CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MY FIRST FLIGHT
It's good to sleep when you have a roof over your head! It's good, in a
bitter frost, to sit around an iron stove, chopping and feeding bits of wood
into it, until the tin smoke pipes begin to roar! But better still, while
weighing out salt and flour, is it to think that Turkestan itself had been
promised us in return for our work. We had stumbled upon a den of
black-marketeering war cripples. Their boss, a lame Pole with a scalded
face, promised to take us with him to Turkestan. We learned that it was not
a city, but a country, whose capital was Tashkent, that same Tashkent to
which our cripples used to go every two or three weeks.
Those crooks employed us to pack food products. We got no wages, only
board and lodging. But we were glad to have that.
But for the boss's wife, life wouldn't have been at all bad. But the
woman got on our nerves.
Fat, with bulging eyes, her belly shaking, she would come running into
the shed where we were packaging the food to see whether everything was
safe.
"Pfef A pfef Jak smiesz tak r®biá?" "How dare you work like this?"
I don't know about robic, but it was a sore temptation while weighing
out salted pork fat not to nip off at least a tiny bit for yourself. Lump
sugar just got itself stuck into your sleeve or pocket. But we put up with
her. Had we known that we should no more see Turkestan than our own ears,
that old hag might have really found herself short of quite a few things.
One day, when we had been working for over two months with this gang,
she came rushing into the shed clad only in a dressing gown. In her hand was
the padlock with which she locked up the shed at night. Eyes popping, she
stopped in the doorway, looked over the shoulder and went very pale.
"No knocking, no banging," she whispered, clutching her head. "No
shouting! Keep quiet!"
Before we knew where we were, she shot home to bolt, breathing heavily,
then hung up the padlock and went away.
It was so unexpected that for a minute or so we really kept quiet. Then
Pyotr swore and lay down on the floor. I followed suit, and we both put an
eye to the crack under the door to see what was going on.
At first all was quiet-the empty yard, the thawing snow with yellow
footprints filled with water. Then there appeared strange legs in a pair of
black high boots: after that another pair of legs, then a third. The legs
were making for the annex across the yard. Two pairs disappeared, the third
remaining on the doorstep. The butt of a rifle came to rest beside them.
"A round-up," Pyotr whispered and sprang to his feet.
In the dark he bumped his head against mine and I bit my tongue. But
this was no time to think of bitten tongues.
"We must run for it!"
Who knows-my life might have taken quite a different turn if we had
taken some rope with us. There was plenty of rope in the shed. But we didn't
think of it until we were up in the loft. The shed was brick-built, with a
loft, a lean-to roof, and a round opening in the rear wall which gave on to
the yard next door.
Pyotr poked his head through this opening and took a look round. He had
scratched a cheek when we had removed a plank from the ceiling in the
darkness, and now he kept wiping the blood away with his fist every minute.
"Let's jump, eh?"
But it was no easy thing, jumping through a small opening in a sheer
wall from a height of fifteen or eighteen feet, unless you took a dive, head
foremost. You had to crawl through this opening feet foremost, sitting bent
up almost double, then push free from the wall and drop to the ground.
That's what Pyotr did. I had half a mind to go back for some rope, when he
was already sitting in the hole. He couldn't turn round. He just said, "Come
on, Sanya. Don't be afraid." And he was gone. I looked out, my heart in my
mouth. He was all right. He had dropped on to a heap of wet snow on the
other side of the fence, which at this point came close up to our shed.
"Come on!"
I crawled out and sat down, knees drawn up to my chin. I could now see
the whole of the next-door yard. A little girl there was playing with a hand
sled outside an old house with columns, and a crow was sitting on a
drainpipe. The girl stopped and looked at us with curiosity. The crow
glanced at us incuriously, then turned away and drew its head between its
wings.
"Come on!"
Besides the girl and the crow, there was a man in the yard, a man in a
leather overcoat. He was standing at the point where our annex adjoined the
next yard. I saw him finish his cigarette, throw away the fag end and coolly
walk towards us.
"Come on!" Pyotr cried desperately.
As I started feebly to push off from the wall with my hands everything
suddenly came into motion. The crow took wing, the girl backed away in
fright. Pyotr made a dash for the gateway, and the leathered man gave chase.
At that moment I understood everything. But it was too late-I was hurtling
down.
Such was my first flight-down in a straight line from a height of
fifteen feet, without a parachute; I shouldn't call it a successful flight.
I stmck the fence with my chest, jumped up and fell again. The last thing I
saw was Pyotr dashing out into the street and slamming the gate in the face
of the man in the leather coat.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CLAY MODELLING
It was very silly, of course, to run away when you hadn't done anything
wrong. After all, we weren't blackmarketeers, we had been only working for
them. Our captors wouldn't do anything to us, they'd simply question us and
let us go. But it was too late now for regrets. The man in the leather coat
gripped my arm and marched me off-to jail probably. I had been caught, while
Pyotr had got away. I was alone now. It was already evening, the sun was
going down, and the daws were circling slowly over the trees along the
Strastnoi Boulevard. I wasn't crying, but I must have looked pretty
miserable, because the man in the leather coat looked at me closely and let
go of my arm. He realised that I wouldn't run away.
He brought me into a large well-lighted room on the fifth floor of a
huge building at Nikitsky Gate. It was a children's reception centre of the
Education Department, where I was to spend three memorable days.
My heart sank when I saw all those ugly customers. Some were playing
cards, squatting around a clay-built stove, some were taking down the wooden
valance rods from the high windows and feeding them straight into the stove,
while others were sleeping or building a house out of old frames and
canvases stacked haphazardly in a corner. At night, when it got colder
inside the reception centre than outside, these houseowners lighted a
primus-stove and exacted payment for admission into their house at the rate
of a couple of cigarettes or a piece of bread. And gazing incuriously with
the sightless white eyes upon all this chaos there stood on tall pedestals
plaster figures of Hercules, of Apollo, Diana and other Greek gods.
The only human faces there were those of the gods. Waking up from the
cold towards morning with chattering teeth, I glanced at them fearfully.
They were probably thinking: "You poor mutt, you! What made you run away
from home? That orphanage? You'd be back in the spring and find some job
helping the old folks. And now what? Now you're all alone. If you die no one
will remember you. Only Pyotr will be running around Moscow, looking for
you, and Aunt Dasha will heave a sigh. Ask for some clothes, my lad, and
hotfoot it home!" They changed your clothes at the Education Department,
they burned your old ones and gave you trousers and a shirt instead. Many
waifs deliberately let themselves be rounded up in order to change their
ragged clothes.
All those three days I kept silent. For a boy who had only recently
learned to speak that was not at all difficult. Who was there to talk to
anyway! Every time they brought in a new batch of waifs I caught myself
looking to see if Pyotr was among them. But he wasn't, and that was just as
well. I sat apart and kept silent.
What with hunger, cold and misery, I started modelling. There were lots
of white sculptor's clay in this former art studio. I picked up a lump,
soaked it in hot water and started to knead it between my fingers. Almost
without realising what I was doing, I had made a toad. I gave it big
nostrils and goggle-eyes, then tried my hand on a hare. It was all pretty
poor, of course. But at the sight of the familiar features of Frisky
emerging from the shapeless lump of clay something stirred within me. I was
to remember that moment. Nobody had seen me modelling: an old thief, who had
by some miracle landed in the reception centre for homeless children, was
describing how they worked at the railway stations in "two-men teams". I
stood apart by the window, holding my breath as I gazed at the little lump
of clay with long ears sticking out of it, and I couldn't make out why it
stirred me so.
After that I modelled a horse with a thick-combed mane. Then it struck
me-why, old Skovorodnikov's horses-that's what it was! The figures he used
to carve out of wood!
I don't know why, but the discovery bucked me up. I fell asleep in a
cheerful mood. I had a feeling as though these figurines were going to be my
salvation. They would enable me to get out of this place, help me to find
Pyotr, help me to return home and him to reach Turkestan. They would help my
sister at the orphanage, Pyotr's uncle at the front, and everybody who
roamed the streets at night in cold and hungry Moscow. That's how I
prayed-not to God, no! to the toad, the horse and the hare, which were
drying on the window-sill, covered with scraps of newspaper.
I daresay some other boy in my place would have become an idol
worshipper and I have had everlasting faith in the toad, the horse and the
hare. Because they did help me!
The next day a commission from the Education Department came to the
reception centre and that place was done away with from now on and for aye.
The thieves were packed off to jail, the waifs to orphanages, and the
beggars to their homes. All that remained in the spacious art studio were
the Greek gods Apollo and Diana and Hercules.
"What's this?" said one of the commission members, a tousled unshaven
youth, whom everybody called simply Alee. "Ivan Andre-yevich, look at this
sculpture!"
Ivan Andreyevich, no less unkept and unshaven, but older put on his
pince-nez and studied the figures.
"Typical Russian figure work from Sergiev Posad," he said.
"Interesting. Who did this? You?"
"Yes."
"What's your name?"
"Alexander Grigoriev."
"Would you like to study?"
I looked at him and said nothing. I must have had a pretty rough time
of it during those months of hungry street life, because all of a sudden my
face twisted and the floodgates opened everywhere- from eyes to nose.
"He'd like to," said commissioner Alee. "Where shall we send him, Ivan
Andreyevich?"
"To Nikolai Antonich's, I think," the other answered, carefully
replacing my hare on the window-sill.
"Why, of course! Nikolai Antonich has just that bent in art. Well,
Alexander Grigoriev, do you want to go to Nikolai Antonich's?"
"He doesn't know him, Alee. Better write it down. Alexander
Grigoriev... How old are you?"
"Eleven."
I had added six months to my age.
"Eleven. Have you put that down? To Tatarinov, Commune School No. 4."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN NIKOLAI ANTONICH
The fat girl from the Education Department, who somehow resembled Aunt
Dasha, left me in a long dimly-lit corridor of a room, saying that she would
soon be back. It was in the cloakroom. Empty racks, looking like skinny
people with horns, stood in open cupboards. All along the wall-doors and
doors. One of them was of glass. I saw myself in it for the first time since
I had left home. What a sight! A pale-faced boy with a round cropped head
looked at me despondently; he was very small, smaller than I thought. A
peaked nose, down-drawn mouth.
The fat girl returned and we went to see Nikolai Antonich. He was a
stout pale man with scant hair combed back over his balding head. A gold
tooth gleamed in his mouth, and I, in my usual stupid way, stared at that
tooth and could not keep my eyes off it.
Nikolai Antonich was talking to a group of boys of about sixteen who
crowded round him arguing and interrupting each other. He heard them out,
twiddling his stubby fingers, which reminded me of hairy
caterpillars-cabbage-worms I believe they're called. He was unhurried,
condescending, dignified.
We came forward.
"A waif?"
"No."
"From the Education Department," the fat girl explained and placed a
paper on the desk.
"Where do you come from, Grigoriev?" Nikolai Antonich demanded after
reading the paper.
I told him.
"And what are you doing here, in Moscow?"
"Passing through," I said.
"Oh, I see. Where were you going?"
I took a deep breath and said nothing. I had been asked all these
questions a hundred times.
"All right, we'll discuss that some other time," Nikolai Antonich said.
He wrote something on the back of the paper. "You won't run away, will you?"
I was quite sure that I would, but to be on the safe side I said, "No."
We went out. In the doorway I looked back. Nikolai Antonich was gazing
after me with a thoughtful air. What was he thinking? One thing he was
definitely not thinking was that Fate itself had appeared to him that day in
the shape of a half-starved ragamuffin in outsize boots and regulation
jacket from which protruded a skinny neck.
PART TWO
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
CHAPTER ONE
I LISTEN TO FAIRY-TALES
"I'll stick it till the first warm day," I had firmly decided. As soon
as the frosts let go, it was goodbye for me at the children's home. They'd
never see me again. But things worked out differently. I didn't run away at
all. What kept me there were the reading sessions.
First thing in the morning we went to the bakery for bread, then
lessons began. We were counted as Form I, though some of us were old enough
to be studying in Form 6.
Our teacher was an old lady by the name of Serafima Petrovna, who came
to school with a rucksack on her back. I really couldn't say what she taught
us exactly.
I remember the Duck lesson. It was three lessons in one-geography,
nature study and Russian. At the nature study lesson we studied the duck as
such: what sort of wings it had, what sort of feet, how it swam, and so on.
At the geography lesson the same duck was studied as a denizen of the Earth:
you had to point out on the map where it lived and where it didn't. At the
Russian lesson Serafima Petrovna taught us to write "d-u-c-k" and read to us
something from Brehm about ducks. She mentioned, in passing, that the German
for duck was so-and-so, and the French so-and-so. This, I believe, was
called at the time the "complex method". It was all sort of "incidental". It
is quite likely that Serafima Petrovna got this method mixed up a bit. She
was an old lady and wore a mother-of-pearl watch pinned to her breast, so
that in answering her we always looked to see what time it was.
In the evening she read to us. It was from her that I first heard the
fairy-tale about Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka.
Sister, dear sister, Swim out, swim out to me. Fires are burning high,
Pots are boiling, Knives are ringing, And lam going to die.
All Baba and the Forty Thieves made a particularly strong impression
upon me. "Open Sesame!" It grieved me to learn, years later, upon reading
the Thousand and One Nights in a new translation, that the word should be
Simsim and not Sesame, which was a plant, something like hemp. Sesame had
magic, it was a wonder-working word. I was terribly disappointed to learn
that it was just ordinary hemp.
Without exaggeration it can be said that these tales simply knocked me
flat. More than anything else in the world now I wanted to learn to read,
like Serafima Petrovna.
On the whole, I liked the life in the children's home. It was snug and
warm there, and they fed and taught you in the bargain. It wasn't dull, at
least not very. The other boys treated me well-probably because I was a
small chap.
At the very outset I made friends with two boys and we did not waste a
minute of our spare time.
One of my new chums was Romashov whom we nicknamed Ro-mashka which
means "a daisy". He was a skinny lad with a big head on which grew yellow
matted hair. He had a flattened nose, unnaturally round eyes and a square
chin-altogether a wicked-looking piece of work for a face. We became friends
over some picture puzzles. I was good at guessing them and this won his
admiration.
The other one was Valya Zhukov, a lazy boy with a headful of plans. At
one moment he was all for getting a job at the Zoo, learning to tame lions,
the next he was raving to join the fire brigade. After a visit to the bakery
he wanted to become a baker; he would come away from the theatre with the
firm intention of becoming an actor. Valya was fond of dogs. All the dogs in
the neighbourhood treated him with great respect.
But all the same, Valya was just Valya, and Romashka was just Romashka.
Neither of them came anywhere near Pyotr.
I can't describe how I missed him.
I went round all the places we had roamed together, inquired about him
from all the street waifs and strays, and hung round the reception centres
and children's homes. He was nowhere to be found. Had he gone to Turkestan,
travelling in some box under an International Sleeping Car, I wondered. Or
had he returned home on foot from hungry Moscow? Who could say?
It was then, during my daily wanderings, that I came to know Moscow and
to love it. It was mysterious, vast, snowed-up, preoccupied with hunger and
war. Maps were hung up in public places, and the red thread held by little
flags passed somewhere between Kursk and Kharkov and was nearing Moscow.
Okhotny Ryad, the old shopping centre, was a long, low row of painted wooden
stalls and shops. Futurist artists had daubed strange pictures on its
walls-people with green faces, churches with falling cupolas. Similar
pictures decorated the tall fence on Tverskaya. ROSTA placards (Caricatures,
often with verse, put on the walls in the street for propaganda purposes in
the '20s) hung in the shop windows, saying:
Munch your pineapples,
Chew your grouse,
Your last day is coming,
Bourgeois louse/
These were the first verses I learned to read by myself.
CHAPTER TWO
SCHOOL
I believe I have already mentioned that the Education Department
regarded our children's home as a sort of hatchery for budding talent. The
Department considered that we were distinguished by having gifts for music,
painting or literature. Therefore, after lessons we were allowed to do as we
pleased. We were supposed to be freely developing our talents. And so we
were. Some of us ran down to the Moskva River to help the firemen catch fish
in the ice-holes, while others loitered about the Sukharevka Market, helping
themselves to anything that lay in temptation's way.
I spent most of my time indoors, however. We lived on the floor below
the school rooms and all school life passed before my eyes. It was an odd,
puzzling, complex life. I hung around groups of senior pupils, giving an ear
to their conversation. New attitudes, new ideas, new people. All this was as
unlike life in Ensk, my home town, as Ensk was unlike Moscow. For a long
time it all baffled me and kept me wondering.
One day I happened upon a meeting of fifth-formers, who were discussing
the question of whether or not to study. One scruffy-looking schoolboy, who
was greeted with cries of "Go it, Shrimpy!", argued that on no account
should they be forced to study. Attendance at school should be voluntary,
and marks given only by a majority vote.
"Bravo, Shrimpy!"
"Hear, hear!"
"Generally speaking, comrades, it's just a question of teaching staff.
Now take those teachers whose lessons are attended by an absolute minority.
I suggest that we set them a limit of five pupils. If less than five come to
the lesson, the teacher should get no rations that day."
"Hear, hear!"
"Sap!"
"Go and eat coke!"
"Bravo!"
Evidently they had in mind not all the teachers, but only one of them,
because they all suddenly turned their heads, whispering and nudging one
another, at the sight of a tall man with walrus moustache who appeared in
the doorway, and stood with folded arms, listening attentively to the
speaker.
"Who's that?" I asked Varya, a fat girl with thick plaits.
"That's Whiskers, my boy," Varya answered.
"What do you mean, whiskers?"
"Fancy not knowing that!"
I was soon to discover who it was that everyone in School 4 called
"Whiskers".
He was the geography teacher, Korablev, whom the whole school heartily
disliked. For one thing, the consensus of opinion was that he was a fool and
an ignorant one at that. Secondly, he turned up for his lesson every blessed
day and sat it out, even though there might be only three pupils in his
class. This simply got everyone's goat.
I looked at Korablev. I must have been staring, because all of a sudden
he stared back at me, ever so faintly aping my goggled look. I even fancied
that he smiled into his moustache. But Shrimpy was holding forth again, and
Korablev, turning his twinkling eye away from me, listened to him with close
attention.
CHAPTER THREE
THE OLD LADY FROM ENSK
I remember that day distinctly-a sunny day, with spring rain that kept
coming and going-the day I met the thin old lady in the green velvet coat in
Kudrinskaya Square. She was carrying a shopping bag full of all kinds of
things-potatoes, sorrel leaves, onions-and in her other hand a big umbrella.
Though she obviously found the bag heavy, she walked along briskly with an
air of preoccupation, and I could hear her counting to herself in a whisper:
"Mushrooms-half a pound-five hundred rubles; washing blue-a hundred and
fifty; beetroot-a hundred and fifty; milk-a pint-a hundred and fifty; prayer
for the dead-seven hundred and sixty rubles; three eggs-three hundred
rubles; confession-five hundred rubles." Prices were like that in those
days.
Finally, she drew a light sigh and put the bag down on a dry stone to
recover her breath.
"Let me help you, Grandma," I said.
"Go away, you rascal! I know your kind!"
She shook a threatening finger at me and picked up her bag.
I walked on. But we were both going in the same direction and presently
drew level with each other again. The old lady was obviously anxious to get
rid of me, but her burden made it difficult for her to get away.
"Look here. Grandma, if you think I'm going to steal anything, then
I'll help you for nothing," I said. "Cross my heart I will, I just can't see
you dragging that load."
The old lady got angry. She clutched her bag to her with one arm and
began to wave her umbrella at me with the other as though fighting off a
bee.
"Get along with you! I've had three lemons* stolen already. I know
you."
"Just as you like. It was the street boys who stole them from you, but
I'm from a children's home."
"You're just as bad a lot as the others."
She looked at me and I at her. Her nose was slightly tilted and had a
purposeful look about it. She seemed a kind old soul. Maybe she took a fancy
to me too, because she suddenly stopped brandishing her umbrella and
demanded: "Who are your parents?"
"I haven't any."
"Where d'you come from? Moscow?"
I realised at once that if I said I was a Muscovite, she would chase me
away. She probably thought it was Moscow boys who had stolen her money.
"No," I said, "I'm from Ensk."
Would you believe it, she was from Ensk too! Her eyes lit up and her
face grew kinder still.
"You're fibbing, you little liar," she said sternly. "The one who stole
the lemon from me said he wasn't from Moscow either. If you're from Ensk,
where did you live there?"
"On the Peshchinka, back of the Market Square."
"I don't believe you." This without conviction. "Peshchinka, you say?
There may be Peshchinkas in other places too. I don't remember you."
"You must have left the town a long time ago, when I was still little."
"It wasn't long ago, it was only recently. Come on, take the bag by one
handle, I'll take the other. Don't jerk it."
We carried the bag and chatted. I told her how Pyotr and I had headed
for Turkestan and got stranded in Moscow. She listened with interest.
"Hoity-toity! What cleverdicks! Globe-trotters, eh? Of all the crazy
ideas!"
As we passed our street I pointed out our school to her.
"We do belong to the same places, I see," the old lady said
enigmatically.
She lived in the Second Tverskaya-Yamskaya, in a little brick-built
house. I knew it by sight.
"That's where our headmaster lives," I said. "Maybe you know
him-Nikolai Antonich."
(*In those days of inflation a million ruble treasury note was
popularly called a "lemon". -Tr.).
"Is that so!" the old lady said. "And what's he like? Is he a good
Head?"
"Rather!"
I couldn't make out why she laughed. We went upstairs and stopped in
front of a door upholstered in clean oilcloth. There was a name on the
doorplate written in fanciful lettering which I hadn't time to read.
Whispering to herself, the old woman drew a key from her coat. I turned
to go, but she stopped me.
"I did it for nothing. Grandma."
"Then sit with me a bit for nothing."
She tiptoed into the little entrance hall and began to take her coat
off without putting on the light. She removed the coat, a tasselled shawl, a
sleeveless jacket, then another smaller shawl, a kerchief and so on. Then
she opened her umbrella and after that she disappeared. The next moment the
kitchen door opened and a little girl appeared in the doorway. I was almost
ready to believe that this was my old lady who had magically turned into a
little girl. But the next moment the old lady herself reappeared. She
stepped out of a cupboard in which she had been hanging up her shawls and
things.
"And this is Katerina Ivanovna," she said.
Katerina Ivanovna was about twelve, no older than I. But what a
difference! I wish I had the same poise she had, the same proud set of the
head, the same way of looking one straight in the face with her dark bright
eyes. She was rosy, but demure and had the same purposeful nose as the old
lady. All in all, she was pretty, but gave herself airs-you could tell that
at once.
"You can congratulate me, Katerina Ivanovna," the old lady said,
peeling off more clothes. "They've pinched a lemon again."
"Didn't I tell you to keep your money in your coat pocket," Katerina
Ivanovna said with annoyance.
"Coat pocket, you say? That's just where they pinched it from."
"Then you've been counting again. Grandma."
"No I wasn't! I had this young man here escorting me."
The girl looked at me. Till then she hadn't seemed to notice me.
"He carried my bag for me. How's your mother?"
"We're taking her temperature now," the girl said, regarding me coolly.
"Tut, tut!" the old lady said, thrown into a flutter. "Why so late? You
know the doctor said she was to have it taken at noon."
She hurried out and the girl and I were left by ourselves. For two
minutes or so we said nothing. Then frowning, she asked me gravely:
"Have you read Helen Robinson'!"
"No."
"Robinson CrusoeT
"No."
"Why not?"
I was about to tell her that it was only six months since I had learned
to read properly, but checked myself in time.
"I haven't got them."
"What form are you in?"
"I'm not in any form."
"He's a traveller," said the old lady, coming back. "Ninety-eight point
seven. He was footing it to Turkestan. Treat him nicely, Katya."
"Footing it? What d'you mean?"
"What I say. He hoofed it all the way."
In the hall, under the mirror, stood a little table, and Katya drew a
chair up to it, settled herself in it with her head resting on her hand and
said, "Well, tell me about it."
I had no desire to tell her anything-she gave herself such airs. If we
had made it and got to Turkestan that would be a different matter. I
therefore answered politely, "Oh, I don't feel like it. Some other time
perhaps."
The old lady put bread and jam in front of me, but I declined it,
saying, "I told you I did it for nothing."
I don't know why, but I got upset. I was even pleased that Katya had
reddened when I refused to tell her my story and made for the door.
"Come, come, don't be angry," the old lady said as she saw me out.
"What's your name?"
"Grigoriev, Alexander."
"Well, Alexander Grigoriev, goodbye, and thank you."
I stood for a while on the landing, trying to make out the name on the
doorplate. Kazarinov ... no, it wasn't Kazarinov...
"N. A. Tatarinov," I read it out suddenly.
Gosh! Tatarinov, Nikolai Antonich. Our Head. This was his flat.
CHAPTER FOUR
MORE FOOD FOR THOUGHT
We spent the summer at Silver Woods, just outside Moscow, in an old
deserted house which had lots of little passage steps, carved wooden
ceilings and corridors that unexpectedly ended in blank walls. The whole
place creaked-the doors in one key, the shutters in another. One large room
was boarded up, but even in there something creaked and rustled, and
suddenly there would come a measured rattling sound like that of a little
hammer in a striking clock tapping without striking the bell. In the attic
grew puffballs and foreign books lay scattered about with pages torn out of
them and covers missing.
Before the Revolution the house had belonged to an old gypsy countess.
A gypsy countess! How mysterious! It was rumoured that before she died she
had hidden away her valuables. Romashka searched for the treasure all
through the summer. Puny, big-headed, he prowled around the house with a
stick, tapping and listening. He tapped at night until he got a clip on the
ear from one of the older boys. At thirteen he was determined to get rich.
Whenever he spoke about money his pale ears would begin to burn. He was a
born treasure-seeker-superstitious and greedy.
Lilac grew thickly round the tumbledown arbours. Statues lined the
green paths. They were quite unlike those Greek gods. Those had been remote,
with white sightless eyes, whereas these were people, just like us.
Life was good only at the beginning of the summer, when we first moved
into Silver Woods. Afterwards things got worse. They all but stopped feeding
us. Our children's home was put under a system of "self-supply". We caught
fish and crabs, we sold lilac at the stadium when anything was on there, and
simply helped ourselves to anything we could lay hands on. In the evenings
we lit fires in the garden and roasted what we had bagged.
Here is a description of one such evening-they were all much alike.
We are sitting around our fire, tired out, hungry and ill-tempered.
Everything is black with smoke-the mess-tin, the sticks from which it hangs,
our faces and hands. Like cannibals getting ready to devour Captain Cook, we
sit in silence, staring into the fire. The smouldering brands suddenly blaze
up and fall apart, and a cap of curling, dark-red smoke, hangs over the
fire.
We are a "commune". The whole children's home is divided into communes.
Foraging on one's own is a hard job. Each commune has its chairman, its own
fire and its own reserve supply-whatever has not been eaten that day and is
left over for the next.
Our chairman is Stepka Ivanov, a fifteen-year-old boy with a smooth
mug. He is a greedy-guts and bully whom everyone fears.
"What about a game o' knuckles?" Stepka says lazily.
All are silent. No one cares to play knuckles. Stepka is sated, that's
why he wants to play.
"All right, Stepka. Only it's dark, you know," says Romashka.
"Know where it's dark? Get up!"
There was nothing our chairman liked more in the world than to play
knucklebones. But he cheated and everyone knew it. All except Valya and I
sucked up to him, especially Romashka. Romashka even lost to him on purpose
so's to keep in with him.
If you think we were roasting some dainty gamebird over our fire you
are mistaken. In our mess-tin, seized in battle from the kitchen, we were
cooking soup. It is real "soup made from sausage stick", as in the
fairy-tale which Serafima Petrovna had read to us during the winter. The
difference, if any, is that while that soup had been made from a mouse's
tail, ours had any odd thing put into that came to hand, sometimes even
frogs' legs.
And yet it wasn't a bad summer. It had stuck in my memory not because
we were poorly fed. I was used to that. I don't remember ever having had a
decent meal those days. The reason I remember this summer was quite a
different one. It was then for the first time that I gained a sense of
self-respect.
It happened at the end of August, shortly before we went back to town,
and around one of those fires on which we were cooking our supper. Stepka
all of a sudden announced a new procedure for eating. Up to now we had eaten
from the one pot in turn, spoon by spoon. Stepka started, as chairman, then
Romashka, and so on. But now we were to tuck in all together while the soup
was still hot, the quickest getting the most.
Nobody liked the new arrangement. No wonder! With a chairman like ours
no one stood a chance. He could wolf down the whole pot in no time.
"Nothing doing," Valya said with decision.
This was greeted with a hubbub of approval. Stepka slowly got up,
dusted his knees and hit Valya in the face. It was a smashing blow that sent
the blood gushing over his face. It must have got into his eyes too, because
he started to wave his arms about like a blind man. "Well," Stepka drawled,
"anyone else asking for it?"
I was the smallest boy in the commune, and he could have mopped up the
floor with me, of course. Nevertheless I hit out at Stepka. All at once he
staggered and slumped down. I don't know where I had struck him, but he sat
on the ground blinking, wearing a sort of thoughtful expression. The next
minute he was up and made a rush at me, but now the other boys took my part.
Stepka was thrashed like the cur he was. While he lay by the fire, howling,
we hastily elected another chairman-me. Stepka, of course, did not vote. In
any case he would have been in a minority of one, because I was elected
unanimously.
Oddly enough, this scrap was my first act of social service. I heard
the boys say of me: "He's got plenty of guts." I had guts! Now, what sort of
person was I? Here was food for thought indeed.
CHAPTER FIVE
IS THERE SALT IN SNOW?
Nothing changed in our school life that year except that I had now
become a pupil of Form 3. As usual, Korablev turned up at school at 10 a.m.
He would arrive in a long autumn overcoat and a wide-brimmed hat, leisurely
comb his moustache in front of the looking-glass and go in to his classroom.
He asked no questions and set no homework. He simply related something
or read to us. It turned out that he had been a traveller and had been all
over the world. In India he had seen yogi conjurors who had been buried in
the ground for a year and then got up as alive and well as anything. In
China he had eaten the tastiest of Chinese dishes-rotten eggs. In Persia he
had witnessed the sacrificial feats of the Mohammedans.
It was not until several years later that I learned he had never been
outside Russia. He had made it all up, but how interestingly! Although, for
some reason many had said that he was a fool, none could maintain that he
knew nothing.
As before, the chief figure at our school was the Head, Nikolai
Antonich. He made all decisions, went into everything, attended all
meetings. The senior boys visited him at home to "thrash things out". One
day I was lounging about the assembly hall, trying to make up my mind
whether to go down to the Moskva River or to Sparrow Hills, when the doors
of the teachers' room opened and Nikolai Antonich beckoned to me.
"Grigoriev," he said (he had a reputation for knowing everyone in the
school by name). "You know where I live, don't you?"
I said that I did.
"And do you know what a lactometer is?"
I said that I didn't.
"It's an instrument which tells you how much water there is in the
milk. As we know," he went on, raising a finger, "the women who sell milk on
the market dilute their milk with water. If you put the lactometer in such
milk you will see how much milk there is and how much water. Do you
understand?"
"Yes."
"Well, go and fetch it to me."
He wrote a note.
"Mind you don't break it. It's made of glass."
I was to give the note to Nina Kapitonovna. I had no idea that this was
the name of the old lady from Ensk. But instead of the old lady, the door
was opened by a spare little woman in a black dress.
"What do you want, boy?"
"Nikolai Antonich sent me."
The woman, of course, was Katya's mother and the old lady's daughter.
All three had the same purposeful noses, the same dark, lively eyes. But the
granddaughter and her grandmother were brighter looking. The daughter had a
drooping careworn expression.
"Lactometer?" she said in a puzzled tone, after she had read the note.
"Ah, yes!"
She went into the kitchen and returned with the lactometer in her hand.
I was disappointed. It was just like a thermometer, only a little bigger.
"Be careful you don't break it."
"Me break it?" I replied with scom.
I remember distinctly that the daring idea of testing the lactometer
for snow salt struck me a minute or two after Katya's mother had shut the
door behind me.
I had just reached the bottom of the stairs and stood there gripping
the instrument with my hand in my pocket. Pyotr had once said that snow had
salt in it. Would the lactometer show that salt or was Pyotr fibbing? That
was the question. It needed testing.
I chose a quiet spot behind a shed, next to a refuse dump. A little
house was built of bricks in the trodden-down snow, from which a black
thread, resting on pegs, ran round the back of the shed- the children had
probably been playing a field telephone. I breathed on the lactometer and
with a beating heart stuck it into the snow next to the little house. You
can judge what a stupid head I was when I tell you that, after a while, I
pulled the lactometer out of the snow and finding no change in it, I stuck
it back again upside down.
Nearby, I heard someone gasp. I turned round.
"Run! You'll be blown up!" came a shout from inside the shed. . It all
happened in a matter of seconds. A girl in an unbuttoned overcoat rushed out
of the shed towards me. "Katya," I thought, and reached for the instrument.
But Katya grasped my arm and dragged me away. I tried to push her off and we
both fell in the snow. Bang! Pieces of brick flew through the air, and
powdery snow rose behind us in a white cloud and settled on us.
I had been under fire once before, at my mother's funeral, but this was
much more terrifying. Rumblings and explosions still came from the refuse
dump, and ea