Sometimes we took longer trips. The best place was the Polotnyayny factory, the former Goncharov estate. What remained of the good old days was the huge park. At one time the regional party boss tried to have the age-old trees chopped down, but fortunately there were more trees than workers.
The house burned down, and only ruins remained of the once- beautiful building. It’s still not clear what happened. The official version is that the Germans burned down the house during the war. But the locals said that it was Russians who did it before the war. There had been a museum in the estate, and village drunks got into the room filled with various oddities and monsters kept in alcohol. They broke the jars and drank the alcohol. They might have burned down the house, too, to cover their tracks.
It was sad to see how Russians were destroying their own culture. Pushkin had come here. The estate belonged to his wife’s relatives, and he had walked in the old park, sat in the gazebo, and regarded the bend in the river and the fields and forests stretching to the horizon. It was here that he wrote:
The east is covered in rosy dawn,
And in the distance beyond the river, a light went out.
We wanted to be transported to the nineteenth century, to see the old house, and to walk through its charming grounds. Now I would love to return for a bit to my Kaluga childhood, but it is as inaccessible as the nineteenth century.
APRIL 24. When I think about Kaluga, I can’t leave out the story of my great-aunt, Grandfather’s stepsister. We became real friends when she realized that I liked the decadent poets. This made me worthy of her attention. No, she wasn’t a snob. It’s just that her romantic illusions were stronger than reality to the
last day of her life. It was probably these illusions that complicated her life, but she never complained of her choice. She was married rather early to a young man with a good future. “He loved me so much/’ she told me, “that he often took off my shoes and kissed my toes. And my feet, by the way, weren’t all that clean,” she added with a chuckle. She left her husband after several years, to run off with a handsome actor. He couldn’t give her anything besides love, and that she had to share with other women. But Auntie didn’t complain about her fate. She loved her new husband and was prepared to forgive him everything. They spent most of their life in a tiny room in a communal flat. When we visited them, there weren’t enough chairs for everyone. But Auntie continued stubbornly to live in her own world. She read decadents, listened to love songs, and bred cats. In the meantime, her first husband had made his way in the world. His new family lived in a big three-bedroom apartment and shopped in stores for the privileged. Auntie always fried up some cheap fish on a gas ring when we came to call.
Auntie’s daughter got married, and one more person moved into the tiny room. The newlyweds slept on a folding cot. The son-in-law was a simple worker, kind and receptive. Auntie quickly converted him. He started reading poetry and came to like the old love songs. It was funny to see the big, broad fellow reading the exquisite and mannered poems of Gumilev.
Today, I see, your gaze is particularly sad,
And your arms, embracing your knees, are particularly thin. Listen, far, far away along Lake Chad Wanders an exquisite giraffe.
It is given graceful slender and languor,
And a magical pattern adorns its skin,
With which only the moon dares to compare,
Shattering and swaying on the moisture of broad lakes. . . .
Auntie got two presents late in life: a small one-bedroom apartment and The Master and Margarita , published in Moskva journal at long last. I don’t know which was more important to her. She held on to Bulgakov’s novel to the very end. The night before she died, Auntie’s daughter read to her from her beloved book until morning.
A few years ago I was in Tallinn at the grave of the poet Igor Severiyanin. I read the lines quoted on his headstone and thought of Auntie:
How beautiful and fresh will be the roses My country will toss into my coffin.
APRIL 25 . One fine morning the front door opened, right into the entry room where my cousin and I slept in warm weather, and a young foreign-looking man stood on the doorstep. This was in the sixties, when America was on another planet as far as we were concerned. Kostya, the son of our friends, was wearing American jeans, a jersey with bright lettering, and big crocodile-leather shoes. He had a name brand bag filled with records and foreign clothes slung over his shoulder. The twenty-year-old had come from Moscow to visit his relatives and have some fun. We were handy—a fun group. At
breakfast he told us that he was in his American period. He would buy American clothes and records and stuff, and sometimes to get the complete feeling, he would walk in front of the American Embassy, paying no mind to the vigilant police outside. With charming sincerity, Kostya told us that he was tired of his Jewish period and liked his new role better. During the Jewish period he told everyone that he and his mother were poor Jews who had been abandoned by his father and were eking out a miserable existence. He was no more Jew than American, but the trusting provincials believed him and helped out. Some gave clothes, some a few jars of home preserves, and some gave money. “Now, in my American period, the income is better and life is more fun,” Kostya confided. Of course, we realized that the enterprising youth was a simple black marketeer.
After breakfast he had to get out and around; he was looking for fun. Kostya took out some American T-shirts for us from his bag and said that we’d go walk around town pretending to be foreigners. This was in Kaluga, where no foreigners were allowed.
To start with, we pretended we were Poles. We stopped at a mineral water stand, and Kostya asked with a Polish accent how to get to Red Street. We said nothing and even had a second free glass of water; the woman wanted to treat the “furreners.” We reached Red Street, where Kostya’s aunt lived. He turned into a poor relative again and got a big three-liter jar of strawberry jam. Once he saw that he wouldn’t get anything else out of her, he claimed he had to catch a train. Then the most interesting part began. It was time for us to be Americans. We decided to go to the city park, where there were always lots of
people and we would have an audience. A flower show was being held in the former church in the middle of the park. His prior victories gave him no peace, and Kostya decided to be Jewish, this time from Israel, and told us to speak English. My cousin could do all right, but I hadn’t gotten much beyond “beautiful” and “wonderful” after several years of English at school. We walked around the room and expressed our delight with our limited vocabulary. Kostya went up to the elderly man in charge of the exhibit and in broken Russian with a Jewish accent told him that he was a tourist from Israel and that we were American students crazy about lovely Kaluga and that we wanted to leave a note in the visitors’ book. Kostya spoke loudly so that everyone could hear. In a few minutes a small crowd had gathered, and the women looked at our clothes with interest. Kostya, to our amazement, wrote something in Hebrew, and my cousin put together a few sentences in English.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” we cried as we showered them with air kisses. After we had left the church, Kostya sighed and said that he had almost been caught. He thought that the man in charge actually was Jewish and would expose him to his great shame. He had a lot of trouble pretending to write in Hebrew. Kostya kept thinking, He's going to find out and show me up. I still don’t understand how the trusting Kalugans could have fallen for Kostya’s cheap trick.
It would have all been fun and cute if it hadn’t turned to something uglier when Kostya grew older. He sold out and became a scoundrel. He chose another role for himself later. He took a job in a factory and became “an honest Soviet citizen and a militant patriot.” When Solzhenitsyn was thrown out of