A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka: A Memoir Read online

  Everyone in first grade is lined up in a hallway with brown walls painted with murals of Pioneers, boys and girls helping the elderly and planting trees. There are posters of bald Adult Lenin, too, with slogans like “Be Ready! Always Be Ready!!” and other quotes centered on readiness and the importance of education. Suddenly the boy at the front of the line is told to run and he runs and we follow, up the stairs and down the stairs, outside to the pavement and inside to the hallways, and the gas mask lenses are fogged up and dirty and all I see are gray cement blurs when we run outside, and red-and-brown mural blurs when we run inside.

  It’s October, so most of us have learned our way around the building, and the run goes smoothly. We loop through the school several times, corridor by corridor, classroom by classroom, and then we take off the masks and split up by class, and then I’m lying on the floor, my arms pinned by the tall brother, the older one, and someone’s at my legs, the fat kid with the big head, I think, and my forehead’s bleeding, and I’m trying to lift my head up, and it makes the blood flow into my eyes and down my nose. The blood obscures my vision but I can still make him out, the little kid, the younger brother, straddling my chest and shoving a shit-stained wad of toilet paper in front of my eyes. “This is what you are, this is what you all are,” he hisses, and the shit is brown, and his face is tan, almost dark brown, and his eyes are receded and black, and his uniform is dark blue, and the Lenin pin is dark red, and what stands out from the whole dull palette are his bright white teeth that spread over half his face.

  His face is frozen. I can hear “zhid” and “shit,” and feel the spit as it shoots out his mouth, but his face is trapped in that gargoyle smile. They’re all frozen—I see hands, pressing down on my arms and legs, I see faces in the periphery, still, immobile, bored—they’re doing this all in a perfunctory way, as if they have to, and they’re just frozen in the middle of their task. A Squad of Pioneers flutters by, or maybe it’s a Watchgroup, I can’t tell the difference, and their red kerchiefs look like a flock of colorful birds. The younger brother’s grin is not happy, it’s more of a scowl, a baring that cuts through the smell of the shit and the blurry red fog of the blood, and I see the teeth, and the brown of the hallway, and blue blurs of uniforms and the gray-and-white blur of Anna Konstantinovna as she opens the door and calmly reminds us that it’s time for class. The late bell rings, a few more punches, another shit smear on my face, and my classmates and I head in to learn.

  I’m still not clear as to why we had to run in the gas masks. Anna Konstantinovna briefly alluded to the Capitalists and said that it was vital to be prepared in case they attacked, and it must’ve been a satisfactory explanation, because I didn’t push her for further clarification, and neither did any of my classmates. But that’s the only regular school day I can vividly recall. The rest of it, Soviet poetry and Ukrainian grammar, blood and shit, Revolutionary history and gym class, it all blends together and I remember little. I probably wouldn’t have remembered that day, either, except for the masks—the masks were kind of neat, and they made the day stand out.

  * * *

  To my memory’s credit, I missed about half of my first two years of school. Mom drew on her contacts among city doctors to get me extended-absence notes whenever I fell ill, which was frequent, and so I stayed home as much as possible. Overall, I didn’t mind being sick: there were always books to read, Grandma allowed me to hang out with her when she was cooking dinner, and at night my parents and sister came home and then I could tell Mom about what I’d read or hammer out plots to annoy my sister, Lina.

  If the weather was nice, I’d tag along with Dad for a walk in a little lilac park behind the apartment complex. He was an engineer who traveled all over the Union to fix turbines, and he never failed to return with trinkets and stories. Dad told me of frost-shackled mining towns in the tundra, where temperatures plunged to minus forty and birds froze to the ground like little feathered ice lumps. Some of the workers would chip away the ice and tuck the birds under their armpits, and by the time they reached the refineries the birds would thaw out and fly away. My favorite were his stories from the ’stans in the south, where minarets stuck out into the skies and one madrassa built in the days of Timur the Lame had a niche inlaid with red stones, and when you stood just right the stones aligned to form an image of a Muslim saint. Dad, ever the engineer, spoke with delight of the Uzbeki and the Turkmeny, whose tribal ancestors had built huts in the deserts, drilling holes in the walls to create air currents that made the interiors feel cool and breezy. Often, Dad’s thoughts would wander back to his turbines and he’d start muttering about blades, rotors, and diaphragms. Newspapers and other trash lined the paths, and homeless men bunked beneath the trees at night, and the park smelled like piss and lilacs. Long branches swollen with purple blossoms drooped overhead and I’d walk alongside Dad and dream of the day when I would be tall enough to have to bend under branches, too, and then I could help him with his turbine problems and maybe leave Kharkov and go see the minarets for myself.

  When Dad was on the road, I spent the afternoons with my best friend, Oleg, who lived in the apartment across the landing from us. Our usual game was playing the German invasion of Russia in our housing block’s common yard. Sometimes we’d be the Red Army, creeping back before the German advance, holding fortifications, making desperate stands, making sure the Nazi bastards paid a dear price for our city. Sometimes we did the opposite, trekking out to the far end of the yard, by the landfill and the army barracks, then turning around and taking the land bench by bench, foyer by foyer until we secured our apartment building by the bakery. Going that route meant being the Germans, of course, so Oleg and I just called it “starting at the far end” to make ourselves feel less unpatriotic. Attacking was more fun than defending, though, and more often than not we started at the far end.

  Imagination wasn’t required for the game. Kharkov had been destroyed by the Germans—four major Battles of Kharkov between 1941 and 1943 had made their way into the history books—and, forty years later, the scars remained. Our balcony wall was pockmarked with mortar holes. Memorial plaques and captured Panzer war trophies littered the city. Mom, Dad, and Grandma all remembered the frantic evacuation in the fall of 1941, when they were packed on trains and sent far to the east, Dad to the Urals, Mom and my grandparents to Central Asia. Back when Dad had returned to the city, there were more than just pockmarks. Dad and his school friends, many of them fatherless, would burrow into collapsed buildings and dig through the rubble for machine guns, grenades, and bones. They carried weapons to school, just because they were so readily available, and for a while Dad armed himself with a wicked SS dagger with German writing on the blade. When his father, Grandpa Lev, saw the knife, he brought Dad to the fields by the tractor factory.

  “Somewhere around here are the pits where five years ago, the man who owned this knife, and other men like him, shot thousands of Jews in a single day,” Grandpa Lev told Dad.*

  He didn’t order Dad to get rid of the dagger, but Dad carried a regular Soviet knife from then on.

  For Oleg and me this wasn’t like playing in a backyard; it was more like stepping onto an old movie set and reenacting the movie. We crept past the army barracks, hid behind the lilacs, crawled on recon missions over the hill by the apartments, dodged, seized, and raided until we reached our home building, grimy and victorious. Day after day, it was me and Oleg kicking ass against the yard: the older boys who congregated by the doorways and traded pins and coins, the girls, including Oleg’s sister, Tanya, who plucked flowers and squealed whenever we nicked their dolls (or, as Oleg and I thought of them, “enemy combatants”), Mitya the yard keeper who mostly paid attention to his pipe, the babushki parked on benches who never missed anything, and the ghosts of the German and Soviet dead.

  * * *

  * Much later, the details emerged: the Nazi killing field was a ravine called Drobytsky Yar, on the outskirts of Kharkov, where 15,000 Jews were killed on Decembe
r 15, 1941. The city refused to create a memorial for the Jews on the site until 1991, after the USSR fell apart.

  THE BLACK WITCH COMES TO KHARKOV

  Kharkov, Ukraine, USSR, 1980s

  My mother was a psychiatrist who worked at one of the several large clinics in the city. The majority of her patients suffered from the standard psychiatric ailments: depression, mania, anxiety, an occasional psychosis. Mom and her coworkers made house calls or held office hours for the functional patients, and attended to the more serious, hospitalized cases in the clinic. It was a similar routine to that of her Capitalist counterparts, save for a little-known group of patients who were unique to the Soviet Union. These patients were rarely spoken of, because prior to being institutionalized they had been mentally healthy.

  Political dissidents posed a tricky dilemma to the regime. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill murderers or petty thugs (most were highly educated intellectuals). No, these individuals knowingly, willingly, and conspicuously rejected the Soviet Union, the Soviet way of life. They penned letters, attempted to organize rallies, spoke out against the system, and otherwise engaged in bizarre actions that had only one explanation. “No sane individual would oppose the USSR” was the official stance of the dictatorship. In other words, since: a) Communism was the ultimate form of human society; and b) it was natural for any normal person to aspire to the best; then c) anyone who shunned the best was clearly deranged. Deranged people belonged in asylums, which is exactly where the dissidents were incarcerated.

  But locking them away wasn’t enough; to erase all doubt, the protestors had to be officially classified as insane. To achieve that, the regime first required an appropriate illness, and in 1969 one was supplied by Dr. Andrei Snezhnevsky, a leading Soviet academic. “Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia,” a disorder recognized nowhere outside of the Communist Bloc, was characterized by a sole key symptom: an irrational desire to fight perceived social injustice. Sluggishly progressing schizophrenia was considered an intractable disease that demanded the most aggressive treatment, and, once diagnosed, patients were subjected to electroshock, insulin-induced comas, sensory deprivation, tranquilizers, and potent psychotropics. Eventually, the diagnosis became reality.

  Mom’s workload always swelled around the holidays, when a KGB agent would present her boss with a list of names. “Surely you realize how certain individuals tend to get overly agitated this time of year. They go out in the streets, shout nonsense, pass out leaflets, and disturb the working men and women of our city. Please sign these orders so we can institutionalize them for a while. That way the public won’t get harassed and everyone will have a safe and pleasant holiday.”

  It wasn’t a request; the head doctor would sign and the black Volga sedans used by the secret police would hit the streets, off to ensure that everyone had a safe and pleasant holiday.

  There was an area of Kharkov called Nemyshlya. It was a place rife with crime, a neighborhood the city had given up on; even ambulances stopped at the outskirts, and police entered strictly en masse. Mom was one of the few psychiatrists who made house calls to Nemyshlya. The taxis would drop her off and wait on the periphery, and Mom would enter on foot, unescorted, and hardened criminals would smile and part way for her, because they knew she was the only doctor who would take care of their friends and families. Her care wasn’t limited to just the city. Kharkov, like other Ukrainian cities, was surrounded by villages and communal farms—many of which weren’t readily accessible—and Mom’s work took her on countryside excursions, via trucks, motorcycles, and, on one occasion, a horse and buggy.

  Mom refused constant attempts to bribe her, but at some point long before I was born, word spread that she loved flowers. Our apartment was a garden, with fresh bouquets arriving daily. Tables and stools held vases of lilies and peonies, and bluebells poked through the laundry lines on the little balcony. One ex-patient, a farmer, would drive his truck into the city and fill our bathtub with tomatoes and cucumbers. Mom kept insisting that we couldn’t possibly go through a tub of the plump vegetables, but the farmer, like all farmers, was a man of routine and the deliveries continued, year after year, with the cyclical surety of the harvest.

  * * *

  My sister, Lina, was twelve years older than me, and I devoted much of my time in the apartment to cooking up novel ways to annoy her. Lina’s studies left her with limited private time for boys—it was a fact I leveraged to my benefit. The first time a romantic interest stepped into the apartment, he was bombarded with an onslaught of unpleasantries. Lina’s shutting her door wouldn’t help, since I’d make sure to disable the latch beforehand. Some of the more intrepid boyfriends managed to extricate me from the room, which was fine; I had backup plans. There were hidden alarm clocks set to buzz every few minutes, booby traps rigged above the bed, and, failing that, I could sing, loudly and badly. I never went to school and spent entire days in the apartment: this was my home court, and one had to do a little better than locking the door.

  Soon, usually by the second date, the boyfriend would quit worrying about impressing our parents and grandmother and focus on me.

  “There you are, Lev!” He would find me, waiting in the foyer. “I brought you candy!”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now that we’re friends, would you mind not gluing my shoelaces together? Deal?”

  “I read about it in a book, you know.*1 There was this man, and he was in South America, in the pampas, and they were hunting these big ostriches, except in South America they’re called rheas, and they would throw this rope around their legs when they hunted, and that’s where I got the shoelace idea.”

  “How about this: I’ll bring you more chocolate and you stop doing that.”

  “How about pirates: they’re these sailors who attack other sailors, and they have bandanas, and peg legs, and parrots, and they bury treasure. Do you have any pirates?”

  “I’ll find you some pirate toys, promise.”

  “And chocolate. And be careful when you walk into Lina’s room—I stretched some fishing line across the door. I read about that in a book, too.”*2

  The boyfriend would tear the city apart, but by the next date I’d have my pirates.

  Lina got back at me by telling stories. I’ll never forget the evening she flew into my room to ask if I’d heard about the Black Witch, who made toys come alive and strangle kids at night. No one could determine which toys were possessed. The Black Witch was patient: some toys remained perfectly harmless for years, then pounced without warning. Lina’s bulletin was timely; she wasn’t a hundred percent sure, but she had it from a reliable source deep in the Witch’s retinue that the Witch was heading to Kharkov. I hollered for Mom, but Lina shrugged it off.

  “He asked me for a story, so I told him one.”

  “Is that true?” Mom asked.

  “Yes, Mom,” I said, frantically compiling an inventory of which of my soldiers were likely sleeper cell candidates.

  “Stop asking her. You always ask and you always get scared.”

  “I know, but—”

  “See!” Lina jumped in, beaming. “I told you he likes my stories.”

  She was right. I spent a week barricading myself in the bedroom, then lowered the threat level and came back for more. I couldn’t resist. Sometimes she sketched pictures of her monsters to help me visualize the horrors that waited for the lights to go out. Sometimes she didn’t even have to make anything up.

  “Before you were born, when I was your age, the KGB detained Dad and started asking him about what books he owned [true]. They sat him down and detained him, and then, they raided our apartment and searched it! Bang! went the door, and in they burst! Thank God, one of Dad’s coworkers warned Mom and Grandma beforehand, as soon as Dad was taken, so they burned all the illegal books we had [true]. By the time the KGB agents came in their black cars, dressed in their big black coats [the KGB and the Black Witch shared a penchant for the color], everything bad was already gone. So they let
Dad go and didn’t put him in prison. But who knows? The KGB’s unpredictable. Maybe tomorrow they’re not going to like the books you read—you know, like your fairy tales [poetic license: all children’s lit had long been scrubbed free of undesirable religious and Western allusions]—and they’re going to come for you, and you don’t have any coworkers to warn you, do you? They’ll come in their black cars and take you away.”

  She paused, waiting for the desired effect to set in.

  “Go ahead and read your books while you still can … Watch out for the black cars.”

  She grabbed her schoolbag and rushed out, a trail of satisfied giggles lingering in the hallway.

  Lina was good.

  When Lina was in high school, she was working hard to go to med school. She was on track to earn her gold medal, an award given to high school seniors with straight A’s that qualified them to pursue certain professions, such as medicine. Lina had the grades, and then in the fall of her senior year her high school director called Dad in for a conference. The director, an accomplished educator, looked concerned.

  “Comrade Golinkin, your daughter is a fine student and a very nice girl. I asked you here because I admire her, and I don’t want this to take her by surprise. She will get a B, only one B, which will preclude her from getting the medal; it’s the best I can do for her. I have my orders, just like everyone else.”

  Dad was confused. Un-affirmative action policies of the Soviet Union shifted and varied depending on the year, the republic, and the whim of the dictatorship. Some years, certain ethnicities would be tolerated in certain professions and institutions; then, a nameless bastard in the nameless echelons of the bureaucracy would decide that too many zhidi were getting straight A’s, and a memo would be generated and sent out. Dad knew all that; what confused him was why the director bothered to bring him in to discuss it.