“So what we give you isn’t good enough?”
I objected and tried to explain that the shoes were my own, not a pair I’d been handed out. That was my second mistake. Her eyes filled with murder. I’d argued with her in front of others. “All right,” she said, and began to undress me. She stripped off my shoes and socks, then my shirt and pants, my undershirt, and, finally, my underpants. She threw open the window and made me stand in front of it while the others watched. It was mid-February. Outside, in a play yard that was mostly mud, crusts of snow clung to half-frozen dirt. I stood naked in the wind as she lectured the others on the sacrifice the country was making, taking in such undeserving children.
I remember shivering. The skin of my arms and thighs and buttocks became a carapace of gooseflesh. I tried to keep my eyes from welling—not from the humiliation of standing naked, but from the sting of being so misunderstood. I steeled my seven-year-old body, already stiff from the cold, with mute and rigid rage—rage at my absent mother for not buying me new shoes when I’d asked her to, at myself for failing to explain that the shoes were my own—my own!—that I was not an ungrateful or bad boy.
I don’t know how long she made me stand in front of that open window. As always, I was lucky and only caught a cold and not full-blown pneumonia. “I hope you learned your lesson,” she told me when it was all over. I did. I learned that when your toe hurts, it hurts only you and no one else.
I suppose that, to keep their conspicuous enmity of us alive, they had to destroy in themselves any innate sympathy for a child’s suffering. We felt their disgust but could not guess its source: in their eyes our malfeasance was predetermined. That was why the cruelest punishments were always brought on by seeking sympathy, as I’d sought with my toe. For such monstrous innocence regarding ourselves, there could be no pardon.
Our wardens’ belief in our criminality was convincing enough to make it true. We picked up the code from the older children almost as soon as we arrived. My turn came when I was told to sneak into the kitchen and steal two bottles of kefir. Were I to be caught, I would certainly be beaten, and yet to refuse to do the bidding of the older kids made punishment just as sure. In the end, I chickened out and came back in the dark empty-handed. I took my penalty stoically in the morning, when I was buttoned inside a duvet cover and rhythmically kicked with a series of fast, blunt blows. It was only one of our barracks-style “games,” called “Cat in the Bag.” By then I knew better than to plead for mercy. Any attempt at seeking compassion would only excite their belligerence. Not long thereafter I saw another boy suffer this punishment. He was older than me, but slender and small-boned. I remember walking in on him, after the duvet had been unbuttoned, and finding him still crouching inside it, his shoulders jerking as muffled sobs escaped him. I recall him looking at me, his eyes blurred, imploring. What did he want from me? Comfort? Probably not even that. He wanted what I’d wanted from my acne-scarred child minder: the barest nod of compassion. But there is no greater demand you can make of another than asking him to suffer with you. I went cold around the edges, felt myself being filled with revulsion for the boy’s quivering, naked need. It does not please me to think that my heart could be such a desert. I wanted to go to that boy, and I knew what it would cost me. I was already becoming inoculated against my own human impulses. Though “inhuman” is not the right word. What is more human than having our cruelty incited by another’s weakness?
I’ve tried hard not to imagine my moral or mental disfigurement had I been left in that place. But fortune smiled on me again. My ejection from the grim asylum whose name I’ve since forgotten happened after an incident involving a maroon rag. Another enemy parasite and I were ordered to wash the floors of a long corridor. A thick-armed janitress brought us a bucket of water and then disappeared without telling us where to find the mops and brushes. Or maybe she did tell us and we couldn’t find them. In any case, we went in search of a broom closet, peeking behind the various doors, until I discovered, on a table in an empty room, a maroon rag sufficiently plush to work as both a duster and mop. We took turns dragging it across the floor, sticking it between the walls and the oily radiators so that we would not be impugned for cutting corners. We employed it to swab the grime out of moldings, the residue of shoes off stairs. Filth clung to its felty texture like magic.
The janitress returned not long afterward and dropped her broom when she saw what we’d done. There was an almost audible gust of wind as she ran toward the rag and fell on it in horror. She attempted to wash it out in the bucket, but the water was already dank with old scum. When she turned the rag inside out, I saw that it was not a rag at all but a velvet banner of the sort that hung in so many of the rooms, emblazoned with the profile of our magnanimous mustached Leader, his eyes as always crinkled in a smile. “You turn your back and what these little Abrams don’t think up!” she cried.
Two days later, I was pulled out of morning lineup and put on a train to Saratov. I believed I had been tossed out for polishing the floors with Stalin’s face—the only explanation my child’s mind could conjure. I couldn’t know how absurd that was. The janitress would have told nobody of my crime; she would have cleaned the banner and never spoken of the incident, knowing full well whose head would roll first if she did. This much I understand now, but at seven, alone on a train, hungry, I did not know where I was going or what awaited me there. I thought of leaping off, getting lost in the crowd and living on the street. Only my cowardice saved me.