Lara Shapiro
Rebecca. End of USSR, Yekaterinburg in early 90s, or Lessons on survival in difficult times

© Lara Shapiro, 2020

ISBN 978-5-0050-8437-8

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

End of USSR,

Yekaterinburg in early 90s,

or lessons on survival in difficult times

(a man is interesting by his future, and a woman by her past.)

Dear reader, if you are one of those who are not able to watch to the end “Silence of the Lambs”, you better not read this book. Life can be a lot bitter than the movie.

Childhood

In the very centre of Russia, in the Southern Urals, there is a small but very picturesque place called Kasli, famous for its iron castings, elaborately cast gates and elegant figurines. It is very remote place. Perhaps that is why the Soviet government, together with the atheism imposed by it, was not wholly rooted there; and the deceased were buried in the church, according to the old Russian tradition.

Life covered in a grey, dull sky. Large raindrops beat deafly through the window, nervously flowing down, leaving a wet mark, reminiscent of a human life full of fuss and nonsense. A large window, over the wall, from floor to ceiling, a spacious, cold room, smelling of printing ink and glue, here and there numerous stacks of books neatly folded on the floor. The window overlooked the church square, endless, like Russia. Rebecca sat at the window, buried in cold glass and silently watched the world through wet grey drops. She loved to sit by the window and watch. There was a church in the square. Every day, coffins were carried across the square, bells rang. Rebecca sat at the window and looked at these endless strings of coffins.

These were the earliest memories of her childhood, she was not even three years old, but she remembered these coffins, the bell ringing, and the old white church for her whole life. Life began with a death. She still loves large windows. Reminiscent of childhood and mom, who is no longer alive.

When Rebecca became an adult, she specifically went there. Everything seemed so small: the house, the square, the church, Kasli themselves. But there, in childhood, everything was big, dimensionless, boundless, vast. The whole world is getting smaller and smaller over the years.

Soon they moved to Kazakhstan, where mom was assigned on the instructions of the party and government, as the secretary of the communist party organization of the North Kazakhstan region. They settled in a beautiful white-brick cottage with three bedrooms and a spacious hall, where Rebecca loved to dance to the songs of Anna German and “Rush me, rush me, the forest deer”.

The cottage looked like a modern castle, with a vast plot around. Rebecca got the opportunity to walk and think a lot. She walked around the large courtyard covered with white wool of snowdrifts and thought – people are born, go to kindergarten, school, college, work, get married, have children, retire and die. And this is the whole purpose of life? This one? From generation to generation, year after year, century after century. Is that all people live for? What is the sense of life?

At the edge of the plot was a wooden, grey barn where the Rebecca’s family bred rabbits. Despite the numerous prohibitions from adults, Rebecca loved, having put the ladder to the roof, climb to the very top, and lying on the roof, look into the bottomless, boundless sky, at the majestically floating clouds. She could lie like that for hours, the most favourite occupation. It seemed that there, behind the clouds, was someone alive and mysterious, the one who, with the help of these clouds, explains her the meaning of life.

Between hours of contemplation and reflection, there was a place for adventure. Rebecca always had a lot of strange ideas. Her new idea was “to steal the raft from the teens and cross the lake, to see how deep it is on the other side.” At that time, Rebecca reasoned as follows: since the farther from the shore, the deeper, so on the opposite shore there should be the most profound depth. Need to check.

It was proposed to hijack a raft from the teens early in the morning, in their absence. Almost no one supported Rebecca. Everyone was too scared. They stood by the shore and crumpled. – Well, to hell with you all, I’ll sail alone – Rebecca thought. At that moment she saw the eyes of Alyosha and Yurka. Horror and the struggle of two fears froze in their eyes: fear of striding on the raft, into the unknown, and fear of leaving her alone on this raft, alone with the frightening unknown. They were frightened. But it was even worse for them to leave her alone. And they took a step.

The three of them sailed, rowing with sticks along the shore. If they tried to go too far, the sticks did not reach the bottom, and they could not push, so they kept the coast.

Thanks to this trip, they learned that in some places their lake is covered with mud and not everywhere you can swim. That on the other side, beautiful weeping willows grow. That their Kazakh peers are already working on an equal footing with adults, grazing cattle on horseback, without fear of either cows or bulls, they just brought cattle to the watering place when Rebecca, Alyosha and Yurka sailed by.

They sailed almost all day and to sunset returned. The teens beaten them, but the children met them as heroes.

At seven years old, Rebecca had gone to school and all three years of elementary school only heard that China was about to take Kazakhstan since there are too many Chinese, and they need more land and space. It was scary. Rebecca studied the map of China and was numb by how big it was. She learned to write with her left hand and forced her classmates to do the same, having heard on TV that in one of the countries the terrorists had seized a school, and their children had their right hands cut off so that they could not study.

Mom worked in the military enlistment office with Russian officers. Beautiful, slender, blue-eyed officers irradiated from Baikonur.

So, at the age of 8, Rebecca first heard the story about Damask Island, where hundreds of crazy Chinese slaughtered a handful of our guys.

It is not surprising that at the end of the second grade, Rebecca decided to organize a diplomatic mission to China: go to the Chinese and explain that the Soviet people are peaceful and kind, so that the Chinese do not attack Kazakhstan. Lack of knowledge of the Chinese language was not an obstacle – we will draw smiling suns and sing songs, – Rebecca reasoned.

For the diplomatic mission, two bully brothers were chosen: Yurka and Pavlik. Yurka was two years older and more experienced in terms of hiking. Pavlik was a classmate of Rebecca and did everything as Yurka said. There was also Igor, a “nerd”, a classmate of Yurka, and his sister Luda, a classmate of Pavlik and Rebecca. Here is such a team. In general, Rebecca vilely took advantage of the sympathy of all three boys and forced them out to join her own adventures.

Provisions and blankets were stocked up in advance and imperceptibly. They decided to leave at night when parents will sleep, to have an advantage of several hours. Igor was the smartest; he calculated and thought over everything.

Police and military searched for them for two days, registration and enlistment offices, with “military cars”, because Yurka and Pavlik had a stepfather, head of the police, and Rebecca’s mother worked in the military registration and enlistment office. All military services were raised. But the children deftly disguised themselves in the forest. Firstly, they were small and inconspicuous. Secondly, upon hearing the howl of sirens, they immediately extinguished the fire and covered everything with old leaves, leaving no traces.

On the third day, they were found. Rebecca was locked in her room, – to think about her behaviour. – Reason: – leaving the little sister unattended. – The sister was four years old at that time. – My mother is foolish, – Rebecca thought, sitting in the room – I had a DIPMISSION, how I would reach China with a four-year-old child?

Igor and Lyuda were from an intelligent family and ended with a “behavior lecture”. But Yurka and Pavlik were beaten by their stepfather with a rubber hose. Harshly. There was no healthy place on them; they were blue and black. Rebecca’s mother blamed her: – look at what you brought to people. – Mom guessed who the initiator of this crazy idea was. So, at nine years old, Rebecca realized the meaning of the phrase: “We are responsible for those we tamed.”

Then there was Russia and high school. An ordinary school with a military bias. Lessons of military training, almost every day and field exercises called “Zarnitsa”. Probably, it was necessary. Posters and slides with details of the consequences of chemical, nuclear, biological, gas and other attacks, vivid pictures of mutilated human bodies were imprinted in memory for life.

And again, she only heard that they were about to being attack, now by America. They should be prepared, and if the US kill the entire Soviet army, then they will have to defend the country, despite their young age. They were brought up in the spirit of “who, if not you?” And “in life, there is always room for a feat.” They made to be soldiers. Their childish minds were pressed to such an extent that Rebecca could not stand it. She was coming home sobbing: – Mom, they’ll kill us all tomorrow. And it will not be the worst. The worst will go to those who survive. Mom, the Americans have four plans for attack, and all four have Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg in the first place. – Mom planted Rebecca in front of the world map, explaining: – Look to America and to the USSR. America is three times smaller than us. When they will defeat one-third of our territory, we will defeat them all. – It reassured, but not for long.

They did not have classes at school, instead they had platoons and companies. When it came time to join the Komsomol, Rebecca was accepted in the first stream and was immediately elected as a Commissioner and a platoon commander. That is how they studied: first, regular classes, and then military classes, where the command – “Gases!” – sounded all the time, where they were groomed to be solders – assembling and disassembling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, shooting from a standing position, from a lying position – climbing a rope, throwing a grenade, climbing through a fence, through the fire, run stair bridges on feet, by arms, on speed.

– soldier Zaplatinskaya, how do you throw a grenade?! You will undermine yourself on it, not the enemy!

– Comrade Senior Lieutenant! I’ll wait for the enemy to come closer and kill all at once!

– Soldier Zaplatinskaya!

– Yes, Sir!

– To the blackboard!

– Yes, Sir!

– Tell us the device of the Modernized Combat Vehicle.

So her childhood and youth passed.

Generation of Mammoths

Our generation is a generation of mammoths. We will die out soon. And there will not be those who grew up and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that is no longer on the map. Lev Nikolayevich Kassil has such a novel, “three countries that are not on the map,” you know? No, the modern generation no longer knows. They did not read Kassil; they do not even know whether he was a writer or a poet. They would not give Gogol’s first name or patronymic, they would not remember a single Ukrainian poet, and if they remember, by chance, Taras Shevchenko, they will undoubtedly google in search of his middle name. His middle name was Grigoryevich. Eh, what will you do if Google is turned off? It is not as if they read little; they do not read at all, in our understanding.

But we had read. Oh, how we had read! We were the most readable nation in the world! We knew all the classical literature of Russia, England, France, Germany and America, better than all these nations combined. A person who did not read Dickens was not considered an intellectual among us.

We did not have Internet; there were no mobile phones, TV only showed congresses of the CPSU, harvesting, and smelting steel. Therefore, to know the world, we read. We read passionately, recklessly, binge, forgetting about food and sleep, and even forgive me such a gastronomic detail, enduring to the last to tear away from the book and go to a toilet. I am afraid that the current generation will not even understand what I mean.

Kindergarten, we are five years old, we still do not know how to read, so the teacher arranges the chairs in a circle, in the centre herself, reads to us Agnia Barto, about the bear, who was dropped to the floor, and his paw was torn off. Now he has cotton sticking out of a hole, and he is unattractive. The teacher read about the horse, whose hair was combed smoothly, about Tanya the muddler, who dropped the ball into the river. Oh, probably the ball was beautiful, yellow, with blue stripes. – Slumber you, Tanya! I would not lose such a ball. Now here you are, standing still and roaring like a fool, instead of running, grabbing a stick and get a ball from the river! – And the teacher continues to read about the unfortunate bunny, his painful fate and the evil owner; about a fat bull, who only knows that he is puffing and sighing, he broke all the boards and now he is going to fall somewhere.

But most of all I liked Gianni Rodari’s poems “What the crafts smell like?” – the whole book is one odorous sweet roll, then the brain was already disconnected and thought only about the roll. Maybe, with raisins. Or with poppy seeds. Or with jam.

Still terribly liked Berestov’s poems, isn’t it magical:

“How we study the life of sharks?

Their nature, customs and habits?

And here is how – we cry out “Attacks!”

And run away as little rabbits.”

You run, yell, the shark is on its tail is jumping after you – an intrigue, not a verse.

Or here:

“if you take all these puddles

and combine it into one,

it turns out that the puddles

Almost like the ocean.”

Imagine what a turn of events, however! Everyone wants to go to the Black sea, they wait a whole year, they save up money, and it is not always possible, but you do not need to go anywhere, you need to collect all the puddles after the rain and, voila, the black sea under the windows!

Then, we learned to read ourselves. And there was a mysterious poet ASPUSHKIN and the moon. Now I do not remember what was before – ASPUSHKIN or the moon. But then it was just some kind of magic spell:

“Through the wavy mists

the moon is sneaking.

To the sad glades

it pours light, sadly”

I read this spell to the moon, in winter, standing on the summer terrace, on the cold floor, barefoot, sticking my nose to the window and standing on tiptoe to be closer to the moon. I read it every night, before going to bed, so that the moon was not so lonely there, in a black sky. And I learned all the available verses of ASPUSHKIN and howled at the TV, in romance songs, I was grateful to him for the fact that he also loved the moon and did not leave it alone. Although ASPUSHKIN turned out to be A.S. Pushkin, but that was no longer important.

He also liked to drink tea in the winter with his old nanny, when “the storm covers the sky with darkness, twirling snow whirls”. Even all the time, he asked: “where is the mug? The heart will be more cheerful.” Our winters, too, always “howled and cried from the storm”. And I also liked to drink tea from a large mug at such moments. From this, indeed, the heart became more cheerful, especially if tea is with raspberry or currant jams.

I loved to read fairy tales to my little sister. She was only three years old, and she could not read yet, but she liked the large, varnished books, with colorful pictures. Very remarkable people wrote tales. One of them, for sure, had a big hat with a huge ball-point pen, with which he wrote his fairy tales. His name was Charles Pierrot. Or something like that. The other two were jolly brothers, laughing all the time, making faces, they were Brothers Grimm.

Then it became more serious. After reading my entire library, my curious nose was stuffed into my mother’s closet. And what am I discovering there? Shocking names! “Woe from the Wit,” “Walking along agony”, " How the steel was tempered.” My curiosity knew no bounds: how there can be woe from the wit? How can metal be tempered? People run barefoot and dousing themselves with water. Why should iron be attributed to human qualities? And who went through the agony and why?

No matter how I tried, I still could not understand who went through agony and suffering. I just liked that there were two beautiful women in the book, with exotic names: Katya and Dasha. I loved reading about beautiful women. In my mother’s room, there was a huge portrait of a beautiful woman in black, with sad eyes. Her name was Nina Chavchavadze. She was the widow of Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov, the one who wrote “Woe from the wit.” Mom said she was sad because her husband was brutally killed by angry Iranians when Alexander Sergeyevich worked there with a diplomatic mission. What a fierce, cruel death, I thought. And how could the Iranians tear such a holy man: smart and intelligent? They were probably real barbarians. And I was wildly afraid of the Iranians.

I liked “Woe from the wit”, although I didn’t understand anything there either, being eight years old. But there were many expressions that mother often used in her speech: – is it possible to chooser remote back streets for walks?, when you wander, you return home, and the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us. – Ah, that is where it all came from, I thought. I considered Griboyedov to be a member of our family, and Nina Chavchavadze – the ideal of a woman to strive.

Unlike “Walking along the agony” and “woe from the wit”, “How the steel was tempered” I read in one breath, except love scenes, which were stupid and annoying, and I skipped them. The book was understood by me, as it seemed to me then. I bowed before the courage and stamina of Pavka Korchagin, the strength, courage and endurance of the people who built the narrow-gauge railway. From this book, I understood what the meaning of willpower is, determination, betrayal, meanness. To be able to respect and appreciate the work of others, you need to be able to work yourself, be prepared to overcome difficulties, and hardships. Pavka Korchagin will become my ideal for many-many years. And only with the time comes the awareness of unnecessary and absurdity of all these victims, deprivations and the narrow-gauge railway itself.

But further, reading on the school curriculum, so to speak, joined my reading, out-of-class reading. For example, “Song of the Prophetic Oleg”: “as Prophetic Oleg is now climbing, to avenge the unreasonable Kharzas.” This immediately raises the question: who are the Kharzas, and why does Oleg want to take revenge on them? But this is not about that; there is an entirely different intrigue. This Oleg had a horse, beloved. The horse was faithful; Oleg was taken out of many battles; he was saved from many troubles. But then someone say to him that “you will get death from your horse.” Imagine the injustice in the structure of life, dishonesty and even somehow smacks of betrayal. Or maybe it was said out of jealousy, or out of envy, now no one already knows, but only Oleg ordered his horse to be taken away. He became sad and sorrow; imagine if you were told so.

Years passed, Oleg forgot to think about his horse, when he was informed that the horse had died. The horse died in sorrow, unable to withstand separation and did not say goodbye to the master. Oleg, of course, was very saddened that he was so stupidly fooled. He went to look at his favourite horse, dead and harmless. And so he stands over his horse, thinking about the injustice of life, and then a serpent crawls out of the horse’s head, stings Oleg, and he dies.

Of course, we a little incomprehensive and even offended, why Prince Oleg died such a ridiculous death. Still, he was an experienced person, suffered many battles. He could wave off this snake with a stick or a stone. The author somehow did not think of this moment, somehow, he hurried to finish his work, or maybe he was afraid of Green Peace’s anger, or he loved animals and felt sympathy for them. Only we are not aware of this. Shota Rustaveli has a more straightforward plan in this regard, in his poem “The Knight in the Tiger Skin” – in grief – everyone is crying, in joy – everyone is crying too.

However, for the current generation, to realize the importance of reading, it’s better to start not with “The Knight in the Tiger Skin”, but with Fonvizin’s play “Undergrowth,” where the young man is asked: “Is the door a noun or an adjective?”: if it exists by itself, then it is a noun, and if it is attached to the jamb, then the adjective”. “Why does the gentleman need to know geography? What for is the cabman?” Cab is the type of taxi used to be.

And since we were talking about Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin, do you, young reader, know that Fonvizin wrote his first draft version of the “Undergrowth” when he was fifteen years old? That he lived a short life, only 47 years old, was persecuted by Catherine 2, was paralyzed, but even paralyzed, he continued to write, so important it was for him.

Speaking about the importance of literary work in the life of a writer, it is worth mentioning Gogol, Nikolai Vasilievich, who wrote his Dead Souls for almost 17 years, burned and rewritten twice the second volume, brought himself to exhaustion and died at the age of 43 years. The same can be said about the already mentioned earlier Taras Grigorievich Shevchenko, sent to the army, because of his books, where he was forbidden to write.

Almost all writers and poets somehow paid for their books severe price, were lonely, persecuted, suffered from diseases and poverty. But they continued to write, dear reader, for you and me.

Or here is Conan Doyle. Well, how can you compare modern Hollywood detectives with Sherlock Holmes? You are alone, in a vast empty apartment, half-dark and half-gloomy, where everything creaks, cries and drips, and you sit and read. You are afraid to lower your legs to go to the kitchen to drink some water, to moisten your throat, which was dry from fear. It seems to you that undoubtfully colourful ribbons will crawl out from under all sofas, beds, ventilation systems; and evil muzzles of the Baskervilles dogs will climb on you.

And when we found out that Edgar Allan Poe was the mentor of Conan Doyle, we surely read his story about a rabid gorilla who had escaped from the zoo, cut into pieces an adult, and put him in a drain pipe. And for a long time later we hid prickly-cutting objects and tried to turn off the lights early, so as not to attract wild monkeys “by the light”.

And the hit of Yesenin:

“I am a Moscow mischievous, reveler

throughout the Tversky district,

Every dog in the alley

knows my light gait.”

Every tattered horse

by head nods towards me.

I am a good buddy for animals.

Every my verse heals the soul of the beast.”

Something like this, I’m writing as a keepsake without looking at Google. This hit, in our time, was much more popular than “Twenty dollars in my pocket.”

For lovers of nature was Prishvin. Prishvin, what a surname! Cherries have come! And then I immediately recall Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich: “The Cherry Orchard.” Blossoming of apple trees and cherries in the spring. Inexpressible aroma. There are also recalled “Three Sisters”, “Chestnut”, “Horse’s surname”, “Chameleon”. Ah, no one from the current generation will remember that Chekhov’s pseudonym was “Antosha Chekhonte”, that the words belong to him: “Everything should be beautiful in a person: face, clothes, soul, thoughts …” “Chestnut” – was the name of a dog. I recommend it to young animal lovers.

And this is the tragic story of little Nellie, from the novel by Charles Dickens’s “The Shop of Antiquities”? Her death is shocking much more when you are 12 years old. At this age, the girls read out “Dinka” and “Fourth Height” and compared themselves with Dinka and Gulya, or Seraphima from “The Great Confrontation of Mars” and many girls certainly wanted to be like the heroines of these books. The boys preferred science fiction, or, at worst, Robin Hood, The Ballad of the Valiant Knight Aivengo, and Richard the Lionheart. Girls also liked those novels, because they were written about the valiant knights and their “Ladies of Heart”, for the sake of which feats were accomplished.