The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia (22 page)

In truth, my parents have nothing to worry about. My failing grades have nothing to do with physics, but everything to do with its teacher, Anatoli Petrovich. He is young and athletic, with bright hazel eyes, a wide smile that makes my heart race, and wavy blond hair, just like the late famous Russian poet Sergei Esenin. Anatoli Petrovich is also witty, and he uses a lot of big words, which makes him sound both learned and important.

In short, my physics teacher is completely different from my male classmates, who never say anything worthwhile and whose pimply faces look like miniature mine fields. All of Anatoli Petrovich’s female students—and possibly all the single female teachers—are in love with him, and when he conducts experiments, the quiet of the physics lab is charged with our high-voltage unspoken desire.

The only person who does not appreciate Anatoli Petrovich is our class clown Grisha, a narrow-shouldered, scrawny boy with crow-like dark eyes and large, mushroom-shaped ears. Most of my male classmates keep to themselves during physics class, but not Grisha. Instead of being quiet in the presence of a true deity, he constantly shouts stupid jokes and then looks around the class with the victorious expression of an opera tenor who has just hit high “C” and waits for applause. On top of that, Grisha often strikes me on the back with his briefcase, and when I turn around, he makes stupid faces or wiggles his ears—he is the only person I know who can do this—which I find neither funny nor amusing.

Anatoli Petrovich, on the other hand, does not notice me at all. Had I been pretty, I would have given him meaningful glances or sighed deeply when he looked at me, the way some of my classmates do. But I am not pretty: I am too short, too skinny, too flat-chested, and, worst of all, my nose is too big.

Actually, my nose used to be average. But, by the age of nine, it began growing much faster than the rest of my face—or my body for that matter. Even Mother was unnerved: “Don’t look down,” she would say. “It makes your nose appear longer.” When my nose reached its ultimate size, my lips and mouth began catching up, and my distraught mother added another cadence to her old song. “Purse your lips,” she would say, looking at me with such pity that I knew I had no future whatsoever, even if I were the only Eve in a garden inhabited by thousands of Adams.

The only way I can attract Anatoli Petrovich’s attention, I figure, is by failing in physics. This causes him to keep me after class together with our d
voeshniki
Vitka and Kolka. Anatoli Petrovich talks about physics, Vitka and Kolka stare out the window, and I stare at Anatoli Petrovich with the kind of adoration that my Western counterparts reserve for the Beatles, minus the screaming.

“Electric current is the flow of electrically charged particles. It’s measured in amperes …” I hear Anatoli Petrovich’s voice, and a flow of charged feelings sweeps along my body at a rate no ammeter can measure.

“Do you understand?”

“More than you think,” I feel like saying, drunk on the sound of his velvety voice and the bitter-sweet taste of my first love. I have no illusions about my situation. My feelings are unrequited. I am like the poor young clerk in Anatoli Kuprin’s famous love story “The Garnet Bracelet,” who fell in love with a beautiful married woman from a wealthy family and killed himself after a confrontation with her brother. Or, maybe, I am more like the dreamer Tatyana Larina from Alexander Pushkin’s masterpiece
Eugene Onegin
, enamored with the selfish and vain Onegin.

The setting sun is already burning on the horizon, but I am still in my chair, looking at the picture of Scheherazade prostrated at the Persian king’s feet. Did she love him as much as I love Anatoli Petrovich or did she just want to save her life? And if she did love him, did she experience the same sensations I do when I look at this picture or at my physics teacher?

I put down the
Arabian Nights
and take two steps to the bookcase in the corner. I raise my hand and pensively stroke the dark-colored spines with lettering that announces the names of famous Russian writers: Pushkin, Lermontov, Kuprin, Turgenev, Chekov, Dostoevsky. The volume of heart-ache and sadness that flows from these tomes would be enough to fill many
kvass
cisterns, and yet, none of them mentions anything about physical feelings. Is there something about love that these books do not reveal?

My fingers slide from one spine to another, as if the answer to my question is written in Braille, and I have to read it by touch. After several rows of novels and poetry, I reach a thick catalog of the Hermitage Museum, mindlessly pull it out, and open it at random.

There is a painting of a woman lying in bed. Her blankets are thrown off, her gaze is intense, and her ample naked body is turned toward an opening in the dark curtain at the foot of the bed, where a lustrous milky light is pouring into the dark room–Rembrandt’s Danae is waiting for her lover Zeus, who comes to her in the form of golden rain.

I have seen this picture before, and it has never impressed me—just an overweight woman in bed. And yet, this time, something in Danae’s pose, the atmosphere of waiting, and the darkly peering figure in the background strike me like a lightning bolt. Everything around me suddenly changes, even the air, which now smells fresh and intoxicating, as it does after a thunderstorm.

With my hands trembling, I flip through the pages. I skip landscapes, still life, portraits of numerous Madonnas and self-important aristocrats, and devour shamelessly beautiful Aphrodite and Eros, Cupid and Psyche tangled in a sensuous embrace, and the marble statues of nude satyrs. As if scales have fallen from my eyes, I suddenly see details that I have never noticed before—heaving chests and swollen nipples of women, men’s hands groping women’s breasts and resting between their legs, and males’ private parts depicted in all their anatomical glory.

My heart is pounding, and I lean against the bookcase to catch my breath. Surely, I observed baby boys before, but these still images suddenly seem more real than anything I have seen in life. They are disturbing and gross, and yet, I cannot take my eyes off them, and, to make matters worse, I cannot control my own body either—its rhythmical tensing is as frightening as it is pleasurable.

What’s happening to me? I am trying to catch my breath, but another image comes suddenly to my mind’s eye—that girl, Dasha, from my summer camp. Her bed was next to mine, and sometimes I heard her thrashing and stirring in bed and making muffled moaning noises, which I attributed to bad dreams. But then, one day, I saw Dasha leaving the office of our Chief Camp Leader. Dasha’s eyes and nose were red, and the Camp Leader looked at her with an expression like the one that must have been worn by members of NKVD court troikas when they sentenced prisoners to firing squads during Stalin’s purges.

The Chief Camp Leader’s office, a large room decorated with portraits of Lenin, Brezhnev, and a painting of happy collective farm workers, was adjacent to the camp library, where I was gulping down Leo Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
. The chapter I was reading described Natasha Rostova’s love triangle with the honorable Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and the dissolute Anatole Kuragin. I was so engrossed in the story that it took me some time to notice loud voices in the room next door.

I could not hear everything that was said–only separate words and phrases: something about Dasha’s dirty and antisocial behavior, the stain she put on our detachment and the camp, and her inevitable bad end. None of that made any sense to me, since as far as I knew, Dasha was a quiet and aloof girl. Yet very soon, Dasha’s mother arrived and took her back to Moscow. Is this what that was all about?

At night, after my little sister falls asleep and Mother turns on a bedside lamp and opens her book, I get out of my bed and tiptoe over the bare wooden floor to my parents’ half of the room.

“Mom, do you remember that girl from our summer camp, Dasha?”

“What about her?” Mother says, half of her face glowing in the golden light of the lamp and the other half hidden in deep shadow.

“Why did they expel her from camp?”

Mom puts her book down and turns away from the lamp—the illuminated side of her face sinks into the shadows, the way the sun sinks into a dark cloud. “I don’t know.”

“Mom, please, tell me!”

“It’s too late to talk about it now. Go to bed.”

“What did she do?”

“You’re too young to talk about such things.”

“But she was my age!”

“Listen, Sveta. I’m not your friend. I’m your
mother
. Some things cannot be discussed between children and parents.” And with this, my mother brings her face back to the light and to her book, “Go to bed.”

Who should I discuss these things with, Mom?—I want to shout. But I bite my lower lip and retreat to the even breathing of my sleeping sister and the disturbing questions that adults do not want to answer.

Next morning, I pack the Hermitage catalog into my briefcase and head to school. The first class is math, and our teacher Evgenia Sergeevna gives us a test. She writes math problems on the blackboard, and we diligently bend over our notebooks to solve them.

In twenty minutes or so, heads begin popping up like fishing floats, and relaxed whispering indicates that the exercise is winding down. I am done, too, and while the class waits for Evgenia Sergeevna to collect our papers, I carefully pull the Hermitage catalog out of my briefcase and open it under the desk at a bookmarked place—a full-frontal statue of a handsome, curly-haired young man, clothed with nothing but his seductive smile.

“What’s that?” My neighbor Zoia peers under the desk and, before I have the time to close the book, goes into a breathless “Ahh, …”

For a while, we both gawk at the naked man, careful not to look at each other.

“Did you solve the second problem?” Big-eared Grisha turns to us from his desk. Recognizing that our attention is elsewhere, he quickly changes his question. “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” Zoia whispers, quickly straightening up and adjusting her hair. I slam the catalog and, trying to distract Grisha with math, turn my notebook upside down.

“What’s going on?” Evgenia Sergeevna thunders, suddenly behind us.

“They’re reading something under the desk.” Grisha reports, winking and moving his ears like a spooked deer.

“Idiot,” I hiss.

“And she called me an ‘idiot,’” Grisha adds, smiling happily from ear to ear.

You
are
an idiot!—I feel like saying, but I keep quiet and make an attempt to shove the Hermitage catalog back into my briefcase inconspicuously.

“Give me that,” Evgenia Sergeevna orders. There is enough steel in her voice to forge a sword.

Evgenia Sergeevna is a seasoned teacher with twenty years of experience, and she knows how to handle misbehaving students. She grabs the catalog from my shaking hand and her eyes shift to the title.

“The Hermitage Museum,” she reads aloud and looks at me—her pale blue eyes piercing through me from behind her thick-rimmed glasses. Then Evgenia Sergeevna notices my bookmark and opens the book to it.

“What is this?” she exhales, holding the book at arm’s length as if it is some slimy creature she stumbled across in the woods. “Get up and answer me!”

The poor clerk in “The Garnet Bracelet” could not have been more mortified by the confrontation with the brother of his love interest than I am now by the confrontation with my math teacher. He had to kill himself to get out of his predicament, and I momentarily consider doing the same to get out of mine.

“I’m going to pass this on to your head teacher,” Evgenia Sergeenva says, and her distorted face lets me know that committing suicide may not be the worst thing that can happen to me.

When I come home, my mother is in the kitchen, grinding meat. For a minute, I watch red fleshy worms come out of her
myasorubka
(cast-iron meat grinder) and coil into a large aluminum bowl.

“
Kotleti
(small hamburger patties made of meat, onions, and bread) will be ready in half-an-hour.” Mom says without looking at me.

“My head teacher wants to talk to you,” I respond.

“Why? What did you do?” Mom looks up.

“Nothing. I just took the Hermitage Museum catalog to school, and my math teacher found some naked pictures there.”

“Naked pictures? Of whom?”

“Nymphs, satyrs, and other men, too ...” I suddenly feel tired and my voice trails off.

“Wait, wait, I don’t understand. Why in the world did you take the catalog to school?!”

“You didn’t want to talk to me about … you know … Dasha and … the feelings. So, I thought I’d show the catalog to somebody in school, and we’d talk.”

My mother’s hand slips from the handle of her meat-grinder and hits the bowl. The bowl tilts to one side and, after hesitating a moment, slides off the kitchen counter and lands on the floor with a loud “bam!” Its meaty contents fly out every which way and, in a moment, our kitchen is transformed into a bloody battlefield, where I feverishly perform the duties of a medic, while my speechless Mother watches me like a general who has just lost the battle of her life.

Mother is still frozen, when the front door opens and my father comes in with a newspaper in hand. “What’s going on?”