So when and where, I ask myself, does the transition from freedom to slavery acquire the status of inevitability? When does it become acceptable, especially to an innocent bystander? At what age is it most harmless to alter one's free state? At what age does this alteration register in one's memory least? At the age of twenty? Fifteen? Ten? Five? In the womb? Rhetorical questions, these, aren't they? Not really. A revolutionary or a conqueror at least should know the right answer. Genghis Khan, for instance, knew it. He just carved up everyone whose head was above a cart wheel's hub. Five, then. But on October 25, 1917, my father was already fourteen; my mother, twelve. She already knew some French; he, Latin. That's why I am asking these questions. That's why I am talking to myself.
27
On summer evenings all three of our tall windows were open, and the breeze from the river tried to acquire the rank of an object in the tulle curtains. The river wasn't far, just ten minutes' walk from our building. Nothing was too far: the Summer Garden, the Hermitage, the Field of Mars. Yet even when they were younger my parents seldom went for a stroll, together or separately. After a whole day on his feet, my father wasn't terribly keen on hitting the streets again. As for my mother, standing in queues after eight hours in the office produced the same results; besides, there were plenty of things she had to do at home. If they ventured out, it would be mostly to attend some relatives' gathering (a birthday or a wedding anniversary), or for a movie, very seldom for the theater.
Living near them all my life, I wasn't conscious of their aging. Now that my memory is shuttling between various decades, I see my mother watching from the balcony the shuffling figure of her husband down below and muttering under her breath, "A real oldster, aren't you. A real decided oldster." And I hear my father's "You're just bent on driving me into the grave," which concluded their quarrels in the sixties, instead of the door bang and receding sound of his steps a decade earlier. And I see, while shaving, his silver- gray stubble on my chin.
If my mind gravitates now to their images as old people, it has to do presumably with the knack of memory for retaining last impressions best. (Add to this our addiction to linear logic, to the principle of evolution—and the invention of photography is inevitable.) But I think my own getting there, to old age, also plays some role: one seldom dreams even about one's ovwn youth, about, say, being twelve. If I have any notion of the future, it is made in their likeness. They are my "Kilroy was here" for the day after tomorrow, at least visually.
28
Like most males, I bear more resemblance to my father than to my mother. Yet as a child I spent more time with her— partly because of the war, partly because of the subsequent nomadic life my father had to lead. She taught me how to read at the age of four; most of my gestures, intonations, and mannerisms are, I presume, hers. Some of the habits, too, including the one of smoking.
By Russian standards, she was fairly tall, five foot three, fair, and on the plump side. She had dishwater-blond hair, which she wore short all her life, and gray eyes. She was especially pleased that I inherited her straight, almost Roman nose, and not the arching majestic beak of my father, which she found absolutely fascinating. "Ah, this beak!" she would start, carefully punctuating her speech with pauses. "Such beaks"—pause—"are sold in the sky"— pause—"six rubles apiece." Although resembling one of the Sforza profiles by Piero della Francesca, the beak was clearly Jewish, and she had reasons for being glad that I didn't get it.
In spite of her maiden name (which she retained in marriage), the "fifth paragraph" played in her case a lesser role than usuaclass="underline" because of her looks. She was positively very attractive, in a general North European, I would say Baltic, way. In a sense, that was a blessing: she had no trouble getting employment. As a result, however, she had to work all her conscious life. Presumably having failed to disguise her petit bourgeois class origins, she had to give up her hopes for higher education, and spent her entire life in various offices, as either a secretary or an accountant. The war brought a change: she became an interpreter in a camp for German POWs and received the rank of junior lieutenant in the Interior Ministry forces. When Germany signed the surrender, she was offered a promotion and a career within that ministry's system. Not anxious to join the Party, she declined and returned to the graph sheets and abacus. "I don't intend to salute my husband first," she told her superior. "And I don't want to turn my wardrobe into an arsenal."
29
We called her "Marusya," "Manya," "Maneczka" (my father's and her sisters' diminutives for her), and "Masya" or "Keesa," which were my inventions. With the years, the last two acquired a greater currency, and even my father began to address her in this way. With the exception of "Keesa," all these niclrnames were diminutive forms of her first name, Maria. "Keesa" is a slightly endearing form for a female cat, and she resisted being addressed in this way for quite some time. "Don't you dare call me that!" she would exclaim angrily. "And in general, stop using all these feline pet words of yours! Else you'll end up having cat brains!"
That meant my predilection as a boy to enunciate in a catlike fashion certain words whose vowels seemed to me to invite such treatment. "Meat" was one, and by the time I was fifteen, there was a great deal of meowing in our family. My father proved to be susceptible to this, and we began to address or refer to each other as "Big Cat" and "Little Cat." A "meow" or a "purrmeow," or a "purr-murr- meow," covered a substantial part of our emotional spectrum: approval, doubt, indifference, resignation, trust. Gradually, my mother started to use it, too, but mainly to denote detachment.
"Keesa," however, stuck to her, especially when she got really old. Rotund, wrapped in a couple of brown shawls, with her terribly kind, soft face, she looked very cuddly and very much self-contained. It seemed as if she might purr. Instead, she would say to my father: "Sasha, have you paid this month's electricity?" or to nobody in particular: "Next week is our turn for cleaning up the apartment." Which meant scrubbing and washing the floors in the corridors and the kitchen, as well as cleaning the bathroom and the john. She would address nobody in particular because she knew it was she who had to do it.
30
How they managed all those chores, cleanups especially, for the last twelve years, I have no idea. My departure, of course, meant one less mouth to fill, and they could hire someone from time to time to do these things. Still, knowing their budget (two meager pensions) and my mother's character, I doubt that they did. Besides, in communal apartments, this practice is rare: the natural sadism of neighbors, after all, needs some degree of satisfaction. A relative, perhaps, may be allowed, but not a hired hand.
Croesus though I became, with my university salary, they wouldn't hear of exchanging U.S. dollars into rubles. They regarded the official rate of exchange as a rip-off; and they were both fastidious and fearful of having anything to do with the black market. The last reason was perhaps the strongest: they remembered how their pensions had been revoked in 1964, when I received my five-year sentence, and they had to find work again. So it was mostly clothes and art books that I sent them, since the latter command very high prices with bibliophiles. They relished the clothes, especially my father, who was always quite a sharp dresser. As for the art books, they kept them for themselves. To look at after scrubbing the communal floor at the age of seventy-five.