I am not quite sure what I will do if the cook attacks my mother—besides screaming at the top of my lungs and pounding his thick back with my fists. Yet I must do something! For now, I resort to declaring a variety of ailments for which I can be sent to the doctor’s office, so I can check up on Mom. This is not technically lying—I am sick with worries. But for Evgenia Vladimirovna, I have to come up with something more substantial, like a bad headache, an upset stomach, or sudden dizziness.
Soon, Evgenia Vladimirovna gets impatient with my poor health and tells my mother to keep me in the infirmary or send me back to Moscow, so she, Evgenia Vladimirovna, will not have to keep track of my comings and goings. A week goes by uneventfully, and I gradually relax and almost forget about the threat to my family. Besides, another exiting event has come up—our detachment is going on an overnight trip to watch the sunrise!
In the evening, contrary to the bugle's plaintive command, “Go to sleep ...,” we form a column and, chuckling and giggling, march into the twilight shrouding the woods outside our camp. Evgenia Vladimirovna walks at the head of the column lighting the way, and Victor Gerasimovich, our male vozhati, brings up the rear. Both vozhati carry large backpacks and we, the campers, rolled-up woolen blankets. In thirty minutes or so, we stop at a hilly clearing with a tall pile of tangled sticks and twigs in the middle. The pile is laid for a bonfire, but in the shimmering moonlight, it looks like a giant anthill or a mound built by mysterious inhabitants of the woods for a ritual sacrifice to the sun god.
Of course, I do not actually believe in the sun god or any other gods. From a very early age, we were taught that religion is, according to Karl Marx, “opium for the masses.” None of us knows what opium is, but we all understand that it must be something very bad, like rotten capitalism, wars, exploitation of the working class, or writing curse words on the wall. As for the sun god, that is the stuff of fairytales, like terrible Baba Yaga or young Snegurochka, daughter of Father Frost, who forgot about her frosty nature while playing with peasant girls and jumped over a flaming bonfire, then melted away and turned into a cirrus cloud.
We campers are not going to jump over the bonfire. We are here to see the birth of a new day. Quickly, we unroll our blankets, spread them around the wood pile, and watch our leaders ignite the fire. At first, a narrow red tongue appears in the middle of the twisted sticks and branches, licking everything within its reach. Then it breaks into several flickering lights that spread in all directions. Soon, a burning mass soars up, stretching its flaming hands toward the dark cosmos.
Sunrise is a night away. We spend the time singing “Soviet Pioneers Always Walk First” and other songs like that, and telling jokes. When the blaze crumbles into the winking embers, we bake potatoes and, tossing the burning-hot vegetables from one hand to the other, marvel at how much tastier they are than those we eat at home or at the camp.
After midnight, the other campers begin falling asleep, wrapped in their blankets like larvae in cocoons. The stars glimmer above us, the air smells of trees, mushrooms, and cooling ashes, and unfamiliar sounds of wildlife fill the woods. For a while, I peer through the dense darkness with a watchful eye, but not for long. The impressions of the day, the fresh air, and my sudden fatigue put me to sleep, too.
It seems that I have just closed my eyes, but when I open them to a loud “Wake up, wake up, look!”—everything around me is changed. The night is rolling up into the misty air, and a bleeding sliver appears on the horizon, pushing the darkness back into the shadows. The sliver grows larger and brighter, and also more rounded—until it rises like a floating bonfire.
We watch silently, engrossed by the grand performance unfolding before our eyes. This is a miracle! Not like the make-believe miracles we have seen in the theater. Here in the woods, we are witnessing a true everyday miracle, ordinary and amazing at the same time.
“Remember, children,” Evgenia Vladimirovna's voice breaks the spell. “This is what your country and the Communist Party do for you! You must appreciate that!”
Confused, we look at her and then at each other. Is she talking about the sun or the camp? No matter. It is the time to go back. Suddenly everybody feels weary. Complaining about the cold morning and sleeping on the ground, we slowly pick up our blankets and trudge back.
When our disorderly column enters the camp, the sun is still low on the horizon, large and burning, but we no longer pay attention to it. We cross paths with other detachments walking to the lineika, and they greet us cheerfully. We do not pay attention to them, either. Our limbs are heavy, our emotions are spent, and we feel irritable and disheveled. Sleepy, too. At least I am. Everyone around seems to be moving too fast—the camp director is walking hurriedly to his office, both camp nurses are rushing toward the clinic, and the cook’s assistant Lida, who’s supposed to be in the kitchen, follows them with a large ladle in her hand.
Also, I have trouble focusing my gaze. Who is that man I see by the clinic talking to my mother and grandmother? From a distance, he resembles my father ... Wait! That is my father! A sudden burst of energy propels me away from our formation and toward my parents. Why is Dad here? Today is not a visitation day, not even a weekend.
Even before I get close to my parents, I sense that something is wrong. Mom's cheeks are flaming like last night's bonfire and Dad's are the shade of the ashes we left behind this morning.
I hear Grandma's voice, “Natán, calm down. Let's go inside and discuss things there.”
“Don't tell me to calm down! She's having affairs and you're covering for her!”
I stop in my tracks. What are they talking about?
“Natán, be reasonable,” Mom enters the conversation, her lips trembling. “I'm not having any affairs. Who would I have an affair with around here? With the children?”
“Stop pretending! With your camp director, of course!” Dad cries in a high falsetto, simultaneously pulling a piece of rumpled paper out of his pocket and thrusting it into the women’s faces. “I have a letter. I know everything!”
Now Mom's cheeks turn the color of Dad’s. “What letter? Who wrote it? Let me see ...”
With her hands shaking, she grabs the rumpled paper and brings it to her eyes, but at that moment Tanya's cry comes from the house, loud and desperate. Mom throws her hands up and the letter drifts to the ground like a giant snowflake.
“Natán, whatever this letter says, it is not true,” she says, biting her lips, “Besides, I cannot discuss it right now. I'm working here, and Mother needs to attend to Tanya. Can you understand that?! And people are watching ...”
Mom looks around at the crowd of spectators: her nurses, Lida, and several more people attracted by the unexpected entertainment. Her gaze stops on me.
“Sveta, go back to your detachment, immediately!” she cries—which is the only phrase from this whole scene I fully understand. Then she turns to my father, “Do you see what you're doing to me? What authority can I have in the eyes of my own children? Or the staff? The nurses, the cook …”
Here, Mom interrupts her tirade and the expression on her face changes—as if she just discovered a cure for cancer or another life-threatening disease. She slowly bends over and picks up the rumpled piece of paper from the ground,
“Let me see that letter again …”
Despite my attempts to defend my mother, the cook did stab her—not with a butcher’s knife, but with a pen—the way Shakespeare’s Iago caused Desdemona’s death with an ordinary handkerchief. It all started the day I found my mother writing in her clinic. It was not, as I assumed, a report about the sanitary state of the camp, but a letter to my Dad. The cook's wife, a local postal worker, took notice of the address on the envelope, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I never see the end of my parents’ confrontation. Someone grabs me by the hand and delivers me back to my barracks, where I join other, already sleeping, sun-gazers. For a short while, I try to I concentrate on what I have just witnessed, but exhaustion and a vag
ue recognition that whatever it is, I can do nothing about it, come over me and I fall into a deep dreamless sleep. When I wake up, the sun is high in the sky and we are getting ready for lunch. I ask Evgenia Vladimirovna if I can visit the clinic, but she gives me a funny look and tells me that I’d better not.
Next time I see my mother, she does not talk about the events of the previous day, nor does she—or Grandma—mention my father’s sudden arrival and equally sudden departure. A couple of days later, Olga Fedorova, the girl with a large repertoire of ghost stories, reports to us in the dark that the cook has been reprimanded by the camp leadership for stealing. How does she know that? She eavesdropped on a conversation among detachment leaders—“Let me be struck by lightning if I’m lying!” Are they going to fire the cook and sue him? She does not think so.
Olga Fedorova proves to be right. The cook never gets fired, much less sued. In fact, he gets to keep his job (and more likely continues to steal from children) for another year, until vodka—or divine justice—drowns him in the lake nearby.
As for my mother, she, unlike Desdemona, survives the ordeal, and even adds another responsibility to her already numerous duties—inspecting the kitchen staff's bags before they leave work. She does so until the end of the summer, after which she returns to her regular job and her Moscow Othello—my father.
Soon afterward, I overhear her talking to my Aunt Raya.
“Am I glad to be back! Mother was afraid something would happen to me,” Mom says, leaving me guessing whether she refers to the thievery of the camp’s staff or to my father.
Next year, I go to the camp again, but Mom does not.
“Too much work,” she tells me, when I ask her why.
Summer camp: I am fourth from the right in the third row
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE ELEPHANT
We are visiting Father’s older sister on her birthday. The scratched wooden door of her apartment flies open and Aunt Masha herself appears on the threshold.
“Come in, come in. I’m almost done,” she says and turns back to the kitchen while my family heads toward the room with a table set for a typical Muscovite feast. I walk at the end of our short column. Another boring gathering with my father’s family. Well, at least this does not happen often. For one thing, Father does not get along with his two sisters very well. For another, Father’s parents do not pay much attention to Tanya and me, directing all their love toward our three boy cousins.
I have nothing against the cousins, though. It is not their fault. It is just that two of them are much younger than me, and the older one is as dull as his parents. And how could he not be? Nobody among Father’s relatives plays a musical instrument or tells jokes, or does anything fun. I do not think they even read books. As for this apartment, there is nothing interesting here either. In fact, if not for its lack of a bookcase, Aunt Masha’s apartment would be an exact replica of our own, and also of every other apartment I have ever stepped into—one gloomy room per family with a shared kitchen and bathroom out in the hall.
Wearily, I look around the space stuffed with bulky furniture and papered with faded floral patterns, and my gaze stops on a dark wooden dresser in the corner. The dresser is covered with a white crocheted doily, on top of which I spot something new—seven white elephant figurines, a current Moscow fad. I step closer and look carefully at the figurines crowded in the center of the dresser as though ship-wrecked. The largest elephant is about three inches tall and the smallest is so tiny that only a child with her attention to small details can make out his ears and trunk.
I cannot take my eyes off the elephants. Pale and shiny, they radiate the allure of a faraway country where women wear bright-colored saris, paint red dots on their foreheads, and sing love songs in high tremulous voices; and where men ride elephants, swallow fire, and charm snakes. I know this from a book of Indian tales I read recently. That book was so interesting that I could not put it down. I finished it in bed under my blanket with a flashlight, perspiring from the thrill of the stories and the lack of ventilation.
Behind me, a birthday party goes through its usual stages. The adults—my parents, grandparents, and other relatives—are gathered around the table in the middle of the room, toasting loudly to my aunt’s health. Their enthusiasm, fueled by a disarray of bottles, steadily increases, and they pay no attention to anything around them. My sister and cousins are assembled in the opposite corner, where I hear them shout:
“Give it to me!”
“Yeah? Just come and get it!”
“You’d better give it to me now!”
I stand by the dresser alone, holding the smallest ivory elephant in my hand. The figurine appears so snug in my palm and so foreign to this room filled with rowdy voices and smells of food and alcohol, that I cannot bring myself to put it back. Instead, I cautiously look around. Nobody is watching me. All are immersed in the excitement of the moment. I slowly close my hand and, almost without thinking, quickly shove the elephant into the pocket of my skirt. Then, with my cheeks burning, I casually walk toward the other children, thinking to myself, "They won't even notice. They don’t need it anyway.”
At home, I take the elephant to bed and hold it in my sweaty hand while reading under the blanket. When I finally fall asleep, my dreams are inhabited by exotic animals, enticing smells of the jungle, and people speaking strange languages.
The next morning starts with a problem. How can I hide the elephant in a room where nothing is my own and everything is shared by all of us? After a quick appraisal, I put the figurine into my briefcase and go to school.
It is early, and the night's shadows still linger over our neighborhood of identical four-story concrete-block houses, where piles of coal guard the front entrances like giant watchdogs. It is also drizzling, and the wind spits wet needles and leaves into the faces of pedestrians who, with their heads lowered and torsos bent forward, look like a procession of hunchbacks. I walk tall, oblivious to the weather. With me, I carry the best toy I have ever had, a fragment of life as beautiful as pictures in my books and as tempting as the songs of Greek sirens.
The school day drags on: math problems appear on the blackboard, questions and answers hang in the air, and my classmates get up and sit down around me. I am not following any of that—my mind wanders, the dissonant classroom sounds seem muted, and the best I can do is stare at my teacher’s heavily painted red lips and hope that she will not ask me a question.
During the breaks, I do not talk to my classmates. I do not even go to the hall but sit in the classroom with my hand reaching inside the briefcase, dreamily caressing the elephant with the tips of my fingers, imagining what I will do with it after school.
When the last bell finally sounds, I spring from my place and dash to the door. As I reach the doorway, a sudden blow on my back from a briefcase interrupts my flight. Instinctively, I strike back, but I miss and drop my case on the floor. On landing, it pops open, and a jumble of papers and text books flies out—along with a little white figurine.
"What's that?" The girl who hit me says, picking up the elephant from the floor.
"Nothing!" I scream and yank it from her before she has a chance to take a good look at the figurine.
At home, I lock myself in the bathroom and try to assess the situation. Clearly, taking the elephant to school was a mistake, but where am I going to keep it? I cannot leave it at home, and I cannot ask anybody to hide it for me. What would I say? I bought it? None of us kids has any money. My parents gave it to me? Then why didn’t I leave it in our apartment?
Not knowing what to do, I no longer fantasize about playing with the elephant. I just keep hiding it again and again, several times a day, and every time my parents address me, I gasp for breath.
In the meantime, my aunt notices the loss.
"Did you see the little elephants at your aunt's?" my father asks me one day, looking at me attentively.
"Yes, I did. So what?" I exhale, leaning against the wall, suddenl
y fatigued.
"She says one of them is missing. You didn't take it, did you?" Father continues.
"Of course not."
The answer comes too quickly, and now it is too late to change anything. If found out, I will be in big trouble. What my punishment might be, I am not sure. Will my parents exile me from the family? Will they send me to prison or reformatory? I am a thief, after all, and that’s what happens to thieves in books.
I dread going to bed now. Reading no longer comforts me, and I wake up weeping from nightmares in the middle of the night. At meals, I hardly touch my food, and my mother begins to wonder whether I need to see a doctor. I cannot concentrate in school, and my grades suffer. I cannot even return the elephant without first admitting to stealing it and then lying about it.
Finally, the day comes when I decide to get rid of the figurine. At dusk, I go out, clenching the elephant in one hand and a flashlight in the other. I pass old women gossiping on a bench by the front door, turn the corner, and walk slowly through a narrow alley of cottonwood trees, stopping where the trees border a construction site, empty at this hour. There is no moon, and the narrow rectangles of lighted windows behind the trees are my only beacons.
I peer intensely through the cool darkness, but see nothing except the dark silhouettes of the trees disapprovingly whispering in the light wind. I put the elephant on the ground, turn on the flashlight, and start to dig a hole with a tablespoon that I brought from home. When that is done, I line the hole with a handkerchief, place the innocently glimmering figurine in the middle, fold the ends of the handkerchief over it, and fill the hole with dirt. Then, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I turn off the flashlight, smooth out the ground with both hands, mark the place with a stick, and run home to the lighted windows.
The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia Page 13