Starting in first grade, Katya had felt that she would be an outsider to her classmates forever. Her mama, the dentist, was staff, so to speak. The children of the first and second secretaries of the Provincial and City Party Committees, the offspring of prominent trade union officials and military leaders on a provincial level, would never consider some dentist’s daughter their equal.
Still, she stubbornly believed that if she was nice and good, people would like her and want to be her friend. Who cared who her parents were? A dentist wasn’t the lowest rung on the ladder, either. After all, everyone was friends with the son of the director of the city’s principal food store, and he was a lousy student who liked to pick fights.
In the younger grades, Katya would bring in her favorite toys and give them away. She liked to give presents, but most importantly, she wanted everyone to understand that she was a nice, good, generous little girl and to want to be her friend.
A few of her presents were condescendingly accepted, but the majority of the secondhand plastic dolls and shabby plush animals were rejected with disdain. What did elite children care about the tacky, boring toys put out by the local toy factory for the populace? Elite children had German dolls with real hair you could shampoo and Czech stuffed animals with expressive little faces.
Katya’s mama had taught her it wasn’t the present but the thought that counted. But it turned out that Katya’s thought didn’t count to her classmates, none of whom found her interesting, no matter how hard she tried.
Katya wanted so much for everyone to like her. Well, maybe not everyone, but at least a few. She thought she could earn her classmates’ love by explaining what they didn’t understand in physics and math and letting them copy off of her. She was waiting for them to finally understand how kindhearted she was. But no one did. All her kindnesses were treated as part of the natural order of things, as something that was to be expected. Katya’s mama fixed their teeth, and Katya solved their problems.
Another child in Katya’s place might have said to hell with her arrogant classmates and stopped dragging toys from home and letting the other students copy from her tests. Another child might get mad and develop a fierce hatred not only for the elite kids but for all humanity for their stubborn refusal to like or accept her. The older Katya got, though, the deeper she was convinced of her own—and only her own—inferiority.
When she tried to share her accumulated insult with her mama, her mama would cut her off.
“Look inside you for the reason! Why is it no one wants to be your friend? Surely you don’t believe that everyone else is bad and you’re good.”
Katya didn’t believe that. She believed more and more deeply that she was the bad one.
There was a terrible rainstorm on the evening of her graduation, leaving the streets extremely muddy. Katya left home in a flimsy white dress she’d sewn herself for her first real dance. When she ran across the school yard barefoot, holding an umbrella in one hand and her white patent sandals wrapped up in the other, a black Volga from the City Party Committee rushed past her at full speed.
Its wheels sent up a fountain of mud that drenched Katya from head to toe. Not only was her white graduation dress covered in mud but so was her carefully made-up face and her short, reddish hair. Two of Katya’s classmates were in that Volga.
The son of the City Party Committee’s second secretary had pestered his father for permission to drive to graduation night in his official car and to let his best friend accompany him in the passenger seat. It had been for the sake of that very same boy, for the sake of the manly, broad-shouldered Party secretary’s son, that Katya had made such an effort, spending nights sewing the white dress and applying makeup in front of the mirror for three hours.
They hadn’t doused her with mud on purpose. She didn’t go to the graduation dance. She didn’t even wash the dress. She just threw it out and tried to forget all about the elite school and the boys and girls who hadn’t wanted to be her friend.
With the highest grades, Katya headed for Moscow, where she had been accepted into MAI—the Moscow Aviation Institute. Now she was surrounded not by the children of the select, but by children of the populace. However, her experience in the elite school in Khabarovsk had taken its toll. Katya didn’t know how to behave normally with people. Before they ever even met, she suspected each one of them of despising and disliking her. She couldn’t even say the simplest things to her dorm mates. She apologized forty times a day, wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, and earned a reputation as being “a little odd.” Once again no one was her friend—not because she was a dentist’s daughter, but because of her impenetrable reticence.
She didn’t get along with the boys at MAI, either. She didn’t go to the parties, and no one noticed her at the institute. She roamed the halls like a shadow, ducked her short ginger head, didn’t talk to anyone, and when someone said something to her, she turned red and looked away, as if she were guilty of something. If Katya did like some boy, she would try her hardest to hide it and not to come into his field of vision.
When Mitya Sinitsyn came into her life, he arrived like lightning out of a clear sky. Katya was in her third year. The student club at MAI had a songwriters’ concert just before New Year’s. After the concert, a cheerful group of students invited a few of the performers to the dorm.
Katya was lying on her bed, alone in her empty dorm room, reading Dostoyevsky’s Diary of a Writer. She heard them singing and having fun in the next room, but she didn’t care. All of a sudden the door opened, and there stood a tall boy wearing a black sweater and black jeans. His curly blond hair was cut short, and his bright blue eyes were full of kindness.
“Good evening,” he said in a low voice. “You don’t happen to have a little bread, do you? My apologies for barging in. They sent me because I’m the only sober one left.”
Without waiting for her answer, he crossed the room and sat right down on Katya’s bed.
“Yes, I think we do.” Katya tried to jump up from the bed, but he held her by the arm.
“You’re reading Diary of a Writer? Everyone’s drinking and you’re here quietly communing with Dostoyevsky? Why didn’t I see you at the concert?”
“I didn’t go.” Katya freed herself, jumped away, and slid her feet into her slippers. “What kind of bread do you want? White or black?”
“Why didn’t you go to the concert? Don’t you like songwriters?” He seemed to have forgotten all about the bread.
“Why do you say that? I do. It’s just… I wanted to be alone and read.”
Katya was standing in the middle of the room in oversized, worn-out slippers, thin stockings, and a long, loose sweater.
“Do you always look so frightened?” he asked. He got up from the bed, walked over to her, and took her hand. “And are your hands always so cold? My name’s Mitya.”
“Katya.” She could feel herself blushing.
“Pleased to meet you! Could I take them the bread and come back and sit with you a little?”
The suggestion was such a surprise that Katya didn’t answer, she just pulled her head down into her shoulders, freed her hand from his warm grip, slipped over to the shared refrigerator, and pulled out half of a white baguette.
“I’m sorry. I guess there isn’t any black,” she mumbled, holding out the bread.
He returned five minutes later, carrying his guitar.
“Since you weren’t at the concert, I want to sing for you. There”—he nodded at the wall, on the other side of which they heard laughing and cheerful whoops—“everyone is drunk and crazy. You and I may be the only sober people in this whole building.”