There is just enough space between the blankets to walk among sunburned bodies—some tiny and resilient, others saggy and misshapen—to the water’s edge, where playful waves call vacationers to the depths of the sea. We maneuver toward our blanket—which Mom takes to the beach early in the morning while Tanya and I are still asleep. Here we spend most of our day. Like everybody else, we breathe the intoxicating sea air, sunbathe, bury each other under the hot sand, and wade in the water. I have not learned how to swim yet, and Tanya is just a baby. Mom sometimes goes for a short swim, still keeping an eye on us even as her body sinks into the clear water.
Me, Tanya, and Mom in the Black Sea
When Mom and I are hungry, we snack on vobla (dry and salty Caspian Roach fish, a perennial favorite of our countrymen), and at noon, Mom opens a can of Spam and makes us sandwiches. For supper, we go to a nearby diner.
Mom goes first to take a place in line, and I stay on the beach with Tanya. An hour or so later, when Mom’s turn seems close, she comes back and gets us. The food in the diner is always the same—solyanka (a soup made with pickles and tomato paste), kotlety (hamburgers), and compot (a sweet drink made of dry fruit). I mostly drink the sweet compot, Mom eats her dinner and the rest of mine, and little Tanya squeals in Mom’s arms.
At night, before going to sleep, we join a crowd of vacationers strolling along the town’s promenade, which is bordered by the shore on one side and blooming acacia and chestnut trees on the other. Here, the sultry smell of the sea mixes with the light aroma of the acacias and the heavy perfume of the vacationers, who enjoy a warm southern evening and watch distant ships lingering in the harbor.
Everybody is dressed in their summer best: men in light shirts and pants and women in light summer saraphan that reveal their bronze skin peeling from too much harsh sun. A small orchestra sends whirling waltzes into the darkening air, and their sounds reverberate from the calm surface of the sea and the still-warm asphalt of the promenade. Also, the bewitching baritone of a popular singer Leonid Utesov, who himself was born and raised beside the Black Sea, pours seductive, nostalgic melodies of lost love out of the loudspeakers.
Time seems to stretch, easy and warm, and I no longer think about Moscow or going to school, or even about my grandparents and my favorite park Sokolniki. Yet one day everything changes.
That afternoon, as Mom slowly submerges her body in the sea, squatting, splashing turquoise water, and exclaiming something between “Aaaaah” and “Uuuuuh,” I bring Tanya to the water’s edge. I sit her on my lap, and point to Mom, so Tanya can join in Mom’s excitement with her favorite “goo-goo.” When my little sister does not respond, I jokingly slap her on the back. Suddenly, Tanya’s little body becomes rigid, and she begins jerking—once, twice, three times. She shakes harder and harder, as though she had been wound up inside by an invisible hand and cannot stop until she is completely unwound. Her head falls back, her face goes blue, and her eyes close, just like the eyes of a dying bird I once saw.
“Mom,” I scream at the top of my lungs, making a desperate attempt to hold shaking Tanya in my arms but inadvertently dropping her onto the sand, where she writhes and twists as if in a frantic dance.
“Doctor, doctor! This baby needs a doctor!” I hear people nearby shout, and I see Mom—her wet hair glued to her scalp and her eyes wide with terror—jump out of the sea and run toward us, spraying those in her way with water and sand. She kneels in front of my sister and tries to feel her pulse. Then she clasps her to her chest, but Tanya continues to struggle in her arms, almost slipping away from Mom’s embrace.
“Mom, stop her, stop her!” I cry, as if I am the only one who knows that this mad dance needs to be interrupted.
The rest of that day is gone from my memory. All I remember is walking over numerous railroad tracks. Why or where, I do not know. One day later, we take a train back to Moscow.
“It's all your fault!” Father spits at my mother in a hoarse whisper. His eyes are red, as if he had not slept for many nights, and his usually shiny hair is dull and disheveled.
“How could I have known? I wanted the best for both of them …”
Mom speaks in a low voice, rocking Tanya to sleep. “Sea air is supposed to be good for children.”
“I told you she's too young to take her there!”
Father's voice reaches a strained falsetto that sounds like a stifled cry. Mom’s shoulders quiver, and when she looks at me, I see tears streaming down her cheeks. She carefully lowers Tanya into her zinc bath-tub bed, covers her with a blanket, and motions me to leave the room. Dad walks behind us.
When we reach the kitchen, he opens his mouth as if to say something else, but instead, he grows pale, clutches at his heart and, gasping for air and moaning something about Mom’s “stupid” stubbornness, sinks to the floor. Terrified, I look to Mom—What’s wrong with Dad?—but she is already kneeling in front of my father, feeling his pulse, the way she knelt on the hot sand of the Black Sea before my little sister not long ago. Then she lifts her wet face to me—“Get a cup of water. Hurry!”—and rushes back to our room.
When she comes back, I see two tiny blue pills on her open palm. She brings them to my fathers’ half-open mouth and pushes the pills inside it. “I’m sorry, I'm sorry, I’m sorry,” Mom repeats in a tired monotone—the way nuns and monks chant their endless prayers—until her husband's breathing becomes normal and the color returns to his face, which still wears an expression of someone unfairly betrayed by the world.
Time goes by. Doctors come and go. Tosja comes back—thin as ever. Yet my home is never the same—more like a front-line hospital, with its smells, cries, and sounds of a raging war nearby, than the warm and comfortable place it used to be. In this new home, I am alone with my fears: What’s wrong with Tanya? What’s wrong with my parents? Will things ever be the way they once were?
There is nobody to ask. Tosja will not talk about it. As for my parents, they keep fighting. In fact, their fights will never stop. They will go through their lives—and ours—arguing and complaining about each other. The reasons will be numerous—parenting and money, relatives and jealousy, and other ordinary miseries of life. Still, no matter what the reason, most of their disagreements will end up the same way: Dad sinks to the floor, Mom kneels in front of him, and I—and later Tanya—run for water.
For now, though, all I can do is spend as little time at home as possible, which is easy, since I finally start school.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
September 1st is a very special day in our country. Not because summer has already faded, and the trees have turned red and yellow. And not because September marks the enchanted time of the year we call babskoe leto (woman’s summer), known as Indian summer in America. The thing that makes September 1st special is that on this day students all over the country—from first graders to PhD students—start a new school year.
Rain or shine, the streets light up with streams of school children carrying bouquets of pink, white, and purple gladiolas or sun-splashed chrysanthemums. Young children, excited and apprehensive, walk with their parents, nestling their small hands inside the adults’ big ones. Older students stride on their own, chattering, scanning faces around them, and laughing out loud. All of them move toward their schools the way brooks and rivers flow toward the sea. The rest of the school year is commonplace and dull, but the first day is fresh with expectations mixed with the fragrance of flowers—a short-lived triumph of hope over experience.
I walk to school with Mom. She is wearing her best dark-maroon woolen jacket, which Dad brought her a year ago from one of his business trips, and I am wearing a brown woolen dress and a white satin apron with wing-like gathers along the shoulder straps.
My dress uniform for school, 1958
“Just like an angel,” Grandma sighed when she first saw me try on my new uniform. Later that day, she took me to a photo studio. There, a tired photographer, overwhelmed with energetic first-grade
rs and their parents, seated me on a high chair and placed my right hand on the armrest and my left hand on my right elbow. Then he hid behind his tripod and said: “Look into the camera! A little bird is going fly out of it!”—and took my picture “na dolguyu pamyat” (as a remembrance).
Despite my festive appearance, I do not feel festive. For one thing, going to a new place, even if it is only two blocks away, feels to me like jumping into a strange lake. For another, my best friend and next-door neighbor Igorék will not be in my class as we both expected.
“There will be two first grades,” Mom said to me when I asked her about it. “You’ll be in First Grade A, and he will be in First Grade B. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
By the time Mom and I get to my new school, the school yard looks like a small parade ground. Rows of children are drawn up on one side, a crowd of adults on the other, and officially dressed women scurry between the two. Mom hesitantly lets go of my left hand, and a strange young woman in a white blouse and black skirt immediately grabs my hand and pulls me away—as if I am a baton passed on in a relay race. I turn and give Mom a desperate look—Where is she taking me?—but Mom just waves at me and smiles encouragingly.
In a minute, I find myself in a line of other first graders. The boys in my class wear dove-gray woolen suits and white shirts, and the girls have uniforms just like mine, with large white bows clinging to their heads. Too bad Grandma cannot see us now—a flock of angels waiting for their first assignment.
As soon as I get used to my surroundings, I look for Igorék. I spot him in the group next to mine. Shriveled among other gray-suited boys, he seems thinner than usual, and his face is almost as white as my new apron. I wave at him and smile, wanting to encourage him the way Mom tried to encourage me. Igorék looks at me and casts his eyes down. I understand. He does not want other boys to think that he is a devchatnic (a boy who keeps company with girls).
Several more minutes pass by. Then a small middle-aged woman in a black suit walks to the center of the school yard and raises her hands. Despite her size and civilian clothes, this woman has the presence of a military commander. For a minute or two, she studies our faces, as if trying to decide whether we are worth her effort. When the noise and excitement subside, she claps her hands and presses them to her bosom in a gesture of urgency:
“Dear children! Today is the most important day of your lives. Today you’re joining thousands and millions of children all over the country in the pursuit of education …”
The woman is our school principal. She talks about the importance of learning, discipline, and making good grades—not just for our future or our parents’ satisfaction but, more importantly, “for the prosperity of our country.” The principal’s speech is long and her voice is monotonous, so gradually our attention flags, and we shift from one foot to the other. Yet just before we get openly restless, the principal’s voice raises to a high C, and she pushes her hands forward like an opera singer who is about to break into a final aria, “Remember, children, all of this is available to you because of our dear Communist Party!”
The speech is over. Led by our teachers, we head to the school’s front door, which is decorated with a banner, “Thank You Our Dear Communist Party for Our Happy Childhood!” One by one, we walk underneath these words of gratitude and into the school building, while our parents wave at us and brush away tears.
Before we enter the classroom where we will study for next three years, we are sorted into pairs— one girl and one boy—and told to take seats in the order of our arrival. The classroom is filled with several rows of black party (wooden student desks for two) with folding front panels that make loud noises every time we get up or down. In front of the room sits a teacher’s desk. Behind the desk, just above a blackboard, hang large portraits of two men: one with high temples, piercing eyes, and a short pointed beard; the other with a bold head, small eyes, and an almost simple-hearted expression on his round face.
The first man is Vladimir Iljich Lenin—or rather Dedushka (Grandfather) Lenin as we children are taught to call him—a great revolutionary and the most important person in the history of our country. The portrait next to Lenin depicts our current leader Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.
I have seen numerous pictures of Lenin in my ABC book: Dedushka Lenin by himself, Dedushka Lenin surrounded with young workers, Dedushka Lenin giving a speech in front of revolutionary soldiers, and others. In fact, there are two more portraits of him in the classroom. On the wall to the right, Lenin, in a cloth cap, one hand in his pants pocket, is talking to a group of children. On the wall to the left, he stands on the roof of an armored car—his coat flies open, his hand points forward, and a sea of people crowd around him on all sides. As for Khrushchev, his pictures do not appear in our ABC book, but his face is also familiar to me—his photos fill our newspapers and adorn tall city buildings during government holidays.
Everybody is seated, and our teacher, a large woman with deeply-set, suspicious eyes, opens a class roster.
“Hello, children,” she says, forcing an official smile. “My name is Maria Ivanovna and I am your teacher. Now, I need to know your names. I’ll read the roster, and when you hear your name, I want you to get up, so I can see you.”
She goes down the list, and the children stand up one after another—some look straight at the teacher and some carefully study the surface of their desks. When my name sounds, I get up, too, and whispering sweeps through the classroom like the rustling of falling leaves. I turn around—Is something wrong with me?—but I can see no answer. I am dressed like all the girls in my class. My hair is arranged into two coiled braids, the way many of them wear theirs. My briefcase, my cotton stockings, and my shoes are almost identical to everybody else’s. And yet, I must be different. I feel it with my skin and in my suddenly aching teeth. What is it?
The explanation is simple, and it has nothing to do with my appearance. The thing that makes me stand out is my family name—too long and characteristically Jewish. I am not aware of that, yet, but the children in my class are. There are twenty-four of them around me. Some know each other, some do not, but all of them know that I am a stranger who will never be like them.
Roll call is over and the class begins. My classmates open their ABC books and start repeating after Maria Ivanovna, “A—alphabet, B—babushka …”
My heart is still pounding, and my eyes are filled with tears. I bite my lips and breathe deeply—the way Grandma tells me to do when I have coughing fits or cannot stop crying. I try to follow the class, too, but the pace of the lesson is too slow, and, despite being the youngest student here, I already know how to read. In fact, that is why my parents sent me to school a year early. That, and also Tosja’s claim that it is too hard to babysit both of us, especially now that Tanya is sick.
I furtively look around again. I know no one here, and Igorék, my only friend in this school, is in a classroom down the hall. I sigh and quietly pull a slim volume of Russian Fairytales out of my new briefcase, open it under my student desk to the page titled “Vasilisa the Beautiful,” and read “Once upon a time in a distant kingdom, there lived a merchant …” And that makes me feel better.
CHAPTER TWELVE
WHY I WILL NEVER BE A HERO
As soon as my first school year is over, we are going out of town. Despite the bad experience we had at the Black Sea, my mother still believes that, in the summer, children—especially sickly children like Tanya and me—should be taken away from the smog and dust of a big city to places where clean air, fresh milk, and eggs will perform miracles for our health. This time, we follow Dad, whose job takes him to a distant provincial village on the border with Ukraine.
The village consists of barely twenty single-story, run-down wooden huts built along a dirt road, muddy when it rains and dusty when it’s dry. The house where we are renting a room with a pechka (fireplace) sits by a wide circular lawn formed by a bend in the road. Like other village dwellings, i
t is surrounded by a wooden fence that contains a small vegetable garden, a chicken coop, and a cowshed. One thing that the fence does not contain is smells—from the bitter aroma of garlic to the pungent odor of chicken and cow manure.
Life in this house is monotonous. Chickens kill time digging in the dirt, while a dozen cheeping chicks fuss cutely around them. A cow and her offspring spend most of their days in the pastures, and one can set one’s watch by their drawn-out bellowing, which sounds early in the morning as they leave their shed to join the village herd, and in the evening, when they come home tired from the serious business of feeding. As for our elderly khozyaika (proprietress), her existence is as routine as the lives of her animals: chore after chore, day after day.
My life is not exciting either. No children my age live nearby, and I spend most of my days reading books and watching the chickens. I am supposed to watch Tanya, too, but at the age of one-and-a-half, she can play on her own and does not require much attention. Nor am I willing to give it to her anyway. Tanya has passed the constantly crying stage, and she has gotten over whatever illness she caught at the Black Sea. Yet I cannot forgive her for the changes her arrival has brought into my life, and I believe more than ever that I am an adopted daughter. What else can account for my parents fussing over Tanya’s every move and not exhibiting any interest in me?
The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia Page 7
