Victor, who was in fact nineteen at the time, ran to fetch the shells without a word. He ran a hundred yards there, empty-handed, and a hundred back, carrying a hundred-pound crate. But when he returned, the panting and winded student commander couldn’t find the gun crew anywhere—there was just a giant smoking crater in the spot where the gun had been set up. None of the crew survived.
There wasn’t even anyone to bury. It had been a direct hit. The trainee sat down on the box, his mind empty, feeling like he was the scorched earth itself, a blast of searing metal, boiling blood, and burning rags. Then, abandoning his useless box, he left, amid the whistles and explosions that he no longer heard.
When the siege of Tula was lifted, they transferred the trainees to Tomsk—those who were left alive after the onslaught, at any rate. For a long time Victor had nightmares about the perished gunners, and the fleshy man cursed him darkly—not about the box of shells, but for something far more serious. A thousand times Victor returned to the scene in his thoughts. What should he have done? How should he have acted? If he had shouted down the fleshy older man, which was his duty as a commander, that guy was the one who would still be alive today, and not he himself.
He decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a commander, only a private. He submitted a request to be assigned to active duty. It was refused—he had only six weeks until graduation. A slight transgression—that was what was called for. Not so great that he would be court-martialed or sent to a punitive battalion, but enough to get him sent to the front as a private instead of an officer.
He came up with a plan for a fitting offense. On the eve of his swearing in as an officer, he went AWOL, got drunk in the city, sneaked into the women’s dormitory, and spent the night with a girl in the recreation room. Early the next morning, at his request, she turned him in to the military patrol. It worked like a charm. He was thrown into the guardhouse for ten days, and then sent into active duty as a private. There he remained until the end of the war, which for him was in 1944, after he was wounded. He never once had to give orders, only carry them out. The task was always the same: make it from point A to point B alive. And myriad petty concerns: eating, drinking, sleeping, not getting blisters on his feet. And it would have been nice to have a good wash once in a while … They gave the order—he fired. No orders—no firing. He didn’t talk about that. He chose to keep silent.
“Where did you get wounded?” the boys asked.
“In Poland, during the invasion. Look, they took my hand.”
What happened after that, he wouldn’t tell the kids. How he learned to write left-handed—in a rounded, slanting script, not devoid of elegance. The stump of his right arm still helped him out a little, but he never wore the pink celluloid prosthesis. He figured out an easy way of donning his rucksack—with his left hand he arranged the first strap over the stump of his right arm, and then reached around behind him with his left arm, slipping it under the other strap. After he left the hospital he went to Moscow. The institute where he had studied before the war had been reorganized, and the vestiges of it had merged with the philological department. That was the place he returned to, in his military overcoat that still reeked of war, and in officer’s boots that didn’t match his rank.
The university on Mokhovaya Street! What a sweet luxury it was—for three whole years he recuperated there, regaining his health through his own efforts: he washed the blood off with Pushkin, Tolstoy, Herzen …
In 1948, shortly before graduation, he was encouraged to take up graduate studies. His academic adviser would be a marvelous medievalist and renowned scholar in the field of European literature. The subject of Victor’s research was intriguing—it examined Pushkin’s relationship to his European counterparts in a primarily Romano-Germanic context. But Victor Yulievich wavered: he also wanted to be a schoolteacher, and he felt that he now knew what he wanted to teach them. Choices, choices …
Where was that voice that prompts you at critical moments and tells you what to do? Yet it turned out he didn’t need that voice after all. The would-be academic adviser was officially reprimanded for his Western leanings and his “cosmopolitanism,” and was later sent to a prison camp.
Victor’s graduate studies ended before they began. He was assigned to teach Russian language and literature in a middle school in the village of Kalinovo, in the Vologda Oblast.
They gave him room and board at the school—one room and an entrance hall, where there was a wood-burning stove. They supplied him with wood. The local store sold hard candy and crabs from the Far East, awful wine, and vodka. Bread was delivered twice a week, and lines started forming in the early hours of the morning. The store opened at nine, when the first lesson at school was just ending. The mothers, observing time-honored village custom, would bring him eggs, cottage cheese, or homemade pies that had the remarkable quality of tasting delicious when warm, but being completely inedible once they had cooled off. From time immemorial this had been the accepted form of payment for the services of doctors, priests, and teachers. He would share these offerings with the cleaning lady Marfusha, an asocial, eccentric widow, but he always drank alone. Not too much and not too little—one bottle an evening. Before going to bed he would read the only author he never got tired of.
Besides literature, he also had to teach geography and history. The school principal taught math and physics, as well as the social sciences, which were all versions of the history of the Communist Party, only with different names. The other subjects—biology and German—were taught by an exiled Petersburg Finnish woman. Besides her nationality, she had one other blemish in her biography: before the war she had worked with Academician Vavilov, an unrepentant Weismann-Morganist, who dared insist on the validity of the theory of genetics.
Everything in Kalinovo was meager. The only thing in abundance there was virginal, unsullied nature. And the people were perhaps better than city-dwellers, because they, too, were almost untouched by spiritual dissipation.
His interactions with rural children had undone all the illusions of his student years. His notions of “the good, the eternal” had not changed, of course; but the circumstances of everyday life here were so coarse, so very difficult. The young girls, wrapped in their patched and mended kerchiefs, who managed to care for the farm animals and their younger siblings before school, and the boys, who already did the work of men in the summer—what use were these cultural values to them? What was the point of studying on an empty stomach and wasting time on knowledge they would never need under any circumstances?
Their childhood was already over long ago. They were simply underdeveloped men and women. Even the ones whose mothers eagerly sent them off to school, by far the minority, seemed to feel awkward, as though they were busy with trifling pastimes rather than serious work. This caused the young teacher to feel uncertain about his role as well—and, really, wasn’t he distracting them from the fundamental concerns of life by exposing them to superfluous luxuries? What did Radishchev mean to them? Or Gogol? Or even Pushkin, for that matter? Teach them to read, and send them home to work as soon as possible. That’s all the students really wanted themselves.
This was when he first started thinking about the phenomenon of childhood. When it began wasn’t the issue; but when did it end? Where was the boundary beyond which a human being became an adult? It was obvious that childhood ended earlier in the country than it did in the city.
The northern countryside had always lived hand to mouth, but after the war the poverty was profound. The women and children did the lion’s share of the work. Of the thirty local men who had gone to the front to fight, only two had returned: one with only one leg, the other with tuberculosis. He died a year later. The children, miniature peasants, shouldered the burden of labor early, and their childhoods were stolen from them.
And, truly, how was one to reckon it, to weigh the losses? Some had had their childhoods stolen from them, others their youths, still others their freedom. Victor Yulievich himself h
ad lost the most insignificant thing of all: his graduate studies.
After his three-year term of quasi-exile—after all, he was living in the same part of the country to which clever young people like himself, with a sense of their own dignity and self-worth, had been sent during tsarist times—his seventh-graders graduated, and he returned to Moscow to live with his mother on Bolshevik Lane, in the building with the knight standing in a niche above the entranceway.
By some stroke of luck, the first place he was offered a teaching job in Moscow was only a ten-minute walk from his home, near the History Library. The library held a strong attraction for him. He had felt starved of literary culture and missed it more than theaters and museums when he was away.
He tried to reestablish his university connections, seeking companionship. He got together with Lena Kurzer, who had spent the war as a military interpreter, but they couldn’t really communicate. He found two more of his former classmates, but again nothing clicked. The mood of the time was taciturn, disinclined to frankness. People started to open up and talk only several years later. Of the three classmates who had survived the war, one of them embarked on a career in the Party and a second taught school. His first and last meeting with them was limited to splitting a bottle of vodka. The third, Stas Komarnitsky, was out of reach: he had been sent to prison, either for telling a joke or just for talking. The only one of his friends he was always happy to see was Mishka Kolesnik, his former neighbor. They made for an amusing postwar pair: Mishka was missing a leg, and Victor an arm, so they called themselves “Three arms, three legs.”
Mishka had meanwhile become a biologist and was married to a nice girl, also from their neighborhood, but younger.
She was a doctor and worked in the municipal hospital. She was desperate to marry Victor off, and kept trying to hook him up with one of her unmarried colleagues. But Victor had no intentions of marrying. After he returned from Kalinovo, he had fallen in love with two beauties at the same time. One he had met in the library, and the other had approached him in a museum, where he had taken his students on a field trip. Mishka joked, “It’s your good fortune that the dames flock to you in pairs, Vic. If there were only one of them, she’d collar you for sure.”
But it was, in fact, work that “collared” Victor. It turned out that teaching his thirteen-year-olds was the most fascinating experience in his life. These Moscow youths had nothing whatsoever in common with their country counterparts. They didn’t plow the land, didn’t sow, didn’t repair the horses’ harnesses, and had none of the peasant’s sense of responsibility for family.
They were ordinary kids—in class, they cut up, threw paper wads and spitballs, sprayed one another with water, hid one another’s book satchels and notebooks, and grabbed and pushed and shoved like puppies. Then they would suddenly freeze in wonder, and ask him real questions. Unlike the country lads, they had had a real childhood, which they were now leaving behind once and for all. Besides pimples, there were other signs, in a higher register, of their maturing: they asked the “accursed questions,” agonized over the injustices in the world, and listened to poetry. A few of them even wrote something that vaguely resembled it. The first one to bring the teacher a neatly copied page of verse was Mikha Melamid.
“Yes, I see,” Victor Yulievich said out loud, smiling. Jewish boys are particularly sensitive readers and writers of Russian literature, he mused.
Half of the class did not quite understand what the literature teacher wanted from them. The other half clung to his every word. Victor Yulievich tried to treat everyone equally, but he did have his favorites—Mikha, emotionally intense and sensitive to a fault; Ilya, energetic and capable; and Sanya, polite and self-contained. The inseparable trio.
He had belonged to just such a triumvirate at one time, and he often thought about his college chums, Zhenya and Mark, who had died in the first days of the war. They were still just boys, really, who hadn’t completely outgrown childhood. Full of overblown romanticism, with their infantile verses—“Brigantine! Brigantine!”—who would they have become now, had they lived? The red-haired Mikha could have been their younger brother, and if you looked closely you could read his complicated future on his face. Not that Victor claimed any sort of clairvoyance; he was just concerned.
It was 1953, not yet March, and the anti-Semitic campaign was raging. In those rotten times, the eighth of him that was Jewish moaned in horror, and the fourth of him that was Georgian burned with shame.
Victor Yulievich was a man of mixed ancestry. He had a Georgian name, he was registered as Russian, but he in fact had very little Russian blood. His Georgian grandfather had been married to a German woman; they had studied together in Switzerland, and Victor’s father, Julius, had been born there. The ancestry of Ksenia Nikolayevna, Victor’s mother, was no less exotic. Her father, the product of the union of an exiled Pole and a Jewish girl, one of the first females to become a trained field doctor, had married a priest’s daughter. This ecclesiastical blood was the sole source of Victor’s Russianness.
From his Georgian grandfather he inherited his musical talent. From his German grandmother, who carefully concealed her origins and with prudent foresight registered herself as Swiss upon her arrival in Tiflis in 1912, he inherited his rational cast of mind and his prodigious memory. His Jewish grandmother gave him her thick hair and small bones; and from his Vologda grandmother, he got his light-gray northern eyes.
Ksenia Nikolayevna, who was early widowed, was the only surviving descendant of two family lines that had gone extinct during the Revolution. She would carefully wipe dust from bookshelves, battle clothes moths, and water the orange marigolds that bloomed nearly year-round on her windowsill.
She had two favorite things in life: taking care of her son, and painting silk handkerchiefs to sell. She was also good at frying meat patties and making French toast. After Vika (that was what she called him—almost like a girl) returned from the front, she quickly learned to do things for him he couldn’t manage with just one hand: slice bread, butter it when butter was to be had. In the mornings, she would make shaving lather for him out of soap.
The one thing that was categorically absent in Victor Yulievich was a proud sense of belonging to some particular people or ethnic group. He felt like an outcast and a blue blood, in equal measure. The Jew-baiting that was endemic to the times was anathema to him primarily on aesthetic grounds: ugly people dressed in ugly clothing whose behavior was ugly, too. Life outside the bounds of literature was harsh and abusive, but the world of books offered living thought, and feeling, and learning. It was impossible to bridge these two realms, and he retreated farther and farther into literature. Only the children he taught could make the nauseating reality outside of books bearable.
And also women. He loved beautiful women. They flashed through his life like brief festivities, often in succession, sometimes even parallel to one another, and all of them were equally beautiful to him.
It must be said that women liked him, too. He was handsome, and even his physical defect (this took him some time to realize) was attractive in its own way. Beautiful women would fall for him not just for the obvious reason that there were fewer men than necessary for the purposes of reproduction, as a veterinarian might put it. What made him especially attractive to women was their mistaken assumption that he would belong to them completely, now and forever, because of his disability.
They were wrong. He had no intention of handing over exclusive rights to himself to anyone, which marriage implied.
In the early twentieth century, Bunin, Kuprin, and Chekhov, in his “Lady with a Dog,” all wrote about “profane” love, a still largely unexplored territory in Russian literature: the sudden blooming of desire, adultery, sexual relations—all that the nineteenth century had deemed “vulgar.”
Not one of these writers was aware of the primary problem of our postwar era, however: the problem of territory, which preoccupied the devotees of divine love, and lovers with the most p
rimitive longings and aspirations, alike. Where? Where could a person who lived in a single room with his mother arrange a lovers’ tryst? Where, in a city without hotels, could one experience mutual “sunstroke”* with a lady friend? There wasn’t even a narrow berth to be had for such purposes. Well, perhaps in summer, en plein air; but summers are so brief in our latitudes.
Bringing a girl home and entertaining her behind the tapestry curtain that divided the male, filial half of the room from the female half occupied by his mother was unthinkable. Renting a room just for trysts was both distasteful and expensive. Borrowing the key to the room of one of his single friends was awkward. Fastidiousness stood guard over Victor Yulievich’s morality.
But he lucked out. All his girlfriends had places at their disposal. Lidochka, a divorcee he saw sometimes, with an elegant neck and beautiful breasts, had her own room. Then there was Tanya the tomboy, who was diminutive and seemed to be walking on springs. Her husband worked as an actor in Saratov, and she rented a room on Sretenka Street within walking distance of Victor’s place. There was also Verochka, a well-educated translator of French, who would take him to her parents’ empty dacha.
He never took a single one of these women home with him to meet his mother. Ksenia Nikolayevna couldn’t abide other women. Mother and son lived peacefully together, and Victor Yulievich wasn’t trying to change that arrangement.
On the morning of March 2, they were eating breakfast—French toast, soft and tender on the inside, crisp on the outside. Ksenia Nikolayevna had cut it up into small pieces for her Vika. This kind of meticulous care, sometimes quite gratuitous, took her back to the days when Vika was still a small boy, she was still young and pretty, and her husband was still alive.
The Big Green Tent Page 5