It’s to avoid all this that I usually don’t talk about those years. Once the fact is laid out, everything I say or don’t say about it grows heavy with heroic implication. And, in the end, the sound of my own voice irritates me even more than the delicate inquisitiveness of others. Mostly, though, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble of correcting their Dickensian notions of orphanhood. The persistent hunger, the heartless punishments—all those were part of my story, but they weren’t the only part. By grace or luck, I wound up in a home where we children were treated with civility, even affection.
I was lucky for another reason: my tenure as an orphan happened to coincide with the period after the war, when the national sentiment was swinging in our favor. No longer were we the seeds of kulaks, criminals, and counterrevolutionaries. Our vagrancy, no more the mark of criminality, was a badge of patriotic sacrifice. All over the country, children’s homes were swelling with the war’s little victims, and it was among the dead heroes’ offspring that we—the littlest enemies—sought camouflage. Perhaps that’s how it started for me, my earliest lesson in keeping secrets.
The postwar years were a time of rations and shortages, and yet the variety of food at the Memory of Krupskaya Children’s Home was remarkable: wheat bread, oatmeal, buckwheat, barley, honey, conserves, eggs, Dutch cheese, cottage cheese with raisins, compote, peas, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, and on occasion even kielbasa and watermelon. How did we manage it? We had sponsors—the orphanage was patronized by the local kolkhoz as well as the trade union of a local factory. But the real secret was our director, Mark Pavlovich Guchkov, who was uncommonly deft at courting patronage of this sort.
I picture him clearly, a week into my arrival at the Krupskaya Home. He stands before us in the assembly room, a kind of gymnasium with an old upright piano at one end of a small stage. He is young, no more than thirty-five or thirty-six, and already balding. His wispy brown hair is combed back from a tall forehead. He wears a pulpy brown suit that smells strongly of tobacco. The sleeve of his missing arm is not pinned up to his shoulder, as I’ve seen other war invalids do; it hangs down loosely, tucked into a pocket of his jacket. In his able-armed hand he holds up something small and white. “This is the kind of soap French women use,” he informs us, lifting it up higher so that all us children can see. “French women are ladies, with a high level of culture, measured by how they treat their things. They don’t let their soap sit in puddles of water. When they are done using it, they clean it off and leave it like this—completely dry.”
I am there in that room, sitting in a row of other seven-and eight-year-olds, our heads cocked back, our mouths hanging open. All the boys have the same haircut: cropped close to the scalp to discourage lice, short fringes of bangs falling across our foreheads.
Mark Pavlovich paces between the piano and the flagpole. Above him hangs a portrait of our Illustrious Leader and Teacher, the Gardener of Human Happiness, the one to whom we owe thanks for our happy childhoods. The room is filled with light—the bottom halves of the windows are not painted over, as they were in my last orphanage, to prevent us from looking out or others from looking in. The hall is filled with a fine bitter scent of September leaves, as if somewhere a door has been left open. None of this seems quite real to me yet. It all feels like part of a dream I recognize from some already fading, pre-institutional life. Guchkov speaks and the children repeat after him: “Because we are fortunate to receive it…and because we are not pigs, we will care for our soap like civilized people and not let it get covered with scum.” I mouth the words, entranced by the soap’s whiteness, so pure it too can almost be smelled at a distance.
—
AT THE FORMER CHILDREN’S HOME at which I’d been warehoused, we’d been scrubbed down with coarse ammoniac laundry soap that left our skin chafed and itching. Like a chain gang we were overseen by bullishly built wardens who didn’t fail to conceal their scorn. “Congratulations! So they’ve brought us another shipment of the little enemy bastards.” “These parasites suck our blood while we break our backs over their ilk.” In their own crude way, our minders were only repeating Marx’s Theory of Surplus Labor: they worked all day—changing, feeding, bathing us—while we produced nothing. The taunting from other children started soon thereafter.
“How did your papa die?”
“He was shot in the war.”
“No, he wasn’t. He was shot like an enemy dog.”
Nothing could be hidden from them. They’d been told and knew everything—that my father had never served in the war, and that my mama had been sent off to do penance for her treason with hard labor.
I hadn’t quite completed the first grade when all this happened to me. From my first day I had loved school; I yielded easily to the classroom’s discipline, to the elevated diction of my teacher, Lydia Varlamovna, to the clearly laid-out path to achievement and reward. I craved distinction but instinctively understood the collective ethos, that I could not seek it out for myself—that its bestowing was the teacher’s privilege. I raised my hand often, but not excessively. I was helpful to the slower kids. I was on my way to becoming a master at pleasing grown-ups.
None of this education served me in that first children’s home. In my first week I lent my one pair of extra underpants to a boy who’d soiled himself. The act was discovered and both the other boy and I were punished by being made to kneel on cracked dried peas. This turned out to be one of the less bizarre and more tepid punishments I would receive in the next six months.
If I was given any academic instruction during this period, I don’t remember it. I remember only the physical-education component: military drills that both boys and girls had to perform together, without wearing our tops, even though a few of the girls were already beginning to develop breasts.
We were hit for anything—for throwing up the rotten food we were fed, for whistling indoors, for forgetting ourselves and sucking our thumbs—for displaying any childlike frailty or need. Before my mother was arrested she’d promised to buy me new shoes; I’d started outgrowing my last pair of leather loafers. Nobody noticed this, of course, and during the shuffle when my old things were taken away and the new things handed out, I’d been too petrified to speak up. But within a week of my arrival, my feet were sore and blistering. The big toe on my right foot was developing an ingrown nail that caused me to squeeze my eyes shut against the pain of each step I took. Favoring my left foot, I developed a slight limp, of which I hoped the grown-ups around me might take sympathetic notice. Finally one of them did. She was one of the younger child minders, a skinny girl with limpid blue eyes and acne scars. She might have been raised in the orphanage herself—a “graduate.” If this was the case, her experience did not soften her toward us.
“Why are you dragging your feet like a donkey?”
I told her that my shoes didn’t fit well and my toe hurt.