Half of the Sky

It was perhaps the first time when a grown person cried in front of me. In general, it was the sort of day when grown-ups were crying in front of me, but it all began with Nina Nikolaevna, with her “flea house,” as we once called it. Such women, apparently, are extinct, yet I nonetheless sometimes see a 60-something woman with a complex, peroxide-etched hairdo piled up on top of her head and I remember that we once called this construction a flea house.

Anyway, so she dropped her flea house on the table and sobbed, and we froze. We were just 10 and the image of a crying teacher signified for us, as Ella, my fortnight-long lover from Eilat would later say [in Hebrew], “Olam’eynu cha’sha’ch aley’nu” – that the world had covered us with a black shroud. This went on for at least a minute. She sobbed and we sat. Then she more or less managed to get a grip on herself and, for the first time in the two years she had been with us, pronounced a phrase with normal human intonation. She said: “Children, Leonid Ilyich has died.”

My parents, I guess, still remembered March 1953 – the sobbing crowds, slowly flowing by in their sorrowfully similar, soot-colored cloaks, the massive mustachioed portraits, the cries of those crushed by the crowds, and the fear... the fear of what would happen tomorrow – why had he forsaken us? What will become of us now?

But it had been, what, almost 30 years and we, of course, had not witnessed anything of this sort. In the evening, mama was faced with a serious issue: how should she dress the children for school in the morning? For some reason, no one said anything to us about mourning clothes. Mama remembered something about black ribbons or strings on lapels, but father, in a mocking tone, said, “perhaps black shirts?” – and she became even more enervated. Of course, there were no black shirts in our house. She called Svetka’s mom, the pushy, loud chairwoman of the parents’ committee, who did not disgrace herself: she suggested sewing a black ribbon to the edge of a white shirt’s collar.

The following morning, there were three of us with black ribbons on our collars – two of us whose parents had phoned Svetka’s mom, plus Svetka. The rest, it turned out, came to school dressed in the usual way.

Of course, we could have asked grandma for some advice, except that she and grampa had locked themselves in their room after dinner and did not come back out.

Grandma was the second grownup who cried in front of me on that day. For some reason, I thought that I would astound them with news of the All-Union Death, but grandma met me at the threshold with bloodshot eyes and I was a bit disappointed (I did not know then that the messenger is the first to be killed). And when she said, “Little one, Lyonya died,” I understood only that she was in pain, so I asked, “Who?” She did not answer, so I did not repeat the question, but followed her to the kitchen and ate a warmed-up dinner.

Only an hour later, while I was working on my lessons and heard her sobbing and grampa’s gasping, trachoma-corroded voice through the wall, did I understand that Lyonya was “our dear Leonid Ilyich.”

Grampa and grandma had, for most of the past two decades, slowly trailed behind Brezhnev during the long track of his career – from Dnepropetrovsk in Moldavia; from Moldavia, skipping a few short steps, to Moscow. Mama had been born in warm and sticky Kishinev and, to the end of her days, complained about Moscow’s central heating system.

In his day, grampa was no less than a boss of Lyonya. They lived across the hall from one another and Lyonya’s spirited drinking bouts usually ended with tears in the stairwell, as grandma and Viktoria [Brezhnev] picked up the drunken frame of the handsome Lyonya and led him to a couch. The families fell out of touch when Lyonka began to rapidly ascend the party ladder – grampa was a Jew, and there was no place for him alongside his old friend. Only some 30 years later did grandma speak of “Lyonya”: death does not only take from us, it also returns.

That was all later, several hours later. Right now, a girl next to me was crying, but I could not see her. She was quietly sobbing behind my left shoulder and I could not turn around – no one turned about while in the honor guard. All movement was forbidden and I, a young Octobrist, stood in the front row. A white plaster bust of Brezhnev – now a death mask – stared at the back of my head. Two steps to the right and two steps back stood Chernova; two steps to the left and two steps back was Koroleva, who sobbed for ten minutes. And when the clock finally said 1:30, Chernova and I crisply turned to-the-le-e-e-ft!, but Koroleva was late – apparently she missed it when the minute hand clicked onto the six – and the changing of the honor guard proceeded a bit less mournfully and ceremoniously than it should have.

As we marched down the corridor, I slipped twice on icy slush, carried into the school building on the shoes of the 250 first shift students, then finally got my footing and was able to walk normally. Koroleva began to wipe away her tears with her apron and I, a properly raised Jewish boy, handed her a handkerchief. Only 15 minutes later, as we were leaving the school gates and almost at the end of a wet, poplar-lined path, did I understand that I was walking Masha home.

I should have taken back my handkerchief and headed for home back in the corridor, or, in the worst case, said goodbye to her at the entrance to the school, winding things up at the gate. And I definitely should not have been escorting a girl whom I really did not like, because this sort of thing was full of great significance. Escorting someone home – it was not a nut easily unscrewed... But she just kept talking, and I just kept walking after her, and next thing you know we were at the tram stop. I have absolutely no memory what she said in those first five minutes – something about Nina Nikolaevna, a test, how someone copied something from some other someone, the class monitor, an unclean blackboard – and finally she stopped talking, and so I asked her:

“So, what, were you crying because of the unclean blackboard?” And she said:

“No, because of America.”

“Meaning?”

“Now there is going to be war. And they will kill us all, because Brezhnev has died. They will throw their neutron bombs at us and we will die. Do you know what it is going to be like? Everything will be like it was. Houses will be untouched, and trees, and even cats and dogs. But where once there were people, there will simply be things lying about. Socks. Buttons from a coat. We will simply be gone.”

Ten or even twelve years after all this, I would play the fop and regale my friends – especially girls – about how all of my wishes always came true. Girls blushed and the situation worked in my favor. I even loved to complain, shaking my head, that I had very few unrealized wishes, and that therefore I had to aspire for something metaphysical (I really loved that word back then). In particular, I would say, I wanted to experience a truly unadulterated horror.

Today I am ready to acknowledge that this wish came true – twice actually. But the first time is one which I would prefer not to remember: it was the day of Brezhnev’s death, when a girl told me about the neutron bomb as we stood near a tram stop.

Moving from my groin to my stomach, and then still higher, there rose a kind of cold, white milk, which by turns dissolved my muscles, bones and heart. Just a few days were left before there would be war; there was no doubt about this. For some reason mama, looking through an album called “Hiroshima,” which dad had brought home, and which had that girl on the cover, said, “The living will envy the dead.”

The girls standing alongside me had freckles and wore tights that were constantly sagging. But I had neither the ability to breathe in or out... no knocking knees, no aluminum buttons on my uniform, no words... no strength to walk alone past the wet, shabby pigeon coops in which a local loony raised chickens and the occasional pheasant – beyond which it was still at least another ten minutes to home. And so I walked straight – straight toward one of the hulking buildings on the other side of the street. It had a shield over the entrance, molding that was already cracking, everything that jokers then called “in the Vamperial Style.” And cars were parked near the entrance – something unusual back then. And one of them belonged to Masha’s dad. His rank at the Academy of Sciences endowed him with the right to a four-room apartment, a black “Volga,” and Wrigley’s chewing gum, which Masha treated half the class to – maybe out of conceit, maybe out of goodness. And Masha Koroleva walked with me, the first girl in my life whom I walked to her door, and it fell upon me to find a topic for conversation. I could not talk about the bomb, but also could not think about anything but the bomb. And then I said:

“Let’s play cities.” And she went first, saying:*

“Moscow.”

“Washington.”

“Novgorod.”

“Donetsk.”

“Kansas.”

“Stavropol.”

“Los Angeles.”

“San Francisco.”

* The game requires that each city named be followed by a city which starts with the last letter of the preceding city...   RL