The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia

by Svetlana Grobman

  Lucky visitors have their women on the first floor, and they can see their pale faces pressed to the frosted glass, which is sealed for the winter with patches of dusty cotton. Mom’s room is on the third floor, and I can barely make out her features. Dad puts me on his shoulders, and, at the top of my lungs, I shout into the freezing air that I want Mom to come home. She can’t hear me, though, and just waves at us from up high—a ghost-like silhouette framed by the frozen window. I burst into sobs, and Dad takes me home.

  Mom and Tanya come home in five days. Tanya is no bigger than my doll Masha, although unlike Masha, she has a reddish face, no hair, and a piercing voice. She also has the undivided attention of my parents, especially my mother, so I quickly realize that bringing her home is a mistake. For a week, I beg my parents to take her back to the hospital, but they never do. In fact, I am not even sure that they hear me. Tanya is a nuisance. I myself will never have babies.

  For the first six months of her life, Tanya sleeps in a small zinc washtub that is also used for her bath. This makeshift bed sits in the corner by the bookcase, making it hard for me to get to my books. Of course, nobody has time to read to me anymore, so the first thing I have to master after my sister’s arrival is reading.

  Then, as if that is not bad enough, another newcomer enters my life—a long-feared nanny. The nanny appears just before Mom goes back to work, and, as was the case with Tanya, no one warns me about her coming. One day, the door of our apartment squeaks open, and a small, snub-nosed woman with light thin hair and a broad Mongol face simply steps into our room.

  “I’m Tosja,” she says and gives me a hesitant smile showing her small, slightly crooked teeth.

  I hide behind Mom’s back. The woman puts her suitcase down, looks around, and her face takes on a worried expression. As small as she is, there is no space for her here—not unless she agrees to sleep in another, bigger, zinc washtub kept under Mom and Dad’s bed.

  Luckily for Tosja, it never comes to that. During the next week, my father and uncle put up a thin partition on one side of our room—big enough for Tosja’s narrow bed and suitcase—and Tosja moves there, increasing the number of people in our apartment to five.

  To my relief, Tosja is not a bad person; nothing close to Baba Yaga or our mean neighbors Lida and Zina. She is a young, twenty or so, provincial woman from the Ural Mountains. She comes from a village that is connected to the outside world by a dirt road, where nobody has a car or a truck, where hard work is the only way of life and heavy drinking the only way of escaping it.

  All able-bodied women in Tosja’s village work at a local kolkhoz (communal farm) for almost nothing, and they survive, as well as feed their children, by growing vegetables in their small yards and milking their scraggy goats. As for entertainment, at night, they sit on the benches in front of their houses, gossiping, cracking sunflower seeds, and spitting out the husks.

  Another important characteristic of Tosja’s village is its lack of men. The majority vanished during the war. Those who avoided death and returned home have a hard time staying sober, and their wearily patient wives have to continue performing both female and male duties—including those at the kolkhoz—exactly the way they did during the war. The only marriage-worthy men in Tosja’s village are the kolkhoz chairman and his deputy. Those two drink less, but they never do any heavy lifting either, for they have enough work to do ordering the women around and attending functions of the district Communist Party.

  Had Tosja stayed home, she would have been single. Or, if by some miracle she had married, she would have repeated the fate of many generations of female villagers, who are overworked, abused by their drunken husbands, and old by their early thirties. Tosja, like other young Russians from the provinces, has come to Moscow in search of a better life. Yet here she has a problem—she has no official permission to leave her village and, consequently, cannot obtain a legal job or, for that matter, a residence.

  This is nothing to sneeze at. Nobody over sixteen years old can move around in our country for more than thirty days without official permission and an obligatory passport—which in rural communities is kept at the local government offices. Typical grounds for obtaining permission for exit are getting married, going to college, or bribing a government official.

  The first requires securing a candidate for marriage beforehand, which is difficult to achieve for someone who has never lived anywhere else. The second involves excellent grades and recommendations from teachers, and, by its very nature, is available to very few. The third, bribery, should have been the easiest, considering the corruption of the government officials, but it requires money, which Soviet people do not have. As a result, very few people venture anywhere, and those who do have to do it at their own risk.

  Getting married to a Muscovite must be Tosja’s cherished goal. This does not mean that she neglects taking care of my baby sister and me. She does what she can: feeds us (not a small job in my case), changes Tanya’s diapers, and absentmindedly listens to my reading. I guess she is supposed to read to me, but that never happens. When Tosja first came, she told me several folktales that were popular in her homeland, but she quickly exhausted her repertoire, and I stopped asking for more.

  The thing that Tosja likes doing the most is taking us for a walk. She cheerfully helps me put on my clothes, swaddles up my little sister, puts her into a bulky perambulator, and off we go. Tosja’s affinity for spending time outside the house could be a remnant of her past life in the Urals, where she invariably had to travel long distances on foot, but I suspect that it has a more important motive, too.

  How else can you explain that no matter where we are heading—to a grocery store, a pharmacy, or just around the block—we inevitably end up at the red brick building of our local fire station? There we spend a long time doing absolutely nothing interesting except talking to thickset and hoarse-voiced firemen dressed in mustard-colored padded jackets, squeaky high boots, and ear-flapped caps. Tosja does most of the talking, while my side of the conversation is a repetitive: “I want to go home!” and my sister squeals loudly.

  With the exception of a local school and a dye factory, our neighborhood consists of small one-story wooden houses, so having a fire station here is important. Still, fires are rare, and when they do occur, they are quickly extinguished. For one thing, the overcrowding guarantees a quick discovery of the disaster; for another, the size of the dwellings does not allow for large and protracted conflagrations. In my memory, there has been only one serious incident—a fire at the dye factory.

  That fire started early in the evening, and by the time Tosja and I got there, a huge glow already consumed the building and exploding cans of dye flew across the dark sky like shooting stars, causing mild panic in the crowd of spectators. Animated Lida and Zina were there, too, gasping and informing anyone willing to listen that the fire must have been a terrorist act by Western spies.

  Most of the time, the firefighters seem bored, and they are more than happy to entertain a young provincial nanny, despite her annoying charges. And who can blame them? They are demobilized soldiers who spent two years marching in portjanki (foot-binding cloths used in the Soviet army instead of socks) and obeying the mindless commands of their officers.

  As for Tosja, she is just a lonely young woman. Her home and family are hundreds of miles away, and here in Moscow she has nobody to help or protect her, nobody to tell her what to do, and nobody to teach her to be careful. Besides, thirteen years after the war that killed and injured tens of millions of men, young males are hard to come by, even in a big city, and a fire department seems as good a place as any to meet some.

  It is a Sunday morning. I wake up to the sounds of Tanya’s whimpering and women talking. I open one eye and look. Mom is sitting at the table with Tanya in her arms—a bowl of kasha in front of her.

  “Tosja,” she says. “We’re going to my parents. Could be back late. If you go out, please, don’t forget to lock the door.”

  Th
is is Mom’s frequent request. In Tosja’s small village, where drunken fights often ended in mild—and not so mild—injuries, theft was rare. A scarcity of material goods accounted for much of that and everyone’s familiarity with everybody else accomplished the rest. Here in the big city, theft is common, and Tosja’s repeated failure to lock the front door disturbs my parents and angers our neighbors.

  “Sure, Firochka Raphailovna. (Mom’s first name is Fira, and Tosja’s ‘Firochka’ gives it a childishly endearing quality.) Don’tcha worry,” Tosja says, her voice ringing with excitement, unusual at this relatively early hour.

  I open my second eye and look at her. Tosja’s thin straight hair is arranged in cascading waves exactly like Mom’s, and she is ironing her dress on the side of the table opposite to Mom’s.

  “I’ll be visitin’ my aunt today. I may be back late, too,” Tosja says a little bit too casually. Then she lifts a large aluminum cup from the table, sucks a mouthful of water from it, and liberally spews it out on her wrinkled dress.

  “Your aunt? I did not know you had an aunt here.”

  “Oh, ya know. I wasn’t quite sure I’d find ’er, so I didn’t tell ya. It’s my mother’s sister.”

  “Really? I thought that your mother didn’t have any sisters!” Mom’s voice is laced with suspicion.

  “That’s my father,” Tosja says, lowering her eyes and firmly landing the iron on the flowery fabric, which responds to the heat with gurgling sounds. “His folks didn’t have no girls.”

  “Uh huh,” Mom says, knitting her brows.

  As a streetcar carries my family to my grandparents, I overhear my parents’ conversation.

  “I’m not senile! She told me that her mother has no sisters!”

  “We’re not her family, Fira, and she’s not a child. She can do whatever she wants.”

  “I know that. But don’t you see she’s headed for trouble?”

  “And what do you suppose we can do? First of all, you don’t know for a fact that she’s lying. Secondly, let’s say she is. Are you going to lock her in her room?”

  Time goes by. Every Sunday afternoon, Tosja dresses up and goes to visit her newly discovered relative.

  “How’s your aunt doing?” Mom asks her at night.

  “Good. She’s alone, ya know. She needs me.” And at that, the conversation ends.

  One Sunday, Tosja stays at home.

  “Are you going anywhere, Tosja?” Mom says.

  “Nah,” Tosja says in a morose monotone.

  “Are you sick?” Mom says.

  “Nah.”

  “Well, we’ll have guests over. You’re welcome to join us, but you might be bored.”

  Tosja says nothing. When the guests arrive, she goes to her closet-room and closes the door.

  “Is something the matter with your nanny?” My Aunt Raya whispers to Mom.

  “I’m afraid so,” Mom whispers back and gives her sister a meaningful glance.

  “Ah,” Aunt Raya says. “I knew it would end like that.”

  “I did, too.” Mom says, and they switch to Yiddish.

  More time goes by, and one day I suddenly notice that Tosja is getting fat. Kind of like Mom before she had Tanya.

  At night, I report my observation to my parents. “She’s not fat,” Mom says, glancing at Dad. “She’s going to have a baby.”

  A baby!? With the exception of Sundays, which are Tosja’s days off, Tosja and I spend lots of time together. If Tosja is to have a baby, I will likely have one, too!

  I have nothing against babies—besides my bothersome sister, that is—but being fat is a different matter. In fact, being fat is the worst thing that can happen to a kid in our neighborhood. There is a fat boy in the house across the street, and nobody ever plays with him. Even worse, they all tease him until he runs home, spreading tears all over his round face with his fists.

  I dash to the mirror and inspect my reflection—a scarecrow-skinny girl stares back at me.

  “Will I have a baby?” I say in a thin voice.

  Dad looks at Mom and says, “Eventually, I guess.”

  And Mom says, “What nonsense! This has nothing to do with you. Children can’t have babies.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE COLOR OF WATER

  One month before school starts, we are going to the Black Sea. “We” means Mom, Tanya and me; Dad is staying in Moscow. I am not sure whether going to the sea is bad news, like Tanya's arrival, or good news, like going to visit the grandparents.

  “Mom, is the water in the Black Sea black?”

  “Not at all. It’s as blue as the summer sky.”

  “Why do they call it ‘black’ then?”

  “I'm not sure.”

  “Is the Black Sea bigger than Sokolniki’s pond?”

  “It's much, much bigger, and it has real nice sandy beaches and mountains around it.”

  I have never seen sandy beaches. I have only seen sand on playgrounds and around the pond at Sokolniki. As for the mountains, they appear in pictures in my fairytale books, the ones about heroes who go “far away and over the mountains” in search of a treasure or a princess they want to marry. Do regular people go there, too?

  On the day of departure, Mom, with Tanya in her arms, and I board a train at bustling Kazanskaja station. Behind us, Dad carries a large, heavy suitcase. He brings it to our sleeping car compartment, kisses us good-bye, and leaves. Mom lowers the compartment’s window, and as the train jerks, groans, and picks up speed, we wave good-bye to my father who stands on the platform waving back at us and quickly growing smaller. When I can no longer see him, I turn and look around.

  The small compartment is furnished with four narrow bunk beds—two on the right for us and two on the left for our new neighbors—a small built-in table by the window, and a sliding door. The door keeps slamming: a black-mustached conductor peers in with a pile of linen, a young woman searches for her companion, a vendor offers sosiski (Russian hotdogs), and our new neighbors, an elderly couple, walk in and out.

  Mom asks me to hold Tanya and begins organizing our possessions. Then she positions herself on the lower bunk-bed, turns sideways, and, trying to be inconspicuous, uncovers her breast to feed Tanya. The neighbors exchange glances and politely leave. After Tanya is fed, Mom assembles our dinner: bread, pickles, and pieces of boiled chicken.

  A loud knock on the door announces the arrival of hot tea, and the conductor walks in with two large amber-color glasses, which tinkle in heavy metal glass-holders. He puts the glasses down on the table, counts out two lumps of sugar per glass, and leaves. I hear his hoarse “Tea anybody? Tea?” fading down the corridor.

  After Mom and I finish our dinner, we go to the corridor and our neighbors return to the compartment to eat their dinner. The corridor is busy. People walk up and down, talking, laughing, looking for the conductor, or heading to the bathroom. Mom unfolds a narrow built-in seat beneath a window, sits down, and begins rocking Tanya to sleep. I stick to the window next to her and watch the scenery fly by: streams, birches, power lines, and unkempt villages with dark figures of people and animals.

  At night, Mom and Tanya settle together on the bottom bunk, and I climb to the top. The train rocks rhythmically underneath me, and, for a while, I listen to the night sounds of the compartment: Tanya’s weak moaning, the elderly neighbor’s snoring, and Mom’s breathing. Soon, in time to the choo-k-choo-k—choo-k—choo-k—choo-k of our train, I fall into fitful sleep, interrupted only by the whooshing of passing trains.

  In the morning, we have a breakfast of bread, boiled eggs, and cheese, which we wash down with more hot tea. Mom and the neighbors talk about our destinations. We, Mom says, are going to Adler (a little town by the Black Sea), where she will look for a place to rent. Our neighbors, on the other hand, are going to a sanatorium in Sochi (a much bigger town in the same area), where they will receive medical treatment.

  “You’re a doctor, right? Let me ask you a question.” And they break into a long and tedious mo
nologue about their ailing health.

  I take my observation post by the window. Overnight, the landscape has changed. Pines, birches, and cedars have disappeared, and now our train rumbles through green fields and orchards. At the train stops, tanned, loud-voiced women in headscarves bring apples, cherries, and grapes to the idling train and sell them in paper cones made out of torn newspapers.

  Mom orders me to take care of Tanya and joins other passengers hurrying outside to stretch their legs and buy some goodies. I try to protest: “What if you miss the train? What will we do then?” Nothing bad happens, though. Mom comes back with a paper cone full of cherries so sweet that I forgive her for the fright she has given me and savor the cherries, one by one.

  Late in the afternoon, the train takes a wide turn and an immense glimmering turquoise surface opens up before our eyes like a mirage. Yet unlike a mirage that can deceive human vision but not our sense of smell, this surface emanates a mineral fragrance I have never inhaled before. Exclamations of “Look, look! That’s the Black Sea!” sweep through the train, and everybody rushes to the windows to look at the wonder.

  Two hours later, our panting train comes to a halt and passengers begin unloading. A small crowd of women in dark clothes and headscarves hurries toward the newcomers:

  “Do you need a place to stay?”

  Deals are made quickly, and the platform empties in no time. We follow an old woman with a stooped back and crow-like features.

  “Did you bring your passport, my dear?” She says to my mother—her black eyes looking out sharply from under her headscarf.

  “Yes,” Mom nods. She knows better than to leave Moscow without her passport.

  For the next ten days or so we stay in a dark six-by-nine-foot room with a small window whose deep sill serves as a dinner table. Days pass, each indistinguishable from the next, like the envelopes Mom uses to mail letters to Dad. After breakfast, we walk to the beach, which looks like a huge quilt patched with numerous blankets in a variety shapes and colors. The blankets stake a one-day claim to a small piece of southern luxury. The earlier the vacationers bring their blankets, the better the places they get—closer to the water, with finer sand, and, if one is really lucky, in the shade of one of the tall wooden umbrellas that stick in the ground like enormous mushrooms. The only spaces left for late sleepers are the rocks at the edge of the beach.