Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One
POX
It was a strange coincidence, the news coming on the same day: there was smallpox in Moscow, and my mother was back in town.
We’d heard about the quarantine in the morning: Restricted civilian movement until otherwise reversed by the Protectorate of Moscow Region Health Inspectorate and Population Control as ordered by the Ministry of Health, USSR. So by dinnertime, when Matron took me aside to tell me that my mother had been released, there was no way to know if that meant I would see her in a matter of days, or of weeks.
I wasn’t sure which I preferred.
Of course it was possible I wouldn’t see her at all. She didn’t have to come looking for me. My mother had been gone eight years, and in all that time her name was unmentionable. Not since I was seven years old had I heard it pronounced. When Matron said it aloud, it sounded every bit as archaic and unlikely as “the pox.”
“Vera Konstantinovna Kravshina has been released,” is what she said. “It is her right, as a rehabilitated citizen, to reclaim you from the state’s ward. Because you are not yet of legal age, Svetlana, you have no input in the matter. If anyone is going to deny your mother’s petition, it will be me.”
I could smell dinner being prepared in the kitchen at the end of the corridor. The smog of stuffed cabbage was as familiar as the tang of old books and wet wool, but for years afterward the smell would cause me a moment of panic. A moment when I felt I was about to be thrown to the wolves.
“Do you understand, Svetlana? It is entirely my decision whether you rejoin your mother and her compromised history . . . or you stay here with us, in the House. The matter is in my hands.”
But she was wrong, Matron was. It was not entirely in her hands and neither was I. There were others making the decisions. I just didn’t know it yet. Just like I didn’t know for sure who was the wolf.
Later that afternoon, in the courtyard with Oksana, I repeated Matron’s words about my leaving the House.
“A pox on both your houses!” Oksana retorted.
It was her favorite new curse. Our teacher, Lydia Timofeevna, had passed out the scenes from Romeo and Juliet the week before the smallpox outbreak. Most teachers in the tenth class assigned stories about handsome farmers, clever shepherdesses, and brave soldiers; tales full of burbling streams and birch trees. In these stories there was plenty of collective achievement securing the glory of the Motherland . . . but no teen sex. No duels. No angry curses on aristocrats.
But Lydia Timofeevna had ignored the Soviet Ministry of Education’s standard fare and handed us a soap opera from Verona.
“Shakespeare, boys and girls, was an English imperialist dog,” she declared. “But he was a dog with perfect pentameter, razor-sharp satire, and the barbed tongue of a true class warrior. And that, children, is something to make note of.”
Oksana had made note. She had memorized whole passages, sharpening her barbed tongue. She even dug up the original and mined it for its most peculiar Shakespearean phrases, which she then taught to me. I was a poor student, but in memorizing one simple phrase: “I do bite my thumb, good sir,” I effectively doubled my primitive English vocabulary.
When Matron posted the statement of quarantine as pertaining to all municipal housing blocks in the meeting room, Oksana greeted it as Mercutio would: “A pox on both your houses!”
Which meant, of course, a pox on our House.
There was only one House for me and Oksana. It was a pale yellow four-story brick of a building on the end of a quiet street that curved with the river. There were other houses on the street—squat piles from the last century in various states of dilapidation—but there was only one House. The sign on the gate identified it: the house for orphaned children, #36. It was no secret what kind of orphans we were—solo not because of death or abandonment, but because our parents were political suicides. Orphanage #36 was exclusively for the children of Enemies of the People. It had been my home for more than half my life.
By then, eight years seemed like a long time to stay put in one house. In our Soviet Union, the authorities were always plucking citizens from their beds and rearranging them according to some mysterious political calculus. I sometimes wondered how many times my mother had changed beds, stared at new walls, made new neighbors. I knew from her letters that she had passed through at least three different prison camps, maybe in three different time zones.
Enemies of the People pay for their crimes with hard labor and countless kilometers.
But by the autumn of 1958, they were making the long trip back. Comrade Stalin was gone, and the new leader had called for an era of forgiveness. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were released from the prison Gulag, my mother among them. We had seen them, the lost souls turning up on the train platforms of Moscow looking like ghosts from a darker time. They didn’t look forgiven. Forgotten, maybe. But even that wasn’t really true. We had only pretended to forget. About Stalin and the nights when our neighbors were dragged away in their pajamas. About the photographs we burned and the letters we hid. About the time when they asked us if we had ever heard our parents whispering, and we nodded, once: yes.
Anyway, it made no difference. Whether they had been pardoned by the State or forgiven by the People, it didn’t change who we were: We were, and always would be, the children of Enemies of the People. We were wards of Orphanage #36. We were tainted.
A pox on our House, indeed.
Oksana handed me the ping-pong ball and propped up the sagging net with a twig. A gust of wind blew a fresh shower of leaves into the courtyard. November nibbled at my fingers as I bounced the ball on the dilapidated table. She said, “The busses are still running. In theory your mother could show up any minute.”
I made a spastic serve and she went to fetch the ball. On the other side of the brick wall, the antennae of a passing trolleybus sparked against the electric cables hanging over the street.
“Is it the number twelve?” I asked.
The #12 trolley left from Kursky Station. It was the bus that my mother would take if she were coming to the House.
“Fie, ’tis no number twelve,” said Oksana, now the bard of public transport. “That fine beast is a noble stag cut loose from a primordial wood.”
“And I suppose you will be comparing it to a summer day?”
We were both at the gate now. Oksana looked out. I didn’t. There was no way I was going to star in some maudlin scene: anxious mother, pale-faced daughter, hands gripping iron bars, tearful reunion. All forgiven. All forgotten.
But Oksana said, “Look,” so I did. A woman was climbing off the bus at our stop.
“Is it her?” whispered Oksana.
The bus pulled away. The woman’s face was hidden. She had bent over to rearrange the contents of her shopping bags. I noticed her stocking, which had slid below her knee. I noticed a dried brown leaf that had fastened itself to her coat sleeve. There was nothing else to notice. She was a lady with baggage. She could have been thirty or a hundred and thirty. She could have come from the Gulag or from the other side of town. I had no idea if she was my mother.
“Is it her?” Oksana said again.
The woman lifted the bags. She was crossing the street, facing us, closing the gap. In a moment she would be at the gate, and now I noticed everything: the slight limp, the thin lips, the fatigue, and the impatience. I noticed carrot greens sprouting from one of the net bags. The woman glanced at the plaque on the gate and halted. She looked me full in the face. Then, the woman who was not my mother spat deliberately on the ground and kept walking.
“Parasites,” we heard her mutter.
A single potato dropped from one of her net bags and rolled toward us. Oksana lunged through the gate and grabbed it. She hurled it at the woman’s back. She missed.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, slipping an arm around my waist. “In a matter of months we will be sixteen. Old enough to go wherever we want. Neither Matron nor your mother will have any claim on you. We’ll pack a bag of liverwurst and gingerbread and set out for the Altai, just like the sleeping twins of the Phoenix Plains.”
I didn’t answer. I had never heard of the sleeping twins of the Phoenix Plains, but I loved that they wandered somewhere in Oksana’s clever head. Still, I knew that was not our fate—a life of vagabond gingerbread. Our fate was to be a number in a ledger of Orphanage #36. We might soon be free of its walls, but we would never be free of its stigma. Even far away in the Altai.
Unless.
“Unless what?”
I hadn’t meant to say it out loud.
“Unless what, Svet? Unless your mother makes you go live with her in some barrack halfway house for the officially pardoned outcasts of the Gulag?”
“No.” I shook my head. My idea of escape was wilder than an official pardon, and Oksana knew it.
“Oh, right,” she said. She stooped to pluck the ping-pong ball from the weeds. “I forgot. There’s no ballet out on the Phoenix Plains. Guess I’ll have to find another twin.”
I had only been studying ballet for four years. But I knew I was good. Really good. Just last week I reached a new level: a triple pirouette level; a sustained 120-degree side extension level; a level of musical and physical connection that had, at its hot core, an epiphany. This. This would save me. Ballet would be my ticket. My exit. I blazed through that lesson like a fire. I was no nomad of the Phoenix Plains—I, myself, was the phoenix, the firebird.
Sure enough, at the end of the lesson, Elena Mikhailovna had kept me back to tell me that if I continued to progress through the winter, she would recommend me for the Bolshoi Academy in the spring. Since then, my hazy horizon was crystal clear. No mirage on some fairy-tale plain.
“I have a chance,” I said. “The only chance I will ever have.”
“All right then,” Oksana said, her face serious. “I’ll stay, too. I’ll stay right here in Moscow. And when you get cast as Juliet at the Bolshoi Ballet, I’ll be your Mercutio.”
I laughed. Romeo and Juliet might be ideologically suspect as a play, but as a ballet, it was the sensation of the season. As long as the bourgeois lovers were silent and choreographed by Communists, the Soviet Ministry of Culture approved of their star-crossed plight. Even celebrated it. Especially if Galina Ulanova, the Bolshoi’s leading lady, danced the role of Juliet.
“I’m not sure Ulanova will approve of your plan,” I said.
“Ulanova!” cackled Oksana. “She’s forty years old, Sveta! You do realize that Juliet is supposed to be fourteen? Now please tell me how Galina Ulanova, fabulous as she may be, can pretend to be a fourteen-year-old virgin?”
“Ulanova’s unsurpassed technical maturity brings depth to an emotionally underdeveloped character,” I said, but Oksana just rolled her eyes and gave me a look that said: balls.
“Besides,” I said, “Juliet loses her virginity halfway through the story, remember? Why else would she be willing to die for that moony-eyed Romeo?”
Oksana twirled her paddle and wrinkled her nose.
“Well, all I know is that when you dance Juliet, nobody will have to praise your ‘technical maturity’ because your Juliet will actually be a teenager. A real teenager with raven hair, a face as fair as the east, and a body the boys die for. Just like Bill-chik, that imperialist hack, intended.”
We played until the dark swallowed the ping-pong ball completely. Then we went inside. Another day had passed and we still hadn’t caught smallpox. And I still hadn’t seen my mother.
”Well, clearly, this outbreak just shows that we have gotten too friendly with India. India’s Communist Party apparatus is still unformed and it will never catch up with the Soviet Union in technological, scientific, or medical achievements.”
That was Lara V., of course. Lara was a model student. She got excellent marks, wore her hair in perfect plaits, and was the best speaker in Orphanage #36’s chapter of the Communist Youth Union, the Komsomol. She also had a beautiful singing voice. I liked Lara all right, but mostly when she was singing.
“That is an informed answer,” said Andrei Samoilovich with nasal ambivalence. He tapped his pen on his cheek, a nervous habit that had given our geography teacher a permanent set of inky freckles. “But we cannot state, explicitly, that the outbreak of this ancient disease, which has no place in our highly developed society, necessitates a change in foreign policy. It is, after all, the duty of the Soviet Union to assist all countries trapped in a backward system to further their political and economic growth until they have achieved the same level of socialized harmony and Party unity as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
Lara nodded. Oksana stifled a yawn. I wrote the words “Party unity” on my slate and gave them a mustache like Comrade Stalin’s. You could do that now. Now that Stalin was dead and his “excesses” exposed, you could make jokes. Like the one about his mustache wandering off his face to snack on the crumbs in his lap. That kind of joke. You could even call the new leader—jolly, bald, gap-toothed Nikita Khrushchev—by silly nicknames: Nikitinka, Nikitushka, Nikitulka.
“In this instance, we have to consider the recklessness of the individual who brought this scourge upon us,” continued Andrei Samoilovich. “Was it not the fault of the citizen himself? This artist, whose productivity was minimal at best? Was it not his responsibility to be more vigilant while on foreign soil and prevent this terrible biological contagion?”
His beady eyes were roaming. I ducked them. I didn’t want to answer the question, though its answer was obvious. The answer was: “Yes, Andrei Samoilovich. It was the comrade-artist’s duty to be more vigilant while on foreign soil.”
But I felt sorry for the poor bugger who had brought smallpox back from India. He was a ceramicist or something, traveling with a delegation of artists to a conference in Delhi. He died a week after they returned. So did half of his family and an old man who lived in their communal apartment. That’s when the posters appeared in the subway and the announcements began on the radio. That’s when people began talking disapprovingly about “cultural exchanges” and “folk art.”
All I could think about—beyond the horrors of the disease that, according to Rosa D.’s medical textbook, turned your skin to scabs and bled you from the inside out—was how that ceramicist must have felt when he was told: Your art is exceptional. Your talent will be rewarded. You will represent your country and your people on the world stage!
What I wouldn’t give to hear those words, to be recognized and chosen.
But that’s something you didn’t admit if you were a good Soviet citizen. You couldn’t suggest that you were better, let alone exceptional. And you couldn’t be jealous of someone else’s achievements, because there’s no envy among comrades. A true Soviet knew not to covet good fortune—better to be smug at bad luck. Better to sneer slightly, like Andrei Samoilovich did when he pronounced the word “ceramicist.”
I imagined the artist I secretly envied exploring an exotic city, meeting fellow potters from all over the world, buying his wife a silk sari maybe, or lotus tea, and thinking the whole time, today New Delhi, tomorrow—the world!
It didn’t work out, though, for the poxy potter. Instead, it was today New Delhi, tomorrow—the grave.
So when Andrei Samoilovich called my name I just said, “Certainly it was his fault. He’s dead, after all.”
