10. My father

1

As I have already written, for several years my father and I walked together every morning: I was going to school, he was going to work. The walk to school took exactly fifteen minutes, and then my father walked for another fifteen minutes to his workplace. He could have taken the official car, and taken me along with him, but for reasons unknown to me, he walked with me instead. At the time, I never asked myself why. Perhaps he simply enjoyed talking with me.

Something similar happened with my own son: whenever we were alone together, we talked all the time. In addition, once a week we would go to the bathhouse to wash, on foot again. Those excursions took considerably longer, and included standing in a queue, which was unavoidable and sometimes lasted an hour.

When we went to what was then the Central Bathhouse, on the site of which the famous bath complex now stands, my father would always say that his father had been among those who built it in the 1930s.

Of course, we did not spend all that time in silence. What did I talk about? About what I was reading at the time. For instance, I would retell The War of the Worlds. When I got to the part where the Cardigan Regiment charged a Martian tripod with bayonets and was wiped out, I had forgotten the regiment's exact name and said I wasn't sure I had got it right. To my surprise, my father confirmed that yes, I had named it correctly. My respect for him immediately increased, although a doubt began to stir inside me: where on earth did he know that from?

Another time, as I recall, I was telling him about an article in Young Technician magazine on whether it was possible to create an automatic language translator. The magazine's answer was skeptical: probably not, really; but even if it were possible, it would only happen in the very distant future. This was in the early 1960s. At the same time, it was taken for granted that by the end of the twentieth century we would visit Mars and Venus, or perhaps even fly to the stars.

My father, in turn, told me about events in his own life, about his childhood and, naturally, his family. Whenever he spoke of his father, he did so in a tender voice, recalling only his good qualities. In his stories, his childhood in the Cossack village, which ended in 1930, appeared as a kind of golden age that had passed and would never return. My grandmother's and Aunt Vera's stories echoed his.

How old was I then? The only thing I know for certain is that these conversations took place when I was about fourteen, and that they had mostly come to an end by the time I was fifteen. I remember this clearly because, by then, the evolution of my views had brought me to a state of perfect orthodoxy. In other words, I was simply waiting to turn fourteen so that I could join the Komsomol (Yung Communists League), become an exemplary Komsomol member, and carry forward the banner of communist ideas, which was all anyone talked about in the early sixties.

And so I began to notice that, in my father's stories, his behavior in certain situations did not always correspond to the doctrine he was, by default, obliged to profess as a communist. That he was an exemplary communist seemed obvious to me. But then, either he failed to notice the discrepancy because he was unembarrassed by it, or… Terrible to contemplate, he did not take the doctrine seriously.

So what was he, then? A hypocrite—my own father?

I was tormented by this thought, but did not dare reveal my doubts.

And then, around the time I turned fifteen, there was a turning point in my thinking. My father, Uncle Kolya, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Nadyushka, and I went to the Black Sea, to a holiday resort in Dzhubga. Everyone except me has been dead for a long time.

Uncle Kolya and Aunt Inna were chemists. Uncle Kolya may already have earned his doctorate. He was in charge of a laboratory. If you were to type Zavorokhin surname into Google today, his book would come up immediately—a book that people have continued to cite and refer to for more than fifty years.

They had already traveled abroad to all the places one could visit in those days, and had attended international conferences. Most likely, they also read foreign scientific journals, inaccessible and of no interest to ordinary people.

Otherwise, I cannot explain how it was from them that I first heard about the origins and evolution of humankind—subjects that would not enter our public discourse for another forty years as a news.

And not only about that. I argued with them furiously. Furiously not in the sense that we had any substantive discussions; we could hardly have had those. The fury was emotional, on my part, born of my inability to find arguments against their rational reasoning, my irritation at their gentle irony, and, generally, at the freedom with which they conducted their conversations.

At that time I was—and could hardly have been anything else—an ignorant yet self-confident teenager, a complete dogmatist. I had taken all my views on history and society from Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and believed that this book had settled every question once and for all.

How could that not be obvious?

But eventually I realized that their position was simply a scientific approach to any problem. What I heard from them—nothing particularly extraordinary—eventually turned my world upside down.

I suddenly became aware of the wretchedness and primitiveness of my education, my consciousness, and the very environment in which I lived. And yet I had considered myself one of its finest products.

The lies emanating from the state, enveloping everything, became obvious as soon as one looked closely and began to reason objectively. All my orthodox convictions collapsed during that month. Among the possible responses to these new challenges, I even considered suicide, as a kind of revenge for the collapse of my illusions.

But instead, after a couple of months of inner struggle, I decided to postpone suicide and first become a nihilist—or, rather, to live by the commandment: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

In my case, God was Marxism-Leninism, if one can call it that—the pseudo-religion in which all of us had grown up from the cradle. In my opinion, there was very little actual Marxism in it.

“Everything is permitted” also meant all the vices indulged in by the prodigal son. Shame, conscience, morality—all mere prejudices.

Today, all this seems amusing, like a storm in a teacup. But for a young man who has grown up in a prison cell, sincerely convinced that the cell is the entire universe in which he will spend his life, the discovery that outside it there exists an infinite, diverse world, in perpetual motion and possessing freedom—well, that discovery is a drama.

And the drama lies also in the fact that you have no way into that world. You are destined to go on living in the same cell.

And so I withdrew.

Distrust of my parents arose naturally, along with a rejection of all their values, simply because those values came from them. Sometimes my parents even seemed physically unpleasant to me. I blamed them for all my failures. Since I had no successes to speak of at the time, they became my perpetual debtors by default.

They were part of that deceitful world in which I groped blindly in every direction, like a blind kitten, while remaining firmly convinced that it was not my world and that I did not want to live in it like everyone else.

Thus, in this respect, the revelation that came after my conversations with my uncle and aunt—the rejection of the old world—had already been prepared within me.

I felt that a barrier had arisen between us, or perhaps I had erected it myself. We became different people, and that remained so forever, even though I continued to live with my parents for a very long time, shamelessly taking advantage of their boundless love for me.

My sister, on the other hand, remained what she had always been: part of their world, part of their everyday life.

Now, feeling my guilt and a belated surge of love, I wonder: if I could return to that time as the person I am today, how would our relationship have changed?

I don't know.

After that, my walks with my father came to an end. Perhaps they simply petered out on their own; perhaps I began avoiding them; or perhaps my father, seeing how I had changed, how it showed in my ironic remarks, stopped talking with me himself.

So it was that my main conversations with my father took place between the ages of twelve and fourteen or fifteen, when I still loved him with a child's love.

I remember how, quite suddenly, his stories changed from our fragmentary conversations about this and that into a continuous narrative. Perhaps he even let me understand that the time had come for him to tell me everything about his life.

An initiation of sorts.

In any case, I sensed the moment when things began in earnest.

2

My father's memory was extraordinary, unlike mine, especially now. He would name hundreds of people he mentioned, giving both their first names and patronymics. He spoke of prices and salaries before and during the war, named every settlement he had ever visited, described the landscapes, the layout of towns, and the places where things had happened, in such a way that I could see them before me and could have drawn a picture of the scene.

For example, the entrance hall of the house where he lived while attending the SHKM—the School for Peasant Youth. Dark, with low, broad, thick doors, and barrels standing against the wall.

I already knew about his early childhood, his horse Ryzhka, and the plowed fields - "pashnya". These were inexhaustible subjects of conversation for the whole family. What I did not know was that the Cossack village had once been called Trotsky Village; that there had apparently been a commune there; and that, at some point, roses had been planted in all the fields to produce rose oil, only for the enterprise to be abandoned soon afterward.

Aunt Nyura (Anna) had worked in those fields all summer and used her earnings to buy a pair of shoes. She put them under her head at night, and in the morning discovered that they had been stolen.

Everything was new then; everything mattered; everything was remembered.

Backpacking suddenly came into fashion, but my father said that there had been tourists even back in the 1920s. A couple named Chernyshev, for instance, were making a long trek on foot across the entire country. On that occasion, they gave a lecture at the club, which had been set up in a church that had been stripped of its dome and cross. (The club was still standing and operating when I knew it; today it is once again a church.)

Then they went on their way, leaving an inscription on a bridge: “The Chernyshev Tourists.”

Another time, the hero of a story was a Red Army soldier, a rare sight in those parts at the time. The army was small then, and there was no universal conscription. The soldier urged the young people to listen to their commanders and elders; otherwise, they might all face something my father could not bring himself to tell me.

On another occasion, he and his classmates were taken into the mountains to dig up licorice root for pharmacies. They were given some bread and left alone to spend the night in a field. I suppose no one was surprised by this in those days: peasant children would manage somehow.

In the evening they lit a fire and sat around it, waiting for the potatoes to bake. My father quietly slipped away and began growling like a bear from the darkness, frightening the girls. Once their fright had passed, they tried to beat him up.

My father finished primary school, and his father, who was himself illiterate, decided that the boy must continue his education. He wanted him to become a doctor.

To pay for his schooling, he cut down the trees growing around the perimeter of his fields and sold them for railroad ties for the Turkestan-Siberian Railway.

The nearest seven-year school was thirty versts (twenty miles) away, in Uzun-Agach. There stood a monument commemorating the battle between Russian troops under Kolpakovsky and the Kokand forces.

I saw it after it had already been vandalized. There were holes where the bronze plaques had been torn off, a crooked, rusted eagle at the top of the obelisk, displaced and leaning granite pedestals, and slabs of the steps that had shifted apart, their joints overgrown with grass.

And yet it still retained its grandeur.

Gray granite steps spread across the hillside, climbing toward the tall obelisk. From there, the entire surrounding countryside could be seen.

Standing there, my father told me how the Komsomol members had marched here in a column, as if going to a Saturday work detail, to knock down the eagles and crowns. They had failed to bring down the eagle at the top.

Had he been among them, or had he walked alongside the column with the other boys?

I thought I heard something in his voice—not quite regret, perhaps, or perhaps disapproval.

Kolpakovsky, Kaufman, Chernyaev. He knew suspiciously much about those generals, conquerors of Turkestan.

At the time, no one spoke at all about the history of Russia's acquisition of this region. There was no explicit prohibition, but it was understood. So my father kept quiet.

I was thirteen then. My sister and my second cousin Venka were standing nearby.

My father named his teachers and spoke of them with respect, unlike us. Or perhaps teachers really were different in those days.

He knew Nekrasov's “Meditations at the Front Entrance” and “The Railway” by heart, and enjoyed reading and quoting them until he noticed that we were no longer interested.

As an example of blurting something out without thinking, he would recount an incident from those years. The teacher asked the class: “What are the highest mountains?” My father heard: “What are the saltiest lakes?” He raised his hand with all his might, and when he was called on, he blurted out:

-Elton and Baskunchak!

Everyone burst out laughing.

A girl in his class once sent him a poem containing the line: “You are the object of my love.”

He told her, rather didactically, that he could not possibly be an object, because an object was an inanimate thing.

By then I already knew that in Russian classical literature—which was practically the only literature that existed, or rather, was available at the time—the expression “object of love,” and even the word “object” by itself, was quite commonly used in conversations between young women.

But I did not tell my father that.

He also mentioned the girl's name. Perhaps she was still alive at the time, as were many of his childhood friends. After all, they were only about fifty years old then.

My father lived in a private house, renting a room together with other students who came from elsewhere. Once, his mother—my grandmother—came to visit him. She was walking barefoot on a pilgrimage, passing through Uzun-Agach. But where was she going? To which holy places? What was she praying to God for? What vow had she made?

I have forgotten now, or perhaps it had already slipped my mind even then.

Another time, some boys came running to him:

-Your uncle is at the market!

He went to the market and saw Uncle Dmitry selling apples, the Aport variety. His uncle used a crooked knife to cut out rotten spots wherever he found them. After talking with his nephew, he treated him to the trimmed apples.

My father returned home, and the boys asked him:

-Well, what did he give you?

He showed them the apples.

There was a note of hurt in his voice, and I did not understand why. What had he expected to get from his uncle?

Now I think that the boy, separated from his family, had been hoping for a little gift from his parents.

Collectivization - forcibly bringing peasants together into a collective by taking away their private property and land, was underway.

His father, my grandfather, joined the collective farm among the first. Before that, the brothers had divided up, sensing how vulnerable their prosperous household was to the brazen authorities.

My father himself also took part in collectivization.

He had a certificate of commendation, which has survived to this day. It was written in ink on a sheet torn from a lined notebook and authenticated with a seal. It stated that a certain Pioneer (Kid's Communists Unit) had taken an active part in carrying out collectivization.

My father explained that this “active participation” consisted of the Pioneer activists standing guard in the homes of "kulaks" (Peasants who didn’t want to join the collective farm were sometimes wealthy or considered unfit to join. They were often sent to Siberia, sometimes to die of starvation. before their deportation), making sure they did not hide any belongings or hand anything over to anyone.

My father was proud of this certificate, and it seems to have helped him in certain situations.

At the same time, he said—and it was clear that he had been thinking about it all along—that collectivization had nevertheless been necessary, and that without it we would not have won the war.

A little later, he said that its cruelty had nonetheless been excessive. The dissenters should have been taxed, not ruined, imprisoned, and deported.

Time passed, and he finished school.

Uncle Dmitry was nevertheless declared a "kulak". He himself was exiled to Siberia, while his family was sent to a settlement on the outskirts.

My grandfather called my father and instructed him—he was a Pioneer and still a teenager—to harness the horse, go secretly to the settlement, and bring the exiled family into the city, to the address he had been given.

My father did everything he was told.

He described every bend in the route to me in detail. I could see it all because the landscape of those places had not changed very much yet: yellowish roads winding between hills, their ruts filled with dust; no power lines; rivers running wild in their pristine state, through rocky beds a hundred yards wide.

He hides in a little grove, watching the outskirts of the village, waiting for the appointed hour.

The family consisted of Alexandra Mikhailovna, her three daughters, and a little boy—the very same Uncle Kolya.

My father brought them all into the city, as instructed.

One detail: Alexandra Mikhailovna checked the time using a gold pocket watch, which she took out of… I don't know how to put it… well, from inside her clothes, against her chest.

I sensed a slight hurt in his story. Perhaps because his deed had not been properly appreciated, or perhaps…

On other occasions, too, he hinted that this branch of the family behaved somewhat… arrogantly, perhaps.

A few years later, after returning from a journey, he stopped at their house for the night. They made him sleep on the porch, while they locked themselves inside for the night.

-What's so strange about that? - I asked.

-It means they locked themselves in against me. They didn't trust me, that's what.

That was the first time I felt a dissonance.

How could you, especially as a Pioneer, stand guard to make sure that the families of "kulaks"—your neighbors, your distant relatives—did not hide or hand over any of their own possessions to relatives, God forbid? And you were praised for it, with a certificate you are still proud of.

Yet at the same time, you helped another kulak family, exiled just like the others, escape from the law.

You must have understood that what you were doing was wrong. Why else would you have hidden in the grove? The expression “double standards” was unknown to me then, but that was what I thought. I did not say it aloud.

My respect and love for my father were so great that I swallowed it as a fact of life, especially since it was something he had confided in me personally.

Meanwhile, a rumor arose that those who had joined the collective farm might now be declared "kulaks" as well and deported.

My grandfather was supposedly already on the lists.

The family fled this threat, leaving everything behind. Formally, they obtained a travel permit issued by relatives in the collective farm administration, and their departure was therefore legal. The issuing of such certificates, which legalized the status of those fleeing, was soon discontinued.

My father received another certificate, one he valued highly: proof that he came from a family of a middle peasant. It played an important role whenever the question of his promotion came up.

At some point, either then or earlier, immediately after finishing school, my father tried to enter a university. A teachers' college, an agricultural institute, a medical school.

He was rejected everywhere because of his age.

In the city, my fifteen-year-old father found work as a courier at the Government House, which had just been designed and built by the famous architect Ginzburg.

He told me this as we walked past the building, which had not yet been disfigured by later renovations.

With his first paycheck, he bought black broadcloth. His sister, my Aunt Nyura, made him his first pair of trousers. The fly fastened with buttons on the outside, without a flap. The cloth scratched and burned; it was a hot summer. But he was happy. Until then, they had all worn homespun, homemade clothing, and no one had ever explained to them what material trousers were made from.

His job was simple. He registered documents and delivered them to the republic's chief official, probably the chairman of the Government. My father referred to him by his surname.

He was an aging, melancholic Kazakh who spent his time doing nothing and regularly spat into a polished copper spittoon standing beside him.

Soon afterward, my father was laid off.

The result of collectivization was famine.

My father went to the city of Namangan in Fergana valley. How he got there, and by what means, I no longer remember.

His maternal aunt lived there with her husband and two children, Sonya and Victor. Aunt Sonya's son, my second cousin, incidentally lives here in Pittsburgh.

My father got a job at a factory as a timekeeper.

The famine had not reached Namangan yet, and he was astonished by how cheap everything was. Flatbreads cost almost nothing. In the entrance hall of his relatives' house stood sacks of grain. The man of the house worked as some kind of supply manager.

My father carelessly wrote to his parents about how good life was in Namangan and invited them to come there. He regretted it for the rest of his life.

He told me about this more than once.

But why should he have regretted it? Famine was raging everywhere, and if his parents had not listened to him, who knows how things might have turned out for them back home?

There was apparently another factor here, one I did not know about at the time. If I had asked, my father might have told me.

Perhaps children were dying during those wanderings. Perhaps my mother—my grandmother—was pregnant. She gave birth to fourteen children in all, of whom only five survived.

Had they stayed at home, perhaps some of their relatives might have been able to help.

Soon the famine struck Namangan as well.

Aunt Sonya told me how every morning the bodies were collected from the streets and hauled away somewhere in full carts. Ration cards were introduced.

The fortunate ones who had them were those employed by state enterprises and institutions. They could live reasonably well, and at least they were not threatened by death from hunger. Everyone else was condemned to starve.

My father was laid off. He says his job had to be given to someone else.

What was his family to do?

Well, my father was a boy; he might still have been able to slip through the cracks, so to speak. But besides my grandfather and grandmother, there were Petya, Sonya, and, as I suppose, another child who later died.

Apparently, the peasant code of honor did not allow them to live off a sister, and so the family set out on its wanderings.

But where to?

From my grandmother's stories, I remember only Barnaul. The Cossacks of "Semirechye" (Seven Rivers Valley) had come from the Altai, so there might well have been relatives left there.

My father, meanwhile, wandered through the Fergana Valley and Kyrgyzstan.

Of all the place names, I remember only Karavan and Jalal-Abad, though there were other villages as well.

Usually, he would go to a Komsomol office, show them that same certificate of his service during collectivization, and ask them to give him an assignment.

The assignments varied, and somehow they kept him fed.

Once he was assigned to transport money. The money was wrapped in cloth and tied around his body like a belt.

I don't remember whether he had a rifle for the occasion.

They rode on horseback along the shore of Issyk-Kul lake, and in the darkness he could hear wild boars eating nuts in a walnut grove that was later declared a relic forest.

Another time, he arrived in a village and got to know the saleperson of a small rural shop. The man was going to a wedding in a neighboring village and asked my father to take his place behind the counter while he was away. My father sat there for several days, measuring out flour and vegetable oil—the main commodities—for customers. The shopkeeper returned, took over the money and the remaining goods, and my father went on his way.

Later, when I was there, my father would marvel at how simple and trusting people had been in those days. Famine all around, and he was sixteen years old.

He never seemed to have trouble finding a place to sleep. Usually, he spent the night in a "chaykhana" (tea house) for a negligible fee.

Another time, he was ordered to escort "Basmachi" prisoners (anti-Communists rebels), as they were then called.

There were more than a hundred of them, tied up in carts, sitting back to back. Jackals followed the convoy at a distance.

My father had a rifle. He asked permission, then fired from the kneeling position at one of the jackals, but missed. He picked up the cartridge case and went on.

-Why did you pick up the cartridge case? - I asked.

-That was absolutely necessary. It was the same in the army before the war. However many rounds you fired, that many cartridge cases you had to turn in. It was all right with the Mosin rifle. But the semi-automatic SVT scattered its cases everywhere. Just try collecting them afterward, especially from under the snow.

But I have written about that elsewhere.

The prisoners were untied in front of the fortress gates. They had been holding themselves until they reached the clay walls.

Each man took a little lump of clay and only then relieved himself, because afterward one had to dry the organ of excretion with that same lump of clay.

(In waterless lands, this takes the place of the prescribed ablution.)

We did not discuss what might have happened to the supposed "Basmachi" afterward, and most likely did happen. I never asked myself such questions either, because no one ever talked about it.

Those things were known to the people who were supposed to know. The world was simple then. It is unlikely that they went any farther than that fortress.

At some point along the way, he contracted malaria. Many people suffered from it then, my grandmother among them. He was advised to try a couple of remedies. Both were based on vodka, but one called for drops, the other for a glassful. Turpentine was added to the vodka in one of them; I don't remember the other. He decided to combine the two remedies, bought a bottle of vodka, and took both as prescribed.

The result was predictable: unaccustomed to it, he nearly died.

-Were you ill after that? - I asked.

-I don't think so, - my father replied.

So one of the remedies must have worked after all, I thought.

Once, having read that homeless children used to travel on trains in coal bunkers, I asked my father about those bunkers.

-I used to travel in them myself, - he said.

Of course, it was during that whole episode of his wanderings. But at which point along the way?

In Karavan hamlet, he seems to have settled down for a while.

There is a group photograph, apparently of the local activists, and he is standing close to the center.

He is wearing a brand-new shirt modeled on a military tunic, and has a stern expression. He is still sixteen, although it is already 1932. (His birthday is at the end of November.)

In the front row stands one of the Russians—there are also Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, a young Uzbek woman, a Caucasian man, and two Russian girls. Looking at the photograph, it is impossible to escape the thought that many of these people have only another five years of freedom left to them, and that most of those who survive that period will die in the war.

Whether it was there or somewhere else, his journey through Central Asia was drawing to a close.

Private Uzbek stonemasons were brought together into what was either a cooperative or a collective farm, and given a production quota. My father was appointed something like an inspector or auditor—in any case, he was put in charge of them.

The Uzbeks were carving millstones.

My father noticed that during working hours they spent many days working on one and the same millstone, while the unfinished millstones lying off to the side disappeared one after another.

He had spoken Kazakh since childhood, so he understood Uzbek, and indeed all the Turkic languages. He concealed this knowledge from the Uzbeks and began listening to what they said among themselves and to the people who came to them—who turned out to be customers placing orders. It emerged that most of the orders were being handled off the books.

After learning enough, he let them know that he knew everything and demanded that they hand over all the money received for the recent orders so that he could deposit it in the official account.

The Uzbeks handed over all the illicit money, and he set off to deliver it to the district office.

My father gave me the exact amount, but I have not retained it in my memory. As I recall, there were two of something: either two millstones or two thousand. It was a substantial sum for those days.

The office was closed for lunch.

The whistle of an approaching locomotive sounded.

-Suddenly I thought that no one knew about this money, and the Uzbeks weren't going to complain, - my father said.

In a sudden impulse, he climbed aboard the departing train.

He bought a ticket at the next station, deciding to go to Moscow.

He did not tell me this, but a decree had just been issued concerning the theft of state or collective-farm property. Under that decree, those unfortunate stonemasons could have faced a substantial prison term, or even execution, had an overzealous investigator taken up their case.

And that is exactly what would have happened if my father had done what his duty required of him. So my father committed one of the less reprehensible acts he could have committed.

But that is my comment today, not what I thought then.

On the train, he met a man who, as I understood it, was middle-aged. They became close.

At some station they went to a restaurant. (I now suppose that the new acquaintance suggested it, because my father, a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been in a restaurant before, would hardly have thought of it himself.)

While they were sitting there, their train departed.

They changed their tickets for the next train to Moscow. There were places available only in the international carriage.

-What is that? I asked.

-Today it is called SV (first class), - he said.

The journey passed in pleasant conversation and trips to the dining car.

The man was traveling through Moscow on his way home to Kyiv, and he invited my father to visit him, promising to find him a job in Kyiv. He gave him his Kyiv address.

In Moscow, the acquaintance suddenly announced that he had urgent business to attend to there and arranged to meet my father at the Central Telegraph Office after some time.

He did not show up at the appointed time. My father waited for him in vain for several hours.

One of my father's aunts, his mother's sister, had moved to Moscow, leaving her family behind. My father found her through the information bureau and stayed with her. There is a photograph of the two of them dated 1933. His aunt is wearing felt boots with galoshes, so it must have been sometime near spring. My father is wearing boots.

He liked Moscow very much and wanted to stay there. To do so, he needed to find a job, and the Moscow Metro was under construction at the time. He went to Metrostroy, the organization building the metro.

It seems funny to say now, but at the time this motivation offended me, a future Komsomol member, more than the discovery that my father had appropriated someone else's money. How could that be? A Komsomol member was supposed to go to the front line of the struggle out of duty and from the heart, not in search of personal gain.

How, then, was he any different from a petty-bourgeois opportunist?

It never even occurred to me, in my naivety, that if circumstances had turned against him, my father might by then have been on the same prison transport as the stonemasons.

At Metrostroy, they told him that passports had already been introduced, and without a passport they could not hire him. He should return to his place of residence, obtain a passport, and then come back.

My father went to Kyiv, to the address given to him by his new acquaintance.

No such address existed at all.

-He deceived me, - my father said.

-But why? - I asked.

-He used me, - my father said, waving his hand.

And I guessed who had been paying for everyone in the restaurant. Perhaps the acquaintance had even borrowed money, promising to repay it in Kyiv.

My father went home.

The family was living in an earth hut near Karagalinka village.

There was a whole little settlement of such huts, built by people who had fled the countryside.

My father later showed me the place. By then there were fields there, with no trace of the former settlement. The three of us were together that day, with Uncle Kolya. Uncle Kolya remembered how, in that earth hut, my grandmother had treated him to zucchini. He recalled those zucchini more than once afterward. He must have been about ten at the time.

Everyone was desperately poor.

My father was sitting with his own father outside the hut. The roof leaked whenever it rained, and his father said to him:

-If only I had thirty rubles…

With that money, he could have made the roof properly.

My father immediately felt ashamed that he had spent so much money traveling and had not thought of his parents.

He enrolled in bookkeeping and accounting courses.

Somehow, the family moved into a house on Klevernaya Street, near the zoo.

My father said they rented a basement consisting of a single room for everyone, with an earthen floor and no furniture. All their clothes fitted into a couple of suitcases kept under the beds.

In the evenings, music from the dance floor drifted through the windows. Aunt Vera would throw a shawl over her shoulders and go dancing, despite my grandmother's reproaches.

My father showed me that little house on Klevernaya Street.

He brought the table from that house to our place on Dachnaya. It was a simple office table.  I cut its imitation-leather covering with a razor blade, and I still remember the cut. The table stood on our veranda, where we ate our meals. When it was replaced by a good oak table, it was moved out into the yard, under the open sky, but my father could never quite bring himself to part with it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather worked on construction sites in the city.

For a time, he and his son-in-law, Aunt Nyura's husband, sawed logs into boards with a long two-man saw.

Aunt Vera gave birth to Gena. Gena became my grandfather's favorite.

My father finished his courses and began working at the People's Commissariat of Trade. He very quickly became a department head.

He told me in detail about every step in his career, his own salary and those of his colleagues, and prices at the market.

Unfortunately, I do not remember the figures, but the difference between the salaries of the lowest and highest positions was considerable.

He told me never to write in a book of complaints and never to give my address there. To explain why, he told me how he had once gone to a restaurant during his lunch break and ordered, among other things, some vodka with his meal.

When he discovered that he had been overcharged, he demanded the complaints book. In his complaint, he described what he had ordered, its actual price, and the amount the waiter had charged him. He signed it, giving his position.

Some time later, a satirical piece appeared in the local newspaper under the title “Double-Entry Italian Bookkeeping,” denouncing the shortcomings of the public catering system. As evidence, it included the full text of his complaint: “Here, for example, citizen So-and-so, who ordered such-and-such (including two hundred grams of vodka with his meal), was overcharged…” and so on.

The next day, my father was met with malicious little smiles and feigned sympathy from his colleagues, who hinted that all this had happened during working hours.

There was a system under which an employee received a ten-percent supplement to his salary for knowing Kazakh. (Was it only for Russians, or did Kazakhs receive it too?)

My father said:

-Well, I thought, I can speak it fluently.

So he went to language courses, passed the examination, and began receiving the supplement.

During the war, the supplement was abolished, presumably to save money, and it was never reinstated.

He told me about his acquaintances and colleagues.

One of them wrote vulgar, uninteresting poems about the late emperor and empress. For another, people were constantly collecting money to help his family, because he earned the least of them all, something like thirty rubles a month.

My father earned more than two hundred.

My grandfather, Pyotr Petrovich, suffered from a heart defect, just as I do. For this reason, he was exempted from Cossack military service. However, he was called up in 1916, during the uprising led by Amangeldy.

He worked hard all his life. One day in 1940, he asked his wife for money to buy a drink. My grandmother refused him, something she regretted for the rest of her life.

He lay down on his bed and died quietly in his sleep. Everyone understood that it was his heart.

My father took care of all the formalities. They placed the coffin on a cart, and my father took him to the cemetery. An oak cross was placed on the grave.

During the war, the cross was stolen for firewood, which later led to disagreements about the exact location of the grave—disagreements I remember. Someone was always uncertain whether this was really the grave we had been tending.

When Gena died and was buried nearby, my grandfather's coffin was opened. My father recognized him, and it became clear that we had been tending the right grave.

In 1939, universal military service and conscription were introduced. My father was exempted because of his job.

He began working toward joining the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). I have described this elsewhere.

In 1940, he was given another deferment, but in 1941 he was finally drafted into the army. I believe he was called up shortly before the war.

He received his initial training in the Far East, on the Zeya River. The training was harsh, but he liked the army. More than once he told me how, exhausted after exercises, they would march back to the barracks and the sergeant would command:

-Start singing!

If no one responded, or if the singing began halfheartedly, the next command would be:

-About-face!

They would march back and perform additional exercises.

Another time, as punishment for something similar, they were ordered to ford a river. It was late autumn, the water was icy, and there was nowhere to dry themselves afterward. My father said that the skills he acquired then proved extremely useful at the front.

He reached the front near Moscow, when the Soviet counteroffensive was already underway. I remember nothing about that period.

Some time later, because he had completed seven years of schooling, he was sent to an infantry and machine-gun school. After graduating, he was appointed commander of a machine-gun company and sent to the front near City of Staraya Russa.

He told me more than once about the company's authorized strength: how many heavy machine guns, how many light machine guns, how many men.

How much does the mount weigh? How much does the shield weigh? How many men are there in a Maxim machine-gun crew?

-Five.

-Why so many?

-Now look, and so on, one carries a gun body…

The company had either ninety-three or ninety-seven men.

Their train was bombed before it reached the unloading station.

My father described the bombing, but in my memory it merged with other bombings. All that remains is a single picture: black smoke, snow, trees shredded by shrapnel, and human entrails hanging from the branches. The Junkers dive-bombers swooped down on their targets with their sirens blaring.

Most of the company was killed. My father never again commanded a unit at full authorized strength. It was always smaller. A Maxim machine-gun crew might have two or three men, for example; sometimes there was only one.

The remnants of the company were sent to Yaroslavl for reorganization. This was the division in which my father fought for the entire period allotted to him by the war.

At one point, the battalion was so badly mauled that he was left as its only officer. On paper, he was listed as acting battalion commander. Later, a dozen Red Army soldiers were placed under his command, and this was called a blocking detachment. When I learned about penal companies, I asked him whether he had encountered them at the front.

-Yes, - he said calmly, - I commanded one.

In that blocking detachment, weapons were not used against their own men.

In fact, that would have been impossible. According to him, they would simply have been overwhelmed.

Soldiers emerging from encirclement passed through the detachment, whose purpose was to organize them.

Its principal weapon was persuasion.

He was assigned a sector of the front and given an order allowing him to form penal units out of soldiers who had broken out of encirclement and were to hold that sector.

To do this, he had to establish a  "troika"—a three-man commission that would decide on the spot what was to become of the men emerging from the encirclement. The "troika" did not sentence them to death, as one might have assumed from the name. It formalized their status as soldiers. My father wisely chose not to include himself in the "troika".

The defensive sector would have been large even for a regiment, but there were far fewer men. The distance from one rifle pit to the next was considerable.

The soldiers who came under his command belonged to every branch of the armed forces, not just the infantry: cavalrymen, tank crews, everyone.

Once, he went several nights without sleep, preparing recommendations to remove the penal status from men who had distinguished themselves or been wounded.

-Why couldn't you put it off until morning and get some sleep?

-In war, you can't put anything off. You might not live to see tomorrow, and the man would remain a penal soldier.

I found confirmation of his words in the front-line diary of Daniil Fibikh, a war correspondent who was working in the same area at the same time—Staraya Russa, Northwestern Front, March 1942.

The defense held, he wrote:

“…Not infantry—there was hardly any infantry left. I was told of a case in which ninety men were holding a defensive line two or three kilometers long.”

So such cases were not uncommon.

My father said that he did not drink during the war. He believed that a man who had been drinking was more likely to be killed. Still, he told me that one officer had somehow obtained a small bowl and persuaded him to drink vodka from it together.

-I know you people over there in Asia drink from bowls like these, - the officer said.

At that point, my father was summoned, I suppose, to the regimental commander. The commander took one look at his red face and said something unpleasant to him. After that, my father never drank again.

He was wounded twice and shell-shocked once, but he never left the front line.

There was always hunger, but he said that 1943 was particularly bad. For a time, in the spring, when the roads became impassable, food was dropped from airplanes. Often it fell into no-man's-land or into German hands.

Daniil Fibikh described the same thing, although in his case it was 1942:

“Spring, spring! It came all at once, in full force. The snow melted quickly, almost imperceptibly. The expected flooding never came. But the bridges over the Lovat and other rivers were swept away. The army is starving—there are no supplies coming through. The units are issued 100, sometimes 50 grams of rusks. The mood in our editorial office is low; everyone is hungry and gloomy. They divide the crumbs among themselves…

“In recent days, they have begun dropping food to us from U-2 aircraft. They drop it without parachutes. We receive rusks reduced to crumbs, concentrates mixed with granulated sugar, and dented cans of food.”

There was also a shortage of ammunition.

My father spoke bitterly of the "Osoby otdel", SMERSH (counterintelligence, which also dealt with cases of disobedience, desertion, and so on..).

First, he himself had nearly been taken in for punishment because he had lost his way in the forest.

Second, the security officers remained in his memory as cowards who avoided the front line.

There was one exception, whom he always made a point of mentioning when he spoke about SMERSH.

By then, the tide had begun to turn, and the front had come alive.

My father was ordered to take a height. He decided to send two elements of his battalion around the flank to strike from the rear, while the smaller remaining force would launch a demonstrative frontal attack. A SMERSH representative who happened to be nearby challenged this plan, demanding a general frontal assault, as ordered.

But my father managed to convince him that he was right, and the officer volunteered to lead the frontal attack. (I now seem to remember that my father had dared him to prove himself.)

The attack succeeded, and the height was taken with few losses. I think this may have been the very episode mentioned by Yeremenko in his memoirs—which, incidentally, my father never had the opportunity to read, although it was written about him there.

The SMERSH officer led the attack bravely.

-It's a pity that officer was killed, - my father said, then added:

-And most likely, he was killed by his own men…

-Why do you think that?

-Because the wound was in his back. That happened sometimes. You can understand them.

There were other stories, too: about the assault on a bell tower on the ice of a lake—Lake Ladoga, perhaps—and about a German armored train trapped by blowing up the tracks behind it and in front of it.

Something seems to have gone wrong with that armored train.

Once, at headquarters, my father tore up his own recommendation for the Medal “For Courage” in protest. That medal meant more in that year than the orders he received later.

For some time afterward, he entertained the illusory hope that the recommendation had not been lost, that the medal had indeed been awarded to him but had somehow failed to reach him and was lying somewhere, waiting for its moment.

He spent several months in Moscow attending the Vystrel officers' courses.

He hardly ever spoke about that period, but I sensed that it had meant a great deal to him.

In his military ID—which my sister and I were not allowed to see, although we would look through it and the other documents when our parents were not home—his wife was listed as Olga Ernestovna Ballad, living in Moscow.

We never spoke to him about her. We do not know when he divorced her.

He met my mother in 1944, apparently already a bachelor.

At the end of the 1940s, he was summoned to the MGB.

My mother went with him and waited for him in nearby Park, overwhelmed by fear.

At the MGB, they told him that he was valued and offered him a job as the head of a concentration camp somewhere. He politely declined, citing his poor health after being wounded.

My father was a witness to his age.

We had an acquaintance, a Kazakh member of the nomenklatura. His brother was a KGB general. My father was friends with him, and when the man was imprisoned on a bribery charge, we took some of his belongings into our house for safekeeping, things that might otherwise have been confiscated.

When he was released after serving his sentence, my parents welcomed him into our home as an honored guest. In turn, he saved me from an inevitable and disgraceful expulsion from the institute after I got into trouble while working on a collective farm.

He used to tell my father:

-You and I fought in the war.

I asked my father:

-Where did you fight with him?

-He didn't fight, - my father said, - He served in SMERSH. He sat in the same cell as the arrested men, acting as an informer, and tried to get them to open up.

And whom could he have persuaded to open up? I think mostly unfortunate Kazakhs, probably pleased to meet a fellow countryman.

Another acquaintance, a Kazakh with sad eyes, kind and wise, had graduated from the NKVD Higher School in Moscow and had been assigned to work during the most terrible period of the Great Terror.

He could not cope there. He failed to live up to expectations. My father said that he suffered terribly at the time, becoming so ill that he was removed from the NKVD and transferred to a position as a people's commissar (minister). My first father-in-law and my parents worked under him.

Once, on the street, my father pointed to someone and told me that he was a former NKVD investigator, now dismissed and expelled from the Party for torturing suspects and fabricating cases. My father said that this information had come from that same acquaintance.

That acquaintance made it into Wikipedia.

There is not a word there about his service in the NKVD.

Another friend of his childhood, this time a Russian, was a lawyer who served in the tribunal of the Second Shock Army.

He told my father that at some point it had become obvious that they were hopelessly encircled and that no one had any chance of escaping. Realizing that everything was over, he wrapped his pistol and Party membership card in a piece of cloth, sank them in a swamp, and went to surrender. He spent the rest of the war in captivity.

My father hired him as legal counsel at his workplace because no one else would take him—not as a lawyer, not as a judge after prison.

He worked there until his death.

When my father told me this, a question caught in my throat, one I did not dare ask: How many Red Army soldiers had this man sentenced, and for what, for actions like his own?

My father did not judge these people. They were his friends.

But why should he have judged them? Because at the time, I thought that was what one was supposed to do.

But my father, unlike me, probably understood that a chain of random events and circumstances had led each of them to his fate. Anything could have happened to any one of them in that hurricane. Each was carried wherever the whirlwinds of the age took him, against his will.

3

My father was, without question, an honest man.

At the end of the 1950s, he entered the "nomenklatura" (the reserve of the Communist Party from which all the leaders were appointed) and from then on had the use of an official car. For a time, his rank was equivalent to that of a deputy minister, although for many years he was head of the Control and Audit Department.

Later, he was in charge of the construction of restaurants, shops, and similar establishments throughout the region.

I remember all those years as a time of poverty. There was no money for anything, and it seemed obvious to all of us that things could not have been otherwise. The reason for our poverty was the house we had built on credit.

Many years later, in America, I followed exactly the same path.

Repaying the debt took fifteen of the eighteen years we lived in that house. My mother fed us the cheapest food she could find, things like chicken feet and tripe, although she prepared them very well. My clothes were always too big for me and patched. We wore our shoes until they were completely worn out. A shoemaker we knew would put leather patches over the holes in our boots. I remember such a patch on my father's boots. And he wore them to work! My father wore the same suits for many years. My mother used to tell me this as an example to follow. Once, in front of me, my grandmother turned the worn collars and cuffs of all our shirts inside out. We continued wearing those shirts afterward. We did not even have a radio-phonograph or a television at home.

My classmates discussed films they had watched on television, and I could not take part in the conversation.

In other words, my father certainly never had any source of income other than his salary.

And yet the opportunities were there—what opportunities!

One or another of his fellow "nomenklatura" officials would get caught taking bribes or embezzling money.

The Khrushchev era was intolerant of such things. One was executed, two others were imprisoned.

They had sometimes been our neighbors at the "dacha" (ñountry house), incidentally. I played with their children.

I know of these three cases, but I think there were probably more. My parents simply tried not to discuss such matters in front of us. Some things remained undiscovered.

Later, the arrests stopped, but I think the people remained the same. Only the times had changed, and bribes could now be taken with impunity.

Did my father make use of his position?

Of course he did, but to a very limited extent. For example, he built our house using materials purchased at state prices, something beyond the reach of most people who wanted to build a house. He bought the timber in the form of logs and had them sawn into beams, either free of charge or for a token payment, as a favor from a friend. But at that time he was not yet a member of the nomenklatura. He was an ordinary employee, in a position not much different from my mother's.

Besides, there were benefits available to demobilized officers, especially disabled veterans.

Several houses similar to ours were built around us at that time, all belonging to retired officers.

He very rarely used his official car for family purposes, and whenever he did, he was always in the car himself.

And yet we lived in a house that was large even by American standards. I had a room of my own, with a bookcase in it. We had a garden and an enormous cellar where we stored the harvest, which we could never gather in its entirety. We often shared it with acquaintances.

Jams, fruit liqueurs, a barrel of sauerkraut, a barrel of salted tomatoes and cucumbers.

From business trips to remote places, my father would bring back a canister of honey that lasted us for several years, or a sheep, or a wild boar, or a car trunk full of fish.

He bought all these things cheaply somewhere out there: honey from a beekeeper, a sheep from a shepherd, fish from a river beacon keeper.

For the same reason of economy, we spent every summer at an official "dacha".

The savings came from food. We bought provisions locally, fresh and at prices lower than the lowest prices elsewhere. While we were at the "dacha", we sometimes rented out our house for the summer. Acquaintances often stayed with us at the "dacha", and I suppose they contributed their share toward the cost of living there.

The money was saved and spent on trips: sometimes my mother and I went to Moscow, sometimes my sister went to Latvia to visit our aunt, and sometimes my father and I, as I have already mentioned, went to the Black Sea, stopping in Stavropol to visit my mother's relatives.

I also went to Mariupol. On the way back, I stopped in Moscow, where I stayed with my mother's friends.

I was astonished by the Impressionist paintings at the Art Museum.

Until then, I had never suspected that anything like that existed. Modern Western Art was forbidden until 60-s.

Our economy did not extend to magazine subscriptions, either. We received Young Technician, Science and Life, Youth, and other magazines.

Many of my classmates lived in little shacks, with an outdoor toilet shared by the entire block. None of them went anywhere in the summer, except perhaps fishing with their fathers. But unlike me, they wore fashionable clothes, had tape recorders and watches, and had pocket money.

The girls laughed at their jokes, and I did not know how to make jokes like that. I wonder what their parents and grandparents told them about their lives. Did they teach them anything?

Then, in my relationship with my father, a heavy punctuation mark was placed.

I had already graduated from college and was working at the job assigned to me. I saw no meaning in my work, and there was none to be found. I had also entered into a relationship with a girl without feeling anything for her. I was aware of this and felt irritated, because she was younger than I was and had trustingly turned toward me.

It was the first day of Easter, which had been declared a working day. Celebrating Easter was practically forbidden. I came home from work. My mother was setting the table, and my father began talking to me.

He said it was time I started thinking about my future position. He suggested that I might use some kind of activism, whether in the trade union or the Komsomol, to get into the leadership of my design institute, and then move higher.

I did not wait for him to develop the subject fully. I said that I had no intention of doing that, that I wanted only to become a good specialist.

As the discussion continued, I said that, in my opinion, there were specialists and administrators—the managerial class. And I believed that specialists were higher in status.

My father began arguing the opposite. In the heat of the moment, I blurted out that under certain circumstances—it was clear enough which ones—it was shameful and dishonorable to be a manager, because in that position one had to lie.

-You sound like Solzhenitsyn! - my father exclaimed.

At that time, before Solzhenitsyn's expulsion, almost everyone knew nothing about him except his surname. Every available source referred to him as an ideological traitor.

-Then he is the only decent man left in Russia! - I retorted.

And suddenly I felt a slap across my face.

I left home and spent two nights at friends' places. On the third day, my father appeared at my workplace and told me that he had arranged with my superiors for me to leave for the rest of the day. He told me he regretted what had happened and took me to a restaurant. We were served by some classmate of his. They brought us things that were hardly likely to have been on the menu.

I made peace with him, and we never again discussed such subjects, or anything else that might lead to an argument. We mutually avoided the sharp edges.

There were no more intimate conversations.

A distance arose between us, and we tried not to cross it.

(I now have the same kind of distance with my daughters. But why with them?)

Was it only distance?

Perhaps he had begun to regard me as a beloved but deranged son, someone who had to be protected and, preferably, not irritated, lest he explode and do something even worse. Once, he let slip:

-Well, you're a bit of a crank.

I now understand that attitude. I myself am in that position with regard to my children, and anxiety for them lies quietly dormant in my soul, ready to surface at any moment.

I often sensed that the people around me regarded me as a crank, or at least as a strange sort of fellow.

Then I moved to America, where I no longer surprised anyone, because everyone here is like that, as a certain gravedigger once said of England.

Well, where England is, America is not far away.

Yet I continued to remember my father's stories.

For some reason, it occurred to me that he ought to tell them to my son as well, when the boy came of age. And when that time arrived, I said to him:

-Tell your grandson about your life when you were young.

He did not understand me, or pretended not to, and told his grandson nothing.

Not long ago, I realized that I had never brought my father any joy. And yet we had lived side by side for more than half of both our lives.

He loved me. I always felt that.

I did not bring my mother joy either, but she would get over things easily, and her love for me healed every hurt.

Alas, the mission was impossible.

I grew up differently, and became someone other than the son, the continuer of the family line, they would have wanted me to be.

There is no one's fault in this. Time and nature decided it that way.

If I could return to that time with the wisdom I have today, what could I change?

I am afraid, not much.

I was different from them, but we did not understand this, and each of us demanded from the other something the other simply could not give.

They belonged to one century. I belonged to another.

I often remember my father in conversations with those close to me, and constantly when I am alone.

There is always a tinge of sadness in these memories, as though I secretly regret something.

And I really do regret it, because there is something to regret in every episode.

My father often remembered his own father, and the tone in which he spoke was suspiciously like the tone I use today. It suddenly occurred to me that he, too, had been consumed by belated regrets.

Who can know now what passions lay behind them?

4

Unseen, there was another member of my father's family: Tabiya.

She was the younger wife of Nurmambet, my grandfather's "tomyr".

Nurmambet was a settled Kazakh who cultivated fields.

In summer, Nurmambet would migrate into the mountains with his flock of sheep, leaving his crops in my grandfather's care. In return, my grandfather's sheep grazed in Nurmambet's flock.

They were friends to such a degree that my grandmother told me that, according to my grandfather, Nurmambet had proposed that they exchange wives—as was apparently fitting for their friendship.

I wonder in what proportions, since he had two wives.

My grandmother indignantly refused. But here I think my grandfather was lying, either to test his wife or simply to tease her.

My grandfather was called up to suppress the Kazakh uprising of 1916. He served in Tokmak. No one knows anymore whether he was assigned to garrison duty or whether he had to sit on a horse with a saber in his hand.

What matters here is that a couple of years later, when the Cossacks fled to China to escape the Reds, Nurmambet took my grandfather's family into his aul.

My father, still a little boy, lived in the aul alongside Nurmambet's children by his first wife.

The younger wife, Tabiya, had no children.

He remembered and loved those children, naming each of them. He remembered the eldest daughter especially well. She was being married off and was leaving the aul, smiling. My father would always recall her smile. There was something else there, too, something white—perhaps a piece of felt, perhaps a camel…

Why did they disappear from his memories afterward? I did not know then, but now I can guess.

Collectivization came.

Nurmambet was imprisoned.

My grandmother visited him there. He died in prison while under investigation. I know this from her own account.

His "tomyr", my grandfather, left to save his family.

-The famine hit the Kazakhs especially hard, - my father explained to me.

The Russians had their gardens, and they could also steal something from the collective-farm fields. The Kazakhs had nowhere to get food. They died out entire auls at a time, or fled to China.

Tabiya was the only one of the family to survive.

She had a poetic gift. She was an "akyn", a woman "akyn".

My father told me what this was called, but I no longer remember. And so she sang and somehow managed to live.

Her poems were published in a prewar three-volume collection of aitys, which always lay on the bedside table on my father's side of the bed. Later, in the 1980s, she was recorded on tape at a television studio, and we had a cassette of the recording. It is still kept by my sister.

But all this brought her little in the way of a livelihood. After returning from the front, my father began supporting her. He managed to obtain a collective-farm pension for her, although formally she had not worked a single day on a collective farm. But the pension was small.

I visited her when I was about twenty, at her homestead in the village of Dzhandosova.

It was a tiny adobe house with a low ceiling and two little rooms, one a step higher than the other. In the far room, which was covered with felt, stood a low table. The nearer room was the kitchen, with an earthen floor. There was almost nothing in it: only a little iron stove and some sort of cupboard.

The house stood on a plot of about six hundred square yards, otherwise unused, where several sheep grazed. Poplars grew around the perimeter.

Tabiya was cutting up a lamb—that was why she had called me. A thick flatbread was already frying in mutton fat on the primus stove, between two frying pans turned upside down against each other. I already knew how to butcher a sheep, having helped my father before. As soon as the lamb’s belly was opened, they put the "kaurdak" on to cook.

Tabiya did not speak Russian at all. A neighbor girl helped us, doing her best to translate our conversation. Or perhaps I was the one helping them—or simply watching as the two of them worked so skillfully together. Tabiya called my father Misheke. We ate the "kaurdak" at the "dastarkhan", and I left with a little gift to take home. I rode away just as I had arrived: on my bicycle. That was more than twenty miles each way, by the way. I was young.

Sometime later, I came home from work and found myself sitting at a table with guests. My father was in charge of the table, which was unusual. The guests were all Kazakhs, and the conversation was in Kazakh. My mother was serving everyone, which was even more unusual. Tabiya sat at the head of the table. I don’t know who was treating whom to what. I was just an extra. My father, translating the general conversation for me, said that Tabiya now wanted to sing to me.

Tabiya began to sing.

She sang in a voice quite unlike the one she spoke in—a completely different voice. To me, her singing sounded exotic and ominous. My father translated then and there:

-She wishes you success—and all the other things people wish one another at the table—and pay attention! — that you marry a Kazakh woman.

My mother smiled ironically from the depths of another room. I was still a bachelor then. Even my first marriage was nowhere in sight. Who could have known that it would all come true just as she said? Well, almost.

Several years later, after I had divorced and was living with my parents again, my mother asked me:

-What if Tabiya came to live with us? Would you mind?

From our further conversations, I learned that Tabiya had cancer and could not spend the rest of her life in her cold home.

But suddenly she turned out to have a great many relatives, people my father had never known about. He seemed almost stunned by this. As it happened, she was taken into the home of one of my former institute instructors, whose connection with Tabiya had been unknown to us until then.

My father called Tabiya his second mother.

I think suppose my father and everyone else had never told me any of this. After all, many people told their children nothing. I, for example, told my son nothing about myself or our family line, and taught him nothing. I could have, but it simply never happened. Still, at least I did tell him stories. I told my daughters nothing either, apart from fairy tales when they were little. Later, when I tried to tell them something, they refused to listen. Besides, they stopped speaking Russian fairly quickly.

In that case, I think my life would have been different, and I would have become a thoroughly limited, impoverished person.

As it is, there is an entire universe living inside my head. My father was not the only one who built it, but he was its chief architect