But my mother understood the value of hard work in the classroom. “Sasha,” she would often say as we sat at the kitchen table with my schoolbooks open before us, “the people who get ahead in life are the ones who work honestly and hard.”
My mother was then a person of great optimism.
Her belief in the benefits of working hard in school had a direct impact on me. While other parents in our building made sure their children completed their lessons each night, Lydia Zuyev sat patiently at the kitchen table verifying that her son Alexander completed all of his calligraphy and arithmetic exercises letter-perfect. For her, no errors were permissible, nor was I allowed to cross out mistakes and start again on the same page. “We have sufficient paper,” she would tell me, ripping up the half-complete sheet from my exercise book. From her I learned to concentrate on the task at hand.
In kindergarten my first classroom had been dominated by a large framed painting of “Dedushka,” Grandfather Lenin, smiling warmly down on the children. We’d first learned to sing songs about our patriotic duty from a book with pictures of “Valodynka” Lenin, a child just like us with golden curls above the starched white collar of his school uniform. Once, my mother had taken me on a long riverboat trip to Ulyanovsk, another port on the Volga, where we had visited the Lenin Home Museum. I was happy that Valodynka had been raised in such a nice big house, but surprised that his father had been a schoolteacher, not an engineer.
I was a pudgy boy, not at all athletic. On Sundays my mother would often take me on the long trolley ride out to my grandmother’s house in Bezimaynka on the eastern edge of the city. Anna Vasilyevna Khatuntseva, my mother’s mother, was a typical Russian babushka. She was stooped by years of hard work, but had a bright smile and kind eyes. Like many women of her generation, she smoked, and relished the luxury of a quiet cigarette.
She believed it was her duty to feed her grandchild as much as he could eat. To her, blinchik dipped in melted butter and filled with sugar, honey, or raspberry jam, or a steaming plate of piroshki filled with spiced minced pork, shredded cabbage, and hard-boiled eggs, were meant to be eaten right down to the last crumb. Naturally I loved going to her house. Even though she had no running water and heated her room with a wood stove, I never thought of her as poor.
She was close to her neighbors. On summer afternoons the old people would set tables under the shade trees, and the women would bring food. Everyone shared, everyone was equal.
I enjoyed all the attention I received at these picnics. I was the first grandchild in the family, and had come late in the first postwar generation. Children my age were doted on because we were the visible continuation of families that had been almost extinguished in the war.
And the war was a very strong presence in my childhood. At school we all learned Red Army songs, and the most exciting movies were all war films. One of my favorites was The Chronicle of the Dive Bomber. At the end the heroic young pilot dove his crippled plane right into a column of panzers and sacrificed his life for the Motherland. Sitting in the warm darkness of the Torch Cinema, watching those powerful old fighter-bombers howl through the sky of the Ukraine to blast the invaders, I felt deep pride to be a Soviet citizen. Then, riding home on the trolley, I gazed at the actual Shturmovik that sat atop the pedestal in a neighborhood memorial near one of the new microrayon apartment complexes. Its wide green wings and rugged tail were emblazoned with the red stars of the Soviet Army. That airplane had been built right here in Samara. It had crashed in a Baltic swamp and been carefully restored as a memorial. To me, it was a tangible link to a truly heroic time.
But there were stronger links to the war within my own family. My mother’s father, Mikhail Stepanovich, had driven a truck before the war, then had become a chauffeur for a Party official. Like my father, he must have had some other talents, because he had apparently been fairly well-to-do. Grandmother had a framed photo of him standing on the porch of their own small wooden home, dressed in a handsome leather coat. In 1941 he had gone to war. At first, she told me, his letters had come regularly. Then, during the worst of the fighting in 1942, they had stopped. For months she received no news. She had joined thousands of other women, boys, and old men on the emergency construction of the aviation factories that had been moved east from Moscow and Leningrad after the Nazi invasion. Although she had been a village schoolteacher in her teens and had never before endured hard manual labor, Grandmother worked for months, hacking the frozen ground with a pick, digging foundations for the factories that were soon producing the Shturmoviks.
Those were terrible times, she told me. My mother and her brother, Vladimir, had only one pair of shoes to share between them. Then in the middle of the harsh winter of 1943, a dishonest salesclerk stole the family’s three-month food ration book from my mother one day when she had gone to buy bread. With that ration book, the family was entitled to a basic allotment of bread, flour, and cooking oil. Without it, they faced starvation. That winter and spring my grandmother led my mother and uncle far out into the countryside, digging beneath the snow for damaged potatoes in the fallow fields. They had survived on rotten-potato cakes and a kind of soup Grandmother made from grass and willow buds.
But despite these hardships, she retained her basic humanity. She was assigned as a guard at a camp for German prisoners of war. Many of these POWs were hardened Nazis, but others, she told me, were just boys who had been drafted straight from school. One prisoner, she said, played the harmonica beautifully, and she rewarded him by sharing her own meager bread ration.
Then in the spring of 1944, they finally received official notification that my grandfather had been killed at the front. As sad as the news had been, this official notification meant the family was entitled to a small survivor’s pension. And as war orphans, my mother and uncle also received a special food and clothing allotment from the American Red Cross. My mother was given a pair of yellow shoes with strong rubber soles. Uncle Vladimir received plaid wool knickers. Once a month the family was given a large can of powdered eggs, canned pork, and several thick chocolate bars.
“Sasha,” my grandmother told me, “your mother and Uncle Vladimir thought it was New Year’s when they opened those packages.”
I understood why making sure children were well fed was so important to my grandmother.
But being a chubby boy of nine had begun to bother me when we lived in the old neighborhood near the center of the city. I could not run in the park or climb trees with the other boys. They laughed and called me “fatso.”
Out in Microrayon 8, my new neighborhood, however, I discovered that being a pudgy, overfed kid was more than simply unpleasant. This district was a cluster of seven-story prefabricated concrete apartment blocks standing like dominoes among open parkland and playing fields. Few families knew each other here, so older boys could prey on kids like me as we walked to school each morning. My mother always gave me fifteen kopeks for sweets at the school buffet. But I often had to hand those three copper coins over to bigger kids who ambushed me along the way. They knew I couldn’t defend myself.
Finally Grigori, one of the guys in my building who had rescued me several times, gave me some good advice. “If you’re going to live out here,” he said, looking around the open fields, “you’re going to have to learn to defend yourself.”
But I didn’t know where to begin to learn this important skill. Then, that summer, I almost drowned while wading in a pond. My mother decided that I had to learn how to swim, even if I didn’t seem otherwise athletically inclined.