The Krupskaya Home was in the countryside, in the village of Sokolovy, built by the Volga Germans. Its rooms did not smell of mice, and its windows were neither whitewashed nor covered with bars. Its original building was squat and long, constructed from the unsawn logs of houses appropriated from the kulaks who’d been exiled to Siberia. With the number of arriving children growing in the war, a new wing had been built. The nearby kolkhoz had given the orphanage two acres of its most arid land. There, on our “farm,” was an old cow with weak udders and a horse that wouldn’t move without constant prodding, but which we kids loved for the solemn rides it occasionally gave us. Somehow, with continued effort, the staff managed to make a few things grow on the little household plot. In the spring all of us pitched in planting wheat, potatoes, and vegetables with the seeds we received from the collective farm.
What kindness of fate had landed me in this refuge? My mind goes naturally to Avdotya Grigorievna, our old neighbor and my babysitter. I picture her searching for me, checking the city’s child-sorting centers until she discovers where I am. I imagine her finding whoever is handling my case—some clerk with blond hair heaped atop her proud head—and imploring her: “Find the boy a good home. Russia is vast—somewhere in the South, maybe.”
“Where there is an opening is where we send ’em.”
Maybe there is a compassionate crack somewhere in the woman’s exterior that Avdotya can pry. “He’s like a child of my own flesh. My son was killed at Stalingrad. You have a Christian soul, I can see it.”
“Please, stop it at once,” and then, “I’ll take a look; come back next week.”
The following day, Avdotya returns with a meter of Boston wool wrapped in newsprint. My old nanny knows something I don’t yet: that this boy must be sent far, far away from Moscow. Far from the great meat grinder that’s swallowed his parents. But perhaps dear Avdotya played no such role. I have not the slightest idea what changed my fortune. All I remember is the plump blond clerk—the last in a succession of nameless bureaucrats—putting me on the train and calling me a “lucky boy” before pointing me out to the conductor. And so I was.
The Krupskaya Home was, on the whole, a place of simplicity and cleanliness. The rules were strict but not arbitrary: food couldn’t be taken out of the dining hall, nothing was to be left on the plates, nothing was to be wasted. Often Mark Pavlovich joined us for meals. This was when, at our pleading, he would tell us about the war, in whose distant echoes we would hear stories about our own real or imagined fathers. He was a marvelous storyteller. With his voice he could render the terrible inferno of grenades exploding behind embankments. He repeated conversations between commanders and their platoons as though they’d happened yesterday. In every tale brave acts were performed, mettle tested, impossible promises made and kept. In each dramatic pause we would hear the crack of artillery so loud that blood would rush in our ears.
Everybody knew the story of how he’d lost his arm: guarding a position one night when the Germans went on the attack and threw a mortar shell behind his cover. He was buried in earth; his friends dug him out and saved his life. All of Mark Pavlovich’s stories invariably ended this way—with a lesson about the value of friendship. During these meals the boys whose fathers had died in battle would assume the poses and coloration of heroes. The ones whose parents had disappeared in less honorable ways would be filled with silent jealousy. And what about me—what thoughts were coursing through my little brain as I sat in a trance, listening to all these chronicles of courage? I knew my father had done something heroic too in the war, something involving papers but not guns. Yet against Mark Pavlovich’s tales of robust manhood, Papa’s peaceable heroism seemed unimpressive. Like every boy of my era I was already nursing powerful fantasies of my own—dashing scenes depicted in the vein of Chapayev, showing my devotion to the cause, Stalin’s name on my enameled lips. Whether I lived or died was not the important thing; what mattered most was the redeeming image I longed for others to remember. Here at last, in the new children’s home, such a redeeming future seemed within reach.
I’d never bought the line that my parents were enemies, a word I could associate only with German fascists. Yet I also knew they were not true Russians. They spoke another language with me and with each other. Could I have put it in words, I would have admitted to believing that one or both of them had simply made some sort of outsiders’ mistake—a careless, absentminded error that a real Russian would never have committed. It was this carelessness that had landed them in the infernal cycle of misunderstanding that held us all captive. My job, while it was all being sorted out, was to keep my nose clean until the moment when I could be called on as a character witness for my mother and father. My parents’ abiding and abject loyalty would be underwritten by my evident patriotism. My courage and honesty, my gifts as a leader of men, could all be introduced into evidence. That, at least, was my plan once I started attending school again. I was resolved to be the good boy I hadn’t been allowed to be at the first orphanage. To this end I immediately joined several “hobby circles”—an art club sponsored by our teacher, and a “young technicians” club for kids interested in learning to make farm tools. I hoped, with my illustrational talent (I was a gifted artist of realistic and bloody war scenes) and my practical enthusiasm, to make myself eligible for the Young Pioneers. My goodness was not entirely altruistic: If I should fail to redeem my parents, I could, at the very least, redeem myself. If I no longer had a family, I was prepared to let myself be reclaimed into the great communist family. Very likely I was taking my cue from the adults around me. At the new home, our parents were not spoken of disparagingly; they were not mentioned at all. If a child should forget herself and accidentally utter the word “mama” or “papa,” the outburst was treated with chilly indifference by the child minders. It was a breach of etiquette. This should have put me at ease, but it only turned my fears inward. In the old place, where I could be beaten for such a misstep, I’d been physically alert for snares and traps, like a hunted animal. Here, passing myself off as a “regular” Russian boy, I was terrified of being discovered for who I really was.