The Restoration Game (17 page)

(That epithet, dear reader, is considered, and deserved.)

And now I really must tell you about the scariest day of my life.

1.

The scariest day of my life was Wednesday, September 4, 1991. Just a couple of days after I'd started my second year at primary school in Krasnod. The second-year classroom looked just like the first-year classroom, except that the pictures and maps looked a little more grown-up. And the lessons and exercises in the textbooks were more difficult.

But lots of things had changed over the summer. It had been a strange, unsettling summer: days when jet fighters flashed around the flank of the mountain and streaked low overhead to vanish in the sky to the south; a day when a tank had idled at a corner of the main street, then squeaked and clanked away; nights when my mother and Nana had sat together in front of the television watching very boring pictures of men behind desks droning out long sentences, as if they were reading from a book they didn't find exciting. In all the classrooms a Georgian flag hung on the wall in the place where the portrait of Lenin had hung the year before. Few of the children wore a red Pioneer scarf anymore. The teacher, Miss Yesiyeva, wasn't kind and attentive and cheerful like our first-year teacher, Mrs. Tushurashvili, had been. Each morning Miss Yesiyeva looked like she'd been crying the previous night, and sometimes she didn't notice what one of us said even in answer to a question she'd just asked, and several times a day she'd raise her voice or sound all snippy with us. At breaks, when we ran around in the playground, fights were more frequent and seemed to have children from different nationalities on different sides. Just in my class of twenty, five children were Russian, three were Georgian (in a different way from how we were all “Georgian”), two were Jewish, and there were other odd little lots and cliques that I didn't know the names for.

We were just starting the third lesson of the day around about ten o'clock when I was distracted from Miss Yesiyeva's telling us which page to turn to by a commotion in the corridor. I looked up. Miss Yesiyeva stopped, and looked at the door. There was a sound of tramping boots, then the door opened. In marched a squad of five men in militia uniforms (that's police, not the sort of militia the Caucasian peoples got to know so well later) headed up by a man in a very sharp suit. A thin briefcase was tucked under his elbow. I didn't think in these terms at the time (in my world there were: children; big boys and girls; grown-ups; and old people) but looking back I'd say he was about thirty. I was sitting in the front row so I got a good look at him, and also at the teacher's face, as her startlement gave way to alarm. In my memory I see him loom above me, though another memory snapshot from a few moments later shows him no taller than the other men in the room. I could even smell him, a sharp tang of an unfamilar scent. For some years after, I would flinch at a whiff of Old Spice.

Two of the militiamen stood just inside the door, blocking it. The other three strode one to each front corner and one to beside the teacher's podium. All three looked very young, pale, and nervous, their gaze twitching about the room. Not the man in the suit, though. He smiled at us all and whispered something to Miss Yesiyeva. She didn't look reassured at all. Her hand went to her throat and she took a step backwards, then nodded at the man.

“Good morning, pupils,” he said. “Please don't be frightened. I'm from the Ministry of State Security. Some of you have to leave the school for a day or two, because there are some bad people on the streets who might want to harm you. If you come with us, you'll be quite safe. The rest of you have nothing at all to worry about.”

Meanwhile Miss Yesiyeva had passed him a sheet of paper, which I recognised as the class register. The man looked intently at us, held up one finger, and glanced down at the paper. His upraised finger rapped down on the sheet, several times, skipping down it. He looked up, and started reading out names.

“Klidiashvili Levan Nugzarovich, Gogolidze Mariya Ivanovna, Lifshitz Sofya Abraamovna, Barbakadze Giorgi Kakhaberovich, Stone Lucinda Erikovna, Sherling David Yakobovich…”

Me, the two Jewish kids, the three Georgians. And then two more: “Melyukhin Andrei Vladimirovich and Zemskova Irina Ilyinichna.”

Behind me someone sobbed. I didn't look around. I looked up at Miss Yesiyeva and said, very firmly: “I want to go home to my mother.”

At that, lots of kids started wailing.

The man banged his fist down on the podium. The bang rang in my ears.

“Stop!” he said. “Listen!”

His voice was quieter than when he'd read out the list. For some reason, that made the kids who were bawling shut up and sniffle.

“You have to be brave,” he went on, still quietly. “We only have a few minutes. You must leave with me and the boys from the militia. Just pick up your satchels, and walk with us to the bus outside.”

Miss Yesiyeva was nodding vigorously. “Yes, yes, children, you must do as the man says. You'll be safe with him.”

She then looked straight at all of us who'd been named—I guess she must have, because I remember her red-rimmed blue eyes staring straight at me—and added: “Really and truly. From my heart. You must go. You'll be back very soon.”

Now I don't know how I'd picked up an apprehension about lists of names and buses and going away with militiamen, but I had, and I wasn't the only one in the class who felt the same. I could see Sofya Lifshitz out of the corner of my eye, in the same row a couple of desks away, and under her curly black hair her face was white as paper. So what Miss Yesiyeva said made a big difference. She wasn't as motherly as Mrs. Tushurashvili, for sure, but we all trusted her implicitly. If she hadn't backed up the man, we might very well have had to be dragged out kicking and screaming.

As it was we all got up and filed out behind the man in the suit, with the two militiamen who'd stood at the door in front and the other three bringing up the rear. Just before the door closed behind us I heard one of my classmates say something in a jeering tone, and Miss Yesiyeva utter a sharp reproof.

Out in the playground, among the slides and swings and carved painted logs, it became evident that matters hadn't gone quite so smoothly in other classrooms. Militiamen were chasing small children and grabbing them, one teacher waddled towards the bus with a child under each arm, and screams and yells echoed off the front of the school building.

The man led us straight to the bus and we piled on. I ended up sharing a hard seat with Sofya Lifshitz, who said nothing and just sat with a fist at her mouth and her shoulder shaking. A pair of militiamen stood at the door, hauling kids on and blocking the few who tried to get off. After what seemed a long time, the bus was full. The militiamen stepped inside and sat down. The man in the suit jumped on and stood beside the driver's seat, facing back along the bus. The door closed, the engine coughed into life, and the bus lurched forward. I clung with one hand to the back of the seat in front of me and with the other arm clutched my satchel to my chest. We were swayed back and forth as the bus made a couple of sharp turns, into a street lined with apartment blocks and heading north out of town. The bus moved slowly through light mid-morning traffic and after a couple of blocks stopped at a red light.

By this time the sobbing and shouting had stopped. I had stopped feeling scared and even begun to feel a little butterfly of excitement and novelty, and it was as if all or most of the other pupils on the bus felt the same way all at once. Even Sofya had turned to look out of the window, and then back along the bus. I saw her cast a wan, fleeting smile at someone behind us.

The light changed. The driver engaged the gears and the bus began to move. I saw out of the front window a line of men in civilian clothes but carrying rifles running across the intersection in front of us. At the same moment I heard a loud clang on the roof, then out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something black hurtling towards my side of the bus. I ducked, just as a loud thump came from the window. Sofya yelled. I looked up as more thuds and clangs resounded through the bus.

The man in the suit had whipped around to look out the front. He bent over and said to the driver: “Step on it, man!”

I rocked back as the bus accelerated. The men with rifles stood for a moment on the road, then leapt to the sides. I saw their faces, mouths open, yelling, as we passed them. They were thumping the sides of the bus.

Then we were moving very fast up the street, overtaking, weaving in and out of, traffic. Sofya clung to me and I clung to the seat in front. A small child tumbled down the aisle, then picked herself up, howling, and returned to her seat.

I watched her go, and just as she reached her seat I saw the back window go all cloudy with a hole in the middle. Something went
spang
off the inside of the top of the bus. At that everyone except me started screaming. The only reason I didn't was that I had no idea what had just happened.

The man in the suit leaned towards the two militiamen and said something, then cocked his ear to a reply. He made an impatient gesture and held out his hand. A militiaman, with reluctance, handed over a pistol.

The man in the suit stuck the pistol in his waistband. Very carefully, but quickly, he paced to the back of the bus, steadying himself hand over hand on the seatbacks. As he passed me he glanced down, smiled, and said: “Don't worry, Lucy, I'll take care of you.”

He said it in English. He said something else to Sofya, in a language I didn't know, but I knew he didn't use her name. I wondered how he knew mine. I watched his back as he went up the bus. He knelt on the rear seat and looked back at us over his shoulder.

“Heads down!” he shouted.

I ducked, but peeked out around the seatback. The man hit the damaged rear window with his elbow and the glass all fell away like ice from eaves in the thaw. From the angle I was looking I couldn't see anything but sky, tree-tops, the upper floors of buildings. The noise of air and traffic got louder. Sweet wrappers and cigarette butts moved on the floor in the sudden draught. The man reached down in front of himself, then raised both arms, together, out in front of him—I could see that from the set of his shoulders.

There were a couple of very loud bangs. A pause, then another.

The man stayed kneeling on the back seat for a few more seconds. Then he turned around, moved a thumb on the pistol, and stuck the weapon back in his waistband. He brushed the knees of his trousers and the elbow of his jacket, frowned at the palm of the hand he'd used for this, and walked back to the front of the bus. He smelled of fireworks and, quite sharply, of armpit sweat. He returned the pistol to the militiaman, with a sort of bow from the waist, and resumed his position beside the driver, with his back to the windshield.

I looked around again and saw that we'd passed the town's outer ring of buildings. Far away to our left I could see the blocks of the university. That made me think about my mother. I began to cry. Sofya put her arm around me.

About twenty minutes out of town, the bus turned sharply off the north road and bumped along a narrow track through scrub. A wall topped with barbed wire filled the view ahead. A Soviet flag hung from a pole at one end of the wall. The bus stopped.

“Everybody out,” said the man in the suit. He opened the door. “It's all right, it's a Russian army base.”

Believe it or not, every kid on the bus cheered. I couldn't have said why, but I whooped too.

We stood up and began to file out. As I edged past him the man in the suit gripped my shoulders and squatted down in front of me.

“Lucy,” he said, “my name is Ilya Klebov. Remember my name. What's my name?”

“Ilya Klebov,” I said.

“Ilya Klebov,” he repeated. “Remember that!”

He let go of my shoulders and stood up. I hopped down off the bus and walked after the other children, through a door in the wall. Beyond it was a big square of tarmac and some low wooden buildings. A few tanks were lined up in front of the main gate, away on the other side of the square. Young soldiers lounged around the perimeter, smoking. Half a dozen women in white uniforms hurried up to us and took the hands of the younger ones and led us into a big room with lots of tables and a smell of cigarette smoke and boiled fish.

We were all given tea and bread with vile, metallic-tasting jam, which we devoured. Afterwards we queued up to deliver our plates and mugs back to the serving-hatch. That was when an odd event happened which in any other context would have seemed innocuous (if, to me at the time, inexplicable) but which frightened me even more than the shooting. One of the nurses stood at the top of the queue and called out three names: “Andrei Melyukhin, Irina Zemskova, Lucy Stone.” Even if we hadn't answered, I'm sure she'd have identified us all from the way we flinched.

She beckoned. We followed. She led us into a small room where a man in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck sat behind a table. He wore round glasses over his bright, cold eyes—features that reminded me, quite unreasonably, of Nana's descriptions of Beria. With the nurse's help, he gave us each a brusque physical examination. Height. Weight. The stethoscope was cold on my chest. He yanked a single hair from each of our heads, and put each hair into a clear glass tube, stoppered with a little rubber bung. It was while he was doing this that I noticed the only thing we seemed to have in common: all three of us had red or ginger hair.