maybe hundreds; no one ever knows the true number. I’m happy because our school is closed for two weeks. Its windows have been blown out.

  People say it was sabotage and that our town simpleton, Bathhouse Losha, is a German spy. Bathhouse Losha has never harmed anyone, but a few weeks later he disappears and we never see him again.

  ***

  Chapaevsk lies on a railway line between the Front and the arms factories in the Ural mountains. Trains loaded with broken tanks and weapons stop at our station. Some of us boys distract the guards while the others swarm over the equipment. I undo copper rings from shells and mainsprings from grenades. I know a neighbour who’ll give me a couple of roubles for these. We open the hatches of tanks and drop down inside, examining dials and levers, taking them apart to try to understand how they work. When the train jerks and begins to move we scramble out and leap off, rolling down the embankment on the far side of the station.

  The prisoners in the camp by the railway line have been sent to the Front. Uzbek and Kirghiz peasants take their place. At first they too were sent off to fight but they didn’t understand enough Russian to obey orders. When one was killed his comrades would gather around the corpse and wail. Then they too were cut down by bullets. So instead they join the labour army: changing their kaftans and skull caps for rubber suits and breathing apparatus, they work on production lines filling shells with mustard gas and Lewisite.

  My mother is a medical assistant at a munitions plant. She tells me that the Uzbeks are homesick for their mountain pastures and sometimes slip off their gas masks for a minute or two. They hope to fall sick enough to be sent home, or at least to earn a couple of weeks’ rest in bed. There are many Uzbek graves in our cemetery.

  ***

  Everyone clutches the person in front of them in case hooligans try to break through the bread queue. A man hurries out of the shop, clutching a loaf to his chest. A small boy hurls himself at the man. He sinks his teeth into the man’s wrist, making him yell and drop the loaf. The child falls to his knees and devours the bread right there on the ground. The man kicks him and tries to pull him up but the boy takes no notice. People in the queue tut and grumble but no one moves.

  “Well, God sees everything and the poor things are hungry too,” says the old lady behind me. There are many homeless kids in our town. They have run away from the Front and the areas under Nazi occupation.

  The next morning I watch the boy-thief crawl out from under Stalin’s feet. I grab a piece of bread from our kitchen and run downstairs. Feeling a bit scared, I hold out the bread. The boy takes it and stuffs it into his shirt. His face is white and he looks straight through me as blind men do. Before he can run off I say: “My name is Vanya, what’s yours?”

  “Slavka.”

  “Why d’you live under the board of honour?” The board is shaped like the Kremlin walls and carries photos of star workers.

  “I ran away from a children’s home in Kharkov. We starved there. My father was killed on the Front. My mother died when our house was bombed. I’m okay here.”

  “I can get some potatoes from our store. Come with me and we’ll roast them on the slag heap by the TNT plant.”

  “All right.”

  I skip school to hang around with Slavka. I admire him almost as much as my literary hero, Robinson Crusoe. His senses are much sharper than mine. If he hears a paper rustle 50 metres away he stiffens like a hunting dog.

  I take him to our Zambezi river – the effluent stream running past our plant. It is so hot that it steams even when there is snow all around and we have 20 degrees of frost. Using a board as a raft, we race downstream.

  “Vanya,” Slavka suggests, “let’s run away to the Front. Maybe a regiment will adopt us as sons.”

  Taking a small bundle of clothes and a loaf under my arm, I creep out of the house to meet Slavka. He shows me how to sneak onto trains. Twice we try to cross the Syzran bridge over the Volga, but soldiers discover us and turn us back. The third time, we manage to wriggle into a dog bo
x fixed underneath a carriage. Although it’s summer, the wind is cold. I wrap my jacket tightly around me and close my eyes, picturing the whole map of Russia spread out before us with our locomotive crawling along it like a toy. I want to burst with happiness.

  After a long time we emerge at a station. We tell the soldiers there that we’re orphans making our way back to liberated territory. Young and kind lads, they give us food and send us on our way. We jump trains, travelling inside now, telling the same story until we reach Kharkov. The city has just been liberated and lies in ruins. It smells worse than the waste-pit behind Chapaevsk’s meat-processing plant. Before we can explore we are picked up by female officers, and sent to a children’s home in Tambov.

  The law of the jungle reigns in that home. Big boys snatch food from the girls and the younger kids. Slavka sticks up for me, but I can’t stand the hunger so I confess that I’m not really an orphan. They send me back to Chapaevsk. My stepfather beats me so badly I spend several days in bed. But my mother feeds me. I feel bad about leaving Slavka.

  After the war is over a post office form arrives, saying a parcel is waiting for me. My mother takes me to the post office and I hand in my form. It is the first parcel I have ever received. At home I untie the heavy package. Inside is a book from Slavka, a Herbarium full of pictures of strange southern plants and flowers. He writes that he is in an orphanage in Moscow. He has won a trip to Artek, an elite children’s camp in the Crimea. Even Party members’ children have to be top students to go there. Slavka writes that he will never forget me, but that is the last I will ever hear from him.

  ***

  We carry our books to school in gas-mask containers lined with plywood. After class we wait by the school gate for the girls. As they come out we hit them with our bags. We’re punishing those who tell tales; the rest we hit as a warning.

  Worse than the girls are the Young Pioneer leaders who hang back after class to report wrongdoers to the teacher. We despise them and exclude them from our games. In an act of bravado, my friend Tolik throws his red scarf into the classroom stove. A meeting is called. One after another, Pioneer leaders spring to their feet and denounce Tolik with spite in their voices. Afterwards I try to cheer him up: “Never mind Tolik, better be damned than an honest Pioneer!” But he becomes less bold after that.

  The Palace of Pioneers is in the former church of Sergei Radonezhsky. The church was once the most beautiful building in Chapaevsk, with mosaic images of saints adorning its facade. It closed after the revolution. During the war it was turned into an armaments store and camouflaged in thick grey plaster. Now the plaster is beginning to fall off. First it crumbles away from the mosaics. A nose emerges, then a forehead, then the stern eye of a saint. As news of the miracle spreads, the town fills with believers. News spreads through forest and steppe, summoning the faithful from as far away as the Ural mountains. The police drive them back but they regroup at a distance from the church.

  Our maths teacher, Sava Stepanovich Liga, takes us down to the church after school. He lost a leg in the war and hobbles on crutches. We gather in front of the church while Sava Stepanovich speaks: “It is a very simple phenomenon, explained by the laws of physics. The brickwork is rough so plaster clings to it; mosaics are smooth and plaster falls off them quite easily.”

  He speaks loudly enough for the faithful to hear, but the old ladies raise their voices so their prayers drown out the words of the heretic. They want to believe their miracle.

  Soon afterwards the mosaics are chipped away and a huge glass window is put in their place. On Saturdays we children are sent to help with the work.

  After we have helped to build the Palace of Pioneers they send us out to the steppe to plant forests. These bands of trees will stretch from Chapaevsk to the Caspian Sea, and will protect the crops from dry southern winds. In the town we plant saplings around our school and along the streets. At first we care for them, but then the State diverts our energies into a new campaign to collect scrap metal, and the neglected trees wither and die.

  ***

  “Pale youth with feverish gaze,”3 the teacher recites. “This is an example of reactionary poetry. How could a young boy possibly look like that?”

  “It’s possible,” I pipe up.

  She peers at me over her glasses. “How?”

  “Perhaps he had TB.”

  The class giggles.

  “Out!” roars the teacher. I run past her and soon I’m walking in the spring sunshine, happy to think of the others bending over their books.

  I run down to the railway line, climb the embankment and march along the tracks, keeping my eyes fixed on them in the hope of finding a spot where an American spy has undone the bolts. I’ll become a hero by running towards an oncoming train waving a red scarf on a stick. But I have nothing red. I wish I hadn’t left my Pioneer scarf at school. A character in a book would cut his arm with a piece of glass and soak a handkerchief with his blood. It’s a pity handkerchiefs are bourgeois-intellectual relics and I blow my nose with my fingers.

  A long-distance train charges past, as though it cares nothing for our town and our lives. The faces flashing by must belong to the happiest people in the world. In the wake of the train I search for empty books of matches. Their town of origin is stamped on rough cardboard: Vladivostock, Tomsk, Khabarovsk. The names make my head swim.

  At dusk I make my way over to the workers’ barracks. Throwing open the outer doors I yell: “Hurrah!” and charge down the corridor, punching the long-johns and bras that dangle overhead. Outside the door of my friend Victor’s room I whistle our pirate signal.

  “Who’s there, friend or foe?”

  “Crusoe.”

  Victor’s parents sit at the table eating rye bread and potatoes. His grandparents snore in their bed above the stove and his baby brother bawls unheeded in the corner. Victor and I wrestle on the floor until his parents scream at us to stop. Then Victor picks up his accordion and we sing old folk songs and sea shanties. Even the grandfather gets up from the stove to join in the chorus. I’m so out of tune he laughs: “Eh, Vanya, a bear must’ve farted in your ears.”

  Victor and the other boys who live in the barracks used to make fun of me because my parents are Party members and we have a home-help. But they’re not malicious and soon grow tired of teasing me. I feel comfortable with them for they aren’t ashamed of poverty and have no pretensions.

  Some of the barracks’ families are so poor the children have only one pair of shoes between them. In bad weather they take it in turns to go to school. I don’t want to stand out from the rest so when I leave our flat in the morning I run down to the basement, take off my shoes and hide them behind the hot-water pipes. But I come home from school to find my shoes have gone; my trick has been discovered. My step-father Dobrinin rages while my mother asks why I did it.

  “To be like the rest.”

  “Vanya, there is nothing admirable about poverty. There is no shame in working hard for a better life.”

  But it is my mother I am ashamed of. She struts through the town like a film star in high heels and expensive dresses. Local children jeer as she passes by with her nose in the air: “There’s shit on your shoes, Madame!” They parade in her wake, holding their noses and wiggling their bottoms until they collapse into the mud, hooting with laughter and whistling at her disappearing back. My mother pretends not to hear. She despises the barrack dwellers as only someone who comes from that background can.

  ***

  My step-grandparents live in a dacha at Studioni Avrag, a settlement further up the Volga. Before the revolution the Dobrinins were members of the nobility. Now they’re ‘former people’ and receive no pension. They survive by growing flowers. Their neighbours say that flowers are useless and that they should grow tomatoes and cucumbers instead. But Granny loves her gladioli and asters. Her fingers are bent and clawed and in the evenings she complains of back ache. After supper she puts on her night-cap and gown and retires with her French nove
l. She keeps a porcelain chamber-pot under her bed, for nothing will make her visit the earth closet at night.

  Grandad is a quiet man but when he speaks it’s to the point. He’s always busy in his garden. I help look after his two goats, making sure they don’t jump over the wall to nibble the neighbours’ apple trees. Sometimes they escape and then we hear the neighbour woman chasing them, shouting: “Hey, you Americans, hooligans, get out of here!”

  My grandparents have a daughter, Ira. Although she’s my stepfather’s sister Ira isn’t like him at all. Tall, strong and fearless, she rows Granny and me across the Volga for a picnic one day. My mother swims after the boat. She is a good swimmer, but to tease me Granny asks: “Aren’t you afraid your mother will drown?”

  “No,” I reply. “I have Auntie Ira.”

  My grandparents complain that the new dam being built across the Volga will harm our natural environment, that animals will be driven away and fish will disappear from the river. I know they’re wrong. The dam will give electricity to everyone and bring us closer to communism.

  Studioni Avrag is a summer resort for professors and doctors. I play with their children. Each year, as August draws to a close, we bid each other farewell until the next summer. But one year, just after the end of the war, few of my playmates return. In their place young and beautiful newcomers arrive in shining black Emka limousines. They wear well-cut uniforms and laugh loudly. Through the fence I glimpse lithe figures leaping to catch volley balls. The adults speak about the newcomers in whispers.

  I am a white raven amongst these people, for I come from godforsaken Chapaevsk and I tend goats. I have to prove myself. I’m no good at football but I can dive off the river ferries. When the boats tie up at the dock I climb their sides to the third deck and launch myself into the air like a swallow. Last year a boy dived under the ferry’s paddle and was killed. Now the sailors keep a strict watch, so it’s even more exciting to sneak past them. Finally they catch me and slap tar all over my body. It takes days to clean the tar off, and I get into big trouble at home.