No, maybe I shouldn’t inform on my grandparents. I stay with them during my school breaks. Besides, Grandpa plays the guitar and sings sad songs, and Grandma makes my favorite strudel. If they are in prison, I won’t have a place to go. Still, my parents are really awful! They’re never happy with anything I do. They make me babysit Tanya, they force me to eat all that gross food, and … I definitely should turn them in!
I take a bowl of soup and storm out of the room, not willing even to look at Mom bending over Tanya’s bed. I walk straight to the bathroom, pour the soup into the toilet and flush it. I don’t need her food! And I don’t want to talk to her ever again!
For a while, I mope around our small kitchen. Unfortunately, I cannot spend much time there. The neighbors, Klavdia Petrovna and Naúm Vasilievich, are already eyeing me suspiciously. I head back to our room.
“Sh-sh,” Mom says again. “Did you finish your dinner?” Then she beckons me closer, puts her arms around my shoulders and whispers, “Congratulations! Did you have fun?”
I do not answer. Too late now! They think I’m stupid. They think I don’t understand what’s going on. But I’m a Young Pioneer now! I’m a patriot! I know that being loyal to our Motherland is more important than my family, especially such an awful family.
“Svetochka, what’s wrong?” Mom says, peering into my eyes.
You are wrong! All of you!—I want to say, trying to extricate myself from Mom’s embrace, nourishing my anger.
“Are you sick, too, honey?” Mom’s palm lands on my dry forehead.
Her voice sounds so concerned, and her arms envelop me so tenderly that, for a moment, I feel like cuddling on her lap and telling her all about driving through Moscow, about Red Square, the ceremony, and my disappointment in the mausoleum. But … I won’t! She’s just pretending. She’s never interested. Pavlik’s father must’ve pretended to be nice to him, too, but Pavlik didn’t let himself be fooled. He did what he had to do, and so will I, and no “Svetochka” will stop me!
A short cry comes from Tanya’s bed, and we both turn to look at her. Tanya’s breathing is laborious, but her eyes are still closed, and she appears to be sleeping. Suddenly, the thought goes through my head, what will happen to Tanya when my parents are gone? She could be put into an orphanage. Well, she’s a pain. Why should I care? Of course, she’s sick now. I’d better wait till she’s better and then turn my parents in to the authorities.
But … what will happen to me? I guess I could live with my grandparents. No, wait. Will they want to kill me? That’s what Pavlik’s relatives did. My heart skips a bit, but I shake off the scary thought. My grandparents would not want to kill me. They love me! Still, what will they do when they find out about my deed? Will they take me in then? What if they won’t? I can’t live alone, can I? I have no money and I don’t know how to cook. Also, who will buy me clothes or take care of me when I am sick? If my parents are taken away, I’ll have nobody. It’ll be the way it is in my war nightmares. I’ll be under the table, scared and alone.
The room is quiet, and everything stands still, except Mom’s hand stroking my hair. Her hands smell of medicine, and they are as soft and comforting as sun-rays breaking through the clouds after a long cold winter. I don’t remember a time in my life without my mother’s hands. These are the hands that cuddled me when I was little, these are the hands that woke me up from my nightmares, and these are the hands that ironed my new Pioneer uniform last night. How am I going to live without them?
Something starts to melt in my chest, dissolving my anger into streamlets of tears. Of course, being loyal to our Motherland is more important than my family, and of course my parents are not the kind of people Maria Ivanovna would hold up to us as an example. But, they’re the only parents I have, and I do love them!
I wipe off my tears, bring my face closer to Mom’s, and whisper, sniffling, into her ear, “I won’t report you.”
Mom looks at me blankly, “What are you talking about? Report? To whom?”
At this moment, another moan comes from Tanya’s bed and, once again, Mom turns to my sister, forgetting about me. I follow her with my eyes, and my heart grows heavy. I recognize that I’ll never be the center of Mom’s attention, nor will I be a true Soviet patriot. Because, to my shame, all I can say to my mother’s bent back—as well as to myself—is: “To anybody.”
Tanya and me, 1961
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DESDEMONA AND SUGAR
Another winter melts in the warm embrace of spring, which, in its turn, gives way to rising temperatures, clear skies, and the irresistible temptations of summer. School is over and all of us, except Dad, are going to a summer Pioneer Camp sponsored by the factory where Mom works—I as a camper, Mom as the camp doctor, and Tanya and Grandma as members of the doctor's family.
On a warm June morning, prospective campers and their parents head to the factory building. When we arrive there—sacks and suitcases weighing down our arms—we hardly recognize the place. Buses line up on the street in front of the factory like giant caterpillars. Flags, posters, and flaming-red Pioneer scarves fly in the wind, and young voices mix into a cacophony of sounds, like an orchestra tuning up before a performance.
The camp’s vozhati (leaders), with Pioneer scarves around their necks and large notebooks in their hands, check newly arrived children against their lists, sort them by age into otryadi (detachments), and send them to their buses. Before the children are swallowed by the vehicles, their parents kiss them, instruct them to behave and write letters home, and, as the motors start coughing and growling, wave good-bye. The next time they will see each other will be in twenty-four days.
After several hours of riding along curvy gravel roads, our caravan arrives at a fenced-off cluster of one-story wooden barracks hidden in a thinned-out coppice. The biggest of the barracks is the camp cafeteria, the smallest Mom's clinic with a four-bed infirmary and, in the back, a room for Mom, Tanya, and Grandma. The rest of the barracks are wards for the campers, lodging for the staff, and one more for the office of the camp director, a small library, and rooms for kruzhki (hobby groups).
The heart of the camp is a square with a tall flag pole that rises to the sky like the mast of a ship. Every morning, we wake up to an energetic bugle call, “Tatá-tatá-tatátatá-tatá”—which, according to the long-established camp tradition, translates into “Get up, get up, put on your underwear!”
Yawning and shivering in the fresh morning air, we half-heartedly pour out of our barracks and perform compulsory physical exercises. We bend our stiff bodies, flap our arms, squat, and run laps. Then we head to the outdoor zinc umivalniki (wash stands) lined up beside the building like a row of metallic cow udders. We quickly splash our faces with cold water, brush our chattering teeth, and head inside to groom ourselves. In fifteen minutes or so the bugle sounds again, and we form a line to march to the camp square for the lineika—the raising of the flag.
The lineika is a vital part of our day. Every detachment takes turns reporting to the Chief Camp Leader, a young strawberry-blond woman with cold blue eyes who wears a Pioneer scarf on her neck and a no-nonsense expression on her face. She, in her turn, reports to the camp director—a misshapen middle-aged man with a balding head and the unnaturally rosy cheeks of a heavy drinker.
The reports touch on sickness and discipline issues, and they are followed by a short discussion among the camp leaders at the end of which every detachment receives a detailed schedule for the day. Then a drumbeat breaks the morning calm, sending local crows into a panic, and one of the children hoists the camp flag. The rest draw themselves up and salute. The day has officially started.
And what a full day it is! Under the vigilant supervision of our leaders, boys play sports and girls do crafts. Children with good voices rehearse songs about our happy childhood, like “Ah, chorosho v strane sovetsky zhit! Ah, chorosho svoyu strany lubit!” (Hey, it's great to live in the Soviet Union. Hey, it's great to love our country!) And those few
without athletic abilities, hobbies, or performing talents—in short, children like me—head to the library and lose themselves in imaginary worlds.
If the weather permits, we swim in a small lake nearby—twenty minutes every other day—and older kids go on hikes. Once a week, we go to banya (bathhouse), from which the boys emerge with red cheeks and the girls with heads wrapped in towels, looking like African Queens.
Also, every detachment, except the youngest one, takes turns helping in the kitchen: setting up tables, collecting dirty dishes, and serving food. Our common dinner dish is makaroni po-flotsky—macaroni with boiled ground meat, often mixed with small bone fragments that get stuck between our teeth if we are not careful. Our common drink is compot—dried fruit boiled in a large quantity of water.
Every evening before dusk, we march to the camp square for the lowering of the flag. It is an honor to be chosen to hoist or lower the flag. The usual recipients of this honor are good athletes or kids with talents. With their cheeks blushing and their eyes fixed victoriously on their friends or enemies, they get to bask in everybody's attention and feel important, if only briefly.
I am terribly jealous of them. I myself have nothing to offer to society at large or to my detachment in particular. I do not knit or sew. I do not like singing. I am terrible in track and field, and my swimming technique—desperate thrashing in the cool water of the lake while trying to feel its bottom with my toes—never gets me farther than three yards from the shore.
My only talent—if I have one—is reading. Unfortunately, I have not read any ghost stories, and ghost stories are big in our barracks. As soon as the drawn-out evening song of the bugle—“Tá-tá- tatatá-ta” (Go to sleep to your wards, boys and girls)—sinks into the shadows behind our windows, and our vozhati Evgenia Vladimirovna turns off the lights, somebody whispers loudly in the dark, “Anyone know a ghost story?”
Olga Fedorova, a tall girl with a freckled snubbed nose and large round eyes that never lose the expression of utter surprise, often responds first. She sits up in her bed and begins weaving a story.
“This woman lived alone in a village not far from here. Every day, just before nightfall, her neighbors saw her walk toward the cemetery on the edge of the village—always in black, with her eyes lowered. Early in the morning, people saw her again, walking back to her house. Nobody knew what she did in the cemetery, but they all wanted to find out … ”
The room is still: no squealing of springs under our thin mattresses, no whispering, not even breathing disturbs the silence.
“One night, a village drunk decides to follow the woman. She walks and he walks, she stops and he stops. In thirty minutes or so, the woman enters the cemetery with the drunk behind her. The woman kneels by a grave near the entrance and starts digging with her bare hands.”
We are frozen in our narrow beds. Our hearts pound, our pulses race, and our hair stands up on the back of our necks.
“And as the drunk watches, another woman, all in white, rises from the grave, moaning and howling. She points at him and screams, 'Die, die, die!’”
At this pivotal moment, something hits our barracks window from the outside, as if a ghost were trying to reach us from its unquiet grave, and we scream with one terrified voice, “Aaaaaah!!!”
It was probably a large moth that lost its way in the depth of the starless night. Yet long after the scare is over and everybody falls asleep, I am still awake, too frightened to close my eyes— watching shadows crawl in the corners and listening to howls from the woods.
In the morning, I have a splitting headache and Evgenia Vladimirovna sends me to see the doctor. Despite being in the same camp, I rarely see my mother. She is busy taking care of campers scratched by a variety of objects, struck by footballs, suffering from indigestion caused by eating raw mushrooms or camp food, or afflicted by other ailments.
Every morning Mom and her two nurses walk from one detachment to another checking for cleanliness of the campers’ hands and nails, and, after banya, they inspect children’s hair for lice. On top of that, Mom is responsible for the sanitary condition of the camp and the quality of the cafeteria food.
Even before I open the squeaking door of the clinic, I hear Mom talk to Grandma. Mom's voice is high with excitement, Grandma's low and worried.
Mother with her nurses
“Wait, wait, Fira. I don't get it. Why did you decide to check up on him?”
“Lida, his assistant, told me that he steals food from the cafeteria,” Mom says.
At this, I open the door ever so slightly to see Grandma say, “She told you that? Why?”
“What do you mean, why? Because she’s an honest person!” Mom tosses her head like a horse champing at the bit. Then she adds, “Well, I did see them argue a couple of days ago… Anyway,” Mom speeds up again, “She came to me today and said that she saw him hide something in the teakettle.”
“Oy vey, what if she lied?” Grandma says.
“But she didn't! When he was leaving the kitchen, I stopped him and asked him to bring me tomorrow’s menu. I said, ‘I'll hold the teakettle while you’re looking for the menu.’”
“Did he give it to you?” Grandma asks.
“He had no choice. And when he turned around, I 'accidentally' dropped the teakettle and sugar poured out of it!” Mom says, half-triumphant, half-disgusted.
“So, what now?”
“I told the director. I hope they'll fire him. Maybe even sue,” Mom says.
“I don't like it, Fira. The cook won't forgive you. You shouldn't have crossed him. We don’t need any more tsuris (trouble, Yiddish).”
“What can he do to me, that thief? I'm just doing my job!” Mom’s voice is like a breaking violin string. “He was stealing from children who get the bare minimum as it is!”
“Oy vey, you shouldn’t have done it. And what if ...” Grandma’s voice trails off, and I can no longer discern her words. No matter. I have heard enough. My headache is forgotten, and my imagination takes off like a plane. In my mind's eye, I see the whole scene as if I had witnessed it myself: Mom crouched over the teakettle spilling sugar on the floor, and the angry cook bent over her. This is almost as exciting as a story I recently heard about a man who stole a valuable violin and wanted to sell it abroad for American dollars.
I have never seen American dollars, nor have I, or anybody I know, ever traveled abroad. Still, I have a vague feeling that American dollars must be worth more than our rubles, which surprises me, since, according to our teachers, the Soviet economy is—and always will be—the best in the world.
In any case, the militsiya (Soviet police) were looking for the violin, so the man hid it in the coffin of his stepdaughter, who had just died under mysterious circumstances. The man’s wife, however, suspected that her husband had something to do with her daughter’s death. After the funeral, the wife went to the police and told them all about it. The militsiya men drove to the cemetery, dug up the coffin, opened it, and found the violin where the girl’s body was supposed to be. Unfortunately, just as they arrived to arrest the husband, he pulled a Swiss army knife out of his pocket and stabbed his wife to death!
This last detail suddenly sends a pang of pain through my body. The knife. While it is true that hiding sugar in a teakettle is not the same as hiding a valuable violin in the coffin of your stepdaughter, it is also true that there are lots of knives in the camp kitchen. In fact, the last time our detachment was assigned to kitchen duty, I looked them over, and I vividly remember seeing a butcher knife with a long sharp blade and a thick handle. Is that what Grandma is thinking about, too?
Blood abruptly rushes to my head and invisible needles begin pricking my fingers. I push the door open. Grandma is gone and Mom is sitting at the table, writing one of her numerous reports about the sanitary state of the camp.
“Mom, he might kill you!” I blurt out, breathless.
“What are you talking about?” Mom says, lifting her green eyes from the report and fixing the
m on me.
“You have to call the militsiya!” I mumble hurriedly, already picturing the grim scene of Mom's funeral in my head: a cold and rainy day, Tanya and I in black dresses and Dad in a black suit, his hair gone gray overnight.
“Did you eavesdrop?” Mom says, interrupting her funeral scene and giving me a “look”—as if I were the one who hid sugar in the teakettle. “You know you shouldn't do that.”
“But, Mom, he'll seek revenge!” I say in a melodramatic whisper as I nervously look around to make sure that the cook is not hiding somewhere in Mom’s office with the butcher knife raised.
“Oh, stop that nonsense. Nobody is going to kill me,” Mom says. Then she puts her pen down and gives me another “look.”
“What are you doing here?”
Of course! I'm trying to save her life and all she can say to me is, “What are you doing here?”
I turn around—my hands crossed on my chest and a “soon-you’ll-be-very-sorry” expression on my face. I head for the door, while Mom's voice trails behind me, “Don't you say anything to anybody, you hear me?”
For the next several days Mom rushes around the camp as if nothing has happened, while I have trouble sleeping, eating, and even reading. Had my mother recognized the degree of danger and reported the cook to the militsiya, she would have taken the burden of worries off my narrow shoulders. Had we had a phone in our Moscow apartment, I would have called my father and asked him for help. Unfortunately, Mom has no intention of contacting the authorities, and my family—like every family I know—has no telephone. So all I can do is try to keep track of the cook's whereabouts. But he spends most of his time in the kitchen and rarely walks around the camp. I, on the other hand, must attend camp activities, therefore I have no time or excuse to hang around the kitchen.
The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia Page 12
