pyatiorka
. My best subjects were physics
and maths, and these were very important to the Russian authorities.
Nobody ever let you forget that we were the country that had sent the
first man – Yuri Gargarin – into space. There was even a photograph of
him in the front entrance and you were supposed to salute him as you
came in. I was also good at sport and I remember how the girls in my
class used to come along and cheer me when I scored a goal. I wasn’t all
that interested in girls at this time, which is to say I was happy to chat to
them but I didn’t particularly want to hang out with them after school.
My best friend was the Leo that I just mentioned and the two of us were
inseparable.
Leo Tretyakov was short and skinny with jutting out ears, freckles and
ginger hair. He used to joke that he was the ugliest boy in the district
and I found it hard to disagree. He was also far from bright. He was a
two-star student, a dismal
dvoyka
and he was always getting into trouble
with the teachers. In the end they actually gave up punishing him
because it didn’t seem to make any difference and he just sat there
quietly daydreaming at the back of the class. But at the same time he
was the star of our NVP – military training – classes which were
compulsory throughout the school. Leo could strip down an AK47
automatic machine gun in twelve seconds and reassemble it in fifteen.
He was a great shot. And twice a year there were military games, when
we had to compete with other schools using a map and a compass to find
our way through the woods. Leo was always in charge. And we always
won.
I liked Leo because he was afraid of nothing and he always made me
laugh. We did everything together. We would eat our sandwiches in the
yard, washed down with a gulp of vodka that he had stolen from home
and brought to school in one of his mother’s old perfume bottles. We
smoked cigarettes in the woodland close to the main building, coughing
horribly because the tobacco was so rough. Our school toilets had no
compartments and we often sat next to each other doing what we had to
do, which may sound disgusting but that was the way it was. You were
meant to bring your own toilet paper too, but Leo always forgot and I
would watch him guiltily tearing pages out of his exercise books. He was
always losing his homework that way. But with Leo’s homework – and
he’d have been the first to admit it – that was probably all it was worth.
The best time we had together was in the summer, when we would go
for endless bicycle rides, rattling along the country roads, shooting down
hills and pedalling backwards furiously, which was the only way to stop.
Everyone had exactly the same model of bicycle and they were all death
traps with no suspension, no lights and no brakes. We had nowhere to go
but in a way that was the fun of it. We used our imagination to create a
world of wolves and vampires, ghosts and Cossack warriors – and we
chased each other right through the middle of them. When we finally got
back to the village, we would swim in the river, even though there were
parasites in the water that could make you sick, and we always went to
the bathhouse together, thrashing each other with birch leaves in the
steam room which was meant to be good for your skin.
Leo’s parents worked in the same factory as mine, although my father,
who had once studied at Moscow State University, was the more senior
of the two. The factory employed about two hundred people, who were
collected by coaches from Estrov, Rosna and lots of other places. I have
to say, the place was a source of constant puzzlement to me. Why was it
tucked away in the middle of nowhere? Why had I never seen it? There
was a barbed wire fence surrounding it and armed militia standing at the
gate, and that didn’t make sense either. All it produced was pesticides
and other chemicals used by farmers. But when I asked my parents about
it, they always changed the subject. Leo’s father was the transportation
manager, in charge of the coaches. My father was a research chemist. My
mother worked in the main office doing paperwork. That was about as
much as I knew.
At the end of a summer afternoon, Leo and I would often sit close to
the river and we would talk about our future. The truth was that just
about everyone wanted to leave Estrov. Outside work, there was nothing
to do and half the people who lived there were perpetually drunk. I’m
not making it up. During the winter months, they weren’t allowed to
open the village shop before ten o’clock in the morning or people would
rush in as soon as it was light to buy their vodka; and during December
and January, it wasn’t unusual to see some of the local farmers flat on
their backs, half covered with snow and probably half dead too after
downing a whole bottle. We were all being left behind in a fast-changing
world. Why my parents had ever chosen to come here was another
mystery.
Leo didn’t care if he ended up working in the factory like everyone else
but I had other ambitions. For reasons that I couldn’t explain, I’d always
thought that I was different from everyone else. Maybe it was the fact
that my father had once been a professor in a big university and that he
had himself experienced life outside the village. But when I was
watching those planes disappear into the distance, I always thought they
were trying to tell me something. I could be on one of them. There was a
whole life outside Estrov that I might one day explore.
Although I had never told anyone else except Leo, I dreamt of
becoming a helicopter pilot – maybe in the army but if not, in air-sea
rescue. I had seen a programme about it on television and for some
reason it had caught hold of my imagination. I devoured everything I
could about helicopters. I borrowed books from the school library. I cut
out articles in magazines. By the time I was thirteen, I knew the name of
almost every moving part of a helicopter. I knew how it used all the
different forces and controls, working in opposition to each other to fly.
The only thing I had never done was sit in one.
“Do you think you’ll ever leave?” Leo asked me one evening, the two
of us sprawled out in the long grass, sharing a cigarette. “Go and live in
a city with your own flat and a car?”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“You’re clever. You can go to Moscow. Learn how to become a pilot.”
I shook my head. Leo was my best friend. Whatever I might secretly
think, I would never talk about the two of us being apart. “I don’t think
my parents would let me. Anyway, why would I want to leave? This is
my home.”
“Estrov is a dump.”
“No, it’s not.” I looked at the river, the fast-flowing water chasing over
the rocks, the surrounding woodland, the muddy track that led through
the centre of the village. In the distance, I could see the steeple of St
Nicholas. The village had no priest. The church was closed; but its
shadow stretched out almost to our front door and I had always thought
of it as part of my childhood. Maybe Leo was right. There wasn’t very
much to the place, but even so, it was my home. “I’m happy here,” I said
and at that moment I believed it. “It’s not such a bad place.”
I remember saying those words. I can still smell the smoke coming
from a bonfire somewhere on the other side of the village. I can hear the
water rippling. I see Leo, twirling a piece of grass between his fingers.
Our bicycles are lying, one on top of the other. There are a few puffs of
cloud in the sky, floating lazily past. A fish suddenly breaks the surface
of the river and I see its scales glimmer silver in the sunlight. It is a
warm afternoon at the start of October. And in twenty-four hours
everything will have changed. Estrov will no longer exist.
When I got home, my mother was already making the dinner. Food
was a constant subject of conversation in our village because there was
so little of it and everyone grew their own. We were lucky. As well as a
vegetable patch, we had a dozen chickens, which were all good layers so
(unless the neighbours crept in and stole them) we always had plenty of
eggs. She was making a stew with potatoes, turnips and tinned tomatoes
that had turned up the week before in the shop and that had sold out
instantly. It was exactly the same meal as we’d had the night before. She
would serve it with slabs of black bread and, of course, small tumblers of
vodka. I had been drinking vodka since I was nine years old.
My mother was a slender woman with bright blue eyes and hair which
must have once been as blond as mine but which was already grey, even
though she was only in her thirties. She wore it tied back so that I could
see the curve of her neck. She was always pleased to see me and she
always took my side. There was that time, for example, when Leo and I
were almost arrested for letting off bombs outside the police station. We
had got up at first light and dug holes in the ground which we’d filled up
with drawing pins and the gunpowder stripped from about five hundred
matches. Then we’d sneaked behind the wall of the churchyard and
watched. It was two hours before the first police car drove over our
booby trap and set it off. There was a bang. The front tyre was shredded
and the car lost control and drove through a bush. The two of us nearly
died laughing, but I wasn’t so happy when I got home and found
Yelchin, the police chief, in my front room. He asked me where I’d been
and when I said I’d been running an errand for my mother, she backed
me up, even though she knew I was lying. Later on, she scolded me but I
know that she was secretly amused.
In our household, my mother and my grandmother did most of the
talking. My father was a very thoughtful man who looked exactly like
the scientist that he was, with greying hair, a serious sort of face and
glasses. He lived in Estrov but his heart was still in Moscow. He kept all
his old books around him and when letters came from the city, he would
disappear to read them and at dinner he would be miles away. Why did I
never question him more? I ask myself that now but I suppose nobody
ever does. When you are young, you accept your parents for what they
are and you believe the stories they tell you.
Conversation at dinner was often difficult because my parents didn’t
like to discuss their work at the factory and there was only so much I
could tell them about my day at school. As for my grandmother, she had
somehow got stuck in the past, twenty years ago, and much of what she
said didn’t connect with reality at all. But that night was different.
Apparently there had been an accident, a fire at the factory … nothing
serious. My father was worried and for once he spoke his mind.
“It’s these new investors,” he said. “All they think about is money.
They want to increase production and to hell with safety measures.
Today it was just the generator plant. But suppose it had been one of the
laboratories?”
“You should talk to them,” my mother said.
“They won’t listen to me. They’re pulling the strings from Moscow and
they’ve got no idea.” He threw back his vodka and swallowed it in one
gulp. “That’s the new Russia for you, Eva. We all get wiped out and as
long as they get their cheque, they don’t give a damn.”
This all struck me as insane. There couldn’t be any real danger, not
here in Estrov. How could the production of fertilizers and pesticides do
anyone any harm?
My mother seemed to agree. “You worry too much,” she said.
“We should never have gone along with this. We should never have
been part of it.” My father refilled his glass. He didn’t drink as much as a
lot of the people in the village but, like them, he used vodka to draw
down the shutters between him and the rest of the world. “The sooner
we get out of here, the better. We’ve been here long enough.”
“The swans are back,” my grandmother said. “They’re so beautiful at
this time of the year.”
There were no swans in the village. As far as I knew, there never had
been.
“Are we really going to leave?” I asked. “Can we go and live in
Moscow?”
My mother reached out and put her hand on mine. “Maybe one day,
Yasha. And you can go to university, just like your father. But you have
to work hard…”
The next day was a Sunday and I had no school. On the other hand,
the factory never closed and both my parents had drawn the weekend
shift, working until four and leaving me to clean the house and take my
grandmother her lunch. Leo looked in after breakfast but we both had a
lot of homework, so we agreed to meet down at the river at six and
perhaps kick a ball around with some other boys. Just before midday I
was lying on my bed, trying to plough my way through a chapter of
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