STAMP ALBUM

A collection of People, Things, Words and Relationships

I'm lying on Mama's trestle bed and through the planed partition I can see white, flour-flecked figures in my room cutting plump rolls of dough with carving knives. A small gland in my neck has become inflamed. The stately surgeon bicycles over from Malakhovka. I call him Gastronome. He always brings me chocolates and one fine afternoon under a burning light on the dining-room table — Mama and Granny are holding me down — he operates.
"A job fit for a young lady. The stitches are so neat no one will notice."

I no longer need my pacifier, but I hate to give it up. Papa leads me down an embankment, puts the pacifier on the rail, and points:

"Look, there's a train coming."

I stare into the distance towards Malakhovka. The train rushes past. When the rail reappears, it's bare. I feel better now it's over, not sad anymore; but the bareness scares me.

Everything must be washed; we wash a slender carrot from the garden in the slop-barrel. Nothing happens to Vadik. For my dysentery, Doctor Nikolaevsky prescribes a vile, salty-sweet medicine white as clotted milk. My stomach aches for years.

Anna Aleksandrovna, the nun from the Tikhonovs', brings the news:
"Some children — the flowers of our life — pushed Doctor Nikolaevsky off a train. Going full speed."
CHILDREN ARE THE FLOWERS OF OUR LIFE is written on my favorite little fork. The big ones read: VACHA LABOR FACTORY. The iron knives and forks smell for a long time of what they've been used for. At lunch on the veranda, Mama/Granny stop me just as I'm about to cut:
"That's the herring knife!"
The spoons are nice, especially the teaspoons. They are silver, engraved with St. George's insignia and the surname SAZIKOV. We don't know anyone by that name.

Avdotia had a little boy staying with her: his name was Marxlen Angelov. Because his father is a Bulgarian revolutionary. Yurka Tikhonov didn't understand at first, and asked him again:
"Mark Twain Angelov?"
Papa knows someone at work named Vagap Basyrovich.
Papa wanted to name me Viktor; Mama named me after Andrei Bolkonsky. In the hospital, the woman in the bed next to hers sneered:
"What sort of a peasant name is that?"
Then she gave birth. She named the baby Vilor. Mama taunted:
"What sort of a churchy name is that?"
The woman was indignant: "V-I-L-O-R: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Originator of the Revolution."
Mama's heart sank.

Mama and Granny are always afraid:
"Don't pick that up: it has germs!"
"Don't touch that cat: it may be rabid!"
"See that dog: mind it doesn't bite you!"
"See that man: mind he doesn't hit you!"
I look around, I tense up, I feel wet under my armpits and suddenly tired. I run to Mama, to Granny, to some soothing pastime — so as to be alone and in peace.

It soothes me and amuses me to leaf through my motley books of rhymes:

I feel cozy copying portraits of little Pushkin and Marshal Voroshilov into my Pushkin Anniversary copybooks. Voroshilov is the best of all leaders, the only one better is Stalin, the nicest, kindest, most soothing — part and parcel of my childhood.
"THANK YOU COMRADE STALIN FOR OUR HAPPY CHILDHOOD," I pictured a low winter sun, four-story apartment houses with big windows — like those new schools — people strolling along broad sidewalks, and children pulling sleds. All this slightly downhill.

No one taught me to read and write, I learned all by myself. In 1938, bearing down with a red pencil on the first page of Stalin's new Concise History of the Communist Party, I etched an indelible SHIT. Papa didn't notice at first and nearly went off with it to his political study group. The book had to be taken to Granny's and burned in her stove. I didn't catch it. What's more, Granny cooed:
"Our very own saboteur."

The boys say they caught a spy in the house next to ours. He spent nights in the bathroom sewing military secrets under his skin above the elbow.
The grown-ups say the pictures on the covers of my Pushkin Anniversary copybooks are counterrevolutionary. Turn the picture of Kalinin on the tear-off calendar upside down and he looks like Radek. Radek's the one who makes up all the political jokes. They haven't shot him because then who would there be left to write the lead articles in Pravda and Izvestia?
In a beautiful blue history book for fifth graders, I find a patently fascist symbol on the button of Lenin's grammar-school uniform.

Barto prompts me:

The woman activist from the Red Study Corner explains:
"They've arrested Hoffman for having a photograph of Trotsky."
A former partisan from the Far East, Hoffman kept a pair of German shepherds inside his fence. Our mothers hated him: he always cut in line waving his red pass.

Red pass: the grown-ups say the words slowly, cautiously. But they aren't a bit shy about calling our house the Big House; it's the biggest house on our lane — five floors and a semi-basement. The squat houses on either side have sunk down, but our beautiful house was put up in 1914 right on the Kaplya River. When a tram trundles down our Kapelsky Lane, the windowpanes rattle in their frames.
On the corner of First Meshchanskaya Street there used to be a church called the Trinity on the Kaplya. It was built by a tavern-keeper whose drinks, by agreement with the customers, were all short a kaplya (a drop). Now there is nothing there but bareness and puddles pocked with bright red shards of brick — the same as in Granny's yard. Surrounding the bareness is a tall, gray building with the local post office. Coming up First Meshchanskaya there's a colonnade: Papa leads me along the elevation between the ribbed columns. Papa is enchanted by new, modern First Meshchanskya, only the windows in the buildings are low. And running down the middle of the street there used to be such lovely trees: they cut them all down.

On a wintry side street a coatless man, swollen and bespectacled, asks Mama for twenty kopecks. She gives him a ruble:
"Poor soul."

When Mama and I go in town, she usually buys me a hot Mikoyan cutlet on a round roll and waits while I eat it.
Mikoyan cutlets, I think, are better than Mama's, but I can't tell her that: she'd be hurt. And I feel awkward chewing in front of the people in the bakery — as if I'm being rushed.
Ancient ladies inquire over the counter:
"Are the French buns fresh?"

Ads on the sides of buildings:

One evening they show cartoons on a firewall in the yard: the three little pigs croon:
"Boys and girls, eat more ham!"
Every payday Papa brings home two hundred grams of bologna he's had sliced specially in the shop, paper-thin.

Mama gives the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedia to a book peddler; it took up all the shelves on one side of the marble windowsill. When Papa comes home from work he is horrified — now all we have is the Small Soviet Encyclopedia and it isn't even complete.
Papa doesn't cut articles out of the Encyclopedia or paste over the portraits of people who have since been arrested.

That summer in Udelnaya our half-mad lodger Varvara Mikhailovna showed Mama two booklets, one with Timiryazev on the cover, the other with Stalin:
"Look what a noble face he has. But that one has no forehead at all!"

Papa is telling us about things at work, at Timiryazev: a colleague of his, associate professor Dyman, has taken to turning up in church on Sundays and spying out acquaintances. Has to: he's a Party man.
"He's a paltry man," Mama chimes in.
The Dymans call on us several times every winter.

Bolshaya Ekaterininskaya Street. We're sitting on a little bench in front of Granny's stove. As soon as the fire catches we quick shut the door: mustn't waste wood. Gazing at the fire is hypnotic, but we're not allowed. Today, though, we are.
Granny is going through the velvet-covered family album with the gold clasps and cutting the heads off tsarist uniforms with shoulder straps:
"Save their faces at least!"
Sometimes she talks to the wall:
"Sadist!" Or to the window: "Syphilitic!"
I've heard her confess to Mama in a whisper:
"When I find his picture on a piece of newspaper in the WC, I still use it, I do, but I turn it over, it's a person's face after all..."

Granny is so much a part of me that one day I humble a boy in the yard with the boast:
"Only your mama borned you, but my mama and my granny borned me!"
No one tries to tell me what I can and can't say. Even so, I only once told a terrible lie in the yard: I said my papa was a tsarist general. Again I didn't catch it.
Another time when I bragged, they were even pleased. Kayanna — our neighbor Klara Ivanovna — bent down and said:
"What was that you said, Andrei? Say it again."
"My papa is a military man, my mama is a military woman, and my granny is a military old lady."

Badges of rank and their different shapes fascinate me: cubes, rectangles, four diamonds with a star, red cuffs, chevrons on sleeves. Most splendid of all are the stripes down the sides of Cossack trousers; most striking is Marshal Budyonny's handlebar moustache.

The spire on the Budyonny helmet is a military ruse: if the spire sticks up out of the trench, the enemy will shoot straight through it.

In one of my books of nursery rhymes, Budyonny visits a kindergarten and lets the children touch his saber and his moustache. The book is called Budyonnickies.

I'm having my hair cut at the new barbershop in the Central House of the Red Army. I can't take my eyes off the mannish woman in the flight uniform. Is that Raskova? Grizodubova? Osipenko? Mama thinks nothing of asking. That's Vera Lomako. She's also training to fly non-stop from Moscow to the Far East.

Names from my childhood:
Maksim Gorky, the airplane; Chelyuskin, the icebreaker
Otto Yulevich Shmidt, Captain Voronin
Molokov, Kamanin, Lyapidevsky, Levanevsky, et al
Chkalov, Baidukov, Belyakov
Gromov, Yumashev, Danilin
Raskova, Grizodubova, Osipenko
Papanin, Krenkel, Shirshov, Fyodorov
Badigin, Trofimov

The most important is Valery Chkalov. Lots of boys younger than me have been named after him. Then one day the mothers are telling each other something and crying. They say Chkalov has crashed into a scrap heap. I picture our back entrance, the Tatar yard-keeper's hut, and the wooden garbage bin — with a little plane sticking up out of it.
The Tatar yard-keeper's family may be eyeing it from their hut.

Tatar rag-and-bone men call out under the windows:
"Bring us yer things! Br-r-ring-da-ding!"
The rag-and-bone men are brought into the kitchen through the back door. Nannies frighten little children with those large sacks of theirs.

Nannies are everywhere. I once had a nanny named Matyonna — Maria Antonovna Venediktova — a friend of Granny's. She took me to different churches and may have had me quietly baptized. Mama/Granny didn't baptize me deliberately: they said that when I grew up, if I wanted to, I could do it myself.

Down quiet side streets orderly groups of five or six boys and girls stroll with elderly instructresses conversing in foreign languages.
"I've put mine in a German group."
"Mine's in a French one."
"Why did you put yours in an English one?"
I wasn't in any group. Nor did I go to the kindergarten on the other side of the fence.

In Udelnaya, glaziers come down the road shouldering wooden boxes:
"Panes fer frames! Panes fer frames!"
Or odd-job men:
"Fix it, patch it, reattach it!"
Once a summer Ivan Ivanovich turns up from the village of Vyalki. With a long-handled shovel he scoops the shit out from under the outhouse and wheels it away in a metal barrow to a pit by the gate.
In Udelnaya and in Moscow, scraggy one-legged organ grinders wander by: tyurlyurlyu. They're one-legged because of their one-legged organs.

In the yards they're selling Chinese nuts (peanuts). I don't like them, they smell of earth and castor oil, but if you shell one and split it open you'll see — on one of the halves at the top — the little head of a bearded Chinaman.
Countrywomen go from yard to yard hawking raspberry rooster lollipops — a mother's nightmare:
"All those germs!"
On parade days First Meshchanskaya Street is full of lollipop women.
They tried renaming First Meshchanskaya (Commoner) Street First Grazhdanskaya (Citizen), then went back to First Meshchanskaya.
People are walking down First Meshchanskaya. Few of them are tall. So few, in fact, that boys would invariably call each tall one a long name — Uncle-Grab-That-Sparrow.
On ordinary days on First Meshchanskaya you see carts, sledges, covered wagons, horses. As many horses as cars. The horses don't interest me, the cars vary. As a rule they're gray and rickety. But every once in a while a big, black shiny one tears down the middle of the street, tootling in a treble something like:
"Ovid-ovid!"

On the corner of Third Meshchanskaya by the cooperative, by Sokolov's, there's a Mosselprom stall selling toffees, caramels, candies with white or pink fillings, and hollow chocolate eggs. They say the eggs used to have wonderful little trinkets inside. But all that's expensive.

Most tempting of all — because I can't have them — are the peddlers' homemade toys:
A paper ball filled with sawdust on an elastic string: to thwack the boy sitting next to you with.
A nightingale: a bright red wooden sleeve with a lead core. Twirl it while squeezing, and it erupts in raspy trills.
A bumblebee: a clay cylinder on a string or a twig. Spin it and it buzzes.

So as to outdo the peddlers, my parents take me to a little toy shop on First Meshchanskaya and buy me a box — like a matchbox, only bigger — of ten painted toy soldiers and a captain, nestled in cotton.
I add to my collection, one or two soldiers at a time. On a visit to Bolshaya Ekaterininskaya, I show Grandfather:
"Infantryman, cavalryman, standard-bearer, bugler, machine-gunner."
Granfather points to one running on the attack in a gas mask:
"Sic'emer."

On Kapelsky Lane, while Mama is cooking in the kitchen, I play with my soldiers on the oak parquet floor. There's only one table: it doubles as Papa's desk. On the radio they're giving a lecture: Did the garden of Gethsemane really exist?
Every morning at ten o'clock I listen to a children's program:

I also listen to fairy tales and stories. I'm always spellbound, so long as it's not:
Read by Nikolai Litvinov: he sounds like he's wheedling, his voice is smarmy, as if every word were a lie.

After the children's program comes one for housewives featuring activist wives, who've won bicycles, and Khetagurova girls.
One of the songs is called The Girls Are Off to the Far East. Another is about a heroic switchman:

Mama only turns the radio off at bedtime or when there's something on about Pavlik Morozov.
At eight o'clock, Papa listens to the news summary.
Sometimes the Comintern station transmits No Pasaran from Madrid. All the broadcasts are crackly; the crackliest are the ones from Madrid and the ones that have been recorded on tape.

Papa takes me for a ride on the metro. I gasp in wonder when the train comes up over the Moscow River and the Kremlin appears out the window with its ruby stars. Everyone knows that the most beautiful station is Kievskaya.
Over the November holidays Papa takes me to see the illuminations and shows me the new locomotives, the JOSEPH STALIN and the FELIX DZERZHINSKY, decorated with ribbons like the horses in my books.
I'm voting — just like a big person. Papa lifts me up and I drop my ballot into the urn: for Bulganin.

In our yard, I'm like everyone else, I want to be like everyone else. I'm afraid of Arkasha from the annex, but I lord it over Rafik — nicknamed Rickets — from the yard-keeper's hut. I sled down our hill standing up — not a success. Because of being clumsy, I avoid playing hopscotch on the asphalt. I play war and hide-and-seek, and once I played mother's-little-girl.
If I forget the time, Mama grabs me by the scruff of the neck:
"Wet as a wet rat."
Even without her embarrassing me like that, it's not easy: I always feel annoyed (that I don't move well or fast enough) and hurt (though no one has hurt me). I become tense, tire easily, fly into uncontrollable rages. When a little girl from the fourth floor starts arguing with me, I hit her on the head with the blade of a shovel so that her head bleeds. Mama runs and apologizes, then tries to shame me. I feel not shame, but horror: what have I done, what will they do to me now?
(I don't know whether or not to believe what Mama remembered later:
"You always wanted to be a yard-keeper. You said: 'I'll get up early, take my shovel, and when people come along, I'll whisk the snow right under their feet — whisk! whisk!' ")

Scrawny, hungry Nyusha the milkmaid comes into the kitchen with the milk can. She pours out a mug of milk then pours it back to show that the can is full. If it isn't full, the milk sloshes and slops. I bring her a vile concoction: cucumber pickles and jam. Our neighbor Ekaterina Dmitrievna sees me and says that where she comes from in the Ukraine they eat cucumbers with honey. Mama doesn't say anything. Papa praises me glumly:
"Simply marvelous, how vile!"
Once I heard Nyusha whispering to Mama that her sons the pilots had come for a visit and she was afraid of them.

Granny likes to physic others, Mama is always physicking herself.
Words from my childhood: cups, mustard plasters, blue light, calcex, aspirin, quinacrine, sulfanilamide, digitalis, adonilene, salsoline, diuretin, phenobarbital, papaverine, phytin, purgene.
I like it in the apothecary. Outside everything is dirty, derelict. But in the apothecary — the whiteness, the neatness, the orderlinesss — it's almost beautiful.
My teeth ache constantly. In Moscow, Mama takes me to Doctor Barskaya on First Meshchanskaya Street; in Udelnaya, to Doctor Salanchevskaya on Severnaya. Both women are old, not very tall, look-alikes; both pump the drill with their foot. Mama explains:
"Now a Chinese bee is going to fly into your mouth. It won't sting you."

Scarlet fever. The district doctor passes sentence: clap him in the hospital. And leaves. Mama is horrified: who knows what they'll do to him in the hospital! Granny — who works in a hospital — takes charge:
"When the ambulance comes, say they've already taken him."
In a high black taxi Granny spirits me to Bolshaya Ekaterininskaya Street.
The only time I was ever visited by a private physician, recommended by friends, he told me to squat down, then listened to my knees crack:
"You're on your last legs, last legs, ought to be thrown right out."

I'm not on my last legs in Udelnaya: it's quieter there and I'm alone more.
Towards evening the heat abates and I feel like running. I race from the well to the gate then stride back shielding my eyes against the blinding sun.
Papa often takes me for walks. In Moscow he comes home too late.
Papa isn't afraid that a cat may be rabid, that a dog will bite, that a man might hit me. He passes between a horse and a cow and isn't afraid that the horse will kick me or that the cow will gore me.
Papa's jokes:
"An old woman is standing in church, praying. Suddenly she notices something white and round on the ground. She kneels down and feels around for it: 'Ugh! Forgive me, Lord. I thought it was a 20-kopeck piece, but it was only someone's spittle.' "
"A young lady is repeatedly invited to dance, but always refuses. Finally one gentleman asks: 'Why is it that you won't dance?' And she replies: 'Whayne ah daynce, thayne ah swayte, aynd whayne ah swayte, thayne ah stink.' "
I ask Papa to tell me something interesting, something about spies. Papa doesn't know anything about them. Instead he tells me about the real-life jewel thief Sonka-Golden-Hand and the fictional detective Nat Pinkerton. Across the river, in Chudakovo, he shows me a shabby manor house:
"I used to have a small bulldog revolver. I was expecting a search at home so I left the gun on a beam between some logs and paneling: it fell into the breach, from the second floor. It's probably still there."

I pick a small, crude quasi-crowbar up off the ground.
"A jimmy," says Papa and explains what it is, what it's for and for whom.
"One bitter winter highwaymen ambushed a sleigh. The coachman pointed a smoked sausage at them and bellowed: 'I'll kill you!' The highwaymen fled. Toot-tootle-toot: some sausages shoot. Before the Bolsheviks, a horse-drawn tram went from the station in Udelnaya to Chudakovo. There were some grand dachas. Old woman Klepikova was killed by bandits one winter when she stayed on alone. She wouldn't open the door. They burned the house down."

Mama wakes before dawn: the window creaked, someone was trying to break in. Thieves press rags soaked in chloroform to sleepers' faces.
Granny brings us a whistle just in case: the neighbors will hear it and come running.
It's not safe to walk home from the station late at night. Chances are you'll be stripped in the alder bushes before Novaya Malakhovka, just beyond the new foot-bridge where those two Chinamen drowned.
Two Chinamen drowned is from my walks with Papa. They were students at the Communist University of Eastern Workers and went in wading, drunk.

Sukhovolsky, an acquaintance of Papa's (he's older than Papa), remembers the Chinamen, too, and chuckles: in the very shallowest place. He wears a blouse belted with a Caucasian sash, riding breeches, and slippers. He invites us to his dacha in Bykovo:
"I have a harmonium! I'll play you Bortnyansky! Such music: the walls weep!"
From Sukhovolsky:
"Lacrimosa!"

There's only one policeman in Udelnaya and he's at the station.
Sometimes he struts down International Street, stumpy and barrel-chested in his new diagonal uniform. Mothers stare after him:
"NKVD."
They recall:
"An Army commander — Vacietis — used to live at the old Goat woman's. He did gymnastics every morning and doused himself with cold water."

Volodka, the younger brother of our lodger Sasha, takes Shulgin's Days away from Mama:
"You could be arrested for that book."
"Take it," says Mama, and when he's gone: "Dirty rascal!"
One Sunday Volodka, in the company of other lodgers from other dachas, asserts that the word kerosene comes from the firm Kero and Son — the first outfit ever to sell the stuff. All great men are Jewish: Columbus, Cromwell, Napoleon, Karl Marx. Hitler's Jewish too.

After lunch dacha owners and their lodgers gather on verandas around the gramophone. People spend years preparing, saving, and debating before buying themselves opera glasses, or a thermos, or a gramophone.
Everyone owns essentially the same records.
Out of ideology: Higher and Higher, Bike Tour March, Divers' March, A Komsomol Member is Piloting the Plane.
Out of learnedness: Chaliapin.
Out of love: some own Lemeshev, others Kozlovsky. Lemeshev lovers are waging a desperate and hopeless war against Kozlovsky.
For one's own pleasure: Kozin or gypsy songs.
For parties: Utyosov and foreign tangos, foxtrots, rumbas. The records are not foreign, every last one was made in either the Noginsk or the Aprelevka factory.
Parties mean dancing. Papa doesn't dance. Mama knows how to waltz. I'm told that Varlamov's Sweet Sue is Chinese music. I go off into a corner of the veranda and foxtlot Chinese-style — with both index fingers raised.

Gramophone music was nothing like radio music. On the radio there were operas, Pyatnitsky's folk choir, songs by Soviet composers, variations on songs by Soviet composers, songs about Stalin.
Radio music was far less appealing than gramophone music.
Yet over the years of the radio's always being on, I picked up, came to love, and memorized what was missing in life itself — the vivid and the exotic:

I like to sing along: they say I have a good ear. Granny, Mama and Papa want me to take music lessons.
That means piano. But the music school isn't accepting piano students, the Jews there take violin: if anything happens, they can just tuck the violin under their arm and run.
Crazy Aunt Vera never played her VOIGT upright. Granny, Mama and Papa refused to take it, most likely out of scrupulousness. In early '39 Granny found a good, inexpensive OFFENBACHER, which Papa bought. Inexpensive: five thousand rubles! It's clear where such a large sum came from: Papa had just been paid for his book. What's not clear is how that high, large instrument wedged into our 13 square meters.
I poke the keys. I think of every key as a letter; if I know the words, then I can pick out any song I like on the keys.
The one music teacher Granny had known for years, a Czech named Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shvarts, was very old. Another music teacher, a woman, brought me Gedike, made me tap a sounding board with a pencil, put several volumes of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia under me, and droned on about letter-keys. Enraged, I sassed her to her back:
"Toodle-oo, Meany-malou!"
I caught it.

On the tram, Mama falls into conversation with a serious little girl of about eight carrying her sheet music in a folder with a picture of a lyre.
"I'm taking lessons from Lyubov Nikolaevna Basova, she's the very best."
Gifted children study with Lyubov Nikolaevna in Gorchakov's house on Pushkin Square:

A time of amazement sets in.
Papa's young colleague, whom I call Uncle Volodya (about the only person my parents are happy to invite home), tells us that in Western Byelorussia and Lithuania they were not glad to see the Red Army:
"They stood and wept."
He has brought me a 30-kopeck/2-zloty coin from 1835 and a 20-cent piece with a galloping knight on it.
Estonian crowns with their castle look like gold coins.
The shops are full of Latvian candies: Laima chocolates. Klara Ivanova translates the name. A little rusty, she at first reads Laima as Saima (household).
"Laima, let me see, that's 'happiness'."
Latvian candies are a hundred times better than our Red October, and the wrappers are so beautiful — we don't have anything like them. And you should see their cigarette boxes!
The grown-ups demur:
"Where do they get the tobacco? Probably pack them with peat."

On the last day of the war with Finland, after the armistice, Papa's brother Fyodor is killed near Vyborg.
Those who return are amazed at the spitefulness of the Finns:
"A Finnish sniper sitting in a tree shoots till he's out of cartridges."
"A nurse bends over a wounded Finn: he knifes her!"
On the radio and in the papers they never refer to the Finnish Army or Finnish soldiers. Only to bands and bandits or, at best, to Shützcorps men.
Ogonyok's first issue for the year 1940 says that the Red Army, at the request of Finland's worker-peasant government, is helping the working people to drive out landowners and capitalists.

Our Udelnaya lodger Sasha returns from Riga amazed at the spitefulness of the Latvians:
"They hate us! Getting a shave at the barber's, I was afraid he'd cut my throat!"
Sasha brought a lot of unusual things back from Latvia: striped underpants with an ivory clasp for Lyonka; bright dresses and blouses for his wife Dusya and Volodya's Nadya; a whistling tea kettle; a nickel-plated German cigarette lighter with a shepherd on it; and a pencil sharpener in the shape of a fine little automobile.

The little automobile soon joins my enviable things. In a silk-lined brass box from a bottle of Bilitis perfume (Ralle, Moscow), I have a Tsar's Tea tin decorated with Chinese women; a steel American etui for ten Gillette razor blades; a mother-of-pearl purse; a polished marble lamina; a silver puzzle ring with a ruby; Granny's favorite charm — a green frog with a forget-me-not; a tiny jug from the Caucasus decorated in enamel — also a charm; a copper token for refugees; and a little icon of Saint Ksenia missing one lug.
Grandfather's presents: an ancient one-kopeck coin known as a "fish scale"; a ten-kopeck piece from Peter's reign; a 5-kopeck piece with an eagle in the clouds from Elizabeth's reign; ten-kopeck pieces with holes through them from Catherine's reign.
Rare things all: no one else has them. I want, want to have, what no one else has. I want what is beautiful: one comes across it so rarely...
The mannequin's head in the hairdresser's window strikes me as the height of French-court elegance: its features are fine and light, unlike the features of the women one sees in the street.
Bloody, bright-scarlet spittle on the snow is beautiful. So are the sky blue lion and the unicorn on our toilet bowl. Medals and badges are beautiful. The tsars in my book and on my stamps are beautiful. The last tsar was Nicholas the Third.

My stamps are in a large — the size of a ledger — unlined, plain green copybook. Mama pasted them in in order: England with Victorias and Georges on the first page; France with Libertes on the second; then Italy; then Germany with Lessings and Leibnizes, and so on, from West to East.

At first Mama glued a corner of each stamp with seccotine, but the stamps soon became saturated and the corners turned dark. Then she looked to see how Yurka Tikhonov did it and began mounting the stamps on little squares. It is extraordinary how even the plainest stamps, if you look at them long enough, are still beautiful.

Lyonka, our lodger Sasha's son, does not like beautiful things. He can't even tell the difference between what's beautiful and what isn't. Actually, he's nothing like me.
Every summer, with Papa's help, I fence off a corner of our yard with some old boards to make a house with a door that has small straps for hinges and a latch. The roof is covered with tarpaper scraps, the table by the window I made myself.
Mama and Sasha's Dusya once sat Lyonka and me down at my table to eat lunch. His smacking lips and grease-smeared face so disgusted me that I hit him and ran away. He offended my sensibilities.
The next day I fed him rabbit wood sorrel and "goat nuts". I pretended to eat them too, but he was greedy and grabbed them right out of my mouth. When his stomach began to ache, he told. Sasha didn't dare hit me, but he complained to Mama:
"You are such a lovely person, Evgenia Ivanovna. How is it your son is a sadist?"
My conscience didn't bother me, on the contrary:

Lyonka's grandfather's name is Leon Abramovich, his grandmother's is Maria Efimovna. Mama has her doubts:
"Can't be Maria! Must be Matlya."
Matlya reads to Lyonka in a singsong voice:

She's never heard of the Artek summer camp, but they talk about the Arctic on the radio all the time. She plucks a rooster and croons wistfully:

Before that Yura and Borya — both slightly older than me — lived with us. Borya was a boy after my own heart: I called him my "heart case", an expression I'd picked up from Granny/Mama. Under Borya's influence I became entranced — as never before or since — by nature. We spent whole days in Little Pines — a special place at the end of our yard above a stream where the earth had never been turned up and nothing had ever been planted, where only grass and pines grew. We ate sorrel, corn flags, and wild mustard. In Little Pines or by the bathing place, we netted mourning cloaks, swallowtails, huge dragonflies, and fine coral and turquoise damselflies, we kicked brown frogs and picked up green ones.
The frogs jumped into the water. Horsetails you could pull apart — joint by joint — stood above the water. Water plants grew magically and minnows shimmered under the water. Water lilies lay heavily on the water. While water striders whisked over the water in their own round wakes, as if on skates. Snags stuck up out of the water. It never occurred to me that all this, too, was beautiful.
There is no greater happiness than squelching barefoot along the warm, squashy marsh bottom and sinking into it ankle-deep, while peering all around. A child's paradise lies by the stream.

We bathed not along the bank, but in an enclosed bathing place, which Papa and Uncle Ivan built every year. As long as a grown-up was watching, I was allowed to climb carefully down the little ladder and take a dip. The water was too warm to be refreshing.
Mama's cousin, Uncle Igor, a military cadet, once flipped backwards off the ladder, flashed a gum, and sent bubbles up from under the water.
He asked me a riddle: "How do you spell chocolate? Is it ChAcolate or chUcolate?" I was too ashamed to try and answer.
It was from Igor I learned Ryzan Artillery College songs:

Borya and I had grand times that one summer. Otherwise my best friend and comfort was the Tikhonovs' stuttering lodger Vadik. He was slow. We would weewee over the fence, then scramble up into the tall apple trees and sing away:

It was easy to tease:

Our favorite things were all indecent. A song:

Every winter Mama, Papa, and I went to Usachev Street to visit Varvara Mikhailovna. She had an album full of indecent German postcards, three to a page:

Papa said that these postcards were pornographic.

Vadik and I go off by ourselves to the shed, pull down our pants and show each other our behinds. This is called frucking. Vadik says that where he lives in Sokolniki, boys fruck with girls.

Everyone has a different word for it:

There are other series, too: bottom, rumpet, rear, Madame Derriere, ass.

Mama has accepted the fact that we swear. Shit and ass are almost all right. Fruck is not allowed. We keep quiet about frucking. And keep an ear out for new swear words. We gleefully listen in on a neighbor telling Papa about hunting:
"And there we were just farting along."
Yurka Tikhonov — he's four years older than us — came home with a good word — only he forgot it:
"Something like 'can't'."
Yurka calls sparrows "Yids", and those pretty wagtails "hagtails".
When it rains, he says: "God's pissing"; when it thunders: "God's farting."
He threatens:

He likes to stuff white dandelion puffs into wide-open mouths.
If you say What?, he says: Shit on a nut, wipe your butt.
Yurka shat all over the place and, to our amazement, pulled up his pants without wiping himself.

In a good mood, Yurka would tell us about the cinema:
"A field. Then right in the middle of it an explosion! People running..."
"An old man sitting by a stream fishing... But see, he's a spy."

A joke Yurka made up: "A barin builds a village and decides to name it after the first thing he sees in his path. He walks out onto the road and sees a pair of britches lying right there. So he names his village Britches. The next day, a peasant from another village is going to market. The barin's peasant asks: 'What're you selling?' 'Nuts.' 'You call those nuts? In our barin's Britches, these are nuts!'"

Yurka's mother, Natalia Sergeevna, nags Yurka about his gutter talk. He quacks:
"Aw, shut up!"

With Yurka I can shoot with a bow. His semi-basement is full of old furniture made of mahogany. Mahogany makes the straightest, most accurate arrows.
With Yurka I can play aeroplane.
"Do we have contact?"
"Yes, we have contact!"
Long games make him impatient.

We played soldiers more seriously than the grown-ups played chess. Uncle Igor taught us: on the croquet pitch in front of the veranda we made a Mannerheim line. Barbed-wire entanglements, trenches, pillboxes, cannons. Granny brought us a sparkling machine-gun — turn the handle and sparks fly from the flint in the muzzle. Soldiers fall. Igor rubs the wire with wax and burns it through with a match. A tank rolls out into the breach. A wooden battleship sails along the path. The war goes on and on. Neither I nor Vadik wins — we'll pick the game up again tomorrow.
I already have a hundred toy soldiers. I know them all by face.
Using a dinner knife, a hammer, and a chisel — I get a blister on my right hand — I construct an aeroplane and two cannons that shoot little stones, like slingshots.
And even so I'm green with envy.
Never before or since have I envied anyone so much as I envied the fat son of that man in the foreign service, Zvavich. He was also named Andrei. They lived at the old Goat woman's.
Andrei's toy soldiers were from abroad: English guardsmen in huge black hats and French infantrymen in red trousers. They could raise their arms and place a rifle on their shoulder. Compared to my crude soldiers, Andrei's were unbearably beautiful. I borrowed Aunt Vera's oils and tried painting mine — with repulsive results. I was so upset the Zvaviches felt compelled to give me one of Andrei's Frenchmen.

Soon I was wild about France — about the Napoleons from the second-hand shop, about the Paris Commune in my children's book, about the revolutions in the Small Soviet Encyclopedia. Neighbors of ours on Kapelsky Lane gave me a color postcard from 1912: Cossacks seize Napoleon's baggage train.
Two happy memories are connected with France.
The New Year's party at the Trubnikovs' inexplicably roomy and separate (like a dacha) apartment where beautiful things abounded and Granny was one of the family.
Trubnikov's son-in-law, a chemistry professor by the name of Balandin, performed magic tricks: he combined two glasses of plain water to make multi-colored waters; he set fire to a sheet of white paper, scorching the edges so that animal shapes appeared; he put on a firework display in the big room.
I forgot everything in the world — for possibly the first time. I danced by the tree with children I'd never met before as if I'd always known them. I gabbled, laughed and made friends with a little girl, meaning I pulled her down on the sofa and began twisting her legs. The grown-ups separated us, merrily, their laughter benign.
As I was leaving, the Trubnikovs presented me with a regal gift: an enormous Images Militaires, an album of soldiers in red trousers fighting historic battles and just plain.
Those kind Trubnikovs, if only they knew how much they did for me!
The New Year's party at their house was the one time Granny/Mama were not afraid to take me out to call on people.

My second memory is the third of June 1939. I'm playing with my soldiers on the floor, on the veranda of our dacha. I've just turned six. Everyone is glad to see me, everyone has brought presents. Crazy Aunt Vera comes out from Moscow, gives me an imported French book, and flees, back to the station, so as not to meet anyone. The book is full of red and striped — tricolor — trousers. Goethe lost in thought on horseback. General Kellermann raising his cocked hat aloft on his sword...
A warm, smooth, languid day. Gathered around the table are Mama, Papa, Granny, Igor's mother Great Aunt Asya, her husband Dmitry Petrovich, and our lodgers. Everyone is smiling at me and at each other. Greater benevolence, greater happiness in childhood I never knew.
My very best birthday...

Translated by Joanne Turnbull