The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia (23 page)

“Why did you show her the Hermitage catalog?” Mother blurts out.

“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with the catalog?”

“Nothing! If you have a smart daughter. But we don’t!” Here both of them fix their eyes on me the way gamblers fix their eyes on their disappearing riches, and I shrink on the kitchen floor, calling fire and brimstone down on my head.

The next several days are filled with rhetorical questions and bickering: “Do you understand that they won’t let you into
Komsomol.
Do you? And you’ll never go to college?” This is to me, after Mom’s meeting with my head teacher.

“Why do
I
have to disentangle everything?” This is to my father.

And at night, muffled sounds of arguments reach my ears from my parents’ half of the room: “What are you blaming me for? It’s art!”

“Art? Tell that to her teachers! They say it’s perversion when a 14-year-old enjoys pictures of naked men!”

“They are unintelligent retrogrades! If they had had their way, all paintings would’ve been painted over and statues draped in blankets! It’s bad enough that every word in this damn country is censored. Now I have to worry about museum catalogs, too?!”

“All I’m saying is that we have to be careful. If she doesn’t understand what can or can’t be taken out of the house, then we shouldn’t have anything around here that can get her in trouble.”

“I can’t believe you said that! So now I can’t enjoy my art books when I have a free minute? I work like a horse! I rely on
you
to oversee her reading!”

“And I don’t? I do, too! And I buy food, I cook, I clean. You’re always out of town!”

“I see. You’re just like your mother! I am not good enough for you and your family …” 

In the end, there is one thing my parents can agree on. Only a “complete fool” takes delicate issues—or any important issues, for that matter—outside the family. Since I have proved to be just that—a complete fool—and my parents cannot rely on my discretion, I am not allowed to see any art books or read anything ambiguous. As a result, a complete collection of Guy de Maupassant moves to my aunt’s apartment (fine with me, I’ve already read it), and all museum catalogs, as well as a thick tome of Greek mythology with color pictures of naked gods and goddesses, disappear into thin air.

I am in trouble in school, too. I have soiled my class’s reputation and, therefore, I will not be admitted to
Komsomol
with the rest of my classmates. Yet not everything is lost. If I do not slip up again—and my parents will make sure of that!—I may achieve the honor of joining
The All-Union Leninist Young Communist League
next semester. That is my last chance, as it is for the school’s worst students and for one girl who got caught with her mother at church services, and, pressed by school authorities, repented afterwards.

For now, though, my teachers treat me as if I am a leper who ought to be exiled from healthy Soviet society and made to wear a bell announcing my whereabouts to the chaste student body. Every time the teachers see me, they lower their eyes, and they raise their voices addressing me. The only exception is Vladimir Alekseevich, my art teacher from two years ago. When I run into him in the school halls or staircases, his eyes sparkle, and a couple of times—I swear!—he even winks at me.

The good thing is that my reputation as a fallen woman has considerably improved my standing among my peers. Even those who never acknowledged my existence before, now treat me as if I had won the state lottery or had gotten official permission to register as a true ethnic Russian. I thoroughly enjoy it, since I know that it is not going to last long. Already several of my classmates have had “soul-to-soul” conversations with me, and since there is only so much I can fake, it is a matter of time before my aura of sexual experience disappears forever. Luckily, I recently discovered Mother’s old gynecology textbook, which may get me through this quarter.

Another unexpected change is in my feelings for Anatoli Petrovich. Like Pushkin’s heroine Tatyana, who finally realizes that Eugene Onegin is not the hero she imagined him to be, I am disillusioned with my physics teacher. For weeks, he hardly acknowledged my existence, but now his gaze, heavy and oily, slithers around me the way a snake slithers around a meekly squeaking rabbit, making me feel small and dirty.

Also, he is not
really
handsome—not with that square jaw of his, squat figure, and cold, screwed-up eyes. I no longer believe that he is even smart. He knows physics, of course, but his vocabulary is pretentious and his jokes are flat, and even Grisha, once in a while, tells better jokes.

With love stories and art books gone from our bookcase, I read a lot of poetry: Lermontov, Tyutchev, Nekrasov, and other famous Russian poets. My favorite is Puskin’s “I Have Outlived My Aspirations,” and I read it often. I open the book with Pushkin’s black-and-white profile on the title page, drawn with an old-fashion quill pen by the poet himself, and admire his receding forehead, long nose (Pushkin had a long nose, too!), and copious curls. Then I flip to the bookmarked page and read:

Ja perezhil svoji zhelanja,

Ja razljubil svoji mechti;

Ostalis mne odni stradanja,

Plody serdechnoj pustoti.

I have outlived my aspirations

I have outloved my every dream

Suffering is my sole persuasion,

My heart feels only what has been ...

I soak up Pushkin’s words like a sponge. Their grieving message penetrates my skin and sinks inside my own empty heart. If love disappointed the greatest Russian poet, how can an ordinary girl like me expect happiness? And what about my own parents? Are they happy? Do they love each other? They sure argue a lot, and Dad makes scenes every time Mom talks to another man and, afterwards, grabs at his heart and proclaims that he is dying. Is that love?

What is love, anyway? A feeling that burns you from inside? A physical sensation that takes over your entire body?  A mirage that makes a thirsty traveler walk for miles to an elusive goal somewhere in the deserts of Persia, a country where people still tell Scheherazade’s stories?

Yes, despite my parent’s strict surveillance, I have finished the
Arabian Nights
. I hid it underneath my sleeper-chair and read it under the blanket after the lights were out. During 1001 nights with the king, Scheherazade bore him three children, and the king–finally!—pardoned her.

The children come as a surprise to me, since the book never mentions Scheherazade’s pregnancies, just vaguely states that every night the king “had his will of her,” and I still do not know how to find out what that means. In any case, at the end, the king fell in love with Scheherazade, and they lived happily ever after. Well, the book did not actually mention that, but the magical
Arabian Nights
world, unlike the stringent world around me, must have been happy.

Time goes by, first slowly, like a panting freight train, then faster and faster, like a high-speed express.
Babskoe Leto
passes its colorful torch to the late fall, which extinguishes it with winds, leaden clouds, and drizzle. With the onset of winter, my life returns to its usual order. My teachers, overwhelmed by bad students, miserable salaries, long lines for simple necessities, and the difficult duties of promoting healthy Soviet morals and principles, begin to forget my sins. My peers recognize my utter sexual ignorance and treat me the way they used to. My overworked parents slowly fill up our bookcase.

The question of who should oversee my reading is still unresolved. And gradually, my troubles become another memory, firmly pressed under the layers of time and the piles of early snow. Even my tingling sensations, the reason for all this turmoil, suddenly vanish, like grass and flowers, chirruping birds, and frothy dark amber liquid
kvass
. Until next summer.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

TRAITOR

This year I have a new best friend, Ulya. She is very short—shorter than I am! Puffy clouds of unruly light hair surround her sunny face with big dark eyes. A slightly large nose curves gently above her full lips, and her arms and legs are as plump as a baby's. Ulya and I attended the same music school for years, but since she plays the violin and I the piano, we barely knew each other—until one day, our respective teachers decided that the two of us should play together at an annual end-of-the-year concert. That concert marked the beginning our friendship.

We were the last students to perform that day. When we finally appeared on stage, we were so worn out from nerves and the long wait that we failed to start our piece together. During rehearsals, Ulya always waited for my nod, but at the concert, when I lifted my chin from the piano and looked at her, I realized that she was already playing, and if I wanted to be a part of our number at all, I had to catch up with her.

Unfortunately, I could not figure out how far along in the piece Ulya already was, so I started from the beginning—several bars behind her. Had this been an athletic event, a judge would have declared a false start and we would have been given another go. As it was, nobody told us to stop, and we played on until the end of the piece—with Ulya crossing the finish line first and me second.

Later, our teachers told us that they had never been so ashamed in their “entire lives” and that it was the worst number at that concert and, quite possibly, “in the entire history of our music school!” After our teachers left us alone and we had exchanged several rounds of “It was all your fault, you dummy!” we looked at each other and began laughing—mostly from relief and embarrassment, but also from the recognition that we would never be good musicians; therefore, there was nothing to fight about.

We laughed and laughed, until Ulya said, “Let's go get some ice cream.” That turned out to be an excellent idea, because it gave us a chance to discover that we had lots in common. We both liked the same kind of ice cream—
eskimo-na-palochke
(Eskimo pie
)
. We were both poor athletes who hated PE. We liked reading books far beyond our age level, and we were both Jewish.

To be precise, Ulya was half-Jewish—her mother was Jewish and her father Russian. In a country like Israel, where ethnicity is defined by one’s mother, that would have made her one hundred percent Jewish. Yet in Russia, where paternal relations are more important and where being “Russian” is imperative for success, she was registered as Russian. However, all of Ulya’s Russian relatives—including her father—died before Ulya was born, while all of her mother's relations were alive and actively present in Ulya’s life. So we both decided that for all practical purposes, Ulya was as Jewish as I was.

After we had successfully dealt with the Jewish question, we revealed to each other that we were not popular in our regular schools, we had very few friends, and we worried about being unattractive. Of course, when we got to that topic, we both said, “Oh, you're much prettier than me,” but neither one of us believed the other.

When the ice cream had become a sweet memory, I told Ulya about my past infatuation with my physics teacher, and she confessed to me that she was hopelessly in love with a boy in her school. Together, we reached the grievous conclusion that true love is always unrequited and life in general is not fair. After that, our friendship was cemented forever.

Ulya and I live about an hour away from each other, so we don’t spend much time together. We don’t talk on the phone either, since our families, like all the families we know, have no telephones. We usually see each other on weekends or at the music school—we linger after classes until it occurs to one of us that she has been expected at home a long time ago.

Most of our conversations are about books, movies, and love. Other topics include our families and our future. The latter is a special favorite with Ulya who, unlike me, is practical and focused, rather than a daydreamer. Perhaps this is due to the early deaths of her relatives, which taught her at a young age that time is limited, or perhaps her present does not inspire her, whereas the future promises an escape that she yearns for.

It is a cool weekday, lit by an anemic early-spring sun and fanned by a damp breeze. Ulya and I are taking a stroll in a small city park not far from our music school. We have already discussed burning questions of the heart in general and Turgenev's story “First Love” in particular, and we have sworn never to get involved with the opposite sex but to dedicate our lives to our careers instead.

There are few others in the park. A couple of dry-faced babushkas watch little children launch ships made of newspaper down the stream of melting snow, a hunched old man on a bench pokes the thawing ground with his cane, and a young couple walks furtively holding hands.

“Have you noticed that pretty girls are all dumb?” Ulya says.

This thought has never occurred to me before, but as it comes out of Ulya’s mouth, I immediately recognize its wisdom, and I can hardly believe that I never figured this out on my own.

“Sure,” I say, fixing my eyes on the couple: a young pimply-faced soldier in a gray wool uniform and his companion, an attractive blue-eyed woman with unnaturally long eyelashes and perfectly drawn eyebrows.

“If I had to choose between being smart and being pretty, I'd choose being smart,” Ulya declares, and I nod in not-very-sincere agreement.

For a moment, we enjoy our newly-achieved sense of superiority and we almost feel sorry for the blue-eyed woman in front of us and others like her who are pretty but dumb.
We
do not want to be dumb, and if being ugly is the price we must pay for being smart, we are happy to pay it—not that we have a choice anyway!

Also, none of those gorgeous creatures who bathe in the glow of male attention will be attractive forever. By the time they are old—twenty-five or thirty—their charm will disappear, and everybody will see how shallow and self-centered they are. As for us, even twenty years from now, our intellect and wisdom will continue to shine.

We look at each other satisfied with ourselves. “What school are you going to next year?” Ulya says, picking up a stick and throwing it at a crow cawing behind us.

“The same one I've been going to since we moved to our apartment. Why?”

“If you want to go to a good college, you need to transfer to a better school,” Ulya says, stopping in her tracks and bringing her face close to mine, as if revealing an important government secret. “Mother says that if you don’t have
svyazi
(connections), you need to start preparing now. I’ve decided to go to the University (Lomonosov Moscow State University, the best school in the country). Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” I say, my sense of self-worth shrinking. Maybe I am not as smart as I thought I was a couple of minutes ago; surely not as smart as Ulya!

“The University has more than twenty applicants for every place,” Ulya says, and her dark eyes become as round as the buttons of her coat. “Mother says that to get in I’d have to study with tutors or transfer to a good school, like that one by Minaevskij Marketplace.”

“Will your mother hire you tutors, then?” I say.

“No, we have no money for tutors. I'll transfer to that school. What about you?” Ulya says. “Wouldn't it be cool if we both went there?”

The school Ulya is talking about opened a year ago, and it is one of those rare “special” schools that are sprinkled unevenly throughout the city. In addition to the regular curriculum, these schools give their students advanced training in certain subjects, usually foreign languages or hard sciences. The foreign language schools rarely admit students with no connections, no matter what the students’ abilities. Hard sciences, however, are less popular among the “connected” families, so admission to them is based mostly on merit. The school by Minaevskij Marketplace is one of these.

“I don’t know,” I say, surprised by Ulya’s purposefulness—after all, college is still two years away! “Everybody says that school is tough. And you have to pass an entrance exam.”

“You make good grades. Surely you’ll pass the exam,” Ulya says brightly, as if she is a government official delivering a speech about the unlimited possibilities of our great country.

I say nothing. True, I am one of the best students in my regular district school, but will I be good enough for
that
school?

“You do want to go to college, don’t you?” Ulya says, sensing my reluctance.

I do not answer. I have never doubted that I would go to college. Both of my parents are professionals and both of my older cousins are already college students. I would be the black sheep of the family if I did not go. Yet do I have to change my life
now
? It is still early, isn’t it? Besides, unlike Ulya who has already decided that she wants to be a geologist, I am not clear what I want to do with the rest of my life, besides writing romance novels based on my own and Ulya's experiences and traveling to the North Pole, that is.

“You'll need it even more than me,” Ulya says averting her eyes, and I immediately understand her hidden message.

Wherever Ulya’s true sympathies may lie, she is registered as “Russian” and I as “Jewish.” This means that my admission to college will be affected by a Jewish quota. Depending on the prestige of the college and the number of candidates, that quota varies, but invariably, more Jewish students must compete for fewer spaces. I have heard my relatives talk about this many times; I just never realized that one day this would apply to
me
.

“Do you think I could pass an entrance exam for the University?” I ask my father at night.

“Probably not,” Father says, not lifting his head from his book. “Of course, you need to go to college, but it doesn't have to be the University,” and he turns the page.

“Do we have
svyaz
i, Dad?”

Father puts down his book and looks at me.

“No, we don't,” he says, stressing every word. “That's exactly why you need to make good grades. Any more questions?”

I turn to the dark window and away from Father. This really sucks. More times than I care to remember, I have heard people say that Jews have connections “everywhere.” How come my family doesn’t? What’s wrong with us? Like everybody else, we stand in long lines at grocery stores, and Mother and I freeze our butts off to buy Tanya and me a pair of winter boots, or anything else for that matter. We don’t have much money, we don’t own a dacha, and we live in a small communal apartment.

Yet, apparently, admission to a college will be tougher for me than for my Russian peers, while going to the University is out of the question altogether. Why? And where are those sly, well-connected Jews who have everything on a “silver platter”? I don’t know any of them! Do they really exist? And if they do, why don’t
we
belong to that exclusive group? Nobody likes us anyway, so shouldn’t we, at least, possess something that will give people
reasons
to dislike us? Yes, Ulya is right. I need to go to a better school. I turn to my father again.

“Dad, I want to transfer to the special school by Minaevskij Marketplace. Ulya wants to go there, too.”

Father closes his book. “Um. That’s an interesting idea,” he says and looks at Mother, who is ironing linen on the dinner table. Mother puts down her iron, neatly folds a freshly ironed bed-sheet and returns his glance.

“We’ll think about that,” Father says. “You know they have an entrance exam, right?”

The exam takes place at the beginning of June. By that time, the school year is over and so is my music career. On May 15, after months of rehearsing, Ulya and I, and fifteen more music school students perform our final exams. We play our numbers with hands cold from nerves and hearts heavy with the fear of failing. A panel of teachers evaluates our accomplishments, while famous musicians look upon us mournfully from their framed portraits. In a week or so, we receive our music diplomas and our parents frame and hang them on the walls of our respective apartments.

When I leave the freshly painted classroom where one unsmiling male and two unsmiling female teachers interrogate me with a variety of math and physics questions for what seems like forever, I feel weak and lightheaded. The school hall is packed with potential students: those who are waiting to be tested and those who have already gotten through the purgatory of the exam and now lean against the walls, exhausted. Some kids wear glasses and have an intellectual air about them and some look ordinary. Also, contrary to Ulya's statement about the stupidity of pretty girls, several girls in the hall are rather good-looking.

Ulya rushes toward me from the other side of the hall—her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling with the enthusiasm of a sure winner, “How did you do?”

“I don’t know. The questions were real hard,” I say, trying to keep my voice even. “I think I flunked.”

“I’m sure you did just fine,” Ulya says, containing her excitement and lowering her voice. I say nothing. Ulya looks at me with concern, “Do you want to grab some ice cream?” And we turn and head silently to the exit.

The results come three days later. I have passed! Both of us have passed! I stare at the students’ roster in utter disbelief. There is it—my name, in black and white. Next to me Ulya is jumping up and down, “I told you! Didn’t I tell you?! You’re such a pessimist!”