“Why are you dragging your feet like a donkey?”
I told her that my shoes didn’t fit well and my toe hurt.
“So what we give you isn’t good enough?”
I objected and tried to explain that the shoes were my own, not a pair I’d been handed out. That was my second mistake. Her eyes filled with murder. I’d argued with her in front of others. “All right,” she said, and began to undress me. She stripped off my shoes and socks, then my shirt and pants, my undershirt, and, finally, my underpants. She threw open the window and made me stand in front of it while the others watched. It was mid-February. Outside, in a play yard that was mostly mud, crusts of snow clung to half-frozen dirt. I stood naked in the wind as she lectured the others on the sacrifice the country was making, taking in such undeserving children.
I remember shivering. The skin of my arms and thighs and buttocks became a carapace of gooseflesh. I tried to keep my eyes from welling—not from the humiliation of standing naked, but from the sting of being so misunderstood. I steeled my seven-year-old body, already stiff from the cold, with mute and rigid rage—rage at my absent mother for not buying me new shoes when I’d asked her to, at myself for failing to explain that the shoes were my own—my own!—that I was not an ungrateful or bad boy.
I don’t know how long she made me stand in front of that open window. As always, I was lucky and only caught a cold and not full-blown pneumonia. “I hope you learned your lesson,” she told me when it was all over. I did. I learned that when your toe hurts, it hurts only you and no one else.
I suppose that, to keep their conspicuous enmity of us alive, they had to destroy in themselves any innate sympathy for a child’s suffering. We felt their disgust but could not guess its source: in their eyes our malfeasance was predetermined. That was why the cruelest punishments were always brought on by seeking sympathy, as I’d sought with my toe. For such monstrous innocence regarding ourselves, there could be no pardon.
Our wardens’ belief in our criminality was convincing enough to make it true. We picked up the code from the older children almost as soon as we arrived. My turn came when I was told to sneak into the kitchen and steal two bottles of kefir. Were I to be caught, I would certainly be beaten, and yet to refuse to do the bidding of the older kids made punishment just as sure. In the end, I chickened out and came back in the dark empty-handed. I took my penalty stoically in the morning, when I was buttoned inside a duvet cover and rhythmically kicked with a series of fast, blunt blows. It was only one of our barracks-style “games,” called “Cat in the Bag.” By then I knew better than to plead for mercy. Any attempt at seeking compassion would only excite their belligerence. Not long thereafter I saw another boy suffer this punishment. He was older than me, but slender and small-boned. I remember walking in on him, after the duvet had been unbuttoned, and finding him still crouching inside it, his shoulders jerking as muffled sobs escaped him. I recall him looking at me, his eyes blurred, imploring. What did he want from me? Comfort? Probably not even that. He wanted what I’d wanted from my acne-scarred child minder: the barest nod of compassion. But there is no greater demand you can make of another than asking him to suffer with you. I went cold around the edges, felt myself being filled with revulsion for the boy’s quivering, naked need. It does not please me to think that my heart could be such a desert. I wanted to go to that boy, and I knew what it would cost me. I was already becoming inoculated against my own human impulses. Though “inhuman” is not the right word. What is more human than having our cruelty incited by another’s weakness?
I’ve tried hard not to imagine my moral or mental disfigurement had I been left in that place. But fortune smiled on me again. My ejection from the grim asylum whose name I’ve since forgotten happened after an incident involving a maroon rag. Another enemy parasite and I were ordered to wash the floors of a long corridor. A thick-armed janitress brought us a bucket of water and then disappeared without telling us where to find the mops and brushes. Or maybe she did tell us and we couldn’t find them. In any case, we went in search of a broom closet, peeking behind the various doors, until I discovered, on a table in an empty room, a maroon rag sufficiently plush to work as both a duster and mop. We took turns dragging it across the floor, sticking it between the walls and the oily radiators so that we would not be impugned for cutting corners. We employed it to swab the grime out of moldings, the residue of shoes off stairs. Filth clung to its felty texture like magic.
The janitress returned not long afterward and dropped her broom when she saw what we’d done. There was an almost audible gust of wind as she ran toward the rag and fell on it in horror. She attempted to wash it out in the bucket, but the water was already dank with old scum. When she turned the rag inside out, I saw that it was not a rag at all but a velvet banner of the sort that hung in so many of the rooms, emblazoned with the profile of our magnanimous mustached Leader, his eyes as always crinkled in a smile. “You turn your back and what these little Abrams don’t think up!” she cried.
Two days later, I was pulled out of morning lineup and put on a train to Saratov. I believed I had been tossed out for polishing the floors with Stalin’s face—the only explanation my child’s mind could conjure. I couldn’t know how absurd that was. The janitress would have told nobody of my crime; she would have cleaned the banner and never spoken of the incident, knowing full well whose head would roll first if she did. This much I understand now, but at seven, alone on a train, hungry, I did not know where I was going or what awaited me there. I thought of leaping off, getting lost in the crowd and living on the street. Only my cowardice saved me.
The Krupskaya Home was in the countryside, in the village of Sokolovy, built by the Volga Germans. Its rooms did not smell of mice, and its windows were neither whitewashed nor covered with bars. Its original building was squat and long, constructed from the unsawn logs of houses appropriated from the kulaks who’d been exiled to Siberia. With the number of arriving children growing in the war, a new wing had been built. The nearby kolkhoz had given the orphanage two acres of its most arid land. There, on our “farm,” was an old cow with weak udders and a horse that wouldn’t move without constant prodding, but which we kids loved for the solemn rides it occasionally gave us. Somehow, with continued effort, the staff managed to make a few things grow on the little household plot. In the spring all of us pitched in planting wheat, potatoes, and vegetables with the seeds we received from the collective farm.
What kindness of fate had landed me in this refuge? My mind goes naturally to Avdotya Grigorievna, our old neighbor and my babysitter. I picture her searching for me, checking the city’s child-sorting centers until she discovers where I am. I imagine her finding whoever is handling my case—some clerk with blond hair heaped atop her proud head—and imploring her: “Find the boy a good home. Russia is vast—somewhere in the South, maybe.”
“Where there is an opening is where we send ’em.”
Maybe there is a compassionate crack somewhere in the woman’s exterior that Avdotya can pry. “He’s like a child of my own flesh. My son was killed at Stalingrad. You have a Christian soul, I can see it.”
“Please, stop it at once,” and then, “I’ll take a look; come back next week.”
The following day, Avdotya returns with a meter of Boston wool wrapped in newsprint. My old nanny knows something I don’t yet: that this boy must be sent far, far away from Moscow. Far from the great meat grinder that’s swallowed his parents. But perhaps dear Avdotya played no such role. I have not the slightest idea what changed my fortune. All I remember is the plump blond clerk—the last in a succession of nameless bureaucrats—putting me on the train and calling me a “lucky boy” before pointing me out to the conductor. And so I was.
The Krupskaya Home was, on the whole, a place of simplicity and cleanliness. The rules were strict but not arbitrary: food couldn’t be taken out of the dining hall, nothing was to be left on the plates, nothing was to be wasted. Often Mark Pavlovich j
oined us for meals. This was when, at our pleading, he would tell us about the war, in whose distant echoes we would hear stories about our own real or imagined fathers. He was a marvelous storyteller. With his voice he could render the terrible inferno of grenades exploding behind embankments. He repeated conversations between commanders and their platoons as though they’d happened yesterday. In every tale brave acts were performed, mettle tested, impossible promises made and kept. In each dramatic pause we would hear the crack of artillery so loud that blood would rush in our ears.
Everybody knew the story of how he’d lost his arm: guarding a position one night when the Germans went on the attack and threw a mortar shell behind his cover. He was buried in earth; his friends dug him out and saved his life. All of Mark Pavlovich’s stories invariably ended this way—with a lesson about the value of friendship. During these meals the boys whose fathers had died in battle would assume the poses and coloration of heroes. The ones whose parents had disappeared in less honorable ways would be filled with silent jealousy. And what about me—what thoughts were coursing through my little brain as I sat in a trance, listening to all these chronicles of courage? I knew my father had done something heroic too in the war, something involving papers but not guns. Yet against Mark Pavlovich’s tales of robust manhood, Papa’s peaceable heroism seemed unimpressive. Like every boy of my era I was already nursing powerful fantasies of my own—dashing scenes depicted in the vein of Chapayev, showing my devotion to the cause, Stalin’s name on my enameled lips. Whether I lived or died was not the important thing; what mattered most was the redeeming image I longed for others to remember. Here at last, in the new children’s home, such a redeeming future seemed within reach.
I’d never bought the line that my parents were enemies, a word I could associate only with German fascists. Yet I also knew they were not true Russians. They spoke another language with me and with each other. Could I have put it in words, I would have admitted to believing that one or both of them had simply made some sort of outsiders’ mistake—a careless, absentminded error that a real Russian would never have committed. It was this carelessness that had landed them in the infernal cycle of misunderstanding that held us all captive. My job, while it was all being sorted out, was to keep my nose clean until the moment when I could be called on as a character witness for my mother and father. My parents’ abiding and abject loyalty would be underwritten by my evident patriotism. My courage and honesty, my gifts as a leader of men, could all be introduced into evidence. That, at least, was my plan once I started attending school again. I was resolved to be the good boy I hadn’t been allowed to be at the first orphanage. To this end I immediately joined several “hobby circles”—an art club sponsored by our teacher, and a “young technicians” club for kids interested in learning to make farm tools. I hoped, with my illustrational talent (I was a gifted artist of realistic and bloody war scenes) and my practical enthusiasm, to make myself eligible for the Young Pioneers. My goodness was not entirely altruistic: If I should fail to redeem my parents, I could, at the very least, redeem myself. If I no longer had a family, I was prepared to let myself be reclaimed into the great communist family. Very likely I was taking my cue from the adults around me. At the new home, our parents were not spoken of disparagingly; they were not mentioned at all. If a child should forget herself and accidentally utter the word “mama” or “papa,” the outburst was treated with chilly indifference by the child minders. It was a breach of etiquette. This should have put me at ease, but it only turned my fears inward. In the old place, where I could be beaten for such a misstep, I’d been physically alert for snares and traps, like a hunted animal. Here, passing myself off as a “regular” Russian boy, I was terrified of being discovered for who I really was.
But who was I? Something strange had started happening to me since I’d been removed from my home. My body had started feeling foreign to me. I heard my own voice as if it belonged to someone else, and watched myself as if with a stranger’s set of eyes. I listened to this boy as if to learn who he was, but also to appraise him and take his measure. In time this boy I observed was not “me” but a different boy, one whose father had died in the war, and whose mother, perhaps a nurse, had also perished in some heroic fashion. I watched this boy’s body file in with the other bodies to the cafeteria. I watched it in the common bath, sprinkling cold water on itself. I felt myself becoming sentimentally aroused by this intrepid, lonesome creature’s struggle to abide austerity and remain modest and unflinching despite life’s cruelties. My waking life consisted of secretly playing this character. I clung to him as to a brother and was terrified of having him taken from me.
My fear of being discovered was not totally new. The day I started school, I’d stopped answering my mother in English. She already knew better than to speak English around the neighbors, but even in private I didn’t like it. Only after dark did I relax my vigilance and let her sing me to sleep with lullabies she’d sung to me since I was a baby—“Little Bo Peep,” “Farmer in the Dell,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”—as well as others, such as “Angels Watching Over Me,” “Roll the Old Chariot Along,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” songs that at the time I had no way of knowing were the same Negro spirituals my mother’s nanny had sung to Florence when she was a little girl. In my metal cot in the children’s home, I continued to hum some of these songs under the thin covers, as quietly as humanly possible. What else did I have? We slept alone, with no rag dolls or stuffed rabbits to press into. The songs and their melodies were all that remained for me of my mother, whose image was already fading.
My two existences—nocturnal and diurnal—were clearly demarcated for me by a rule that forbade us children from reentering the dormitory rooms during the day, after we’d made up our beds. (Ever since, and for most of my life, I have avoided the temptation of walking into the bedroom in the middle of the day.) And yet, one day early on in my stay, I broke the rule and sneaked back into the sleeping wing after breakfast. What for? I can’t remember now. Did I leave something inside I’d forgotten? Whatever the reason, I had walked only as far as the door when I heard voices coming from inside.
“They’ll disgrace this home!” This voice belonged to a woman we called the Sergeant, a child minder who dragged some unfortunate kid or another out of the lineup every morning to make him or her confess to a fresh sin (dirty hands, pilfered cigarettes). This time, I gathered she’d discovered evidence of depravity under an older boy’s pillow. I knew I ought to scram, but my curiosity kept me glued to the spot, unable to breathe or move. The item the Sergeant had discovered, it emerged, was a letter. Specifically, a love letter from a girl at the orphanage. She read some lines of it aloud, before giving her assessment: “Vile stuff! Not even like the songs on the radio.”
“I told you, I’ll handle this myself.” I recognized Mark Pavlovich’s baritone, the light gravel in his throat.
“It is my job to see they come out of here…intact,” the Sergeant said. “We are running an orphanage, not a brothel. What happens tomorrow when there’s another mouth to feed?”
“Stop scaring me, and stop scaring yourself.”
“You need to make them an example, before the others get ideas.”
“I won’t do any such thing, and neither will you.”
Crouching behind the open door, I watched the Sergeant stalk out. She didn’t even see me. The set of her pincerlike mouth showed how she felt about having such orders forced down her throat.
Did I understand what I had just observed? Only dimly. I sensed that Mark Pavlovich had made it clear who was in charge, which gladdened me, since I feared and disliked the Sergeant as much as the others did. Nevertheless, the exchange unsettled me as well. It confounded some credo in which I’d long been instructed. At school, our teacher had a portrait of Pavlik Morozov hanging alongside portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Each day, “monitors” would be chosen from among us to examine the dirt under all the children’s nails and the
wax inside our ears. Those who were too lenient and gave their friends a pass were themselves informed on, usually by the little girls who appointed themselves our class disciplinarians. The art of squealing on each other’s deficiencies was drilled into us early, and I was unfortunately not immune to its allure.
Not long thereafter I was sent into Guchkov’s office for getting into a dirty fight. My resolve to be a model citizen had temporarily deserted me when another boy toppled the only available chessboard, which I’d painstakingly set up after awaiting my turn to play. The kid was a malicious little creep who’d tried to bring trouble down on me before and, worse, treated me like the fraud I feared I was. Usually, I was inclined to let his smart remarks pass, but this was a clear provocation. If I’d learned anything from my first children’s home, it was that scores had to be settled at once or never at all. I didn’t know how to fight. I went for the boy’s face with my hands, knowing the only chance I had was to go completely crazy on him before he could respond. I dug my nails into his chin, about as high as I could reach. He punched me in the stomach, but by then I had the bottom half of his face in a claw hold and wouldn’t let go. Blood squirted from his lip. A second blow caught me dead in the eardrum, thundering inside my skull as if I were a deaf man experiencing the percussive shock of a snare drum. Darkness rose up from the bottom of my vision. I might have been smiling as I fell.
—
THE DOOR OF THE OFFICE OPENED, and I was led in by my sore ear. The door was closed behind me. The director pointed to a chair. The room had a scent—a thick odor of pipe tobacco, wool, and masculine sweat.
The undersides of his eyes were rimmed with dark circles. A day’s growth of beard clung to the slack flesh of his not unhandsome face. When he spoke I could feel his voice in my chest. “Stick out your hands, Yuliy.” With his one hand he turned over my palms. “I see they’ve cut off your claws. What do you think you were doing?”
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