Everyone clutches the person in front of them in case hooligans try to break through the bread queue. A man hurries out of the shop, clutching a loaf to his chest. A small boy hurls himself at the man. He sinks his teeth into the man’s wrist, making him yell and drop the loaf. The child falls to his knees and devours the bread right there on the ground. The man kicks him and tries to pull him up but the boy takes no notice. People in the queue tut and grumble but no one moves.
“Well, God sees everything and the poor things are hungry too,” says the old lady behind me. There are many homeless kids in our town. They have run away from the Front and the areas under Nazi occupation.
The next morning I watch the boy-thief crawl out from under Stalin’s feet. I grab a piece of bread from our kitchen and run downstairs. Feeling a bit scared, I hold out the bread. The boy takes it and stuffs it into his shirt. His face is white and he looks straight through me as blind men do. Before he can run off I say: “My name is Vanya, what’s yours?”
“Slavka.”
“Why d’you live under the board of honour?” The board is shaped like the Kremlin walls and carries photos of star workers.
“I ran away from a children’s home in Kharkov. We starved there. My father was killed on the Front. My mother died when our house was bombed. I’m okay here.”
“I can get some potatoes from our store. Come with me and we’ll roast them on the slag heap by the TNT plant.”
“All right.”
I skip school to hang around with Slavka. I admire him almost as much as my literary hero, Robinson Crusoe. His senses are much sharper than mine. If he hears a paper rustle 50 metres away he stiffens like a hunting dog.
I take him to our Zambezi river — the effluent stream running past our plant. It is so hot that it steams even when there is snow all around and we have 20 degrees of frost. Using a board as a raft, we race downstream.
“Vanya,” Slavka suggests, “let’s run away to the Front. Maybe a regiment will adopt us as sons.”
Taking a small bundle of clothes and a loaf under my arm, I creep out of the house to meet Slavka. He shows me how to sneak onto trains. Twice we try to cross the Syzran bridge over the Volga, but soldiers discover us and turn us back. The third time, we manage to wriggle into a dog box fixed underneath a carriage. Although it’s summer, the wind is cold. I wrap my jacket tightly around me and close my eyes, picturing the whole map of Russia spread out before us with our locomotive crawling along it like a toy. I want to burst with happiness.
After a long time we emerge at a station. We tell the soldiers there that we’re orphans making our way back to liberated territory. Young and kind lads, they give us food and send us on our way. We jump trains, travelling inside now, telling the same story until we reach Kharkov. The city has just been liberated and lies in ruins. It smells worse than the waste-pit behind Chapaevsk’s meat-processing plant. Before we can explore we are picked up by female officers, and sent to a children’s home in Tambov.
The law of the jungle reigns in that home. Big boys snatch food from the girls and the younger kids. Slavka sticks up for me, but I can’t stand the hunger so I confess that I’m not really an orphan. They send me back to Chapaevsk. My stepfather beats me so badly I spend several days in bed. But my mother feeds me. I feel bad about leaving Slavka.
After the war is over a post office form arrives, saying a parcel is waiting for me. My mother takes me to the post office and I hand in my form. It is the first parcel I have ever received. At home I untie the heavy package. Inside is a book from Slavka, a Herbarium full of pictures of strange southern plants and flowers. He writes that he is in an orphanage in Moscow. He has won a trip to Artek, an elite children’s camp in the Crimea. Even Party members’ children have to be top students to go there. Slavka writes that he will never forget me, but that is the last I will ever hear from him.
We carry our books to school in gas-mask containers lined with plywood. After class we wait by the school gate for the girls. As they come out we hit them with our bags. We’re punishing those who tell tales; the rest we hit as a warning.
Worse than the girls are the Young Pioneer leaders who hang back after class to report wrongdoers to the teacher. We despise them and exclude them from our games. In an act of bravado, my friend Tolik throws his red scarf into the classroom stove. A meeting is called. One after another, Pioneer leaders spring to their feet and denounce Tolik with spite in their voices. Afterwards I try to cheer him up: “Never mind Tolik, better be damned than an honest Pioneer!” But he becomes less bold after that.
The Palace of Pioneers is in the former church of Sergei Radonezhsky. The church was once the most beautiful building in Chapaevsk, with mosaic images of saints adorning its facade. It closed after the revolution. During the war it was turned into an armaments store and camouflaged in thick grey plaster. Now the plaster is beginning to fall off. First it crumbles away from the mosaics. A nose emerges, then a forehead, then the stern eye of a saint. As news of the miracle spreads, the town fills with believers. News spreads through forest and steppe, summoning the faithful from as far away as the Ural mountains. The police drive them back but they regroup at a distance from the church.
Our maths teacher, Sava Stepanovich Liga, takes us down to the church after school. He lost a leg in the war and hobbles on crutches. We gather in front of the church while Sava Stepanovich speaks: “It is a very simple phenomenon, explained by the laws of physics. The brickwork is rough so plaster clings to it; mosaics are smooth and plaster falls off them quite easily.”
He speaks loudly enough for the faithful to hear, but the old ladies raise their voices so their prayers drown out the words of the heretic. They want to believe their miracle.
Soon afterwards the mosaics are chipped away and a huge glass window is put in their place. On Saturdays we children are sent to help with the work.
After we have helped to build the Palace of Pioneers they send us out to the steppe to plant forests. These bands of trees will stretch from Chapaevsk to the Caspian Sea, and will protect the crops from dry southern winds. In the town we plant saplings around our school and along the streets. At first we care for them, but then the State diverts our energies into a new campaign to collect scrap metal, and the neglected trees wither and die.
“Pale youth with feverish gaze,”[3] the teacher recites. “This is an example of reactionary poetry. How could a young boy possibly look like that?”
“It’s possible,” I pipe up.
She peers at me over her glasses. “How?”
“Perhaps he had TB.”
The class giggles.
“Out!” roars the teacher. I run past her and soon I’m walking in the spring sunshine, happy to think of the others bending over their books.
I run down to the railway line, climb the embankment and march along the tracks, keeping my eyes fixed on them in the hope of finding a spot where an American spy has undone the bolts. I’ll become a hero by running towards an oncoming train waving a red scarf on a stick. But I have nothing red. I wish I hadn’t left my Pioneer scarf at school. A character in a book would cut his arm with a piece of glass and soak a handkerchief with his blood. It’s a pity handkerchiefs are bourgeois-intellectual relics and I blow my nose with my fingers.