The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia (14 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

WHITE ROSE

Changes come when you least expect them. For the longest time, I have been asking Mom to get me a kitten, and her answer has always been, “No. We don’t have enough space for people, let alone pets. If you want to play, play with Tanya.” 

It is true that space is at a premium in our small apartment. Still, every summer that we spend outside Moscow I am allowed to keep a pet. Once, we even have a little hedgehog, prickly like a pin-cushion, with short legs, a foxlike muzzle, and two black beads of eyes. Dad and I find the hedgehog while picking mushrooms. He is hiding under the fallen leaves, and, when we approach him, he bristles up and tries to scare us by jumping and sticking out his dark needles with a touch of gray on the ends. After a couple of minutes of that, he curls up into a thorny ball and plays dead. Dad gives me his mushrooms and rolls the hedgehog into his backpack with a stick.

On our way home, the hedgehog shows no signs of life, and I begin to worry that he is truly dead. But when Dad dumps him onto our floor, scratched by the proprietress’ cats and generations of summer renters, the hedgehog revives, uncurls, smoothes his sharp needles, and immediately hides under my bed. Despite all my tricks and a little bowl of fresh milk, which Mom places for him in the middle of the floor, he does not leave his new shelter until the room grows dark. Hedgehogs—my father later tells me—are nocturnal animals.

It is fun to have him, anyway. At night, lying in bed, I can hear his muffled footsteps and the rustle of the newspapers that I have pushed under my bed so he can make himself a paper nest. When my eyes get used to the darkness, I can make out his fuzzy shape busily rolling around the floor or lapping milk from a bowl, just like a cat. The hedgehog never lets me hold him in my arms or pat him on his back. Yet I feel disappointed when, one day, he slips out through a half-open door and runs back to the woods and the freedom of the animal world.

Today is a Sunday, which I mark by luxuriating in bed until 9 o’clock and Mom by cooking us a special weekend breakfast. It starts with a large glossy
seledka
(herring) swimming in vinegar and sunflower oil and covered with sliced onions—mashed potatoes on the side. Then comes freshly brewed hot tea and a pile of
blinis
(small pancakes), accompanied by sour cream. The breakfast is almost over when the doorbell rings.

Dad goes to the front door, and I hear two hoarse voices: 

“Where do you want it,
chozyain
(boss)?” 

“Just give us a minute,” Dad says and quickly returns to the room where my mother, sister, and I are sitting around the table—bony remains of herring and smudges of sour cream on our plates. 

“Fira, let’s clear this corner,” Dad says hurriedly to Mom. Then he turns to us: “Sveta, pull your chair to the right. Tanya, step aside and ne
meshaisya pod nogami
(don’t get in the way).” 

As if performing a battlefield maneuver, we all start moving, while Dad, our commander-in-chief, directs our progress. 

“Fira, don’t move the bedside table to the left, move it to the right … Sveta, what are you waiting for? Keep moving! Tanya, did you hear what I just said? Step aside!”

I look at my parents, puzzled. What’s the matter? 

“We got you a present,” Mom says, smiling.

“A present? What is it?” I say, and a premonition starts sprouting its tentacles in my stomach, which is filled with herring and sour cream. Surely, this cannot be a kitten. Also, what kind of present needs so much space?

“We bought you a piano!” Dad says. The triumph in his voice is overflowing, and he is looking at me as if he just delivered the very thing I had been begging for every day of my life. 

“A piano?! Why? I don’t know how to play the piano!” 

“We know that. But now you will!” 

Oh, no! Once again, I realize that my parents and I live on two different planets, and, to make matters worse, these planets revolve in different solar systems. I have never asked them for a piano. I have asked them for a kitten!
Nobody
in my class plays piano. In fact, nobody in my class plays
anything
, and as far as I’m concerned, I can live without a piano, while a kitten, or at least a bike, would really make me very happy and grateful.

“I hope you appreciate what we’re doing for you,” I already hear Dad’s refrain. 

I want to say, “Of course, you never ask me what I want, but I have to be grateful for what you want,” but I keep it to myself.

The corner of the room is cleared now, and two men in worn-out padded jackets and cloth caps tilted to the back of their heads appear in the doorway. Wide belts are girdled over the men’s shoulders and under the belly of a huge object, which is wrapped in rough brown paper—the inquisitive faces of our neighbors looming behind it. With much grunting and panting, the men drag the object into the room and put it down in the corner. Then they pull out the belts, collect their tip and retreat, leaving behind their burden and the rough smell of
papirosi
(cheap cigarettes) mixed with a tinge of vodka.

Dad tears off the wrapping paper, and my new present reveals itself to my wistful gaze. 

“This was the best looking piano in the store, and the sales guy told me it sounds great!” Dad declares, shifting his eyes from Mom to me, to Tanya, and then back to Mom, proudly resting them on her face for at least a minute. 

Mom, Tanya, and I stare at the instrument. It does not look like the piano in my school—a black homely contraption with peeling varnish and worn-out keys, yellow like the fingernails of an inveterate smoker. This piano is glowing oak, with a white blossoming rose inlaid on its front panel
.
The rose looks so real that I find myself inhaling in an attempt to catch its delicate scent, and its petals appear both fragile and damp, as if covered by dew. For once, I have to agree with my father—this is a beauty. In fact, it is so exquisite that the rest of our room, including us, its residents, looks shabby and shrunken. 

For some time, everybody is quiet. Then Mom says, to nobody in particular, “I always wanted to play the piano, but … we never had money,” and when she lowers her gaze, the ends of her eyelashes sparkle, like grass after a summer rain.

Two weeks later, having passed an exam certifying my sense of rhythm and ability to carry a tune, I find myself enrolled at a music school. I am not enthusiastic about this. For one thing, unlike regular schools, which are numerous and located within walking distance, music schools are rare. My music school is about twenty blocks away from our home, and I have to walk there at least four times a week: twice for my piano lessons, once for lessons in music theory and solfeggio (sight-singing), and once more for choir. Never mind that all of this takes place after my regular classes and leaves me little time for the things I deem important: reading, daydreaming, or hanging around our
dvor.

While my classmates and neighbors romp in the street, I—a bulky leather folder with music scores in my hand and bitter resentment of the adult world in my chest—walk for forty-five minutes (one way!) to a three-story brick building that radiates the dissonant sounds of various musical instruments from a block away. And, as if this is not bad enough, there are two places on my way there that I dread to go through.

The first is a long, sparsely traveled passage, so narrow and curvy that when I am in it, I do not see people coming from the opposite direction until they stumble into me and scare me to death. And the second place, which comes just after I get through the passage, is a wide and busy road with no pedestrian crossing anywhere in sight. The first couple of times, Mom crosses the road with me, teaching me to be careful and look left and right. Now, I’m on my own—zigzagging through the traffic like a hare chased by a pack of hunting dogs and cursing the day when the piano appeared in our apartment. 

This is not to say that I do not like music. I like listening to my grandfather’s guitar and even big orchestras on the radio. Yet
playing
music is a different matter. Every time I slide onto the piano bench and raise the keyboard lid—which, to me, looks like the full-toothed mouth of a smiling crocodile—a million things I could be doing instead rush through my mind—like playing with a cat, for one thing!

According to my music teacher Elena Abramovna, a small pudgy woman with dark ringlets of hair jumping about her head in time with her energetic gestures, I need to practice at least one hour a day: twenty minutes of pounding the keyboard with boring gammas, arpeggios, and accords, and forty minutes of studying the little pieces she shows me in school. 

To make sure that I do not slack off, Mom winds up a large metallic alarm clock and places it on top of the piano.

“Watch the clock and don’t leave before the hour is up,” she says.

With a sigh, I strike my fingers on the woefully crying keys in an attempt to imitate Elena Abramovna, but I never get close. My fingers are slow and awkward, and the sounds I elicit from my beautiful piano are choppy and rigid. In fact, the only thing I do well is watching the clock. The strange thing is that, as soon as I approach my instrument, time slows down, seemingly from the sheer act of lifting the piano lid. And no matter how often I raise my impatient eyes to the clock, it remains indifferent to my plight, the way the stars are indifferent to the plight of sailors lost at sea. 

After ten minutes of intense clock watching, I furtively look over my shoulder. (The good thing is that most of the time I spend at the piano, I am alone. Even Tanya, who constantly tails me around, leaves the room as soon as I start practicing.) Then I stand up and quickly move the clock’s hand five minutes forward, and, feeling guilty excitement, continue practicing for a little longer, until time gets stuck again and I have to push it forward once more. After doing this three or four times, I finally arrive at the end of the hour and leave my prison bench until my next practice.

The catch is that later in the evening I have to move the clock back—otherwise I would have to go to bed earlier, too! That is tricky, because as soon as I finish playing, my whole family pours back into the room, and I have a hard time restoring the universal rhythm of time discretely.

That said, there are two things about my music school that help me tolerate it. First of all, unlike my regular school, most of the kids there are friendly—even the boys! (My only explanation for this is that suffering through hours of boring music exercises suppresses the boys’ natural belligerence.) Secondly, being a music student gets me into a movie theater two blocks away from the music school, and I do not have to pay for my ticket at all!

This is how it works. Every Sunday afternoon, several of us perform in the movie theater’s lobby before a matinee show. To tell the truth, playing in front of talking and ice-cream-eating strangers is embarrassing and unnerving. Every time I glance at my audience, I get a funny feeling in my stomach, similar to one which the Roman gladiators must have felt when lions poured into the Coliseum. Also, I sometimes spot my “regular” classmates, and they tease me in school the next day. Still, despite fears and embarrassment, my reward is instant—after the performance is over, I just stay on and watch the movie.

Today’s music theory class starts with an announcement—next Sunday, we are
going to a concert in a big hall named after the famous Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. On a drizzly November day, some twelve of us meet at the music school entrance and, led by our music theory teacher Olga Ivanovna, set off for the concert. I toil along behind our group, grieving about the lost Sunday.

Why do we need to go? Music is all around us as it is! It splashes from the radio and TV, we play it at home, and we listen to
plastinki
(long playing vinyl records) during our music theory classes. Yet none of that, Olga Ivanonva claims, can replace a live concert.

Live? How so? Most of the music we hear or play was written a long time ago by people who have been dead for ages! Yet, if I do not go, I will get a low grade from Olga Ivanovna and a lecture from my parents. Also, I like Olga Ivanovna. She is young and pretty, with light flyaway hair, cute dimples on her resilient cheeks, and hazel eyes that seem to smile even when their owner gives us a good scolding. 

The trip is long. First we ride a streetcar. Then we descend into the deep well of a metro station that is lavishly decorated with mosaics depicting male and female
kolhozniki
happily harvesting wheat. We squeeze ourselves into a metro car, and in an hour or so we emerge at the large city square
Mayakovskaya Ploshchad
. We cross the square and finally walk under the monumental columns of the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall. 

It is a children’s concert, and, despite the dismal fall weather, the large building is overflowing with excitement and voices of kids, all looking their best. We check in our wet coats and street shoes (we brought our best shoes with us in cloth bags) and climb the grand staircase, all the while admiring the light and airy feel of the building, its stately interior columns, and the scintillating chandeliers high above our heads.

Our seats are up in the balcony. From there, I look around. A large, deep auditorium looks like a volcano crater, ringed with seats down to the stage, behind which the tiers of organ pipes spread their silvery wings on the back wall. The lights grow dim, and the audience quiets down. Musicians in black suits walk ceremoniously onto the brightly-lit stage and take their seats. A conductor appears, eliciting a polite wave of applause, and the concert begins.