The kitten rested for eternity under the very park bench on which the young Pushkin had allegedly sat with his cousins, amusing them with his mellifluous little rhymes. Sanya’s grandmother never tired of reminding him that the building they lived in had once been grand.
It was astonishing how everything at school changed in a matter of weeks. Mikha, of course, didn’t feel the change as keenly—how could he, he was a newcomer. But Sanya and Ilya noticed it. In their class they still occupied the lowest rung in the hierarchy, but now they did not occupy it singly. They were there together. They became a recognized minority, set apart by some indefinite sign or mark that prevented them from blending into the status quo of this small world. The two leaders, Mutyukin and Murygin, kept a tight grip on all the others; but when they argued between themselves, the whole class split into two hostile factions, which the outcasts never tried to join—and they would not have been accepted anyway. At those times, gleeful, malicious, angry skirmishes erupted—with bloody noses and without—and the outcasts were left alone. When Mutyukin and Murygin made peace, their attention again turned to these odd, unsociable misfits. They were too easy to beat up. It was more fun to keep them in suspense and fear, and to keep reminding them who was boss here: not the Jewish four-eyes, the musician, and the class clown, but the “normal kids,” like Mutyukin and Murygin.
Fifth grade was the first year when there were different teachers for different subjects (math, Russian, botany, history, German, and geography), instead of just one teacher for reading, writing, and arithmetic—the sweet-tempered Natalya Ivanovna, who had even taught Mutyukin and Murygin the alphabet, and who still called them, affectionately, Tolya and Slavochka.
All the teachers were crazy about their own subjects, and assigned a lot of homework, which the “normal kids” clearly couldn’t keep up with. Ilya, who had not excelled in grade school, was given a boost by his new friends, and by the end of the second quarter, just before the New Year, it became obvious that the rejects, the four-eyed weaklings and misfits, were thriving, and that Mutyukin and Murygin were lagging behind. The conflict, which grown-up people would have called a social one, grew more intense and more tangible, at least to the oppressed “minority.” It was then that Ilya introduced a term that would come in handy for many years to come—mutyuks and murygs. The term was basically synonymous with sovok (“a typical Soviet”), a term of later currency. The beauty of theirs lay in its apt self-evidence. It was there for the taking.
No one got under the skin of the mutyuks and murygs like Mikha, but with all of his orphanage experience, he easily weathered the schoolyard brawls. He never complained, but shook himself off, snatched up his hat, and took to his heels while the hoots and catcalls of his enemies rained down on him. Ilya played the clown with aplomb, and was often able to confuse his enemies with wisecracks or with sudden comic moves. Sanya proved to be the most sensitive and vulnerable among them. Still, it was his excessive sensitivity that served as his defense in the end.
Once, when Sanya was washing his hands in the school bathroom—a cross between a parliament and a den of thieves—Mutyukin was overcome with loathing for Sanya’s unassuming pastime and suggested that he wash his mug, while he was at it. Sanya, partly from a desire to keep the peace, but also partly out of cowardice, did as he was told. Then Mutyukin grabbed a filthy rag for cleaning the floor and wiped it across Sanya’s dripping face. By this time, they were surrounded by onlookers who were in the mood for some excitement. But they were disappointed. Sanya went pale, began to shake, then fainted, collapsing onto the tiled floor. The paltry enemy was, of course, vanquished, but the victory felt hollow. He lay on the floor in a contorted pose, his head lolling back. Murygin jabbed his side with the toe of his boot, just to make sure that he was really out cold. He called out to him with no malice whatsoever,
“Hey, Sanya, what’re you doing down there?”
Mutyukin stared wild-eyed at the lifeless Sanya. Sanya didn’t open his eyes, despite the insistent pokes and jabs. Just then, Mikha came in. He glanced at the mute scene, then rushed off to fetch the school nurse. A pinch of smelling salts revived Sanya, and the gym teacher carried him to the infirmary. The nurse measured his blood pressure.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
He answered that he felt fine, though he couldn’t quite recall what had happened to him. When he did remember the dirty rag rubbing against his face, he almost retched. He asked for some soap and washed his face thoroughly. The nurse wanted to call his parents. It took some effort for Sanya to persuade her not to. Mama was at work, anyway, and he wanted to guard his grandmother from the unpleasantness. Ilya was enlisted to accompany his shell-shocked friend home, and the nurse wrote a note for both of them, dismissing them from class.
From that day on, counterintuitive though it might seem, Sanya rose in stature. True, they did start calling him Epileptic Gnome, but they stopped tormenting him: What if he had another fainting fit?
On December 31 school let out for the winter break. Eleven days of bliss. Mikha always remembered these days, each of them a revelation, and each different from all the others. On New Year’s he received a wonderful present. After secret negotiations with her son, who solemnly promised her that his direct descendants would never claim their rights to that particular family heirloom, and he himself didn’t mind in the least, Aunt Genya gave Mikha a pair of ice skates.
They were an American make, long outmoded, a hybrid between the standard Snegurkas and Hagues, with double blades and serrated front tips. The blades had been affixed to a pair of beat-up boots that had once been red, with huge star-shaped rivets. On the metal plate connecting the blade to the shoe, the word Einstein could be made out, followed by a series of incomprehensible numbers and letters. The boots had been thoroughly battered and broken in by their previous owner, but the blades gleamed like new.
Aunt Genya treated the skates like the family jewels, the way other families cherish their grandmother’s diamonds.
And diamonds did figure into the story of these skates in a tangential way. In the year 1919, Lenin himself had dispatched Genya’s older brother Samuel to the United States on a mission to organize the American Communist Party. For the rest of his life, Samuel had prided himself on his mission and regaled his relatives and close friends, of whom there were hundreds, with the details of the journey—until he was arrested in 1937. He was sentenced to “ten years of imprisonment without the right of correspondence,” and disappeared forever; but his remarkable story became the stuff of family legend.
In July 1919, Samuel traveled from Moscow through northern Europe by a roundabout route, finally arriving in New York Harbor on a Dutch trading vessel in the guise of a seaman. He clattered down the gangplank in boots that had been fashioned by the Kremlin cobbler, with an exceedingly costly diamond secreted in the heel. He carried out his mission: at the behest of the Comintern, he organized the first underground congress of the Communist Party. Upon completion of his task several months later, Samuel returned and reported directly to Comrade Lenin.
The whole of his modest travel allowance was spent on presents, minus twelve dollars spent on food. For his wife he brought home a red woolen dress with berries embroidered on the collar and shoulders, and red shoes three sizes too small. The skates were the third, and most expensive, American present in his luggage. He had bought them too big (with growing room) for his son, who died soon after.