Being fifteen that summer, I was expected to attend an organized vocational camp or to intern at an industrial institute in the region. Since I was always eager to travel, I managed to land a summer job with a geological survey team attached to the Hydroelectric Institute. The three-man, two-boy team, led by a friendly engineer named Yuri Sokalov, was assigned to the east bank of the Volga, covering a region over a hundred miles long. Our responsibility was to measure the electromagnetic potential in the bedrock so that a complete geological survey chart of the region could be drawn.
It was interesting work. I was just a helper, but I learned a lot about geology and about the grown-up world of men. Yuri took pride in his profession and made sure we did a thorough job. My responsibilities included unloading the heavy steel probes and coils of cable that we used to set up our measurement grids. The first day, the men let me swing the eighteen-pound sledgehammer to drive in the steel stakes and then hook up the insulated cable.
We worked outdoors, in the rye and wheat fields of the collective farms and sometimes along the sandy banks of the Volga. If we completed a day’s assigned survey tract early, the team would go for a swim and fish until after sundown. Some evenings we cooked up our catch in a big sooty kettle over a campfire on the river beach. The men taught us how to make a delicately spiced fish soup they called oukha, which combined the essence of fresh bream and pike with a tang of woodsmoke.
They also taught me how to play cards and drink vodka. Only an idiot drank warm vodka straight from the bottle without food, they said. On the nights when we split a bottle of well-chilled Sibirskaya, I was responsible for laying out the plates of sliced pickles, boiled potatoes, rye bread, and butter. Then, when the thimble glasses were filled, we all made our toast, exhaled loudly, tossed back the cold vodka, and breathed in through a thick wedge of bread before eating a snack.
They never let me drink very much, though. And when I joined the ritual, I remembered the advice my mother had given me after the escapades of the wine at the school party.
“Sasha,” she said, “I can’t tell you not to drink. But always remember where, when, how much, and with whom to drink, and you won’t have trouble in your life.”
One Saturday night that August when we were staying at the dormitory on a dairy kolkhoz, I hiked over to a nearby summer camp that was having a Komsomol dance. This was the kind of camp where well-connected city kids supposedly worked side by side with the farmers to bring in the harvest, but actually wasted a lot of time on the volleyball court. When I entered the camp refectory, I spotted the red paper banners proclaiming the eternal solidarity between urban youth and the collective farmers. Another boring Komsomol affair. But then I saw there were two distinct groups: a handful of self-conscious city kids, including several pretty girls, outnumbered by a crowd of young kolkhozniki in shabby blue work trousers with a telltale wide seam on the leg. Some of the farm boys were drunk. They insisted on cutting in to dance with the city girls, even though the farmers had no idea how to dance to the Beatles or Pink Floyd records the students had brought to the camp.
I saw a pretty blond girl trying to dance with a city boy in a V-neck sweater, but a drunk, lanky farm guy who looked too old to be there kept pushing his way in. When the shorter boy from Samara tried to stop him, the drunk kolkhoznik elbowed him aside and tried to get the girl in a bear hug.
I shoved my way in and told the guy to leave her alone.
He laughed, his mouth full of rotten teeth. “Sit on my dick,” he swore, then threw a clumsy punch.
I dodged the blow, tripped him, and had him in a neck lock before he hit the dance floor. The guy was tall and had heavy shoulders, but he didn’t know a thing about wrestling. Before I could really hurt him, the adult monitors intervened and hauled him off to sober up.
The girl’s name was Marina. She thanked me, then jotted down her phone number in Samara. “Please call me before school starts again,” she said. All in all, I thought hiking back to the dormitory in the cool starlight, it had not been a bad night.
When I went to see Marina back in Samara at the end of the summer, I took a bus to Microrayon 4, a neighborhood of well-made twelve-story brick apartment blocks along a broad, tree-lined avenue named for Cheluskin, a famous Soviet pilot. This was the nicest district in the city. People called it Micro-Israel, because many of the famous Jewish scientists from the institutes were supposed to live here. On the ground floor of Marina’s building there was a row of nice shops and cafes.
When I went into Marina’s podyesd, the babushka in the concierge box gave me a stern look, as if I had no right to be there. The elevator was clean and ran smoothly. The landing on Marina’s floor had only four doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering if I had the right building. It seemed impossible that only four families lived on each floor of this large building. But I wasn’t lost. Marina greeted me, led me into their long sitting room that faced the street. They had four tall, double-glazed windows and a balcony with a wrought-iron table and chairs. In the vestibule off the entrance, I saw the doors of two bedrooms and the open doorway of a kitchen that was almost as big as the main room of my apartment.
Marina’s living room looked like something out of a European magazine: oriental rugs, Scandinavian furniture, and even a bar with tall swivel stools. Through the glass bar front I saw bottles of imported Scotch whisky, Italian liqueurs, and French brandy. A big Japanese tape recorder sat next to their color television set. When I’d peeked in the kitchen, I had seen a tall refrigerator with double doors. Nobody that I knew lived this way.
The men on the survey crew had joked scornfully about the shishka, the Party “bosses,” whom you found at the top of any organization. Whenever the crew’s work orders were fouled up or a piece of equipment was late in arriving, the men would blame the shishka, who were probably all too busy stocking their apartments with luxury goods to sign the paperwork. Now I was standing in one of those apartments, which I had only imagined were the fanciful subject of frustrated jokes before.
Marina offered me a whisky, but I settled for a stick of American chewing gum instead. She showed me her French and Italian fashion magazines, then told me she attended a special school where all the classes were taught in English.
“All the classes?” I asked. “Even physics and chemistry?”
“Yes,” she said proudly. “We speak, read, and write English all day.”
This was amazing. I wondered how far she had to travel to attend such a school. “What do your parents say about your going away?”
She seemed confused but then answered nervously. “Sasha,” she said, “the school is here in Samara.”
When you learned foreign languages, there were lots of interesting professions open to you. “How do you apply for this school? What’s the exam like?”
“The school,” she said, “is not like you think. Your parents have to have the correct position for you to enter.”
I took in the silk Kirghiz carpets, the bar, and the Finnish furniture. “What does your father do?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, “he is on the city’s Party Committee.”
Riding the commuter train back out to my neighborhood, I felt a moment of regret that my mother did not have the blat needed to secure me a place in one of those special schools. The devil take all of them, I thought. I would become an electrician, land a good job in one of the aircraft factories, and make money on the side repairing the shoddy work the State construction enterprises did in all the new apartments.
But when I went back to School Number Two to collect my academic records before registering at the electro-technology school, I found Rema had locked up my files. She was gone for vacation. Then Coach Karanov called me down to the Spartak center. He explained that Rema Alexandrovna had asked him to talk sense to me. Apparently students in the vocational school were not encouraged to compete in sports competitions within the Russian Republic.