The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia (6 page)

CHAPTER NINE

WHERE DO BABIES COME FROM?

My sister is born on a cold and windy January day in 1958. I do not know she is coming until my father takes my mother to the hospital. Neither of them tells me what is about to happen, and I haven’t thought much about the changes in my mother’s appearance or to what those changes will mean for me.

Pregnancy, of course, is not a topic people talk about freely and certainly not with children—not because of the sublime mystery of it all, but because of a vague sense of shame and, especially, superstition, so prevalent in our country. Unlike our Western counterparts who do not hesitate to express their happiness, we, builders of the great kingdom of communism, are afraid of saying anything positive. In those rare cases that we do, we cross our fingers, knock on wood, or spit over our left shoulders three times, “
tfu, tfu, tfu
.”

As for the future, we never jinx it with irresponsible prattling; we avoid talking about it altogether. Only close adult relatives are initiated into the detail of a pregnant woman’s condition or (God forbid!) informed about her due date. And what does it matter? We have no custom of throwing baby showers or bringing presents for the newborn. In fact, even future mothers’ parents do not buy anything in advance; or, if they do, they keep it a secret.

Even after the baby is born, the cloud of superstition does not dissipate. New parents never blab out that things are going well, and they do not invite anybody but the immediate family to see their newborn until it is several months—better yet, a year—old. Nor do they take the baby’s picture before it is at least six months old. As they say, better safe than sorry. The world is full of malevolent people who are more than happy to cast an evil eye on you and your family.

I am very puzzled when Dad comes home with the news that I now have a sister. Where did she come from? What do we need another girl for? Can I have a brother instead? Dad never answers my questions, but on the next day he takes me to the hospital to visit my mother and new sister.

Packed crunchy snow lies everywhere, and snowdrifts pile up to the first floor windows of the hospital. Visitors are not allowed into the maternity ward beyond a small reception room, where a reticent nurse collects small parcels and letters for the patients.

Like everybody else, we give her our offerings: some fruit and a letter that we wrote together the night before. My father did the writing, and I supplied names for my new baby sister. Not having any preferences, I listed all the female names I knew, starting with Tanya, and my father diligently wrote them down.

Dad asks the nurse about Mom and the baby and, after her indifferent “Everything’s the way it should be,” he pulls me outside. There, we join other visitors who are attempting to spot familiar faces behind the dull, double-layered windows of the maternity ward.

Lucky visitors have their women on the first floor, and they can see their pale faces pressed to the frosted glass, which is sealed for the winter with patches of dusty cotton. Mom’s room is on the third floor, and I can barely make out her features. Dad puts me on his shoulders, and, at the top of my lungs, I shout into the freezing air that I want Mom to come home. She can’t hear me, though, and just waves at us from up high—a ghost-like silhouette framed by the frozen window. I burst into sobs, and Dad takes me home. 

Mom and Tanya come home in five days. Tanya is no bigger than my doll Masha, although unlike Masha, she has a reddish face, no hair, and a piercing voice. She also has the undivided attention of my parents, especially my mother, so I quickly realize that bringing her home is a mistake. For a week, I beg my parents to take her back to the hospital, but they never do. In fact, I am not even sure that they hear me. Tanya is a nuisance. I myself will never have babies. 

For the first six months of her life, Tanya sleeps in a small zinc washtub that is also used for her bath. This makeshift bed sits in the corner by the bookcase, making it hard for me to get to my books. Of course, nobody has time to read to me anymore, so the first thing I have to master after my sister’s arrival is reading.

Then, as if that is not bad enough, another newcomer enters my life—a long-feared nanny. The nanny appears just before Mom goes back to work, and, as was the case with Tanya, no one warns me about her coming. One day, the door of our apartment squeaks open, and a small, snub-nosed woman with light thin hair and a broad Mongol face simply steps into our room.

“I’m Tosja,” she says and gives me a hesitant smile showing her small, slightly crooked teeth. 

I hide behind Mom’s back. The woman puts her suitcase down, looks around, and her face takes on a worried expression. As small as she is, there is no space for her here—not unless she agrees to sleep in another, bigger, zinc washtub kept under Mom and Dad’s bed.

Luckily for Tosja, it never comes to that. During the next week, my father and uncle put up a thin partition on one side of our room—big enough for Tosja’s narrow bed and suitcase—and Tosja moves there, increasing the number of people in our apartment to five.

To my relief, Tosja is not a bad person; nothing close to Baba Yaga or our mean neighbors Lida and Zina. She is a young, twenty or so, provincial woman from the Ural Mountains. She comes from a village that is connected to the outside world by a dirt road, where nobody has a car or a truck, where hard work is the only way of life and heavy drinking the only way of escaping it.

All able-bodied women in Tosja’s village work at a local
kolkhoz
(communal farm) for almost nothing, and they survive, as well as feed their children, by growing vegetables in their small yards and milking their scraggy goats. As for entertainment, at night, they sit on the benches in front of their houses, gossiping, cracking sunflower seeds, and spitting out the husks.

Another important characteristic of Tosja’s village is its lack of men. The majority vanished during the war. Those who avoided death and returned home have a hard time staying sober, and their wearily patient wives have to continue performing both female and male duties—including those at the
kolkhoz
—exactly the way they did during the war. The only marriage-worthy men in Tosja’s village are the
kolkhoz
chairman and his deputy. Those two drink less, but they never do any heavy lifting either, for they have enough work to do ordering the women around and attending functions of the district Communist Party.

Had Tosja stayed home, she would have been single. Or, if by some miracle she had married, she would have repeated the fate of many generations of female villagers, who are overworked, abused by their drunken husbands, and old by their early thirties. Tosja, like other young Russians from the provinces, has come to Moscow in search of a better life. Yet here she has a problem—she has no official permission to leave her village and, consequently, cannot obtain a legal job or, for that matter, a residence.

This is nothing to sneeze at. Nobody over sixteen years old can move around in our country for more than thirty days without official permission and an obligatory passport—which in rural communities is kept at the local government offices. Typical grounds for obtaining permission for exit are getting married, going to college, or bribing a government official.

The first requires securing a candidate for marriage beforehand, which is difficult to achieve for someone who has never lived anywhere else. The second involves excellent grades and recommendations from teachers, and, by its very nature, is available to very few. The third, bribery, should have been the easiest, considering the corruption of the government officials, but it requires money, which Soviet people do not have. As a result, very few people venture anywhere, and those who do have to do it at their own risk.

Getting married to a Muscovite must be Tosja’s cherished goal. This does not mean that she neglects taking care of my baby sister and me. She does what she can: feeds us (not a small job in my case), changes Tanya’s diapers, and absentmindedly listens to my reading. I guess she is supposed to read to me, but that never happens. When Tosja first came, she told me several folktales that were popular in her homeland, but she quickly exhausted her repertoire, and I stopped asking for more. 

The thing that Tosja likes doing the most is taking us for a walk. She cheerfully helps me put on my clothes, swaddles up my little sister, puts her into a bulky perambulator, and off we go. Tosja’s affinity for spending time outside the house could be a remnant of her past life in the Urals, where she invariably had to travel long distances on foot, but I suspect that it has a more important motive, too.

How else can you explain that no matter where we are heading—to a grocery store, a pharmacy, or just around the block—we inevitably end up at the red brick building of our local fire station? There we spend a long time doing absolutely
nothing
interesting except talking to thickset and hoarse-voiced firemen dressed in mustard-colored padded jackets, squeaky high boots, and ear-flapped caps. Tosja does most of the talking, while my side of the conversation is a repetitive: “I want to go home!” and my sister squeals loudly.

With the exception of a local school and a dye factory, our neighborhood consists of small one-story wooden houses, so having a fire station here is important. Still, fires are rare, and when they do occur, they are quickly extinguished. For one thing, the overcrowding guarantees a quick discovery of the disaster; for another, the size of the dwellings does not allow for large and protracted conflagrations. In my memory, there has been only one serious incident—a fire at the dye factory.

That fire started early in the evening, and by the time Tosja and I got there, a huge glow already consumed the building and exploding cans of dye flew across the dark sky like shooting stars, causing mild panic in the crowd of spectators. Animated Lida and Zina were there, too, gasping and informing anyone willing to listen that the fire must have been a terrorist act by Western spies.

Most of the time, the firefighters seem bored, and they are more than happy to entertain a young provincial nanny, despite her annoying charges. And who can blame them? They are demobilized soldiers who spent two years marching in
portjanki
(foot-binding cloths used in the Soviet army instead of socks) and obeying the mindless commands of their officers.

As for Tosja, she is just a lonely young woman. Her home and family are hundreds of miles away, and here in Moscow she has nobody to help or protect her, nobody to tell her what to do, and nobody to teach her to be careful. Besides, thirteen years after the war that killed and injured tens of millions of men, young males are hard to come by, even in a big city, and a fire department seems as good a place as any to meet some. 

It is a Sunday morning. I wake up to the sounds of Tanya’s whimpering and women talking. I open one eye and look. Mom is sitting at the table with Tanya in her arms—a bowl of kasha in front of her.

“Tosja,” she says. “We’re going to my parents. Could be back late. If you go out, please, don’t forget to lock the door.”

This is Mom’s frequent request. In Tosja’s small village, where drunken fights often ended in mild—and not so mild—injuries, theft was rare. A scarcity of material goods accounted for much of that and everyone’s familiarity with everybody else accomplished the rest. Here in the big city, theft is common, and Tosja’s repeated failure to lock the front door disturbs my parents and angers our neighbors.

“Sure, Firochka Raphailovna. (Mom’s first name is Fira, and Tosja’s ‘Firochka’ gives it a childishly endearing quality.) Don’tcha worry,” Tosja says, her voice ringing with excitement, unusual at this relatively early hour.

I open my second eye and look at her. Tosja’s thin straight hair is arranged in cascading waves exactly like Mom’s, and she is ironing her dress on the side of the table opposite to Mom’s. 

“I’ll be visitin’ my aunt today. I may be back late, too,” Tosja says a little bit too casually. Then she lifts a large aluminum cup from the table, sucks a mouthful of water from it, and liberally spews it out on her wrinkled dress.

“Your aunt?  I did not know you had an aunt here.” 

“Oh, ya know. I wasn’t quite sure I’d find ’er, so I didn’t tell ya. It’s my mother’s sister.” 

“Really? I thought that your mother didn’t have any sisters!” Mom’s voice is laced with suspicion. 

“That’s my father,” Tosja says, lowering her eyes and firmly landing the iron on the flowery fabric, which responds to the heat with gurgling sounds. “
His
folks didn’t have no girls.” 

“Uh huh,” Mom says, knitting her brows. 

As a streetcar carries my family to my grandparents, I overhear my parents’ conversation.

“I’m not senile! She told me that her mother has no sisters!” 

“We’re not her family, Fira, and she’s not a child. She can do whatever she wants.” 

“I know that. But don’t you see she’s headed for trouble?”

“And what do you suppose we can do? First of all, you don’t know for a fact that she’s lying. Secondly, let’s say she is. Are you going to lock her in her room?” 

Time goes by. Every Sunday afternoon, Tosja dresses up and goes to visit her newly discovered relative.

“How’s your aunt doing?” Mom asks her at night.