We met a few more times, but I still behaved as though I were paralyzed. I understood that it was time to declare my love, to hug and kiss Ira, but all of this was beyond me.
My greatest happiness came from an episode connected with my performance at the regional cross-country ski championship. I couldn’t participate in the 15-kilometer race because I had broken my skis. Only the gym teacher had a spare pair of good skis, but for some reason he had decided to take part in the race himself, without any training. It was a great pity for me because I was in good shape by then and I had already taken the first place in the 10-kilometer race. But then unexpectedly I got the chance to show what I was made of. My teacher dropped out of the race after the first circle and the judges allowed me to start the race on his skis. Then a snowstorm broke out over us and it was practically impossible to see the ski-track. All the participants stopped racing. But I was inexorable and continued the race because I knew that Irene was among the few spectators.
I finished the race alone and became the champion, but I was happy for a different reason. Right then Rishat handed me a note from Ira with her words of admiration and an invitation for a date.
That date was our last one. Probably my mumbling and unintelligible murmuring in bad Russian dampened her enthusiasm. I failed to turn our budding friendship into love. After all, we were only 16, and at that time there were heated debates in the Komsomol newspapers about whether someone could experience love at such a young age. The answer was always certainly negative. According to the Komsomol directives, love at such an early age distracted young people from their studies.
I met Irene a few more times under different circumstances, but there were no more dates. During the summer following 9th grade, we both worked as counselors in a pioneer camp. Though we had a lot of different opportunities for meeting privately there, I never dared to speak to her. She was silent, too. Still, I was extraordinarily happy to be next to her.
As the years passed, my feeling turned into permanent pain. Though there was no love in the generally accepted meaning of the word, the image of Irene haunted me for a long time, overshadowing my further infatuations with women. There were moments when I cursed her for this and I tried to hate her, but it was beyond me.
We never saw each other again. I remembered her always as I saw her in that portrait on the stand in the photographer’s studio.
In Moscow
The Russian language problem haunted me in Moscow as well. Finally, I spent my first night in the Kiev Railway Station. Policemen drove out every suspicious looking character from the overcrowded waiting room. I think my looks didn’t really appeal to the police, because I was dressed in my ski tracksuit – which looked like coveralls. On my feet I had worn out old boots. At that time, Moscow was full of internal troops, and the police were struggling with criminals who had been released from the jail and labor camps, through amnesty after Stalin’s death. Practically all the released prisoners rushed to the large cities and started terrorizing people.
The people of Moscow hadn’t yet recovered from the shock caused by the appearance of the troops and tanks, which were there to prevent a coup organized by Beria and to arrest this omnipotent head of the KGB. I had to spend another day and night near Kiev Station. Fortunately, the nights were relatively warm then.
Early on Monday morning, I was already in the reception of Bauman High Technical School (MVTU) in Moscow. The admissions secretary listened to me and explained that the admission of medal winners was finished, and he had no right to admit me, a medal winner, to the entrance exams on general terms.
Needless to say, I was deeply disappointed because I hoped that I would be admitted and would receive a place in the dormitory. I desperately wanted to sleep, I could hardly stand up, and I couldn’t think straight. However, the instinct of self-preservation prevailed. I asked a university entrant to give me a reference book on Moscow institutions for higher education and I started making phone calls. The third Institute I called was the Lomonosov Institute of Fine Chemical Technology (MITKhT) in Moscow. I asked if I could come right away and get a place in the dormitory. The answer was positive, and this settled my fate for many years to come.
I immediately went to 1 Malaya Pirogovskaya Street, and submitted my documents as if I were in a dream. I could hardly understand which department and major I should choose to list in the application. I coped with this task intuitively and made no mistakes. I asked to enroll in the Department of Organic Synthesis, with a major of “artificial gas and liquid fuels”, where the scholarship was the biggest in the institute. Even today, I can firmly say that I was never sorry about my choice.
Studies in the college and the life in the dormitory were combined with my constant struggle for survival, because my parents couldn’t help me at all financially. My income consisted solely of the scholarship, and it was hardly enough to cover poor meals and pay for a place in the dormitory. Very often, I went to the Kiev Station to find work unloading train cars. Unfortunately, this job wasn’t always available. Sometimes, like some of my fellow students, I managed to get hired for a night shift at the Dorogomilovsky chemical plant.
The work there was hard and hazardous to the health, because safety measures were very primitive. When I was in my fourth year I found a very profitable job. I delivered bottles of distilled water to the laboratories of the institute, and I almost became a prosperous student. I could even dress more decently and buy the first pair of winter shoes I had in my life.
With great difficulty, I managed to scrape together a little money from my poor scholarship to buy tickets to the Bolshoi Theatre. The tickets were the cheapest ones, for the upper circle of the theatre. Even to buy those, I had to go to the Bolshoi Theatre the evening before the tickets went on sale and cue up with other poor opera lovers. Most of us were students, spending a cold winter night together on the street.
They made frequent roll calls in the line, and those who were late were ruthlessly crossed off the waiting list for the tickets. When the ticket offices opened at 10 A.M., the first two hundred names on the list had the best chance of buying tickets for the next ten days of the month. It was cold, and I desperately wanted to sleep and to drink something hot, but this couldn’t stop me. Cold nights in lines became a peculiar musical school for me. Among the students there were great connoisseurs of opera music who shared their knowledge with grateful listeners. Since I came from a remote village and I had never listened to live music before, this was always wonderful and enchanting. Soon the following operas became my favorites – “Aida” by Giuseppe Verdi, “Pikovaya Dama” by Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and “Demon” by Anton Rubinshtein.
At that time, everybody loved the singers Nelepp, Lisitsian, and Ivanov. I remember “Aida” performed by Georgi Nelepp (Radames), Irina Arkhipova (Amneris), and Galina Vishnevskaya (Aida), as if I heard it only yesterday. Aleksander Melik-Pashaev conducted the orchestra brilliantly.
By that time, famous the singers Ivan Kozlovsky and Sergei Lemeshev had already stopped performing on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre, and I didn’t have a chance to enjoy their beautiful voices. But I remember very well the debut of ballerina Maya Plisetskaya in “Walpurgis Night” of “Faust”. Of course it was a remarkable show, featuring the wonderfully staged dances of a corps de ballet in a witches’ sabbath!