Ma smirks: “Quantum satis!” She has laid out a meal on her best crockery, which Dobrinin brought back from Germany after the war, along with three guns, a cutthroat razor and a radio. He was not an important man and carried away only two suitcases of war trophies, but that’s not the impression he gives. According to him, he rode into Berlin on a tank, and he hints that he had the ear of Marshal Konev himself.
At table, Dobrinin dominates the conversation, beginning with his wartime feats before moving on to even more unlikely subjects: “Anton, Anton Pavlovich that is, always said he preferred vodka to philosophy as a hangover cure.”
‘Chekhov died the year before you were born,’ I think to myself, ‘not that our guests will say anything. It won’t even occur to them that you might not have known him personally. They’re too impressed by your aristocratic origins. They wouldn’t dream of questioning you.’
Our guests present Dobrinin with a bottle of vodka for the toasts. My stepfather goes to the dresser and rummages around, finally laying his hands on the neck of a cut-glass decanter pillaged from some Prussian farmhouse. As he pulls out the vessel there is a gasp and a giggle. I bolt for of the door.
An egg lies in the bottom of the decanter, the result of one of my experiments. I had heard that eggs lost their shape when soaked in strong vinegar. I tried it and it worked. I rolled the softened egg into a sausage and dropped it into the decanter. Then I poured in cold water and the egg returned to its normal shape, but of course I couldn’t retrieve it. I pushed the decanter to the back of the dresser and forgot about it.
I stay out until very late. When I come in Dobrinin is snoring on the sofa and my mother is in bed. In the morning my stepfather begins to recall the outrage of the day before. I run out of the door before he can hit me.
I go to my grandmother’s. Granny Nezhdanova lives with her son Volodya in a wooden house built on a pile of slag beside the sulphur plant. Long ago Granny and her husband fetched soil from the steppe to spread around the house but gradually the groundwater rose and poisoned all their plants. Only goosefoot grows as tall as my head. The water from their well is yellow and tastes of TNT. Granny and Volodya live on potatoes, salted cabbage, bread and milk baked in the oven. My mother is ashamed of her family and rarely visits or sends them money. Granny’s husband died when I was a baby. She survives by buying needles and thread from a local policeman and selling them in the market.
Uncle Volodya is home and to cheer me up he suggests I come into the city with him. My uncle is only six years older than me. He started work when he was fifteen, but he studies at night school and won a Stalin scholarship to Kuibyshev polytechnic. Volodya is very cheerful and sharp-witted. I’m proud to go out with my tall uncle, even though he always wears felt boots, winter and summer, to work and to dances.
We trot off to the station, swinging a pail of baked milk between us. The local train lurches in and we board without tickets. The carriage is packed with passengers squeezed onto wooden benches, all smoking rough tobacco or nibbling sunflower seeds. The floor crunches as we walk. At a stop further down the line we jump off and run to a carriage that the conductors have already checked.
At each station beggars scramble aboard and shuffle through the carriages, telling stories or singing rhymes. Most are war invalids, missing arms or legs; some have been blinded or burnt in tanks. “I returned half-dead from the Front to find a lieutenant’s cap on my peg,” says a shabby beggar, holding out his hand. A legless man rolls through on a trolley, rattling a tin.
The beggars have escaped from invalid homes where they rotted with hunger and boredom. They sleep in stations and cold entranceways, with nothing to do but drink to forget their grief. The most unfortunate are the ‘samovars,’ who lost both their arms and legs. You see them gathered outside markets and stations, begging from their little trolleys. They appeal to their ‘dear brothers and sisters,’ echoing the words of Stalin during the German advance.
As the train pulls into a suburb of Kuibyshev hideous screams and curses come from the platform. A group of homeless women are fighting their way aboard. They stink of drink and sweat; their bloated faces are bruised. They thrust scrawny babies at passengers as they beg. One of them grabs my arm. “Little son, for the love of God give me something for the baby!”
There’s a blackish crust of dried blood where her nose should be. I turn away, curling up on the seat and hugging my knees. I wish I had something to give her.
I enjoy walking around the city with my uncle, meeting up with his friends and laughing at their jokes. At the end of the day we return to Chapaevsk with our empty pail. As we walk down the muddy lane that leads to her house Granny’s voice reaches us: “That puffed-up little tart! Her own mother not good enough for her! Well Nyurochka, what does your fancy man get up to when you’re on night shift? Don’t come crying to your old mother then!”
Granny is in the throes of her weekly drinking spree. Her padded jacket is torn and her headscarf has fallen off into the mud.
Two policemen are stumbling around in the mud trying to catch her. Nimbly, she dodges their grasp, spins around and launches herself at the nearest man: “Fuck you! Parasite!”
She pushes the policeman so hard that he staggers backwards and sinks up to his knees in a rut. Granny laughs and lies down in the deepest puddle. “Come and get me you old goats!”
Guessing that they won’t want to soil their uniforms, she relaxes, shuts her eyes and breaks into a dirty song. Volodya goes up to her. I hang back behind him.
“Come on, Ma, let’s go home.”
Granny allows him to pull her up and she meekly follows him to the house. Once indoors Volodya takes off her muddy clothes and makes up her bed. Soon she is snoring peacefully. Volodya sits down to scrape the mud off her boots. I take my leave.
Although my mother forbids me to visit Granny I like to call on her. I sit on the wooden bench by her door and wait for her to come back from the market. She stops at the gate, looking at me tenderly with a jug of her famous milk clutched to her breast. “Ah, shit of my shit, when you’re a big boy you’ll give your old Granny three kopecks for her hair-of-the-dog.”
My grandmother is very good-natured when sober. She never bothers me about my homework or my performance at school; she’s simply sure that I do better than all the rest. When I tell her about my quarrels with my stepfather she curses him and my mother but she doesn’t approve of my attempts to run away. She always sends me back home at night.
Perhaps it is because of Granny that I like neither drinking nor drunks.
My first drinking party is on New Year’s Eve at Victor’s house. We lay out a feast of bread and herring and prepare ten litres of home-brew from sugar I filch from home. Someone brings a bottle of vodka. Victor’s parents watch our preparations with amusement. The next day we feel so terrible we don’t want to repeat the experiment for a long time.
By the time I reach fifteen I’ve been drunk no more than a dozen times. I don’t yet have the taste for alcohol, though I will join my friends if they’re drinking. Besides, it’s unwise to come home with spirits on my breath because I have an informer sleeping in my room. Marusya is our home-help. A country girl who can barely read or write, she was born during the famine of 1920 when babies ran the risk of being stolen and butchered by their starving neighbours. But Marusya survived both the famine and collectivisation. When war broke out she escaped her farm by going to work in a munitions plant. There was a shortage of labour so they didn’t ask for her passport.[4] Marusya poured mustard gas into shells on a conveyor belt. A partition separated the workers, so that an exploding shell would kill only one person. You don’t have to be literate to understand the dangers of such a job and Marusya was happy to come to work for my parents. Smallpox has blinded her in one eye and left her face pitted and scarred. I call her Cyclops.
4
Peasants had no passports, so that they were effectively tied to their collective farms.