Snow in May: Stories (4 page)

“Tolik, is it you or is it not you?” his message began. His voice was thin but cheerful; he must have been putting on airs. He’d gotten my number through an improbably coiled chain of acquaintances, he went on to explain. “How are things? Family? It’d be nice to talk of our old adventures. Do you still play tennis? I’m in Voronezh, still.” I waited to hear what he wanted, but perhaps this was something he was saving for the conversation proper. He gave his number with the country and city codes and hung up.

I went back to the living room, sat down on the couch, and took some deep breaths. Sputnik, my salt-and-pepper schnauzer, jumped up next to me, wagging his joystick tail. Then he hopped back down and planted his muzzle on my knee. Behind his bushy eyebrows his black eyes begged for a walk, and a snack, and love. For everything at once and right away.

Tolyan and I had been through the trenches of youth together, his loyal presence a watermark of authenticity on so many of my best memories. I should have been happy to hear from him. But what I felt was acute annoyance at this rather minimal invasion of my privacy. Maybe I’ve become too American. Or not yet American enough.

As I go about my long day, performing tasks I don’t mind, thinking either about what I now have the time and mind space to notice—a beautiful flower or an intricate cloud formation—or the people who matter to me—my daughter, Sonya, my sister, Angela, my wife, Marina—I am sometimes shocked into a fleeting physical weakness by the realization of how fast the time has galloped by, each winter marked by the increasingly passionate moaning of my once broken shin. And by the fact that I am here and Tolyan is still there, whereas we started out together and young.

*   *   *

We were both named Anatoly; I was Tolik for short, and he Tolyan. We were born a year before Stalin’s death in a small town on the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, in the northeast. Despite its isolation, every Russian of a certain age still shudders at the mention of our hometown, Magadan, which was once the gate to the most brutal Stalinist labor camps—the most remote island in the notorious Gulag Archipelago. Besides mining gold, tin, and uranium in the permafrost basin of the Kolyma River, the prisoners were engaged in extensive civil works, building the first roads and houses, as well as the Park of Culture and Leisure, the cinema, and the stadium, with its adjacent Palace of Sport. I still remember a brigade that worked on a five-story building across from mine. The construction site was blocked off by a fence—rows of barbed wire strung between eight-foot-high wooden beams. Several makeshift watchtowers were positioned around the perimeter. Canvas-top trucks brought the prisoners in the morning, when I was on my way to school, and carted them back to the camp at sunset. By then the security had been relaxed: the prisoners were not shackled, and the guards were not poking their napes with Kalashnikovs.

Although my mother had reprimanded Tolyan and me when she caught us talking to the prisoners through the fence, we became friendly with many. The scent of the Khrushchev Thaw was in the air; their hopes for freedom were high. At night we snuck in through the spaces between the barbed wire and hid cigarettes in agreed-upon places. In return, the prisoners carved toy guns out of wood and left them for us in secret spots.

By the mid-sixties, half of the town’s population consisted of ex-convicts, some living and working side by side with ex-guards. Many former prisoners were criminals, but there were equally many people with higher education who were not allowed to leave Magadan—doctors, teachers, geologists, engineers. My father knew and worked with many of them. He was in charge of the petroleum supply for the whole region. Whenever I asked him what those people had been imprisoned for, his response was: For having a long tongue. Writers, artists, and musicians of national fame had sat in the Magadan camps, and productions at the local theater were on par with those in Moscow and Leningrad, but back then we kids didn’t understand. Schools until recently didn’t teach this layer of history. Besides, our heads were crammed with mischief. There was no space for anything else.

Tolyan and I were unruly but quick-witted enough to get through school with minimum effort. And we were lucky. Our skinny backsides were forever saved by bells, snow days, and convenient illnesses—our teachers’ or our own. We were called to the blackboard only on the days when we had, on a hunch, prepared our lesson. Everyone smoked in the bathroom, but only Tolyan and I never got caught. We skipped piano lessons and went sledding on our folders, leaving our parents to puzzle over why our sheet music was always wet.

We crawled through the small underground tunnels by the old cinema, which we called “the catacombs.” What with the mysterious trapdoor at the end of one tunnel—behind which there surely lay a chest of Kolyma gold guarded by the ghost of the first prospector, Bilibin—the risk of death by suffocation or drowning didn’t enter our minds. We stole still-hot bread from the city bakery as the slow, fat baker loaded the trays into the truck bound for grocery stores. Tolyan was my upstairs neighbor, and I spent hours at his place watching music programs on TV and staring at the blurry black-market photographs of Swedish porn magazines that had been confiscated from the photo lab at the university by Tolyan’s father, the senior detective at the police headquarters. We also played with his spare revolver, until one day it shot and shattered the crystal chandelier. Now that I think of it: that massive
defitsit
chandelier was probably a very serious bribe.

In eighth grade, we were suspended from the Young Pioneers brigade for bad behavior and, free of “volunteering” duties, spent the summer hiking and grilling
shashliks
. In those days, my big passion was zoology, and on weekends I helped out at the small zoo in the Park of Culture and Leisure. There was a yellowed polar bear named Yulka, an emaciated fox, a balding eagle, and a sad-eyed deer. Though Tolyan didn’t care for such proximity to the creatures of the north (the cages were rather stinky) he tagged along, unable to bear exclusion from any of my activities.

In the last year of school, all the girls in our grade, at once, gained weight and developed acne. Self-conscious and closed in, they were useless for either friendly or romantic purposes. On top of that, the stadium where we played soccer in the summer and hockey in the winter was put under yearlong renovation, leaving us with nothing else to do but study for university entrance exams.

In the spring, a recruiting commission from the Riga Red-Bannered Civil Aviation Engineers Institute of the Lenin Komsomol arrived in Magadan. Riga was not Paris, but it was as far west as any of us had dreamed of getting back then. “Civil” sounded good, patriotic without trying too hard. “Aviation” sounded even better—steel wings and navy-blue uniforms, an exhilarating touch of grandeur and freedom.

Five hundred students competed for thirty spots reserved for recruits from the Magadan region. There were several
facultets
at the Riga Institute, and everyone wanted to get into automatics, the precursor of computer science. No one knew what it entailed exactly, but everyone wanted to dive into the stream of progress. Tolyan and I had passed physics, mathematics, and chemistry with an identical number of points. Together we crammed for the last exam—literature—and could, as far as I remember, tell Dostoyevsky from Raskolnikov.

The weekend before the literature exam, my parents and my younger sister, Angela, went for a walk in the Park of Culture and Leisure, the same park that used to house the now extinct zoo. There they ran into the head of the Riga recruiting commission, a Jewish fellow named Ginzburg. My father had already managed to meet him and mention me as a promising young aviator. So when this Ginzburg heard that I, along with the rest of the student herd, was storming the walls of the automatics
facultet,
he advised my parents that I should instead apply to be an economist. Next, he delivered the famous analogy that would change the course of my life.

“Here’s the difference between economics and automatics.” Ginzburg addressed my mother, a woman of rare beauty, with ashen hair, blue eyes, and the shapely yet sturdy figure of the
Venus de Milo.
“The economist sits in front of the calculating machine, while the automatics specialist sits behind it. With a screwdriver! Who do you think makes the decisions?”

My parents rushed home. Without taking off her astrakhan hat, my mother told me about the screwdriver. I hated screwdrivers. I associated them with my bike, which had to be fixed all the time as I rode the thing down hills, stairs, curbs, and through just about anything in my way. I took my mother’s cold, velvety hands and warmed them with my breath. She laughed brightly. Her gold tooth gleamed in the back of her mouth like a little bell. Back then, I saw her as a conservative, middle-aged woman whom I had to beg to add one more centimeter of flare to the hem of my fake jeans. Now I am astounded at how young she had been that spring, only thirty-eight. “Don’t worry, Mamochka,” I said, “I’ll be all right.” I passed the literature exam and, as a highly ranked candidate, had my first choice of the
facultets
. Ginzburg transferred my application from one pile to the other.

Tolyan’s parents had also gone for a walk in the Park of Culture and Leisure that weekend, and his mother was just as beautiful as mine (gymnast’s figure, curly blond hair, dimples). But they didn’t run into Ginzburg. At the time I was still able to tamper with Tolyan’s destiny. I told him to quit automatics and become an economist, like me.

*   *   *

We blazed into Riga in black trench coats. Pins with Magadan’s coat of arms—a golden deer flying over the turbulent blue water against a scarlet background—burned on our lapels, just above our hearts. Right away we were sent to pick potatoes for a month at a local kolkhoz. Upon our return, we received navy-blue uniforms and caps and were made to cut our long hair and nascent mustaches.

At university we excelled in the economics of civil aviation, army logistics (our required military specialization), and caught up on sleep during the lectures on Marxism-Leninism. Our dorm room, which we shared with six other guys, stank so much of sweat, feet, cigarettes, vodka, and food we had forgotten to refrigerate that in order to fall asleep, we put handkerchiefs soaked in cologne over our noses.

But outside was Riga, so European and clean, so different from Magadan and even Moscow. Only a fool would sleep all night in such a city. Around every corner were coffee shops with five-kopeck espressos and cheap restaurants decorated in grand style and named after Riga’s sister cities: Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Dallas. Street kiosks sold Polish and East German newspapers full of pop music charts, photographs of beautiful models, and of the Beatles—our paper window into the West.

To supplement our student stipends, Tolyan and I worked part-time jobs. First, at the candy factory, which we were fired from for stealing candy. Then, at the vodka distillery, which we were fired from for getting massively drunk. Finally, I settled as a night guard at the glass container storage. While Riga, the captive European princess, slept dreaming of freedom, I listened to the Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Liberty, broadcasting news from around the world in Russian. The container storage was located on the Daugava River, where reception was the clearest in the whole city. Tolyan worked on the chipping floor of a match factory, inhaling sawdust all day. For the damage to his lungs he was given a free bottle of milk daily. His lips were constantly coated with a film of fine sawdust, and at the most inopportune moments he would break out into a violent cough. But we made enough money to finance our modest student fancies: Elita cigarettes,
holodets
at a favorite café, an occasional ticket to a car race or an organ concert at the Dom Cathedral, and copious amounts of vodka, wine, and the famous Riga Black Balsam.

Tall, blue-eyed, and wavy-haired, we were at the peak of our boyish handsomeness. Latvian girls looked at us with admiring fear of our seeming worldliness. So what if we got roughed up by the Latvian guys a few times? There were plenty of Russian girls in Riga, too. We barely noticed how five years of lectures, exams, dances with live bands, and standup comedy competitions clattered past and disappeared around the corner.

We graduated with red diplomas and the rank of junior lieutenant, having passed even the Marxism-Leninism exam, and received priority distribution back to Magadan because of our family roots. My family by then had moved west: my parents to Ukraine, the country of their birth, and Angela to study chemical engineering in Moscow. Through my father’s connections, they left me the best thing a young bachelor could ask for: not just a room in a
kommunalka
—which would have been the allocation for a single person without children—but a private one-bedroom apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. All this without having to wait in line!

We were glad to be back. Magadan, in those days, was the third-most coveted place of employment, after Moscow and Leningrad. Now that there were no Gulag prisoners, someone had to develop the region, and the government encouraged permanent migration with double salaries and benefits that increased every year. The town experienced a real boom as young people streamed in to take advantage of the “long ruble” and the stores stocked better than those “on the continent,” which is what we called the rest of Russia. I got a position as a schedule engineer at the Aviation Administration. Tolyan began working in the passenger relations department at the airport and moved to Sokol, the airport township fifty-four kilometers from Magadan’s city center.

Our mustaches had finally asserted themselves. Mine approached the coarse bushiness of the “walrus,” while Tolyan braved the slight curvature of the “petit horseshoe.” With the cool Baltic wind still whistling in our heads, we set out to stretch the balloon of our reckless youth to its limits. We played tennis and went to the movies with the prettiest girls in town, quickly earning the nicknames “tennisists the penisists.” In the winter, we sledded down the glaciers on oilcloth mats, then spent hours searching for lost hats, mittens, and boots. People in Magadan said about me: Tolik, he’s a good guy, smart, handsome, reads books, has a good job. But he has this friend in Sokol, Tolyan, who will be the ruin of him. Tolyan’s neighbors in Sokol said the same about the good, handsome, educated Tolyan and the bad influence of his debaucherous friend in Magadan—me.