His half-hooded eyes watched me. “Why ‘were’?”
“They’re dead,” I told him without blinking.
I might have even believed it. At that moment, I might have even wished it.
Mark Pavlovich said nothing. He reached his hand underneath his collar and from some recess under his shirt produced a long chain with a brass key. Deftly, he removed the chain from around his neck, and I watched as he crouched to open a drawer in his desk. Above the horizon of the desk I saw his shoulder and limply hanging sleeve. For the first time I understood that even simple movements were not totally natural to him, that he had to turn his whole body to work the lock, as though he were twisting a stubborn screw. At last he got the drawer open and removed something—a heavy leather ledger that he placed on the desk. He found a piece of paper and slid it across to me. “You’re old enough to write.”
With my heart still pounding I understood what the ledger contained. The page he’d turned to was full of addresses.
He stood up and walked around to where I sat. He placed the inkwell beside me. I held the pen he’d given me tightly, but my mind was blank.
Mark Pavlovich began to dictate. “Zdrastvui dorogaya mamochka…”
I took down his words like a scribe. He glanced down at my uneven penmanship. “There is a ‘v’ in the first word….Oh, it’s not important. Let’s keep going.”
My first letter to my mother turned out to be four sentences long. “It is warm here,” it began, and concluded with: “I have made a friend. His name is Kolya.”
“What now?” I said.
“What do you think? Write, ‘Kiss you, your son Yulik.’?”
From another drawer in his desk, Guchkov produced an envelope. Finding the right entry in the ledger, he copied over the infamous address of the prison where the letter was to travel. Once he was done, he placed the ledger back inside his desk and locked it with his key.
I watched the long chain and the glint of brass disappear again under the director’s rough linen shirt, secreted to a place to which only he could gain access. “That’s enough for today,” he said. “You’ll have more to write next time.”
—
AS FOR MY FRIEND KOLYA—I’d met him in the mess hall. He was two years older, though one wouldn’t know it. He was thin, stalk-necked, and albino-pale. His slitty eyes ought to have made him look furtive, but instead he seemed to glance out of them almost serenely, as if wherever he found himself was just a place to pass through. I tried to start a conversation with him by praising the food.
“Yeah, a real health resort. Are you going to eat your candies?” he said.
I looked at my tin plate, where lay two wrapped barbariski. It was Sunday, and this was our treat for the Seventh of November holiday. I’d watched him spend the meal biting off little bits of his sausage and stuffing them in his pocket. Since I hadn’t objected, he grabbed my candies and did the same.
“Hey!”
“Too late. What’s fallen off the wagon is gone.”
I was loath to start a fight with a runt, especially since his swipe seemed almost like a gesture of friendliness, and a friend was what I needed most. Taking food out of the cafeteria was against the rules. “They’ll make you turn out your pockets,” I warned him.
“And what are you, House Management?”
Within a few weeks, he was hoisting me over the metal gate behind the broken-down cattle shed. On the other side of the gate was the wooded path that led to the main road that went to the town bazaar. On this day—some time after my audience with Guchkov—the recent snow had melted and the ground was muddy, tracked with boots and hoofprints. It sucked at our shoes as we walked. Once we were out of view of the children’s home, Kolya pulled down his trousers to piss in a stand of black pines. He tucked his shirt back into his underpants, and then unhooked something from inside his pants. It was a mitten attached with a bobby pin to the inside of his trousers, just beneath the pocket lining. He stuck his finger through the hole at the bottom of his pocket and wiggled it to show me how he’d sneaked out the food. Inside the pinned mitten were pieces of kielbasa and the candies. Also, a piece of a broken comb, a cigarette butt, and some matches. Now that we were out in the elements, Kolya smoked openly, like a grown-up, offering me a few drags on his cigarette in thanks for my sweets.
“What are you going to do with the candy?”
“Trade it.”
“For what?”
“A whistle.”
“Did you trade for the pin?”
“No, I took that from my aunt Marusia’s house. Found it in her box of buttons. She doesn’t live too far.”
“Why aren’t you with her, then?”
“I like it here. Anyway, when Mama comes back from the nick, I’ll live with her.”
I felt myself go cold again. Never before had I heard a kid talk about his mother being in lockup, let alone volunteer it as casually as Kolya did.
“What did she do, your mother?”
“She pulled babies out of women.”
“Delivered them.”
“No, she pulled them out with her knitting needles before they got to be big. If the women didn’t want ’em.”
“Did they scream?”
“The women, sure. Not the babies. They were just guts and blood by the time she pulled ’em out.”
“You mean you saw it?”
“Sure. I’d look when she went to toss out the slop bucket. There was hair sometimes, but mostly guts.”
“And your papa?”
“Froze in a snowbank. Yours both dead?”
I hesitated. “My father might be,” I heard myself say. “My mother, she’s in a camp.” My honesty surprised me. Kolya had gotten the truth out of me without anything like the invasive procedures of which he’d spoken so casually.
“She an enemy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, they had to send her off for something or another.”
I felt the old feeling of unworthiness attach itself to me again. I’d been asking myself this very question for many months. In my mind, one explanation overshadowed the others. Now I wanted to test it out, to see if it could survive in the open air. “We had an iron bust of Lenin in our room. Mama used to crack walnuts with the bottom of it.” The solid iron bust had made a perfect nutcracker. I remembered my father once warned her that if anyone saw her cracking nuts like that she’d be thrown “inside.”
“With Lenin!” A reassuringly horrified look came over Kolya’s face. “My mama said she loved Lenin more than life!”
It wasn’t my first time at the bazaar. We were permitted to walk there on Sundays when chaperoned by older kids, who’d be given a few kopeks to buy us ice cream or a newspaper funnel’s worth of sunflower seeds. It was everyone’s favorite place, an ever-changing landscape—orderly and energetic in the morning, filled with crowds all afternoon, disheveled like a street after a parade by early twilight. Kolya, however, was going there not as a spectator but to engage in commerce. I followed him from stall to stall as he attempted to barter.
“Babushka, a few coins for the sweets?”