When he finds out about my visits to the yacht club our college director phones to tell them I am skipping lessons. He must know I’m jumping the tram to get there and so he wants to stop me going. The club tells me they’re sorry to lose me and that I should come back in a year’s time.
I am furious, but there is nothing I can do without being expelled from the institute. After that I fill up my spare time by drinking with Rickets. The institute’s political instructor warns us that the town is full of bourgeois elements and the older boys say that the Latvian Forest Brotherhood has been known to catch lone Russians and strangle them. Despite these warnings, Rickets and I take every opportunity to slope off together through the dark streets. A stroke of luck secures us an evening job unloading potatoes from railway wagons, so we have cash to spend. We usually go to the Reindeer Antlers, a back-street joint popular with soldiers and sailors. Walking down the steps and throwing open the door of the little basement bar is like crossing into another world, one of warmth and comradeship.
I mix my cocktail of vodka, beer, salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar. “Down the hatch!” I empty the glass in one. I learned to do this back in Chapaevsk by watching my friends’ parents. I practised with water until I mastered the technique.
Regular fights break out in the Reindeer Antlers, but are usually stopped before serious injury occurs. Not to be outdone, Rickets and I fight each other at least once a month. It’s a ritual between us and means nothing. Other customers try to pull us apart but the harder they try the more tightly we grapple with each other. Finally we stagger back up the basement steps and roll home with our arms about each other, roaring pirate songs into the damp night air.
The rich kids of Riga call themselves stilyagi. They listen to jazz and dance the boogie-woogie. They wear tight trousers and jackets with shoulder-pads as wide as the Pacific Ocean. I like western music too but these stilyagi are spoilt brats. You have to have a father in Party headquarters or a mother in a department store to dress as they do. The Komsomol paper denounces the stilyagi as ‘spittle on the mirror of our socialist reality’; we just beat them up whenever we get the chance. They’re pampered kids and useless at fighting.
In summer we are sent out from the college to work on the Beria collective farm. I’ve never seen such dereliction and misery. The mud is even worse than at home. There’s no mechanical farm equipment; only worn-out horses. Our overseer spends his days drinking with the farm chairman. We sleep on straw in a shed and share the farmers’ meals of potatoes and rye bread which is half raw and full of chaff. We skive off to help old people and single women with their private plots in return for food and home-brew. Samogon is the only consolation of farm life. Everyone distils it so no one denounces their neighbour. Besides, the local policeman is a villager too.
I can’t understand why people live on this hopeless farm, why they don’t run off wherever the wind blows. I am so relieved when our forced labour ends and we return to college that I don’t even miss the constant supply of alcohol.
Did you cry when Stalin died? Does the world seem different now? writes Olga, one of my former classmates in Chapaevsk, in a letter to me that March. Stalin’s death in 1953 produces an odd feeling in us all. For some reason everyone starts to speak in whispers, as though his corpse were lying in the next room. I take my place in the guard of honour by his portrait. We assemble in the sports hall to listen to the funeral broadcast. Some boys cry. I feel sad too and strangely insecure. Then Rickets starts a game of push and shove in the back row and I cheer up.
We are being prepared for work in remote Siberian stations where there won’t be any phone connections. We’ll have to know how to repair our equipment when it breaks down. The more they tell us about the difficulties that lie ahead the prouder we feel of our profession. We look down on boys from other colleges; aren’t there already millions of fitters and lathe operators in this world?
For once in my life, everything seems to be going well. It’s my final spring at the college. Then, unannounced, they decide to hold a room search and find a banned book among my things. The book is nothing special, just a dry work on atavistic memory lent to me by Valerka’s mother who is a librarian at the Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, I am summoned to the director’s office.
“Where did you get this book?” the director bangs his fist on the desk. “Who gave it to you? I demand you tell me! Do you want to be expelled?”
My head spins. I don’t know what to do. I am honour-bound to return the book to Valerka. On an impulse I snatch it from the director’s hand and run out of the room. I give Valerka back his book. It would look bad for the college if I was expelled for reading banned literature so I escape with a reprimand.
The following Saturday I’m chatting to some girls from the bookbinder’s college when our new teaching assistant comes up. “Got any more subversive literature?” he asks me. Turning to the girls he says: “Our Ivan here really caused a scandal last week.”
“It’s none of your business!” I shout.
He laughs.
“Okay you bastard,” I swing a punch at him. I’ve already had a few beers and don’t stop to consider that the assistant is twice my size. He knocks me to the ground as easily as if I had been a flea.
“Take him away, lads,” he says to some of my classmates who have gathered to watch the fight. They pick me up and carry me off to my room. I remember that Rickets and I have hidden a bottle of vodka in his locker. I start the bottle by myself. The more I drink the worse I feel. Rickets still doesn’t return, and before I know it I’ve finished the bottle. Some boys appear at the door and begin to tease me. I fling the empty bottle at them, then climb onto the window-ledge and jump.
The ground slams into me. I can’t breathe. I lie with my face in the cobblestones. I’ll keep still for a couple of minutes. It will give the others a fright. The smell of vomit fills my nostrils. I twist my neck to see one of my classmates throwing up in the gutter. I wonder why he’s doing that. Perhaps he can’t hold his drink.
“Don’t move, Vanya, we’ve called an ambulance,” says another boy in a shaky voice.
As they heave me onto a stretcher I catch sight of the teaching assistant. His face is pale.
“Excuse me for causing all this trouble,” I grind out the words with heavy sarcasm.
The ambulance drive to the hospital seems endless. Thirst sears my mouth all night. I scream and curse until I pass out on the x-ray table.
I come to in agony and confusion. Both my legs and my right arm are covered in plaster. I have a vague impression that my mother has been near me.
“Well, young man,” says the doctor, “you have eighteen fractures and your right kidney is damaged. It seems you broke your fall on some telegraph wires and that saved your life. Your mother was here. She stayed until we knew you were out of danger.”
I don’t want to live. Four shots of morphine a day barely help. I pleaded with a God I don’t believe in to grant me a break from the relentless pain for even five minutes. I can’t face the endless hours ahead, knowing there’ll be no respite until nightfall when the nurse brings my sleeping tablets. With a great effort of will I manage to save some of these tablets and store them until I have 14. Then I swallow them all at once. They resuscitate me and pump my stomach. After that a nurse watches as I take my medicine.