From an early age I became adept at walking from place to place looking at the ground. Nobody in Russia looks anyone else on the street in the eye, but with one of my hands firmly in the grip of my mother’s clasp, no one had a better reason than me not to look up at what was coming. Anything could have happened. Besides, if I had looked up I would probably have just laughed. Even today, if there is someone in the room with me here when this private investigator calls, I will probably laugh. I even laughed in Lenin’s tomb.
I was eight or nine and it was to be a very special day for us, part of the rites of the Young Pioneers. There was nothing special about being a Young Pioneer. Every child of that age was a Pioneer, but not every group of Young Pioneers got to visit Lenin’s tomb. Someone had to have known someone or owed someone for this to have happened. What a waste of a favor! We were taken by bus for maybe half an hour from school to Red Square. Everyone was excited, even me. I didn’t know what to expect. I remember we were all singing “Lenin Loves Me” on the bus. About twenty years later I heard the same tune coming out of a Sunday school here in Melbourne. This time children were singing “Jesus Loves Me.”
This was the day we were given our red ties. It signified a certain coming-of-age. First, at six or so, you were a Young October, and then at seven or eight a Young Pioneer. Like everywhere else there was a queue. Lenin’s tomb was the regime’s sanctioned place of pilgrimage. Looking back now, I find it hard to believe people actually thought they could find salvation by coming there, but it seems that that’s what they thought. People from all over the country, old men and women, tourists and us, this day’s little children, all of us waiting, then climbing underground down the many stairs. There was the smell of sweat, everybody’s sweat mixed with breath. The air that came in with us lived and died a life that was not ours. It was not really air but we breathed it anyway. By the time we got into the tunnel leading to the tomb, no one was excited anymore. Many of us were scared. We were made to keep moving, probably because so many people wanted to see him but also perhaps to prevent anyone looking too long.
The chamber containing the body was dark except for the blue light that shone in a stream over him. There was an unfamiliar smell, presumably of embalming fluid. It wrestled with the body odor and the ersatz air. I thought this had to be a preliminary tomb, the body perhaps of one of his lieutenants. I knew his face so well. This was not him. This was a shrivelled nothing, a head with garish makeup and two big hands protruding from under a blanket. No syphilitic mutant rotting in the spring thaw could look this ghastly. Everyone hurried past as fast as they could and up the stairs on the other side, desperate for some street air. The creature we had seen was not the revolutionary father we had been promised. We were not inspired. For most of us it was our first dead body and we were just frightened. Many of the girls were sick, vomiting on the ground near the exit to the tomb. Not me, though. My stomach was too strong. It must have been a bizarre sight, all these children staggering around in each other’s vomit outside the most sacred site in the whole of the USSR, crying, bewildered, disappointed. I laughed.
The Egyptians perfected embalming thousands of years ago, but they apparently took the secret with them. The Russians certainly did not have it. This was not the Lenin I knew so well from my father’s plaster molds. My father worked for the Ministry of Culture. It was by the fervor of his public adulation there of Lenin and Brezhnev that he had got me enrolled in my school. It was a special school, privileged. We learned English from the age of seven and were taught up to four of our subjects in English. We had computers, big and slow, but we had them in the seventies, the halcyon days of Comrade Brezhnev, whom we had to thank for everything. It was a model school. Foreigners were frequently escorted around the grounds and classrooms. We would greet them in English, just briefly.
The Ministry of Culture was responsible for distributing the sculptures and statues, and eventually an enormous statue of Lenin stood proudly and firmly outside my school, a testament to my father’s desire for me to attend there. He always wanted me to be fluent in English. My school was just about the only sanctioned place for this and, in addition to a more or less benign internal regime, its general academic standard was excellent. It took my father more than two years to get me in. I wasn’t supposed to go there because we lived in another district. We lived in the Arbat district till I was five or six, and at first I went to the local primary school. I thought it was fine, but my father had other plans. He has always had other plans. So with Lenin firmly ensconced in the foreground, I started this new school, one of the most prestigious true Communism had to offer. It was part of my father’s plan to prepare me for a life outside the Soviet Union.
Most of the students were Jewish, their parents having done everything they could to get their children in there, and almost all the language teachers were Jews. The school did what it could to dispel the impression that it was a Jewish school, but it was largely in vain. Every teacher kept a roll which listed the nationality of each student next to his name. We never knew why they needed our nationalities and no one ever asked. Anyone thought to look really Jewish was “Armenian” and we got on with our work, stopping only to be shown off, like landlocked dolphins, to hard-currency foreign dignatories. There was a certain irony to this, the foreigners coming along to see us being groomed, since many of us went on to work for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where, if we were not translators, we either spied or defected. A lot of people in Foreign Affairs were “Armenian.”
I was always in awe of my father’s determination, literally in awe, a combination of reverence and fear. What was I afraid of? My mother said it would save us or kill him. He was very strong, not tall, thick hands and hairy, everywhere but on his head. When Pavel, my younger brother, was little, he would often watch my father dry himself after a shower, not saying anything, just watching through the gap in the door. Pavel used to have his father’s physical strength. Maybe he still has it.
There were four of us in the two-bedroom apartment. We were lucky to have it. My mother and father kept their respective apartments for years after we were born. They were not married. My surname, Gamarkin, is my mother’s maiden name. Our father didn’t want to get married until they had secured adequate accommodation. Married couples had to give up one of their apartments and live in the other one, even though it might be a one-bedroom apartment meant for a single person. If you wanted a bigger one, you went on a waiting list. If you had children they waited with you. When I was five or six and Pavel was one or two, we left the Arbat and moved into the larger apartment in Novie Cheremushky. The mixture of working class and intelligentsia in the area made for interesting neighbors. The apartments were relatively new, built in the Khrushchev era. But they were falling apart. The plaster inside was flaking, but between each wall of flaking plaster we had more space, two rooms plus a kitchen and bathroom. My mother did our laundry in the bathroom or else sent it out. This was quite common. At that time no one had washing machines.
My father was an economist, at least by training. He had studied economics at university with his usual foresight and with no intention of teaching or working as an economist. Most of the people with whom he had studied became directors of stores. This was the equivalent in the West of a managing director of a small department store, and one could live relatively well doing this. But to be successful in this job you had to steal. Directors were given quotas that could not be filled by legal means. For example, a director might be ordered to sell a certain number of radios whether he had them to sell or not. You have to be quite an economist to do this. In order to get enough radios, the director would have to buy them on the black market. Sometimes he would have to pay the militia, the police, to get them for him or else pay them not to see him get them for himself. Perhaps he had some surplus coats to exchange? Otherwise all payments would have to be made in black money, money which officially he never had but which was in reality the only means by which he kept himself going.
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A store director meets people, makes contacts, learns how things can be obtained and takes delivery of a batch of radios to fill his quota of radios to be sold. What if they’re defective? He’ll clean them up a little. What if they’re still obviously inadequate for performing all the tasks expected of a radio? He cannot complain to his suppliers that the radios are defective. He’s lucky to have them. There are no warranties to sue on. To whom can he complain? He will have to get them fixed, again with black money. It can’t show up on the books. Will he get a refund because the goods are faulty? Will he get credit from the supplier? They’re not dealing in radios anymore. How much are they worth in stockings, vodka, toothpaste, refrigerators or compressors? With no refunds and no credit, still the director must pay in full and on time. Otherwise there might be an anonymous call to Internal Affairs. Questions might be asked. What were they worth? Up to twenty-five years. “Certainly,” my father said, “store directors can make a lot of black money, but can they sleep at night?” My father was already a light sleeper.
He maintained ties with his economist colleagues but chose not to work as an economist. He claimed that, nonetheless, he was able to get anybody anything. By day he worked at the Ministry of Culture and at night he kept up with his economics. Early on he was sent to the Moscow Planetarium. A stubborn pragmatist with one foot planted firmly on the ground and the other ready to make a move at the hint of an opportunity presenting itself, each day he showed everyone the stars. He was taken under the wing of one of the lecturers at the Planetarium, a renowned astronomer and alcoholic. Often my father would cover for him, even at times delivering his lectures. The astronomer got my father a job as a bookkeeper. He had him promoted to a certain otherwise un-achievable level and advised him to join the Party, which my father did. I was always surprised he hadn’t done it earlier. Sometime not long after the middle of the century, he met my mother. She says that she fell in love. She was never sure about him.
I don’t blame her uncertainty, this orphan with rich dark eyes, curves that would outlast the regime, white skin like silk, full round breasts and a mouth intolerant of stupidity. There was a danger about her with her mane of black hair. And she was Jewish. If she needed him at all, she hated herself for it and tried never to let it show. So what if he was a Jew, this barber-shop baritone stamp-collecting Party member with a limp, economist to the stars from the Ministry of Culture. She could see his mind working. This was no arse-kissing apparatchik. But although she could see his mind working, could see it in his eyes and could see the way he saw her in his eyes, she was never sure that he loved her. This man could get anybody anything. How, then, could he let her go by? He was not about to. She was never sure if this was love or whether it even permitted love.
I had often wondered but never asked whether she had, at that time, any picture of their coming life together or of the life she wanted them to have. What exactly did she think she was getting herself into? But perhaps I was being unfair. Implicit in these questions was the assumption that all that had happened could be traced, step by step, to flaws in my father: that our situation was all his fault. Was he connected to crisis as inevitably as one pole of a magnet to the other? Tempting as this assumption was, I did not succumb to it. Pavel had. He looked for easy explanations and solutions. That was why I was waiting for some news from a private investigator, news for which I was paying in more ways than one, news I was dreading. It was hard enough pretending to be calm at work; it was almost impossible at home in front of my mother. I was sure she suspected something.
But what was she thinking, then, when they got together? She knew from an early age that she was not born under some lucky star but under an oppressive, too often murderous red one. Unlike my father, she was never much impressed by stars of any kind. She was fond of a line by Pushkin’s friend Anton Delvig: The nearer to heaven, the colder it gets. But the converse is not true. Her feet never left the ground anymore and still I had trouble keeping my mother warm.
They worked by day and studied at night. She studied Russian literature. He was transferred from the Planetarium to the Ministry itself, where he was put in charge of organizing exhibitions and performances coming to and from the Soviet Union. Transportation, insurance, propaganda, it was all up to him. At first she worked as an editor for a naval magazine that was distributed to ships in the various fleets, but later, through his position, my father got her a job as an archivist in a fine-art gallery and museum not far from his office. A jealous man, he later got her an office within the Ministry building directly opposite his office. She divided her working day between the gallery and the office, both of which were about two minutes from my father’s apartment. (This was unheard-of. It was not uncommon for Russians to travel two hours to work and two hours back.) By the time Pavel and I were at school, she was able to come and go during the school holidays on the pretext that she was working at home preparing a catalogue. Of course, we never let her do any work.
My father’s direct superior was a half Jewish and half German Russian and one of the greatest anti-Semites my father had ever encountered. He never admitted that he was half Jewish and he brought his son up to be virulently anti-Semitic. There would have been nothing wrong with this for a Russian teenager except that the boy had the misfortune of frequently being mistaken for a Jew and beaten up for it. More so than Pavel or I or any of the “Armenians” at school with me, this boy looked the way Russians liked their Jews to look.
Although my father’s superior hated my father for his Jewish-ness and his education (he himself was not educated), he was in the uncomfortable position of relying on my father’s contacts. Short, with thick-rimmed glasses and an ever-spreading behind, he looked to his coworkers like a fleshy malevolent triangle with bad breath. An ignorant and paranoid man, he liked to bully and intimidate those around and particularly those below him. A good Party man, he ingratiated himself with his superiors by crediting to himself the achievements of others.
Behind his back, people referred to him as Burzhuiki (pot-bellied stove) No. 1 but his name was Zwier, an uncomfortably German-Jewish sounding name. (His wife was Burzhuiki No. 2, and she was the only person outside the Party of whom he was afraid.) Being half German and half Jewish was about the worst combination you could be in Russia in the middle decade of this century, and it took some extensive betrayals for Zwier to live as well as he did. In the early fifties, during the purges, he was recruited by the KGB and assigned to befriend various Jews in the Party and the bureaucracy to find something for which they could be tried. In the Ministry of Culture he gave vague or impossible orders which he would later deny in fits of rage during which his breath and saliva intermingled to form a previously unknown toxic substance that flew from his mouth or hung like string from his lips. This was the man to whom my father had to report every day.
Every day this man kept pushing my father closer and closer to the edge, to the border either of the country or of his sanity. I could not count the number of times my father came home furious, telling my mother to start tomorrow, to get the papers. “We’re leaving!” She would always listen to him, occasionally joining in his denunciation of all the liars and criminals, from Zwier and everyone in the Ministry to Brezhnev himself, and all the way back to Stalin, before returning to the preparation of dinner. Pavel and I knew to keep away from him at those times.
Then my father would quieten and unwind by the radio, listening to the BBC or the Free Voice of Europe. By the time dinner was on the table, it would be okay to talk to him, gently, and by the end of the night the four of us would be in bed, listening to my mother as she read aloud to us Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn. We knew never to say anything about it, just as we knew never to repeat any jokes they told each other.
This was a common pattern for years. They were always talking about leaving, and every time he told her to start making the applications, he meant it at the time. But then she would calm him and the cycle would start again. Emigrating meant applying to l
ive in Israel. The authorities would not have even pretended to consider any applications my parents might have made to live somewhere else. So whenever they talked about leaving, it was for Israel. My parents were not particularly fervent Zionists. In Russia it was hard to be. The official media equated Zionism with Fascism. Pravda forever carried anti-Zionist cartoons. Even in 1967 during the Six-Day War, the news reports were anti-Israeli. My parents and all the Jews they knew were convinced Israel was going to be destroyed. When my father heard on the radio that Israel had won the war, he went out drinking in the streets like the Russians he hated. My mother waited up all night for him, thinking he had been arrested. She always thought this if he were at all late, which was funny, because she was the one with the dangerous mouth. He was a master of talking to himself under his breath.
After 1967 there was for a while, despite the propaganda, a tiny, barely perceptible defiant spring in the step of many of the Jews my parents knew. I had a cousin, a star pupil, a physicist who joined an underground Hebrew class. At twenty-three he was risking everything but said he didn’t care. He and his new wife were going to Israel. Not long after they joined, the class was infiltrated and they were exposed. That was it. They became otkazniks, refuseniks. He started to organize demonstrations. Initially his friends and family gave them moral support, but after a while it became dangerous even to meet with them. My father spoke highly of him. Although he never attended any of my cousin’s demonstrations, he met with him often. My cousin was told he would not be permitted to leave the country for at least ten years because he was a physicist. His parents were devastated and eventually his young wife committed suicide.