And then, finally, Slava’s call came.
Ivan left a haunting legacy: the lower depths of the Soviet Union refracted through his alcoholic mind. Some of the people he talks about in his book are still alive; I have changed his name and theirs in order to protect their identity. I have kept Ivan’s voice in the first person — the way he narrated his story to me.
1
A Town of Death
The 1940s
Sirens wail as gas clouds billow through the market-place. Pressing scarves to our noses we run with other shoppers towards the gate. Stall-holders flee too, deserting bunches of herbs, beetroot and meat-bones. “It’s plant Number 14 again,” yells a woman behind us.
Our block of flats is swathed in yellow fog. We run upstairs, secure the windows and sit down to wait for the radio dish in the kitchen to give the all-clear. I feel safe behind concrete and glass but I worry about the families who live in the wooden workers’ barrack huts below us.
“Ma, what about the people in the barracks? Maybe the gas will get through their walls and poison them?”
“They’ll be all right.”
As the wind changes the fog begins to thin. Stalin emerges through the mist, rooted to his platform in front of our factory’s board of honour. One by one the chimneys of our chemical plants reappear. At last I can see our Chapaevsk pyramids — the great piles of Caspian sea salt that Volga barges dump beside our chlorine plant.
The district where we live is called Bersol, after our local factory, which manufactures potassium chlorate. Its managers and chief engineers live in our block of flats; shop-floor workers are housed in the barracks.
Half a mile down the road there is a TNT plant where prisoners work. In the morning I watch them leave their camp by the railway embankment. When dusk falls and the searchlights come on they shuffle home again with bowed heads. Dogs snap at their heels. I wonder if my father is among those grey figures.
“You know Ivan’s father was a Chekist,[2] my grandmother whispers to a neighbour. I don’t understand her, although I know that the man who lives with us is not my real father. I dimly remember another man, a tall figure walking through the front door with a metal basin on his head. I haven’t seen that man for a long time.
“Ma, where’s that other man who used to live here?”
My mother is standing in the kitchen, slicing onions with her back to me. She pauses: “He’s in prison. Forget about him.”
“Can I send him my drawing of the Cutty Sark?”
My mother lays down her knife on the chopping board. “He’s not allowed to receive letters,” she snaps without turning round.
My stepfather’s belt is studded like a Cossack’s. At school they ask questions about the marks on my skin. I don’t know what to say. I’m afraid that if I tell the truth he’ll beat me again. The local Party committee summons my parents for a consultation. After that my step-father doesn’t beat me so often but instead he keeps me indoors for days at a time.
I sit in our bay window watching my friends kick a clod of frozen horse-dung around the yard. They swoop after their ball like a flock of demented birds. Vovka Bolotin, who is crippled by polio, keeps goal with his crutch. We all envy Vovka, who wields his crutch so deftly it is almost impossible to get the ball past him.
Nelka Ehrlich, who lives in the flat opposite ours, comes to play with my sister and me. The kitchen radio dish broadcasts my favourite song: Sailing the Seven Seas. Nelka distracts me, prancing around making faces. I hit her and grab her pigtails. My mother bursts in and pulls us apart. She slaps me but not Nelka.
I run into the toilet, climb onto the seat, loop the washing line round my neck, tie it to a hook and jump. Black circles close in before my eyes.
I lie on the floor looking up at my mother. Her screams hurt my ears. And my neck hurts too. But Nelka and I make it up.
We are playing a game in Nelka’s flat when suddenly the room starts to shake and dissolve around us. Light bulbs swing, glass shatters and the sideboard topples over onto Nelka’s baby brother. The earth roars and shakes. I think I’d better go home. As I cross the landing the floor heaves again. My mother appears in the doorway with my sister in her arms. “Follow me, Vanya!” We run across the street to the factory offices, where a throng of people are hurrying down to the basement shelter.
The door is thick like a submarine’s and has a round handle. We sit down to wait. At first we think it’s an air raid but we hear no planes. German bombers have never come this far into Russia. Then we guess that one of the munitions factories has blown up. We wait in silence, praying that no spark or ball of flame will drop on Bersol and wipe us all out.
Nelka sits opposite me. She starts to make funny faces again. I stick out my tongue at her, but her eyes begin to bulge until they seem about to burst from their sockets. She coughs and bends her head low. A stream of vomit splashes onto the floor. As she straightens up I see a thin white worm dangling from her lips. Her chest and throat convulse and she spews the worm onto the floor. I watch it lying in the pool of sick and try to imagine it curled up inside Nelka’s guts. I want to ask her if the worm tickled but I guess it isn’t the right moment.
When the all-clear sounds we climb up to the street. It’s covered in glass and rubble and there’s a huge piece of concrete stairwell across the entrance to our block. The windows of our flat are gaping black holes spiked with daggers of glass. We set off for my grandmother’s house on the edge of town. There is a hard frost. Behind us the red sky crackles with sparks and flames. Sounds of the town fade until the stillness is broken only by my mother’s heels clip-clopping on the cobbles.
The next day I pass the hospital. Corpses are piled in the snow, naked and charred like the roasted pig I saw last summer at a country wedding. The TNT plant blew up just as the workers were changing shifts. Dozens were killed, maybe hundreds; no one ever knows the true number. I’m happy because our school is closed for two weeks. Its windows have been blown out.
People say it was sabotage and that our town simpleton, Bathhouse Losha, is a German spy. Bathhouse Losha has never harmed anyone, but a few weeks later he disappears and we never see him again.
Chapaevsk lies on a railway line between the Front and the arms factories in the Ural mountains. Trains loaded with broken tanks and weapons stop at our station. Some of us boys distract the guards while the others swarm over the equipment. I undo copper rings from shells and mainsprings from grenades. I know a neighbour who’ll give me a couple of roubles for these. We open the hatches of tanks and drop down inside, examining dials and levers, taking them apart to try to understand how they work. When the train jerks and begins to move we scramble out and leap off, rolling down the embankment on the far side of the station.
The prisoners in the camp by the railway line have been sent to the Front. Uzbek and Kirghiz peasants take their place. At first they too were sent off to fight but they didn’t understand enough Russian to obey orders. When one was killed his comrades would gather around the corpse and wail. Then they too were cut down by bullets. So instead they join the labour army: changing their kaftans and skull caps for rubber suits and breathing apparatus, they work on production lines filling shells with mustard gas and Lewisite.
My mother is a medical assistant at a munitions plant. She tells me that the Uzbeks are homesick for their mountain pastures and sometimes slip off their gas masks for a minute or two. They hope to fall sick enough to be sent home, or at least to earn a couple of weeks’ rest in bed. There are many Uzbek graves in our cemetery.
2
The Cheka were the Soviet political police formed by Lenin shortly after the October revolution in 1917.