The Northern Caucasus
The Soviet regime provided many people with the opportunity to receive a previously inaccessible higher education. Samuil graduated from medical school in the 1920s and left his native Rostov-on-the-Don on an assignment to the Northern Caucasus. He worked in hospitals and sanatoriums in Sernovodsk, Zheleznovodsk, and Piatigorsk. The clan from Rostov dreamt that the boy might finally settle down and marry a nice Jewish girl. Samuil had his own ideas regarding life. Medicine came first. Medicine was his calling. Behind the plain exterior there was a strong, resolute character. He was a good doctor, organised, knowledgeable and capable of holding his own when it came to treating a patient. He had instinct and intuition. And, most importantly, he loved his patients. That's why he could intuit what they felt. That's why he became a good doctor. And an excellent administrator. He was head of several sanatoriums, one after the other. With regard to having a Jewish wife – no, please don't start. I know what these wives are like. They sleep until midday, and around 2pm they utter the first words: «Syoma, everything hurts!» Samuil loved Tonya Fedotova, who came from an educated, well-to-do intelligentsia family. Every conceivable ethnicity was mixed into this family: there were Russian roots, Terek Cossack influence, Georgian blood and possibly a drop of Turkish blood, too. Tonya was the younger of two sisters. She was not as beautiful as the elder sister, Tanya. But my god, what a woman she was. Delicate and feminine. Slim, well-proportioned, with the Madonna's sad face. Just like Vera Kholodnaya. She played the piano and sang in a quiet voice, kept a diary and wrote poetry. Syoma knew exactly what he needed from life. How could he not have fallen in love with Antonina? If there is a young man among the readers of this sketch, listen to your older comrade. If you happen to meet a woman with a quiet voice who is not talkative and modestly averts her pensive eyes, concealed behind long lashes, don't dismiss her, don't walk past this rare stroke of luck. The strongest, most faithful, selfless and fervent female natures are hiding behind such lowly beauty, such quiet charm. It is them who bestow upon their chosen one the most passionate embraces and become his faithful support for life.
Samuil and Tonya got married. Tonya bore two sons, Vova and Misha, two years apart in age. The chief doctor was a well-respected man. His family received a flat with three rooms. Samuil gave one room to a woman without a family, a fellow doctor at his sanatorium. He had decided that two rooms were enough for his family. Antonina was very hospitable. The doors were always half open. The house was furnished with ascetic simplicity: hospital bunks, a wardrobe, table and chairs. No other furniture whatsoever. In their place a piano, a splendid library and many guests. Antonina, slow by nature, would get up at six in the morning, run to the market, then cook. She managed to feed everybody. Anyone could turn to her family and ask for help. Some insolent women came regularly, asking for money. And Antonina would slip them something. When she had no money, she would give them food, milk, eggs, everything she had. She was incapable of turning anybody away. Acquaintances and others who had come to the resort but didn't know her well would stay at the house. Everybody, apart from Samuil's relations. They couldn't forgive his choice of a wife. They still refused to recognise Antonina and her children. The children hardly knew their father's relatives. However, all their life the children entertained a very close relationship with the beautiful Tanya, Auntie Tanya. I'll charge ahead and tell you that Misha told Tanya things he wouldn't have told his own mother.
The boys were taught music and drawing. They were very capable children. Their school grades were excellent, and both had a gift for the exact sciences. The elder, Volodya, played the violin. He was a fine draftsman, able to create with a single stroke, a single line, the image of a person or outline a landscape. The younger brother, Mishka, played the piano. However, the boys weren't mollycoddled or kept indoors. Let's remember the atmosphere of a warm, southern resort town – the atmosphere of perennial feast. A host of holidaymakers, visitors from the large cities. An abundance of fruit. And an abundance of temptations. Just as all other local children, the boys ran wild in the street, made friends with the people from Caucasus, went to the mountains, climbed trees and collected mulberries. They grew up real tomboys. Once they were chasing each other and Vova slammed the door in Misha's face, bam! Now his brother had a huge conk where his nose was meant to be. And so Misha went through life with a broken, squashed nose. Another time Misha was running after Vova, threatening him with a hot iron, and when he caught up with him he pressed the iron against his bottom, and so Vova was left with the imprint of the iron for life. Antonina decided to get an education and enrolled at the Medical Institute. On the very first day of her course her neighbours told her in the evening that they had seen her dear boys walk along the cornice of the fifth floor. There could be no talk of lectures or study. Oh, it seems that Tonya's dreams of a degree, her dreams to raise her boys to become musicians, writers, artists or doctors, were all in vain. These dreams weren't meant to come true. The younger, Misha, turned out particularly sprightly. He was lively, always laughing and very kind, and as a result everybody loved him, his peers as well as the adults. And whether through constant exposure to the sun or by nature, he was not just sun-bronzed, but downright black. Black like some Indians. Mishka-the-Black, his friends would call him. And that nickname stayed with him to the end of his life. Misha loved to play billiard. He reckoned that he had to know how to do all things better than the others. Sometimes, professional billiard players would come to the sanatorium. One of them became the boy's patron and trained him rather well. Before the outbreak of the war the short ten-year old boy was a very decent player already. Whenever someone came who wanted to play for money, some new artist on tour, Misha's billiard mentor would deploy his favourite trick. Not so quick, he would say. Why don't you first play the lad over there. People would quickly gather for their favourite spectacle. The «lad» would clamber onto a chair, as he couldn't reach the balls standing on the floor. And then he would tear the guest artist to shreds, to everyone's amusement. Yes, it didn't look as if Misha would become a pianist or writer. The country was troubled. Sometimes there was trouble in this god-protected house, too. The terrible year 1937 began to ramble and roar and then exploded in claps of thunder. «Oh how I want to fly away, unseen by anyone, fly off after a ray of light and not exist at all», wrote Mandel'shtam. We won't manage to fly away, Osip Emil'evich, we won't manage to hide or turn into an invisible ray. The local NKVD was given an order; they had to uncover and arrest several thousand hidden enemies of the people. A number of them were to be executed, the other part to be sent to the GULAG. Committees of three NKVD-members were formed, arrests prepared. Lists were compiled of Trotskyites, anti-party groups, kulaks, accomplices of the White Army, spies, war specialists involved in subversive acts, saboteurs, other alien elements. Let's have a heart-to-heart with them, they will confirm everything. Sernovodsk is a small town, everybody knew at whose house the black police car would call next during the night. In the chief doctor's house they were expecting visitors, too. The family was saved by the Chechens. They loved Samuil and decided to help. Old men in burkas came and sat down in the sanatorium's courtyard. «Samuil, don't go home. Stay here for a bit. We've told your family. They won't worry. We'll see what happens.» Every child in town knew about the Chechens in the sanatorium. For the NKVD this was an unexpected turn. There could be unforeseen disturbances. They'd get a rap on the knuckles in Moscow for this. To hell with that Samuil. May he live and work for the good of the proletarian state. He's a good doctor, isn't her? Well, let him work then. We'll manage without including him in our report. Perhaps it really happened like that. Perhaps the Chechens simply hid the chief doctor, his wife and children for a while. Whatever happened, the storm passed by Samuil and his family. But for how long? Hard to predict how the events would have unfolded further. A huge, cruel, merciless war appeared at the threshold, a war that jumbled everyone and everything and destroyed all plans to build a «peaceful» life in the land of the Soviets. During the war, a torrent of casualties flooded from the frontline into the North Caucasus. The sanatorium was transformed into a war hospital. Samuil, the sanatorium's chief doctor, became head of the hospital. His non-proletarian origin didn't stand in the way of his appointment.
The Great Fatherland War
I know little about my father's involvement in the Finnish war. Perhaps he fought only for a short time or not at the main stretch of the front. My father didn't talk about it much. He told something about Finnish snipers at the top of the fir trees and about how dexterous the Fins were at throwing knives. All the rest is muddled. By contrast, WWII, the Great Fatherland War, affected us to the full extent. Just before the war my parents received their own living space. As a fairly highly positioned leader, my father was assigned a flat with two rooms on Liteiny Prospekt. My mother was already pregnant with me. My father decided that a certain colleague of his, who already had a child, needed a separate flat more urgently and ceded the flat. For his own family he took a room in a communal flat, also on Liteiny Prospekt. True, there weren't many other people in that communal flat, which also consisted of two rooms. Our room was large, more than thirty square meters. On the third floor, without a lift. With a stove for heating. My parents only spent a very short time there at first. The war had broken out. My father was preparing his factory's evacuation to the Urals. He sent my grandmother's entire extended family (my aunts, their husbands and children, my uncle) to Sverdlovsk – that was the name of Ekaterinburg in Soviet Russia – and then he sent my mother with her baby bump there, too. She delivered me en route. Well, not on the train, naturally. When she went into labour she was swiftly made to disembark in the town of Galich, Kostroma region, where I came into this world in August 1941. Thus I saw the ancient town of Galich only once. In the following my mother made her own way to Sverdlovsk, with a nursing infant. The food was terrible. She would travel in a heated goods carriage. There was no opportunity to wash. The baby – that is, me – was covered in scabs. Instead of a crib I slept in a wooden trough. She was surrounded by men, soldiers, who had been sent down from the front for various reasons. The soldiers, who were occupying the upper levels of the bunks, picked out lice from under their armpits and dropped them. My mother cried. A wounded officer with heart disease, on his way to a home visit, lowered his head from the second bunk and said, «Don't cry, dear mother, when you son grows up he'll be a Hercules.» As if he'd looked into the future. He was almost right – I grew up to become a big, strong man. With time. Back then what was there was there.
When my mother rejoined my grandmother everyday life became easier, it seems. Although the issue of food remained, of course. It was the same for everyone at that time. Soon afterwards my father moved to the Urals with his family. My mother proudly presented him her cachetic, malnourished baby boy, evidently. Women always show their newborn babies to their beloved husbands in this way. And of course my parents' family joy was once again short-lived. My father, who would always give in to my mother in all matters and consider her opinion in literally all matters, became a very decisive man in those critical moments in life. He was vice director of a huge factory of defensive significance, exempt from military service due to his obligations at the factory and, at 38, was entering middle age. And he enlisted as a volunteer. As a rank-and-file soldier. He told my mother only when he was about to leave.
What do I remember from that time? Almost nothing. A dark stairwell. Some logs that had been stacked on the landing for some reason. A white cat playing among them. Looking at me. My future life, the bright bits and the troubled ones all together, were looking at me through that cat's child-like feral eyes. I remember stories. How my mother took up smoking. Makhorka, rough-cut tobacco. There was nothing else. How my grandmother died. How we waited for the rare letters from the front. How we listened to the song «Wait for Me and I Will Return», how we hoped and cried in silence. How the children greedily snapped up food when there was any in the house. How they swallowed quickly and growled, unable to wait for the next spoonful of porridge. The entire country lived like that. Some faded photographs from that time have survived. My mother, haggard and almost unrecognisable. Huge eyes, a prematurely aged face with a tortured expression. And a terrible puny creature, all skin and bones. That is me. In my eyes, the same suffering as in my mother's.
In 1944 we returned to our flat on Liteiny Prospekt. All our things and furniture had been taken away. By our neighbours from upstairs. My mother didn't argue with anyone. She started again, from scratch. Her sisters and brother came to her aid. Then the war was over. The men returned from the front. In the streets there were flowers, songs, accordion tunes. No news of my father. One joyful soldier in a shirt turned to me in the street, smiled at me and waved. I ran towards him, screaming 'Uncle Daddy!' I didn't know my own father after all. Then the news came that the units of the Second Ukrainian Regiment were still in Prague. That's where my father was. There, the war was still going on; people were dying. While here, peaceful life was beginning. Shops opened. One event that has stayed with me is the opening of a bakery on Liteiny Prospekt. I can still remember it. For some reason my strongest childhood impression was a loaf of white bread on the table. Bulka, as they call white bread in Leningrad.
My father's commander was travelling through Leningrad. «Wait for your husband, Lyubochka, he'll come soon. Your Yasha will return as a Hero of the Soviet Union. All documents are prepared already.» If only it had happened that way. Perhaps many of the subsequent problems in my family would never have arisen. But it turned out differently. Somewhere in the headquarters they had changed the nomination for the Gold Star of the Hero and my father was awarded the Order of the Red Banner instead. My father never pleaded on his own behalf and did not appeal to his front commander.
Who thought of those things back then? The war was over. My father was safe and sound. Almost everyone was safe. The only person in my father's huge family who had died was his older brother. His beloved younger brother Borya returned from captivity. He had pretended to be Tartar and thus saved his own life. What joy that was! My grandmother's entire family, all together. The only one missing was my grandmother herself. My father was jolly and strong. He would sing arias, everybody would start dancing. He would hug my mother and her two sisters to himself, lift them up and waltz around with them. Everybody idolised my father. He was a real hero, his chest covered in orders. Twelve military honours. He would drink a whole bottle of vodka in one go, to the Victory.
So many things remained in the past. He had suffered concussion when a mine exploded next to him. The left side of his body was left paralysed. He'd only just recovered a bit in hospital when he left in a hurry to catch up with his unit. The left side of his face remained immobile for a long time. On one of the photographs from the front his face looks contorted. My father was older than the other front soldiers; they used to call him 'batya', father. Fate saved him from the bullets. But his life could have come to an end for a different reason. My father was a signalman. Once, near Kursk, he and a group of fighters were given the task to set up communication links between our sub-units. With spools of wire on their backs and submachine-guns they had to fight their way through this layer cake of Russian and German positions and return to the position of their unit. Several groups had already been sent on this mission; all had perished. The fighting lasted several days. They completed the task. My father returned and went to the staff quarters to report. An officer he didn't know held forth: «We are risking our lives here while the yids are taking cover behind the front line.» My father threw himself at the officer and hit him in the odious face with a brick. So he came to face trial. According to martial law he should have been shot. What his commander did in order to save him I don't know. They hushed up the story somehow. How they managed to get past the «smershevtsy» – Soviet counterintelligence – I don't know either. God averted them. And the commander. A courageous, noble man. Moreover, he took the risk upon himself. My father received the next award. And in winter 1945 he was nominated for the Star of the Hero for the forced crossing of the river Oder. The Red Army had captured a bridgehead on the other bank. My father's men had to establish a signal connection. They were crawling across the ice with their spools. A mine exploded next to my father, the ice broke, and the massively heavy spool dragged him down, underwater. A very young boy, a signalman from his section, held a pole into the water, which my father managed to grab. Lucky him. He clambered out of the icy water. The section moved on. They established the connection. That's what my father told me. For this action he was nominated for the Hero.