The first shock, so piercing, and the almost unbearable pain are gone, and now I feel depression and sadness. Soon I learned that something had changed in me. I stopped paying attention to the squabbles and hassles at work, to the stupid words and empty threats from the idiot bosses. I understood that I wouldn’t let “them’’ run my life anymore, stealing my happiness and peace of mind. Luckily, my inner freedom coincided with better times in the country. For the first time in decades people began to come out of their faint of fear and hopelessness. I am being given the chance my father never had. His world view was created by the times he lived in, which left almost no room for joy and optimism. How could I blame him for his lack of life wisdom?
CHAPTER NINE
On the Kaluga Wave
A taste of sadness in joy and sadness softened by humor or irony— these are the spiritual states that I find most fruitful.
—Fazil Iskander
APRIL ll. Yet another page of our Kaluga life has closed. They called and told us that Uncle Misha, Papa’s childhood friend, had died. I could write a whole book about him and his family —The Wasted Life of Three Generations. Uncle Misha’s father, Nikolai Mikhailovich, was a major financial figure before the Revolution, the owner of several tea factories. When the whole mess began, his wife and their oldest daughter managed to escape to Harbin. The daughter later became a famous actress and was known even in faraway America. Uncle Misha often joked, “One day I’ll get a call from the Foreign Legal Collegium, and they’ll tell me that my relatives left me a couple of million dollars.”
Nikolai Mikhailovich didn’t manage to get out. He settled in Kaluga and married the former governess of his children, a Russified German. Their son Mikhail was born, half German, half former capitalist and future Soviet prisoner camp inmate. Nikolai Mikhailovich lived poorly but with dignity. He was famous in the town for dressing with his former elegance and wearing hats with great eclat. He earned money by playing a violin in the city park. He died shortly before the war.
When the Germans entered Kaluga, Uncle Misha (as I called him) was working as a secretary in some office. He didn’t leave his job during the brief occupation; he was his mother’s sole support. After Kaluga was liberated, Uncle Misha was picked up right away, allegedly for collaboration with the Germans; his German antecedents did their work. He was sent to distant northern camps, where he spent ten years, the best years of his youth. After he got out, he settled in Ukhta, where many former inmates lived. By then his mother was long dead, and he had no place to go home. His lust for life prevailed, and he wanted a family. Uncle Misha married a rather strange woman who was ten years his senior. They had a son, whom they named in honor of his grandfather, Nikolai. Uncle Misha didn’t love his wife much, so he gave all his attention to little Kolya, who grew up nervous and spoiled.
In the late fifties there was a wave of rehabilitation, and Uncle Misha decided to return to his hometown. As someone who had been illegally repressed, he was given a small one- bedroom apartment in Kaluga, which in those days was a gift of fate, if you could call that payment for his stolen youth a gift. He had a lot of trouble getting a job because the Soviet bosses still had suspicions of former political prisoners. After a few years Uncle Misha finished a technical school and got a job in a big factory. He worked in the supply department—that is, he used every means possible to get the parts the plant was legally entitled to. The most frequently used method was getting drunk with the officials, and the main currency was vodka. Without noticing it, Uncle Misha started drinking heavily. It must not have been an accident that Soviet reality finished what the camps had started, especially since his homelife wasn’t very happy. In
spite of all that, Uncle Misha retained his incredible optimism and vitality, and he was always joking and laughing. Talking about camp life, he recalled only the funny stories and sprinkled his tales with juicy camp slang. He was happy to have gotten out of there, and he didn't want to harp on the unpleasant times.
Uncle Misha had inherited his father's way with clothes. Even dead drunk on a garbage pile, he looked like a dandy. The drinking didn’t spoil his taste for life and beauty. When he was sober, he read a lot and understood world politics, and it was always interesting to talk to him.
But fate kept at him. His son grew up and got mixed up with hooligans. One fine day they robbed a newspaper stand. They made off with small takings—some magazines, records, and pens—but they ended up in a colony for minors. It’s a cruel system, and once you get in, it’s hard to get out. When his term was over, Kolya spent a short time outside and then was arrested for some other small crime and ended up in a real prison. He spent fifteen years going back and forth. In the breaks between sentences, he managed to get married a few times and have children. I’ve heard strange stories about his prison life. He asked for an Esperanto dictionary and wanted to study the language. Then he began reading up on prerevolutionary Kaluga, and Uncle Misha raced around the used-book stores. Life brought Uncle Misha back into the past. And Kolya began drinking, too.
It was only in the last three years of his life that relative calm came to their house. Kolya came out of prison with the firm resolve not to return. I met Kolya last year. It was then that the idea of the wasted lives in the three generations came to me. Here was a tall, well-built young man who seemed sickly (he
had lost a lung in a prison fight). Half his teeth had been knocked out and replaced with metal ones, and his arms were covered with tattoos. He looked the worse for wear. But when he started speaking, I forgot all that. He had a wonderful sense of current events, was a great admirer of Reagan and his hard policy toward the “evil empire/’ During perestroika Boris Yeltsin had become Kolya’s idol. He even went to Moscow to hear him at rallies. But Kolya’s heart belonged to prerevolutionary Russia. He knew the history of old Kaluga very well and could lead you down the small streets for hours, talking about the former life of the city and its residents. He preferred not to speak about his own life; that was an open wound. His prison past still had a hold on him. Whenever there is a robbery or other crime in the city, the police show up on his doorstep. “They won’t leave me alone, as if I’m in their way. They’ll put me away the first chance they get. I try not to go out too much,” he said bitterly. I looked at his nervous face and thought that the Ukhta camps have a firm hold on their victims, even unto the next generation.
Now Kolya seems to be all right. He’s stopped drinking, lives with his third wife and daughter, works in a factory, and breeds parrots.
Uncle Misha was found dead near his house early in the morning. He had been on his way home from the boiler plant where he worked as night watchman. It was amazing that he managed to live to the age of sixty plus, since he had had several strokes and was almost blind but still went on drinking heavily. He never did live to get that inheritance of millions from relatives abroad.
APRIL 13. I could tell a lot about the life of our courtyard and adjoining buildings in Kaluga. We had quite a few colorful characters. But I think I remember Uncle Zhenya, our courtyard singer, best. Uncle Zhenya was of medium height and rather thin, and his enormous, hawklike nose dominated his pale drinker’s face. When he opened his mouth, he exposed his equine, rotting teeth. But as soon as he began singing, you forgot everything. Uncle Zhenya was a fair actor with charming provincial tricks. His repertoire was quite varied—from criminal songs to arias. Often, when the role demanded it, his voice broke with a threatened tear, and at the most dramatic moments real tears rolled down his sunken cheeks. He gave of his talent generously, performing a big concert every evening in the gazebo, and people from neighboring buildings came. Uncle Zhenya liked visiting us. He would sit in Grandfather’s big armchair and sing with sweet, lachrymose feeling: