Yakov was describing previous New Years, spent with his parents. They, like millions of others, never missed the yearly showing of the film The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Steam Bath—a romantic comedy based on the premise that in every town in the Soviet Union there is an identical street called Builders’ Street lined with blocks of apartments, each furnished with the same furniture, with the same pictures on the walls and books on the shelves. Just as comic was the New Year report from the bourgeois capitalist states: “In Spain,” the TV commentator would pronounce in funereal tones, “they will not be greeting the New Year joyfully. Unemployment runs at x percent, x thousands are homeless… In Washington, it won’t be a happy New Year either. Sixty percent of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of five percent of exploitative capitalists… As for Paris—” and so on. The same footage of homeless children would appear year after year, until Soviet viewers grew fond of it. “There’s that one with the wart again,” they’d say. “Still no older.”
This year, however, we turned on the TV at midnight and watched the huge red hammer-and-sickle flag on the Kremlin being lowered against the dark sky. There was a moment’s pause, and then the Russian tricolor was slowly raised in its place.
The tyrants’ surrender! It should have been a great moment, and yet the hammer and sickle looked so brave and bold in comparison with the dreary red, white, and blue stripes. We cheered, and then a pang of nostalgia silenced everyone. The imagery of their childhood was being laid aside and with it, the socialist ideals they had been taught. For children of the Brezhnev years, the real and the ideal were plainly delineated; no one felt any sadness at the end of Party hegemony. The vision, though, was different. It was as though the government had suddenly announced that love did not conquer all.
Yuri jumped up and crashed together two saucepan lids. “Forward, comrades! Let’s sing our anthem for the last time!”
We agreed noisily and set off down the corridor, banging pans and cups, and bellowing the Soviet hymn.
“Farewell to our flag!” shouted Oleg.
“Hurrah!” cried the crowd. People were coming out of their rooms and joining in. One of the English boys produced a Soviet flag and ran in front, waving it and pounding on doors. A crescendo of voices continued with the chorus:
“Farewell to the party of Lenin!” yelled someone.
“Hurrah!”
“Farewell to Young Pioneer uniforms with their little caps!”
“Hurrah!”
“Farewell to ‘Workers of the world, unite!’”
“Hurrah!”
“Farewell to the Communist Party!”
“Hurrah!”
“Farewell to Lenin! Let him point his finger somewhere else!”
“Hurrah!”
“Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!”
Much later that morning, at about six, when Mitya had gone home and I was just finishing up the champagne with an English boy called Jim, Viktor appeared and said, “Let’s go out, see what’s on the streets.”
“Oh, Viktor, I’m finished, I’m just going to bed,” I said.
“Come on! It’s the first day of a new era, don’t you want to congratulate people?”
So Jim, Viktor, and I set off. It was cloudy and warm outside, and the streets were almost empty. Viktor marched about making gestures like a poet. An elderly couple were walking their elderly dog. “Happy New Year!” Viktor spoke up in his stentorian voice and they smiled, a little taken aback. Jim found Young Pioneer badges for sale in a kiosk; they bore a flame surrounded by the motto “Always ready!” We pinned them to our hats. Viktor was striding toward a streetcar. “Happy New Year!” he greeted the driver, blowing her a kiss.
We were heading, inexorably, for the station, partly because I had a vague idea that we might see Sergei or the plums again, partly because we were always attracted to the railways, the trains idling on the way to Sofia, Odessa, and the Far East. There was always commotion going on, even at 6:00 A.M. on New Year’s Day. The waiting room was filled with refugees from the wars in the Caucasus who shifted and moaned on their bundles. People hurried to and from trains, policemen strolled about with a proprietory air, and the eternal row of babushkas gossiped by their buckets of meat pies, boiled potatoes, and bottles of Moskovskaya vodka with crooked labels. Viktor walked among them, spreading his congratulations, and where he went I followed with the packet of M my father had left me, doling them out into mittened palms. “Little chocolates,” I explained. “For health and success.”
The long-distance trains were standing close by, and as we wandered along we saw an open window. Without any further discussion we scurried across the tracks, climbed in, and settled down to sleep and wake up the devil knows where. We’d only been in our compartment a couple of minutes when the conductor came upon us, blazing with fury.
“Happy New Year,” said Viktor gently, kissing her inflamed cheeks.
She suddenly simpered and looked at the floor, saying, “Oh well, and new happiness to you all, too.”
Her arrival put paid to our plans for a long-distance journey, however, so we went to Lipetsk, Viktor’s hometown, instead. The early-morning passengers on the elektrichka wore stoical expressions as they huddled in the corners away from the broken windowpanes. They watched with a certain pleasure as Viktor and Jim took their shirts off and we sang for the two hours of the journey, a sort of Schadenfreude at seeing us ruining our health by sitting in such an icy draft. We took our revenge by inciting the husbands to drink with us.
“Sasha, come on. Join us!”
Sasha’s wife muttered furiously in his ear and he raised a limp hand in our direction to say, “Thanks, guys, but I really can’t, you understand the situation.”
But we showed no mercy and kept on at him. “Join us! It’s a holiday. Just one!”
Two days we spent in Lipetsk, and I remember little of it but a huge reproduction of a lake surrounded by birch trees that covered an entire wall, and dancing with a crowd of blond girls and black-haired husbands, and more vodka, and the feel of a brown blanket under my cheek as I finally fell asleep some time that evening. No other coherent thought crossed my mind.
When we arrived back in Voronezh, Mitya was waiting, furious. Why hadn’t I told him where I was going? Why hadn’t I called? He’d worried. He’d felt a fool, not knowing.
To me, with my hangover, it seemed only reasonable that such a new year should take longer than usual to be born. But Mitya was hurt. At the end of our first serious argument, he walked away from me, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders. I should have gone after him. Instead I stood on the hostel doorstep and watched until he disappeared.
11
The House of the Deaf and Dumb
A newspaper cartoon shows a lone demonstrator waving a banner that reads “I don’t understand anything.”
Lapochka swung open the door to his room before we had time to knock.
“Look at the doorbell,” he boasted.