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

by Svetlana Grobman

  Mom’s only answer is “Stealing is stealing. They can put you in prison for that. And don’t you talk to your sister about Zoya Ivanovna. Understood?”

  Several months later, I do break Mom’s ban and ask Tanya what Zoya Ivanovna told her to do in the store and what else Tanya stole for her. Tanya looks at me under her long eyelashes and tilts her head to one side, the way she does when puzzled,

  “Who’s Zoya Ivanovna?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  LIFE LESSONS

  Another summer announces its approach with a show of pop-up showers, washed blue skies, and flowers in city parks. School is over and, once again, we follow Dad to his summer job—this time in a provincial village located near the old Russian city of Novgorod, some 500 kilometers from Moscow.

  The village is bigger than the one we went to last year, but life here is still nothing like it is in Moscow. No street cars or buses run along its main drag, which is bordered by one-story wooden shacks. No Metro stations wink at pedestrians with their neon signs. And the only sounds that disturb its provincial quiet are produced by hoarse dogs, farm animals, clamorous domestic disputes, and, once in a while, trucks and farm machinery that strain their engines in a fight with the ubiquitous mud and ruts in the road.

  The trucks and machinery belong to the local kolhoz, where peasants work together, and where profits are divided equally among them—that is, after the lion’s share has been sent to the central government. Another vehicle that rumbles through the village, raising clouds of dust or splashing mud, is the jeep of the kolhoz chairman, who is also head of the local Communist cell. The rest of the time the road is empty, for nobody here—as in any Russian village—has any personal transportation, not even a horse.

  There are no grocery stores here either, and the residents have to take a bus to the next village to buy baking flour, salt, sugar, vodka, and matches. Anyone whose needs stretch beyond these basic necessities must travel to the nearest town. As for delicacies like bologna, mayonnaise, herring and such—not to mention clothes nicer than telogreika (a working-style padded jacket) or rezinovie sapogi (black rubber boots)—these require a journey to a regional center or even to Moscow.

  The bus stops here only twice a day, so Mom, when she has to buy groceries, does not even ask me to come along. This is fine with me; I hate standing in lines anyway. And the lines are very long in 1960. The country is at the height of Khrushchev’s corn fiasco. Everybody talks about it: people in grocery store lines, babushkas (old women) on the benches by our house, and, of course, my parents at home.

  From what I gather, last year, our leader Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev traveled to America, a country located so far away that no Soviet high official before him had ever been there. During his visit, Khrushchev learned that corn grows everywhere in America—which, apparently, is a great thing. Nikita Sergeevich was so impressed with all that American corn that when he returned home, he set his heart on increasing the corn production in our country. Before his trip, we mostly grew corn to feed cattle, but now we were going to feed corn to people, too, and every collective farm was given a command to plant more corn.

  I do not know much about growing corn. In truth, I do not know much about growing anything besides medicinal aloe vera whose bitterly stinging sap Mom uses as nose drops. I do not know much about America either. I only see it on the map in my geography class, and that map does not show anything growing there anyway.

  Most of my American knowledge comes from Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which never mentions growing corn, but painting fences, getting lost in a cave, and other things like that. It is a great book, though, and when I first heard my parents talk about Khrushchev's visit to America, I immediately asked them if he had met Tom Sawyer, which would be the first thing I would do had I gone to America. My parents said that they did not think so and asked me to find out if Tanya needed my help.

  In any case, something went wrong with Khrushchev’s corn project. Unlike our aloe vera that needs little attention—we just water it once a week and watch it sprout its prickly branches over our windowsill—corn needed something that most of our country could not provide: hot summers. As a result, the corn that did so well in faraway America stubbornly refused to do the same in our northern country. That happened to be very bad news indeed, since by the time our authorities realized their mistake, the collective farms had already eliminated a lot of wheat—which does very well around here—to increase space for corn.

  To make a long story short, this disaster resulted in Khrushchev’s earning the ironic nickname “kukuruznik” (the corn man) and in severe food shortages. The one exception is an abundance of canned sweet corn, turrets of which fill the shelves of our otherwise empty grocery stores as monuments to Khrushchev’s ingenuity. Dad put it this way: “You reap what you sow.” This, I thought, was a strange thing to say, since we surely sowed much more than we reaped. Yet Dad never explained to me what he meant.

  The food shortages, which are bad even in Moscow, are especially bad in the provinces, where lines for flour, macaroni and such—never mind meat and other delicacies—are almost as long as the distance between our country and the corn fields of America. In our village, many are unhappy with Khrushchev, and everybody is suspicious of “capitalist America” which “must have planned” the whole thing all along to undermine our country.

  The good thing is that, unlike city dwellers, the peasants have something going for them. Outside their collective farms, where they work long hours for very low pay, they are allowed to plant vegetables and fruit trees in their small yards. Had they owned some land, they could have grown wheat or other grains, too. That, however, ended a long time ago with the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, during which small farms were eliminated and their owners—my textbook call them kulaks—were imprisoned or shot. Now peasants have to buy flour, buckwheat, and other grain at a store, the same way town folk do.

  They are allowed to keep a few farm animals, though. Our proprietress Evdokia Nikolaevna has several chickens and two mean geese, which I am told to watch “v oba” (vigilantly) since they might attack Tanya. She also has a cow that I watch v oba on my own account because I am terrified of cows after my misadventure last summer.

  Once, Grandma, who stayed with us for a couple of weeks, took Tanya and me for a walk in the woods, and we ran into several grazing cows. The only thing that kept me from fleeing and possibly never seeing my grandma and sister again was that I was scared of running into even more cows that might have been grazing nearby.

  Grandma, on the other hand, stayed very calm. “There's nothing to worry about,” she said to me when one cow started trotting toward us. Then she picked up a long twig lying on the ground and fearlessly shushed the cow away. That was the most impressive thing I ever saw her do—almost as impressive as a magician swallowing fire at the Moscow Circus. And during the rest of our walk, Grandma talked about her parents (Grandma had parents, too!) who lived on a small farm by the Black Sea and had a vegetable garden, chickens, a horse, and two cows.

  “If not for Stalin,” she said, her voice quivering, “You could've been born there.”

  “Grandma, were your parents kulaks?!” I said.

  “Nonsense,” Grandma said, “My parents had a small piece of land and they worked it themselves. My younger siblings helped them, too.”

  “You had siblings, Grandma? How many?”

  “Six, but let's not talk about that.”

  I could hardly believe this. Not only did Grandma have kulak parents, but she also had six brothers and sisters I never knew anything about! How can I not talk about that?

  “Where are they?”

  “Passed away,” Grandma said, averting her eyes.

  “How? Did they have whooping cough?” I said.

  “No,” Grandma said, speeding up her pace. “Two of them were killed during a pogrom, and one died later of typhoid fever.”

  “And the others?”

  “One brothe
r died before you were born, and one sister died of an illegal abor… Well, you don’t need to know about that.” Grandma said, her voice trailing off.

  “Grandma, what happened to the sixth?” I insisted, having done quick math in my head.

  “Well, one sister left for America, but don't you tell this to anybody!”

  That she did not have to tell me. What kid would like people to know that her great-grandparents were kulaks, the very “enemies of the people” every school child is taught to hate? As for relatives in capitalistic America, that is at least as bad, if not worse!

  Tanya and me (front row);

  Grandma and Mom (back row)

  “How did you survive, Grandma?” I said, suddenly realizing how little I knew about my grandparents.

  “I had no choice.” Grandma smiled a sad smile. “I had to survive so one day I would have grandchildren.” Then she looked straight into my eyes and added, “We’re all survivors, bubala. You, too.”

  Here, Tanya began whining that she wanted to go home, and we turned back to the village. I kept questioning Grandma about her family and about why we are all survivors, but she never explained that.

  Another farm animal found in this village is rabbits. In fact, they are as common around here as badly groomed cats and dogs. Our proprietress has rabbits, too. They are fascinating to watch—fluffy, with large watery eyes, twitching noses, and a sweetly apprehensive expression on their little faces. Evdokia Nikolaevna keeps them in a rabbit-hutch that is divided into several sections.

  “Just like a miniature apartment house,” Mom says, but to me the hutch looks like a rabbit prison.

  For one thing, the rabbits are never allowed to go outside; for another, nobody comes to play with them. True, Evdokia Nikolaevna brings them food, cleans their cages, and gives them water, but she never stays with them for long or speaks to them in a baby-talk voice. I am the only visitor the long-eared inmates ever have, and I do my best to compensate for that. I, too, bring them fresh grass and push it inside through the wire netting. I give them names and tell them about the events of the day while they move their long ears, blink their dark eyes, and wiggle their whiskers—always interested in what I have to say, more so than my own family.

  The more time I spend around the rabbits, the more I am mystified with their lives. Some days Evdokia Nikolaevna keeps them in cages in pairs, while other days I find them alone. Pairing the little animals makes a lot of sense to me—clearly, everybody needs a playmate. Yet she never keeps them together for long. Also, the “temporary” playmates are always the same, as if Evdokia Nikolaevna does not have enough space for them in her rabbit-hutch, so she has to move them from one cage to another.

  Gradually, I notice that the rabbits that lose their temporary playmates grow fatter, until one day I find four tiny bunnies in a cage with a formerly obese rabbit.

  “The rabbits have babies, too!” I report to my mother at night. “They're the cutest little things you ever saw. Would you get me some?”

  “I don't have the time for rabbits,” Mom says. “With all this housework, I hardly have the time for the two of you.”

  “I'll help you, Mom,” I beg. “I'll take care of the rabbits myself. I'll spend more time with Tanya, too. Mom, please! Just two!”

  After a lot of beseeching and promising on my part, Mom finally gives up, and a cage with two rabbits appears next to a strawberry patch that I have solemnly promised to weed every other day. I rush to the cage and something inside me melts, as if I have swallowed a whole box of chocolates in one go. Not only do I have two wonderful creatures all to myself (Tanya does not count, she never pays attention to anything for more than a day), but also my rabbits are the most beautiful rabbits in the whole rabbit world! Their puffy coats are snow-white, their long ears are exquisitely-translucent, their glimmering eyes are full of naïve curiosity, and best of all—something that Mom does not yet know—they are going to bring me the cutest rabbit babies known to man!

  The next week must be the best week of my life. Every morning, I run to the fields to gather fresh grass and clover. In the afternoon I beg Mom to spare some of our cabbage and carrots for my rabbits, and every evening I clean the rabbits’ cage. I also take care of our strawberry patch and play with my little sister—all without getting tired or bored.

  By the end of the week, I walk up to Mom, who is bent over a one-burner portable propane stove with a ladle in her hand, and ask her for another cage. Mom stops stirring borscht and looks at me.

  “What do you need another cage for?” she says.

  “I have to separate the rabbits,” I answer, proud of my insider's knowledge.

  “Separate for what?”

  It is appalling how little Mom knows about country living in general and the propagation of rabbits in particular. Does she even realize that, if not for Stalin, I would have been born on her grandparents’ farm? And, although I was not, I am still excited about recapturing my secret rural heritage. “For babies, of course!”

  “What babies?”

  “You have to separate the rabbits so they can have babies,” I tell Mom in a voice she herself reserves for talking with little Tanya. “Ask Evdokia Nikolaevna! She always does that.”

  The ladle slips from Mom’s hand and falls on the scratched wooden floor, splashing me with hot reddish liquid and pieces of chopped beets. Yet, instead of inquiring if I am okay or, at least, picking up the ladle and cleaning the floor, my mother stares at me as if I just told her that my rabbits have grown horns or I am going to America to visit Tom Sawyer.

  “I'll talk to your father,” she says after a minute of dead silence.

  The next day, Dad brings another cage and transfers one of the rabbits there. All I need now is patience. First thing in the morning, I run to my cages and look the rabbits over. I am not quite sure which one of them will have bunnies, so I carefully examine both. Yet, day after day, my rabbits look exactly the way they did when I first saw them—white and fuzzy, and cute— but they are no bigger.

  A week later, I ask Mom to bring the rabbits back together. She does not mind. After several more days, we separate the animals once again, and my feverish observations continue—to no avail. Finally, after a series of separations and happy reunions, my rabbits become nervous, while I become deeply disappointed.

  My parents will not buy me another couple, I realize that. I have to give up my idea. The last time I pull a trembling rodent from its cage, I clasp it to my face and, despite a nagging premonition that no earthly effort will bring about a change, I whisper into its silky ear, “Please, please, please, bring me little bunnies!” And then I kiss it on its wet, sniffing nose.

  This time, the change does come. It is not the one I hoped for, but it is definitely a change. In size, too. Not in the rabbits, though, but in my face. By next morning, it swells like the risen dough for Mom’s pirozhki, while my eyes turn into two hardly visible slits, as if, instead of coming from a long line of Diaspora Jews and Ukrainian kulaks, I come from the stock of Genghis Khan. I also feel feverish, and my body itches as if ants were crawling all over it.

  Several days later, after Mom brings me home from a local hospital where I have been treated for allergic shock, the rabbits and their cages are gone. I open my mouth to ask about them, but I look at Mom and bite my tongue. I have learned my lesson. Sometimes, the very thing you long for so much can hurt you. Besides, as Mom tells me—her hand stroking my hair—there is a little one in our household already. Not as cute as bunnies and definitely much more troublesome—it is my sister Tanya, who, according to Mom, needs my attention “even more than the rabbits.”

  Tanya proves the truth of Mom's statement the very next day. While playing in the kitchen, she finds a kernel of sweet corn and, for nothing better to do, pushes it deep inside her left nostril. The kernel, which suddenly finds itself in a warm and moist environment, apparently starts growing there—unlike the corn our whole country tried so hard to grow—and the next morning, Tanya wake
s up screaming in pain.

  Mom rushes her to the same hospital, and the same doctor treats her. When they return home, Mom’s green eyes are dark-olive and fulminating. Just before Tanya was released, the doctor asked Mom how many more children she has. This may have been a very innocent question, but Mom took it very hard, and I quickly find myself grounded for the offence of not watching Tanya “v oba glaza.” By the time I am finally forgiven, golden spikes of fall begin penetrating the summer greenery, the evenings cool off, and we move back to Moscow.

  Years later, I ask my mother if she remembers the summer in the village where everybody had rabbits.

  “Sure,” she says. “They raised them for meat.”

  “They did?!” I say, making a belated connection between the 1960’s food shortages and the number of rodents in the village. What else did I miss?

  “What about my rabbits?” I ask. “Why didn’t they have bunnies?”

  “I had no time for rabbits,” Mom says. “Grocery shopping took hours, not to mention cooking on a one-burner stove. We bought you two females.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I REMEMBER THEM

  “For as long as we live, they too will live,

  For they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”

  Reform Judaism Prayer Book

  “A great achievement of Soviet Science!” An announcer’s voice pours breathlessly from the radio, “The first in world history!” The voice reaches a state of ecstasy: “Soviet human spacecraft Vostok 1 orbited the Earth in 108 minutes!” Victorious sounds of a military choir conclude this breaking news, affirming the gravity of the event.

  Wow! Just this morning, while I was still asleep, Yuri Gagarin, our first cosmonaut, flew into outer space! How great is that?!