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Authors: Elena Gorokhova
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to see it because she quickly turns away, and the hands that she held up to her chest are now wiping her dress at her thighs.
I watch my father close his eyes and fall asleep. I watch my mother bring a blanket into the veranda and spread it over him and tuck the sides under his shoulders and his knees. He turns on his side and puts his elbows over his ears as though he doesn’t want to hear any more ruckus over his absence.
I knew my father was stronger than the storm, stronger than anyone here thought he was. I knew he would be all right.
5. Lenin and Squirrels
M Y THIRD-GRADE TEACHER , V ERA Pavlovna, is bony and tall, a brown cardigan trailing from her shoulders, stiff as a clothes hanger. She teaches arithmetic, Soviet history, and Russian. In her class we copy exercises from the textbook into lined, skinny notebooks as she walks around the room, peering down over our heads, praising the uniform strokes of our handwriting.
Most frequently, her praise falls on Zoya Churkina, who sits in the row to my left, two desks closer to the front. Zoya is blond and perfect, her long hair arranged in two tidy braids with bows at the ends, her black apron buttoned over her smart brown dress with a white collar, always starched. “Our diamond,” Vera Pavlovna calls her as Zoya blushes, trying to suppress a smile.
She never calls me a diamond, although I finish the exercises as fast as Zoya does. The best nickname I ever receive is “our gold nugget,” which she bestows on me when I decline all the participles without a single spelling error. I resent Zoya, with her exemplary braids and her permanent diamond status. Although none of us has any idea of what a diamond or a gold nugget looks like, we are all aware of the diamond’s supremacy and thus of my second-place standing.
When the bell rings, Zoya erases the board and makes sure everyone goes into the hallway. She is the class monitor, the only one allowed to stay in at break time, the one to ensure that Dimka, the class hooligan, doesn’t instigate any fights.
Dimka is a dvoechnik, the one who gets a dvoika, or failing grade, in everything. The opposite of dvoika is pyatorka, a five, the grade Zoya and I get. “Most likely this Dimka is a plumber’s son,” says my mother, who just recently had an encounter with plumbers. After a week of daily visits to our apartment building office to complain about a water leak, my mother finally prevailed, and two plumbers were sent to fix the problem. But by the time they arrived they were so drunk that when my mother opened the door, they could only sink to the floor of the stair landing, their heads propped against the elevator shaft.
I T IS ONE DAY before November 7, the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a topic Vera Pavlovna is passionate about in our history class. Stretching her long arm forward, like Lenin in the statues scattered around the city, she tells us how the retired World War I cruiser Aurora, which is now permanently anchored on the other side of the Neva, fired a blank shot signaling the storming of the Winter Palace.
“Workers and peasants,” she says, “ruthlessly exploited by the Tsar, climbed over the palace gate, ran up the October Staircase, and arrested the Provisional Government.” The part about the Provisional Government remains murky since she never explains how this government came to replace the Tsar, and why it, too, needed to be overthrown if it was the already de-throned Tsar who had plunged the country into the pitiful abyss requiring revolutionary intervention.
As her voice trembles describing the arrest, I try to picture a crowd of workers and peasants inside the Winter Palace, the home of the Hermitage, stomping their boots up the October Staircase with its inlaid marble floors and Italian paintings, hurtling past the throne of Peter the Great with their hammers and scythes. I cannot help thinking that, despite Vera Pavlovna’s ardor, they wouldn’t allow anything of that
I watch my father close his eyes and fall asleep. I watch my mother bring a blanket into the veranda and spread it over him and tuck the sides under his shoulders and his knees. He turns on his side and puts his elbows over his ears as though he doesn’t want to hear any more ruckus over his absence.
I knew my father was stronger than the storm, stronger than anyone here thought he was. I knew he would be all right.
5. Lenin and Squirrels
M Y THIRD-GRADE TEACHER , V ERA Pavlovna, is bony and tall, a brown cardigan trailing from her shoulders, stiff as a clothes hanger. She teaches arithmetic, Soviet history, and Russian. In her class we copy exercises from the textbook into lined, skinny notebooks as she walks around the room, peering down over our heads, praising the uniform strokes of our handwriting.
Most frequently, her praise falls on Zoya Churkina, who sits in the row to my left, two desks closer to the front. Zoya is blond and perfect, her long hair arranged in two tidy braids with bows at the ends, her black apron buttoned over her smart brown dress with a white collar, always starched. “Our diamond,” Vera Pavlovna calls her as Zoya blushes, trying to suppress a smile.
She never calls me a diamond, although I finish the exercises as fast as Zoya does. The best nickname I ever receive is “our gold nugget,” which she bestows on me when I decline all the participles without a single spelling error. I resent Zoya, with her exemplary braids and her permanent diamond status. Although none of us has any idea of what a diamond or a gold nugget looks like, we are all aware of the diamond’s supremacy and thus of my second-place standing.
When the bell rings, Zoya erases the board and makes sure everyone goes into the hallway. She is the class monitor, the only one allowed to stay in at break time, the one to ensure that Dimka, the class hooligan, doesn’t instigate any fights.
Dimka is a dvoechnik, the one who gets a dvoika, or failing grade, in everything. The opposite of dvoika is pyatorka, a five, the grade Zoya and I get. “Most likely this Dimka is a plumber’s son,” says my mother, who just recently had an encounter with plumbers. After a week of daily visits to our apartment building office to complain about a water leak, my mother finally prevailed, and two plumbers were sent to fix the problem. But by the time they arrived they were so drunk that when my mother opened the door, they could only sink to the floor of the stair landing, their heads propped against the elevator shaft.
I T IS ONE DAY before November 7, the anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, a topic Vera Pavlovna is passionate about in our history class. Stretching her long arm forward, like Lenin in the statues scattered around the city, she tells us how the retired World War I cruiser Aurora, which is now permanently anchored on the other side of the Neva, fired a blank shot signaling the storming of the Winter Palace.
“Workers and peasants,” she says, “ruthlessly exploited by the Tsar, climbed over the palace gate, ran up the October Staircase, and arrested the Provisional Government.” The part about the Provisional Government remains murky since she never explains how this government came to replace the Tsar, and why it, too, needed to be overthrown if it was the already de-throned Tsar who had plunged the country into the pitiful abyss requiring revolutionary intervention.
As her voice trembles describing the arrest, I try to picture a crowd of workers and peasants inside the Winter Palace, the home of the Hermitage, stomping their boots up the October Staircase with its inlaid marble floors and Italian paintings, hurtling past the throne of Peter the Great with their hammers and scythes. I cannot help thinking that, despite Vera Pavlovna’s ardor, they wouldn’t allow anything of that
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