But who was I? Something strange had started happening to me since I’d been removed from my home. My body had started feeling foreign to me. I heard my own voice as if it belonged to someone else, and watched myself as if with a stranger’s set of eyes. I listened to this boy as if to learn who he was, but also to appraise him and take his measure. In time this boy I observed was not “me” but a different boy, one whose father had died in the war, and whose mother, perhaps a nurse, had also perished in some heroic fashion. I watched this boy’s body file in with the other bodies to the cafeteria. I watched it in the common bath, sprinkling cold water on itself. I felt myself becoming sentimentally aroused by this intrepid, lonesome creature’s struggle to abide austerity and remain modest and unflinching despite life’s cruelties. My waking life consisted of secretly playing this character. I clung to him as to a brother and was terrified of having him taken from me.
My fear of being discovered was not totally new. The day I started school, I’d stopped answering my mother in English. She already knew better than to speak English around the neighbors, but even in private I didn’t like it. Only after dark did I relax my vigilance and let her sing me to sleep with lullabies she’d sung to me since I was a baby—“Little Bo Peep,” “Farmer in the Dell,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”—as well as others, such as “Angels Watching Over Me,” “Roll the Old Chariot Along,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” songs that at the time I had no way of knowing were the same Negro spirituals my mother’s nanny had sung to Florence when she was a little girl. In my metal cot in the children’s home, I continued to hum some of these songs under the thin covers, as quietly as humanly possible. What else did I have? We slept alone, with no rag dolls or stuffed rabbits to press into. The songs and their melodies were all that remained for me of my mother, whose image was already fading.
My two existences—nocturnal and diurnal—were clearly demarcated for me by a rule that forbade us children from reentering the dormitory rooms during the day, after we’d made up our beds. (Ever since, and for most of my life, I have avoided the temptation of walking into the bedroom in the middle of the day.) And yet, one day early on in my stay, I broke the rule and sneaked back into the sleeping wing after breakfast. What for? I can’t remember now. Did I leave something inside I’d forgotten? Whatever the reason, I had walked only as far as the door when I heard voices coming from inside.
“They’ll disgrace this home!” This voice belonged to a woman we called the Sergeant, a child minder who dragged some unfortunate kid or another out of the lineup every morning to make him or her confess to a fresh sin (dirty hands, pilfered cigarettes). This time, I gathered she’d discovered evidence of depravity under an older boy’s pillow. I knew I ought to scram, but my curiosity kept me glued to the spot, unable to breathe or move. The item the Sergeant had discovered, it emerged, was a letter. Specifically, a love letter from a girl at the orphanage. She read some lines of it aloud, before giving her assessment: “Vile stuff! Not even like the songs on the radio.”
“I told you, I’ll handle this myself.” I recognized Mark Pavlovich’s baritone, the light gravel in his throat.
“It is my job to see they come out of here…intact,” the Sergeant said. “We are running an orphanage, not a brothel. What happens tomorrow when there’s another mouth to feed?”
“Stop scaring me, and stop scaring yourself.”
“You need to make them an example, before the others get ideas.”
“I won’t do any such thing, and neither will you.”
Crouching behind the open door, I watched the Sergeant stalk out. She didn’t even see me. The set of her pincerlike mouth showed how she felt about having such orders forced down her throat.
Did I understand what I had just observed? Only dimly. I sensed that Mark Pavlovich had made it clear who was in charge, which gladdened me, since I feared and disliked the Sergeant as much as the others did. Nevertheless, the exchange unsettled me as well. It confounded some credo in which I’d long been instructed. At school, our teacher had a portrait of Pavlik Morozov hanging alongside portraits of Lenin and Stalin. Each day, “monitors” would be chosen from among us to examine the dirt under all the children’s nails and the wax inside our ears. Those who were too lenient and gave their friends a pass were themselves informed on, usually by the little girls who appointed themselves our class disciplinarians. The art of squealing on each other’s deficiencies was drilled into us early, and I was unfortunately not immune to its allure.
Not long thereafter I was sent into Guchkov’s office for getting into a dirty fight. My resolve to be a model citizen had temporarily deserted me when another boy toppled the only available chessboard, which I’d painstakingly set up after awaiting my turn to play. The kid was a malicious little creep who’d tried to bring trouble down on me before and, worse, treated me like the fraud I feared I was. Usually, I was inclined to let his smart remarks pass, but this was a clear provocation. If I’d learned anything from my first children’s home, it was that scores had to be settled at once or never at all. I didn’t know how to fight. I went for the boy’s face with my hands, knowing the only chance I had was to go completely crazy on him before he could respond. I dug my nails into his chin, about as high as I could reach. He punched me in the stomach, but by then I had the bottom half of his face in a claw hold and wouldn’t let go. Blood squirted from his lip. A second blow caught me dead in the eardrum, thundering inside my skull as if I were a deaf man experiencing the percussive shock of a snare drum. Darkness rose up from the bottom of my vision. I might have been smiling as I fell.
—
THE DOOR OF THE OFFICE OPENED, and I was led in by my sore ear. The door was closed behind me. The director pointed to a chair. The room had a scent—a thick odor of pipe tobacco, wool, and masculine sweat.
The undersides of his eyes were rimmed with dark circles. A day’s growth of beard clung to the slack flesh of his not unhandsome face. When he spoke I could feel his voice in my chest. “Stick out your hands, Yuliy.” With his one hand he turned over my palms. “I see they’ve cut off your claws. What do you think you were doing?”
His saying my name made me feel strange. Guchkov walked our halls with an air of celebrity. Now I’d gotten a private audience. Yet it was not for doing anything outstanding, or even for being an honorable outlaw, but for a dirty, opportunistic maneuver.
“Well?”
“I didn’t start it…,” I said, and launched into the story about the chessboard, leaving out the boy’s earlier mockery. I could feel Guchkov making a study of me as I blathered on. Every word that left my mouth I regretted as soon as I spoke it. Even as my nostrils streamed snot, I tried to summon my alter ego—that fine, austere boy who’d never abase himself with excuses. But my doppelg?nger had abandoned me. I felt my face getting wet. Something had come loose in me.
Finally, Guchkov stopped me. “Here we don’t use our claws to settle matters. Is that understood?”
I nodded.
“Speak up.”
Now that I was expected to speak, I fell mute.
“You understand plain Russian?” he snapped.
I managed an affirmative.
“And English, too?”
I felt my body go stiff.
“You’re an amerikanchik, aren’t you?”
Inside my chest, my heart was pounding like a canary trying to get out of its cage. I couldn’t take a normal breath.
“What are you afraid of? We aren’t sending you there.”
“I’m not.”
“Not afraid?”
“Not American,” I said. The taunts still rang in my ears. I could hear them now. Enemy. Enemy. “My mother and father were,” I said.