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

by Svetlana Grobman

  Actually, my nose used to be average. But, by the age of nine, it began growing much faster than the rest of my face—or my body for that matter. Even Mother was unnerved: “Don’t look down,” she would say. “It makes your nose appear longer.” When my nose reached its ultimate size, my lips and mouth began catching up, and my distraught mother added another cadence to her old song. “Purse your lips,” she would say, looking at me with such pity that I knew I had no future whatsoever, even if I were the only Eve in a garden inhabited by thousands of Adams.

  The only way I can attract Anatoli Petrovich’s attention, I figure, is by failing in physics. This causes him to keep me after class together with our dvoeshniki Vitka and Kolka. Anatoli Petrovich talks about physics, Vitka and Kolka stare out the window, and I stare at Anatoli Petrovich with the kind of adoration that my Western counterparts reserve for the Beatles, minus the screaming.

  “Electric current is the flow of electrically charged particles. It’s measured in amperes …” I hear Anatoli Petrovich’s voice, and a flow of charged feelings sweeps along my body at a rate no ammeter can measure.

  “Do you understand?”

  “More than you think,” I feel like saying, drunk on the sound of his velvety voice and the bitter-sweet taste of my first love. I have no illusions about my situation. My feelings are unrequited. I am like the poor young clerk in Anatoli Kuprin’s famous love story “The Garnet Bracelet,” who fell in love with a beautiful married woman from a wealthy family and killed himself after a confrontation with her brother. Or, maybe, I am more like the dreamer Tatyana Larina from Alexander Pushkin’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin, enamored with the selfish and vain Onegin.

  The setting sun is already burning on the horizon, but I am still in my chair, looking at the picture of Scheherazade prostrated at the Persian king’s feet. Did she love him as much as I love Anatoli Petrovich or did she just want to save her life? And if she did love him, did she experience the same sensations I do when I look at this picture or at my physics teacher?

  I put down the Arabian Nights and take two steps to the bookcase in the corner. I raise my hand and pensively stroke the dark-colored spines with lettering that announces the names of famous Russian writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Kuprin, Turgenev, Chekov, Dostoevsky. The volume of heart-ache and sadness that flows from these tomes would be enough to fill many kvass cisterns, and yet, none of them mentions anything about physical feelings. Is there something about love that these books do not reveal?

  My fingers slide from one spine to another, as if the answer to my question is written in Braille, and I have to read it by touch. After several rows of novels and poetry, I reach a thick catalog of the Hermitage Museum, mindlessly pull it out, and open it at random.

  There is a painting of a woman lying in bed. Her blankets are thrown off, her gaze is intense, and her ample naked body is turned toward an opening in the dark curtain at the foot of the bed, where a lustrous milky light is pouring into the dark room–Rembrandt’s Danae is waiting for her lover Zeus, who comes to her in the form of golden rain.

  I have seen this picture before, and it has never impressed me—just an overweight woman in bed. And yet, this time, something in Danae’s pose, the atmosphere of waiting, and the darkly peering figure in the background strike me like a lightning bolt. Everything around me suddenly changes, even the air, which now smells fresh and intoxicating, as it does after a thunderstorm.

  With my hands trembling, I flip through the pages. I skip landscapes, still life, portraits of numerous Madonnas and self-important aristocrats, and devour shamelessly beautiful Aphrodite and Eros, Cupid and Psyche tangled in a sensuous embrace, and the marble statues of nude satyrs. As if scales have fallen from my eyes, I suddenly see details that I have never noticed before—heaving chests and swollen nipples of women, men’s hands groping women’s breasts and resting between their legs, and males’ private parts depicted in all their anatomical glory.

  My heart is pounding, and I lean against the bookcase to catch my breath. Surely, I observed baby boys before, but these still images suddenly seem more real than anything I have seen in life. They are disturbing and gross, and yet, I cannot take my eyes off them, and, to make matters worse, I cannot control my own body either—its rhythmical tensing is as frightening as it is pleasurable.

  What’s happening to me? I am trying to catch my breath, but another image comes suddenly to my mind’s eye—that girl, Dasha, from my summer camp. Her bed was next to mine, and sometimes I heard her thrashing and stirring in bed and making muffled moaning noises, which I attributed to bad dreams. But then, one day, I saw Dasha leaving the office of our Chief Camp Leader. Dasha’s eyes and nose were red, and the Camp Leader looked at her with an expression like the one that must have been worn by members of NKVD court troikas when they sentenced prisoners to firing squads during Stalin’s purges.

  The Chief Camp Leader’s office, a large room decorated with portraits of Lenin, Brezhnev, and a painting of happy collective farm workers, was adjacent to the camp library, where I was gulping down Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The chapter I was reading described Natasha Rostova’s love triangle with the honorable Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and the dissolute Anatole Kuragin. I was so engrossed in the story that it took me some time to notice loud voices in the room next door.

  I could not hear everything that was said–only separate words and phrases: something about Dasha’s dirty and antisocial behavior, the stain she put on our detachment and the camp, and her inevitable bad end. None of that made any sense to me, since as far as I knew, Dasha was a quiet and aloof girl. Yet very soon, Dasha’s mother arrived and took her back to Moscow. Is this what that was all about?

  At night, after my little sister falls asleep and Mother turns on a bedside lamp and opens her book, I get out of my bed and tiptoe over the bare wooden floor to my parents’ half of the room.

  “Mom, do you remember that girl from our summer camp, Dasha?”

  “What about her?” Mother says, half of her face glowing in the golden light of the lamp and the other half hidden in deep shadow.

  “Why did they expel her from camp?”

  Mom puts her book down and turns away from the lamp—the illuminated side of her face sinks into the shadows, the way the sun sinks into a dark cloud. “I don’t know.”

  “Mom, please, tell me!”

  “It’s too late to talk about it now. Go to bed.”

  “What did she do?”

  “You’re too young to talk about such things.”

  “But she was my age!”

  “Listen, Sveta. I’m not your friend. I’m your mother. Some things cannot be discussed between children and parents.” And with this, my mother brings her face back to the light and to her book, “Go to bed.”

  Who should I discuss these things with, Mom?—I want to shout. But I bite my lower lip and retreat to the even breathing of my sleeping sister and the disturbing questions that adults do not want to answer.

  Next morning, I pack the Hermitage catalog into my briefcase and head to school. The first class is math, and our teacher Evgenia Sergeevna gives us a test. She writes math problems on the blackboard, and we diligently bend over our notebooks to solve them.

  In twenty minutes or so, heads begin popping up like fishing floats, and relaxed whispering indicates that the exercise is winding down. I am done, too, and while the class waits for Evgenia Sergeevna to collect our papers, I carefully pull the Hermitage catalog out of my briefcase and open it under the desk at a bookmarked place—a full-frontal statue of a handsome, curly-haired young man, clothed with nothing but his seductive smile.

  “What’s that?” My neighbor Zoia peers under the desk and, before I have the time to close the book, goes into a breathless “Ahh, …”

  For a while, we both gawk at the naked man, careful not to look at each other.

  “Did you solve the second problem?” Big-eared Grisha turns to us from his desk. Recognizing that our attention is elsewhe
re, he quickly changes his question. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” Zoia whispers, quickly straightening up and adjusting her hair. I slam the catalog and, trying to distract Grisha with math, turn my notebook upside down.

  “What’s going on?” Evgenia Sergeevna thunders, suddenly behind us.

  “They’re reading something under the desk.” Grisha reports, winking and moving his ears like a spooked deer.

  “Idiot,” I hiss.

  “And she called me an ‘idiot,’” Grisha adds, smiling happily from ear to ear.

  You are an idiot!—I feel like saying, but I keep quiet and make an attempt to shove the Hermitage catalog back into my briefcase inconspicuously.

  “Give me that,” Evgenia Sergeevna orders. There is enough steel in her voice to forge a sword.

  Evgenia Sergeevna is a seasoned teacher with twenty years of experience, and she knows how to handle misbehaving students. She grabs the catalog from my shaking hand and her eyes shift to the title.

  “The Hermitage Museum,” she reads aloud and looks at me—her pale blue eyes piercing through me from behind her thick-rimmed glasses. Then Evgenia Sergeevna notices my bookmark and opens the book to it.

  “What is this?” she exhales, holding the book at arm’s length as if it is some slimy creature she stumbled across in the woods. “Get up and answer me!”

  The poor clerk in “The Garnet Bracelet” could not have been more mortified by the confrontation with the brother of his love interest than I am now by the confrontation with my math teacher. He had to kill himself to get out of his predicament, and I momentarily consider doing the same to get out of mine.

  “I’m going to pass this on to your head teacher,” Evgenia Sergeenva says, and her distorted face lets me know that committing suicide may not be the worst thing that can happen to me.

  When I come home, my mother is in the kitchen, grinding meat. For a minute, I watch red fleshy worms come out of her myasorubka (cast-iron meat grinder) and coil into a large aluminum bowl.

  “Kotleti (small hamburger patties made of meat, onions, and bread) will be ready in half-an-hour.” Mom says without looking at me.

  “My head teacher wants to talk to you,” I respond.

  “Why? What did you do?” Mom looks up.

  “Nothing. I just took the Hermitage Museum catalog to school, and my math teacher found some naked pictures there.”

  “Naked pictures? Of whom?”

  “Nymphs, satyrs, and other men, too ...” I suddenly feel tired and my voice trails off.

  “Wait, wait, I don’t understand. Why in the world did you take the catalog to school?!”

  “You didn’t want to talk to me about … you know … Dasha and … the feelings. So, I thought I’d show the catalog to somebody in school, and we’d talk.”

  My mother’s hand slips from the handle of her meat-grinder and hits the bowl. The bowl tilts to one side and, after hesitating a moment, slides off the kitchen counter and lands on the floor with a loud “bam!” Its meaty contents fly out every which way and, in a moment, our kitchen is transformed into a bloody battlefield, where I feverishly perform the duties of a medic, while my speechless Mother watches me like a general who has just lost the battle of her life.

  Mother is still frozen, when the front door opens and my father comes in with a newspaper in hand. “What’s going on?”

  “Why did you show her the Hermitage catalog?” Mother blurts out.

  “What are you talking about? What’s wrong with the catalog?”

  “Nothing! If you have a smart daughter. But we don’t!” Here both of them fix their eyes on me the way gamblers fix their eyes on their disappearing riches, and I shrink on the kitchen floor, calling fire and brimstone down on my head.

  The next several days are filled with rhetorical questions and bickering: “Do you understand that they won’t let you into Komsomol. Do you? And you’ll never go to college?” This is to me, after Mom’s meeting with my head teacher.

  “Why do I have to disentangle everything?” This is to my father.

  And at night, muffled sounds of arguments reach my ears from my parents’ half of the room: “What are you blaming me for? It’s art!”

  “Art? Tell that to her teachers! They say it’s perversion when a 14-year-old enjoys pictures of naked men!”

  “They are unintelligent retrogrades! If they had had their way, all paintings would’ve been painted over and statues draped in blankets! It’s bad enough that every word in this damn country is censored. Now I have to worry about museum catalogs, too?!”

  “All I’m saying is that we have to be careful. If she doesn’t understand what can or can’t be taken out of the house, then we shouldn’t have anything around here that can get her in trouble.”

  “I can’t believe you said that! So now I can’t enjoy my art books when I have a free minute? I work like a horse! I rely on you to oversee her reading!”

  “And I don’t? I do, too! And I buy food, I cook, I clean. You’re always out of town!”

  “I see. You’re just like your mother! I am not good enough for you and your family …”

  In the end, there is one thing my parents can agree on. Only a “complete fool” takes delicate issues—or any important issues, for that matter—outside the family. Since I have proved to be just that—a complete fool—and my parents cannot rely on my discretion, I am not allowed to see any art books or read anything ambiguous. As a result, a complete collection of Guy de Maupassant moves to my aunt’s apartment (fine with me, I’ve already read it), and all museum catalogs, as well as a thick tome of Greek mythology with color pictures of naked gods and goddesses, disappear into thin air.

  I am in trouble in school, too. I have soiled my class’s reputation and, therefore, I will not be admitted to Komsomol with the rest of my classmates. Yet not everything is lost. If I do not slip up again—and my parents will make sure of that!—I may achieve the honor of joining The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League next semester. That is my last chance, as it is for the school’s worst students and for one girl who got caught with her mother at church services, and, pressed by school authorities, repented afterwards.

  For now, though, my teachers treat me as if I am a leper who ought to be exiled from healthy Soviet society and made to wear a bell announcing my whereabouts to the chaste student body. Every time the teachers see me, they lower their eyes, and they raise their voices addressing me. The only exception is Vladimir Alekseevich, my art teacher from two years ago. When I run into him in the school halls or staircases, his eyes sparkle, and a couple of times—I swear!—he even winks at me.

  The good thing is that my reputation as a fallen woman has considerably improved my standing among my peers. Even those who never acknowledged my existence before, now treat me as if I had won the state lottery or had gotten official permission to register as a true ethnic Russian. I thoroughly enjoy it, since I know that it is not going to last long. Already several of my classmates have had “soul-to-soul” conversations with me, and since there is only so much I can fake, it is a matter of time before my aura of sexual experience disappears forever. Luckily, I recently discovered Mother’s old gynecology textbook, which may get me through this quarter.

  Another unexpected change is in my feelings for Anatoli Petrovich. Like Pushkin’s heroine Tatyana, who finally realizes that Eugene Onegin is not the hero she imagined him to be, I am disillusioned with my physics teacher. For weeks, he hardly acknowledged my existence, but now his gaze, heavy and oily, slithers around me the way a snake slithers around a meekly squeaking rabbit, making me feel small and dirty.

  Also, he is not really handsome—not with that square jaw of his, squat figure, and cold, screwed-up eyes. I no longer believe that he is even smart. He knows physics, of course, but his vocabulary is pretentious and his jokes are flat, and even Grisha, once in a while, tells better jokes.

  With love stories and art books gone from our bookcase, I rea
d a lot of poetry: Lermontov, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, and other famous Russian poets. My favorite is Puskin’s “I Have Outlived My Aspirations,” and I read it often. I open the book with Pushkin’s black-and-white profile on the title page, drawn with an old-fashion quill pen by the poet himself, and admire his receding forehead, long nose (Pushkin had a long nose, too!), and copious curls. Then I flip to the bookmarked page and read:

  Ja perezhil svoji zhelanja,

  Ja razljubil svoji mechti;

  Ostalis mne odni stradanja,

  Plody serdechnoj pustoti.

  I have outlived my aspirations

  I have outloved my every dream

  Suffering is my sole persuasion,

  My heart feels only what has been ...

  I soak up Pushkin’s words like a sponge. Their grieving message penetrates my skin and sinks inside my own empty heart. If love disappointed the greatest Russian poet, how can an ordinary girl like me expect happiness? And what about my own parents? Are they happy? Do they love each other? They sure argue a lot, and Dad makes scenes every time Mom talks to another man and, afterwards, grabs at his heart and proclaims that he is dying. Is that love?

  What is love, anyway? A feeling that burns you from inside? A physical sensation that takes over your entire body? A mirage that makes a thirsty traveler walk for miles to an elusive goal somewhere in the deserts of Persia, a country where people still tell Scheherazade’s stories?

  Yes, despite my parent’s strict surveillance, I have finished the Arabian Nights. I hid it underneath my sleeper-chair and read it under the blanket after the lights were out. During 1001 nights with the king, Scheherazade bore him three children, and the king–finally!—pardoned her.

  The children come as a surprise to me, since the book never mentions Scheherazade’s pregnancies, just vaguely states that every night the king “had his will of her,” and I still do not know how to find out what that means. In any case, at the end, the king fell in love with Scheherazade, and they lived happily ever after. Well, the book did not actually mention that, but the magical Arabian Nights world, unlike the stringent world around me, must have been happy.