No sooner had we embarked on our bartering project than a shriek came from one of the sellers.
“Thieves! Robbing their children’s home.” She was shouting from behind a pyramid of carrots and beets, waving her pink, frostbitten hands in the air. “They feed and clothe you vermin, and you steal from the state!”
“Calm down, Auntie! This is mine. I didn’t steal from anyone.”
“Liars and thieves! They come here to hawk the clothes off their backs for cigarettes. Another one of them was here already, selling off his scarf.”
“Not us, Auntie,” Kolya said. “Someone shut this horse up.”
“Who do you think it was?” I wondered aloud as we walked back in the dimming light. I already had my own suspicion.
“Baldy, I bet.”
Baldy was more like a savage dwarf than a real child. I’d seen him torture the stray cats that prowled around the play yard—binding their limbs and tossing them against tree trunks. He’d paralyzed one by bursting its pelvis. He’d chase smaller kids away from the swings and merry-go-round, before suspending himself from the playground equipment derisively. His wild laugh marked him with the unmistakable brand of the criminal. We all suspected him of mental deficiencies, but this only gave him a kind of superiority over the others.
“How did he get a name like Baldy if he isn’t bald?” I said.
“His head was covered with bloody wounds when he arrived,” Kolya explained. “He lived in a train yard and gambled with the hobos na volosianku.” He elucidated the rules of this game: “If he won, they gave him food; if he lost, he’d let them yank a tuft of hair from his head.”
When I first arrived at Memory of Krupskaya I had found it difficult to keep my eyes off of Baldy, though I was careful not to glance so long as to provoke a fight. To look at Baldy too long was to nurse a desire for suicide. Instead of making him civilized, the children’s home had only given him free rein to become more rabid. Lately, he had started flouting the rules of fair fighting, which mandated using only fists and ceasing at the first sign of blood. To pull a knife, as Baldy had done during his latest fight with a new boy, was a violation of the order. It necessitated an immediate intervention. Someone had run to Guchkov, and soon the director was there, parting the oglers and dragging Baldy off by the collar with his one, surprisingly strong arm. When Guchkov returned, he removed his fedora from his head and said that anyone else carrying any kind of weapon should place it in his hat immediately. Two boys stepped forward to drop in their tiny, dull blades, the ones I’d sometimes seen them tossing like darts at the trees. “The next knife I confiscate, you’ll be doing more than just shoveling pig shit all month,” he’d warned.
It was bitterly cold as we walked back toward the children’s home. The frozen ground crunched underfoot. “Should we tell?” I asked Kolya.
“Why stick our necks out?”
A few days later, Baldy was pulled out of morning lineup. “Where’s the scarf we issued you?” Mark Pavlovich inquired.
A scornful smile played on the boy’s lips. “Lost it.”
“We pay money for everything here,” the director said, pacing down the lineup. Still addressing Baldy, he added, “You liked picking potatoes so much last month. This month you can enjoy chopping our winter firewood.”
Pretending to look at Mark Pavlovich, we were all really trying to watch Baldy, who had tucked his left arm behind his back in order to mimic the strutting step of Guchkov’s march. A lewd snicker spread among a cohort of the older kids. Baldy had caught the director’s pedantic walk and the uneven wiggle of his behind. Even those who thought the imitation vicious tittered unwillingly. It pained me to see the war hero Guchkov mocked behind his back. Since being reassured that the secret of my mother’s penal address was safe with him, I was more devoted to him than ever. Now I felt my body go prickly with a desire to pounce on Baldy. His malice I could stomach, but not his passing off his spite as noble rebellion. For that I vowed to make him pay.
—
THE NEXT MORNING I stood in my school uniform with my back pressed to the thick, rounded logs of the old building. I was hidden from view by the utility shack. I listened as the other kids filed out for the daily three-kilometer trek to school. I knew I would be punished for being late, but what I’d set out to do was more important than class. I waited for the ring of voices in the crystalline air to fade, and sneaked back to the main building. Observe now the young hero: my earflaps blowing in the wind, the yarn at the bottom of my sweater (already too short) coming loose as I pull on it nervously. The cold air stabs my lungs. As my shoes crunch on the frozen snow, I try to warm myself up with a vision of Mark Pavlovich and me, writing a second letter to my mother (I have yet to receive an answer to my first). The mistaken first impression he had of me as a liar has been corrected now that I’ve shared with him what I know. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he tells me I’m a boy who can be relied on. The warmth on my shoulder lingers as I compose the letter to my mother.
When I reached the director’s office, I found him not alone. Through the door, left partly open, I could hear voices—one gruff and serious, another carefully accommodating. From my vantage point I glimpsed the polish of military boots, the swish of heavy greatcoats of a blue-gray color normally identified with members of the militzia. My eye followed the coat upward to its lapelled shoulder. There were two of them inside: one leaning over Guchkov’s desk in a way that seemed vaguely threatening, while the other paced the room, brushing hoarfrost from his ursine hat. Their heavy boots had left tracks of melted snow on the floor. Holding my breath, I tried to hear what these policemen were saying. The story seemed to be that a local boy in town had been sent to the hospital after a bloody knife fight. The director asked if the boy had identified the assailant. One of the policemen smiled and assured him that they had gotten all the information from him they needed. “Then I suppose you’re free to do your work,” Mark Pavlovich said. The tone of their voices demonstrated dissatisfaction with this decoy answer. The one who had not spoken before began talking about “habitual recidivists” whose ages would not shield them from the full force of the law.