Like most boys his age, Valerii spent his protracted childhood hanging on rickety fences or driving a captured German penknife, his most precious possession, into the run-down suburban soil. In this activity he had no equals, winning with his knife easily and lightheartedly, like a latter-day Alexander the Great, all the cities and states gambled on the barren patch of land behind the Rastorguevo bus station.
The neighborhood kids, having ascertained his total superiority, stopped playing with him, and he spent many hours in the courtyard of his house, implanting the penknife in the pale wall-eye where the lower branch of an enormous pear tree had been sawn off, gradually moving farther and farther away from his target. Over these long hours he gained an insight into the mechanics of throwing, knew it inside out with both hand and eye, but derived the greatest pleasure from the lightning moment when the knife in his hand and his chosen target came into alignment, culminating in the quivering of the haft in the heart of his target.
Sometimes he would take a different one, a kitchen knife, and choose a different target, and with a crunch or a moan or a thin whistle the knife would penetrate it. His mother’s old house, already falling apart, was covered in scars from his boyhood practicing. Perfection proved boring, however, and in the end he packed it in.
New vistas opened up when he moved from primary school to the newly introduced ten-year secondary school where much was new and unfamiliar: urinals, porcelain washbasins, a stuffed owl, a picture of a naked man with no skin, wonderfully shaped glass vessels, metal contrivances with valves. The place that really fascinated and delighted him, however, was the sports hall, which, for those times, was very well equipped. From the fifth grade on, he honed in on the horizontal bars, the parallel bars, and the leather vaulting horse.
A physical giftedness, so much admired in the classical world, and just as rare as musical or poetic talent, or a talent for chess, became apparent in Butonov. He didn’t know that the modern world rated his talent lower than intellectual gifts, and reveled in progress which became more striking with every passing month.
The physical education mistress sent him to the Central Sports Club gymnastics section, and by the new year he was taking part in the first competitions in his life. The trainers were astonished by his phenomenal grasp, his natural economy of movement, and his self-discipline. He achieved results immediately which usually had to be diligently pursued for years.
He wasn’t yet twelve years old when he was first sent for trials. On that occasion the junior athletes were not taken outside of Moscow; they were simply put up in a military hotel on Commune Square, in four-bedded rooms with a red carpet, a decanter and telephone on a hardwood table, in the ponderous opulence of the Stalin style with a military nuance.
It was during the school year, so in the mornings the gymnasts dispersed to their schools and, when they returned, had lunch in the local military cafeteria with thirty-ruble vouchers. The sports complex was located in the right-hand wing of a low, squat building, at the heart of which was the Great Hall. It was there that the future flowers of Soviet sport passed the best hours of their happy childhood. Entry was possible only with a pass, and everything together, the vouchers for lunch, the top-quality calorific food with chocolate, condensed milk, and cakes, the pass itself with his photograph in its little booklet, and especially the dark blue woollen tracksuit with a white stripe by the collar which was issued free, inspired a due respect in the youthful Butonov for his own body, which was deemed worthy of these heaven-sent goodies.
He wasn’t too good at school, always carrying some unredeemed failing mark, which he usually put right by the end of the term for fear he would be banned from training. Since he was the sports star of the school, his teachers usually bit the bullet and awarded him highly questionable passing marks without too much trouble.
By the age of fourteen he was a strikingly built youth with regular facial features, his hair cut short in the sporting fashion, disciplined and ambitious. He was a member of the youth gymnastics team, training under the master of sport schedule and aiming for first place in the forthcoming All-Union Competition.
His trainer, Nikolai Vasilievich, was an intelligent sports insider who had seen it all, had high hopes of him, and anticipated a major athletic career. He took a lot of trouble with Valerii, and his straightforward way of calling him “my son” was very meaningful and important to the boy. Valerii looked for shared features with his idoclass="underline" he was glad their hair was the same color and their greyish-blue eyes similar; he narrowed his eyes the way Nikolai Vasilievich did, imitated the rolling, springy way he walked, and even bought himself white handkerchiefs like the ones Nikolai Vasilievich had.
He did not, however, win the All-Union Competition, even though he was sure he had. He performed excellently, felt like a knife in flight, and knew he had hit the target; but there were other important things he did not know, which his trainer knew only too well, about the secret mechanisms of success, about friends in high places, about rigged judging and the barefaced corruption of sport. The two decimal points which relegated Butonov to second place seemed to him such a cruel injustice that in the changing room he threw off his free Central Sports Club outfit and went back to Rastorguevo wearing his school trousers over his bare body.
Nikolai Vasilievich might just have succeeded in getting him back, papering over the defeat with meaningless words, slippery, half-true explanations of what had happened, but unfortunately one of Valerii’s older teammates—Butonov was the youngest on the team—revealed the secret side of his unjust defeat to him. It was a fix, and his own trainer was implicated. The boy who won had been trained by the son-in-law of the head of the federation, and the panel of judges was not independent—not bribed exactly, but tied hand and foot.
A number of things fell into place now: why the day before his performance Nikolai Vasilievich, who had taught him to reach for the sky, had told him for no apparent reason, “Okay, Valerii, don’t get too wound up. For you at your age second place won’t be bad, not bad at all.”
The trainer came out several times to Rastorguevo. The first time Valerii went up and hid in the attic like a little kid. The second time he came out but talked through his teeth, refusing eye contact. The third time Nikolai Vasilievich talked to Valentina Fyodorovna, but she only held her arms out wide and bleated, “I’m sure it’s all fine by me, what is there to get upset about, but it’s up to Valerii . . .” She too liked the free Olympic suits and saw nothing wrong with second place.
Valerii, however, was implacable. Nikolai Vasilievich was afraid the boy would defect to the Worker Reserves or Spartak and someone else would get the credit for his three years’ work, but that did not happen. The monstrous secret self-esteem of Butonov which had flourished in the shade of the Rastorguevo pear tree drove him on now to seek a different path, more certain, where there were no humiliating possibilities of defeat, no corrupt, rotten fixes, and treachery.
The summer holidays had begun, but he didn’t go to any trials, just lay for days at a stretch under the pear tree, all the time wondering how what had happened could have happened, and after a week was vouchsafed a revelation: you shouldn’t allow yourself to become dependent on circumstances or other people. Had he been musing under a fig tree, the revelation might have been of a more sublime nature, but that was the best that could be expected from a Russian pear tree.
Two weeks later he enrolled in the circus college. How wonderful it was! Every day Butonov came to train and experienced the delight of a five-year-old boy on his first visit to the circus. The training ring was entirely reaclass="underline" it smelled just as it should, of sawdust, animals, and talcum powder. Balls, colored clubs, and physically perfect girls flew freely through the air. This was a special, wholly unique world: that was what every cell in his body told him.