8. HOME

A LITTLE railroad station in a small city in the south of Russia. There was nothing unusual about it except that this was the Astation of the city of my birth, from which, fifteen years before, I had set out for Moscow to begin my adult life.

I was careful not to enter through the passenger entrance, where they were checking tickets. I went to the end where freight cars were standing and found a small gate used by railroad employees.

It was early on a February morning, there was snow everywhere, and I felt chilly without a coat. A shaky old trolley came by. I got into the empty car with its ice-encrusted windows, bought a ticket, and went to the front platform where it was colder, but I could look out and see the city.

Nothing had changed in the fifteen years I had been away. Not one new house. The streets, except for a few of the central ones, were still paved with cobblestones and just as dirty as ever. The only new feature was that the store windows had been filled up with bricks in case of bombardment. And the trees which had been quite small when I had gone away were now so tall that their branches met above the street.

I got off the trolley and began to walk toward home. Everything was the same, but older and more ragged: houses begging for repairs, sagging fences, broken brick-paved paths. Even the holes in the paths seemed to be the same.

I passed few people. They had worried faces and were dressed more poorly than ever. No one paid any attention to my strange, coatless appearance. A sanitary barrel, on a cart pulled by an old horse clattered by me, spreading a very bad smell.

At last my street. Here is my gate and the yard where I played when I was very, very small. I enter the yard. How tiny it has become! That big tree by the house – I planted it myself once. And the house with the closed green shutters, covered with ice, grown rickety. Two unfamiliar dogs are barking.

My heart is beating fast. I knock on the shutter and go to the door. A minute passes, two minutes.

‘Who’s there?’ says a voice that is so familiar.

‘It’s me, Vladimir. Open the door, Mother!’

I hear quick movements behind the door. It opens and I enter the house. My mother, almost fainting, hugs me and cries.

We go up two steps to the tiny kitchen, into the next room, and sit down together. We can’t find the words we need.

‘Why didn’t you telegraph me that you were coming?’ my mother said.

‘I have very little money, Mother.’

‘Why look, you haven’t any wraps on! Where’s your coat, and your things?’

‘I haven’t any. They’re all gone.’

‘How? Where? Oh, well, you can tell me later – Wait.’ And she stared at me, her eyes wet with tears. She had changed terribly. At the age of fifty she already looked very old. Her face was crisscrossed with wrinkles and her hair was almost all grey. She seemed to be shorter – or perhaps it was I who had grown.

‘You know, George was killed.’ She pronounced the words with trembling lips and hugged me again. My heart contracted. My brother would be twenty-two now, but I remembered him as a happy seven-year-old boy.

‘Somewhere between Kiev and Zhitomir, last summer. I wrote you. Didn’t you get my letters?’

‘No, I didn’t get them.’

‘How did that happen? And about your father?’

‘I got one letter, from which I gathered—’

‘Yes, he was arrested in the spring of ‘38. They didn’t try him, but they gave him ten years in a concentration camp. They sent him to the Pechorsky camps in the northern Urals. There haven’t been any letters – I don’t know if he’s still alive.’

‘He may be, Mother. See, I’m all right.’

‘You’re the only one left to me, Vladimir. I blame your father for disowning you after your arrest. They called him to the N.K.V.D. office and told him to sign a paper that he was breaking all ties with his son as an enemy of the people. They threatened him and he signed. Three years later they took him anyway.’

‘It’s all right, Mother. This is the third time he’s been imprisoned. With God’s help, he’ll live through it.’

‘No, I doubt it. He was very sick when they took him.’

We were silent for a minute.

‘And you, Mother, are you still working?’

‘Of course, what else?’ She was surprised. ‘I teach in three schools at once. There are a lot of classes. We work in two shifts because half the schools have been taken over for hospitals. But what are we talking for? You need to wash up, and have something to eat!’

And she began to fuss around in the manner of all the mothers in the world who see their sons after a long separation.

My mother was making a show of energy; I could see that. She had been used to working for many years and that kept her going, although she had become a shadow of the mother I used to know. And as for grief, there was so much of it that it had disappeared somewhere in the depths of her being and did not show in her everyday existence. Otherwise it would have been impossible to live.

My brother’s clothes fitted me fairly well, and I changed into them after taking a thorough bath in the kitchen.

My mother kept looking nervously at her watch.

‘Is it time for school?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got to go, Vladimir. I can’t be late. If you miss a class without a doctor’s certificate they send you to court. You’d better get some sleep. I’ll be home by evening.’

After she left I couldn’t sleep. I went out for a walk. I met two old friends outside whom I remembered from early childhood, but there was no conversation. After greeting me and expressing their happiness that I was home again, they avoided looking in my eyes and quickly said good-bye, murmuring excuses.

I visited some relatives, my mother’s brother and sister. They were genuinely glad to see me. My cousins had become grown-up girls; their brothers were in the army. And their life?! It was the same as it had been fifteen years before, only a little drabber and a little harder. But the young girls did not feel this and tried to make the most of what they had. Both of them were members of the Komsomol; both were studying in the medical institute, where they were preparing to be wartime doctors. They both had admirers from among their childhood friends.

I tried not to tell them about what I had been through. It was plain that they both wanted and were afraid to hear how things actually were in the prisons and concentration camps. But probably they did not want to know very badly. I led the conversation to current affairs, the state of the city, and the evacuation which people were already whispering about, although the Germans were still far away, near Rostov.

I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I was a stranger among my own family, that I could not shake the accursed past in the Kolyma from my shoulders. Time must go by before I could return to my old fife.