Little Zinnobers

Chapter 6

COVENANT

I was six when my younger sister was born. Right there, in the maternity hospital on Vasilevskiy Island, she caught golden staph. Or to be precise, they infected her with it: all new-borns were bathed in the same tub. As far as my mother recalls, this was neither irresponsibility on the part of the nurses, nor carelessness on the part of the doctors. Later, when mothers and babies found themselves in the Paediatrician Institute Hospital, the doctors treating them justified the actions of their maternity hospital colleagues as tantamount to a scientific experiment which fell to the babies’ silent lot. You might expect this explanation would have fanned flames of indignation, but 1963 was still a very ‘scientific’ year. Space exploration, physics, ‘big chemistry’—they all spawned their heroes, so the explanation passed as acceptable. The contagion was methodically purged from the children’s blood during the three summer months, but the conquered disease left its mark: for another ten or eleven years, right up until around 1974 when I finished school, it made its presence felt, tracing symmetrical rashes on my sister’s little arms and legs, or, in acute attacks, a painful, enflamed crust on her face. It was called diathesis. They dried it out with ‘brilliant green,’ so from time to time my sister went about spattered from head to toe in symmetrical green spots. The scientific experiment undertaken by the maternity hospital doctors left its mark on me, too, although I ended up not in the Paediatrician Institute Hospital, but at the kindergarten summer camp. Before the maternity hospital doctors’ ‘voluntary experiment,’ as our parents put it, I was a stay-at-home kid, I stayed home during the long summer holidays.

The kindergarten to which I was assigned had a summer camp in Ushkovo, a dacha village on former Finnish territory. Wooden billets nailed to the trunks of Finnish pine trees were a reminder of the days when Finnish cuckoo snipers climbed those same trees. We learnt about those strange cuckoos from our camp mother’s elder daughter, who lived with her mother in the little plywood cabin-c*m-barn in the furthest corner of the camp. We had a very vague impression of the pine cuckoos. The mother, Larissa Lvovna, worked in our group for older children in shifts (morning/evening), taking turns with another camp mother, Nina Ivanovna. But we loved Larissa Lvovna more, firstly because her daughter befriended us, and secondly because in the evenings, when it was her shift, she would sing songs with us: about a cricket behind the stove, about a little brown button, and about Lyonka Korolyev. When Larissa Lvovna took the evening shift, and it was she who woke us after our afternoon nap, the dormitory would ring with shouts: “Hurray! Larissa Lvovna!” She never cut short our boundless delight. Quite carried away, some of the children, hiding behind the chorus of voices, would change her difficult patronymic, yelping: Larissa Vol'na!3 She did not put a stop to that, either. Larissa Lvovna was expecting. Her daughter, who would chat with our group during her mother’s shift, let us in on this secret, too, so as we sang about little Lyonka Korolyev, we would shoot sidelong glances at Larissa’s belly; the daughter had briefed us. The ditty about Lyonka seemed linked to this belly, as if Larissa were carrying a baby boy fated to perish in the war. She did indeed give birth to a son, in the autumn. Nina Ivanovna was old and did not sing songs with us, but we loved her all the same because she would tell us about Communism.

In the mornings, after breakfast, holding hands in pairs, we would form a crocodile and set off, beyond the camp grounds to the sea, the Gulf of Finland. Along the sandy track past the high wooden enclosure fences of other grounds, then along wayside ditches, their stagnant water covered in lamellar duckweed. The air was heavy with the smell of wild rose bushes wilted by the sun. Small stones crunched under our sandals. The long double needles of the Finnish pines stuck into our soles. We would cross the main road, stamping the needles we had picked up into the weak, sun-softened tarmac which smelt of tar. Beyond the strip of tarmac, a vista of sand dunes, lying in ridges at the edge of the Gulf. Nina Ivanovna would point out a spot for us in the shade under the pines. Using some method known only to those in the medical profession, the nurse would calculate the most auspicious time and allocate us some brief moments of sunshine.

The older group lived in an old, two-storey house just like any other house in any Leningrad resort. The boys’ dorms were on the ground floor, the girls’ on the first. Before retiring to her quarters, the camp mother going off duty would pop in to wish us all good night. First the boys’ dorm would quieten down, then we would hear the creaking of wooden stairs. We were already lying in bed, our hands obediently folded. She would do the rounds of the dorms, then sit herself on the chair in the central corridor. The doors of all three dorms opened onto that corridor, so, settled in her vantage point, she would listen as we fell asleep. Both camp mothers observed this ritual to the letter, no personal touches. Each sat, consumed by her own thoughts, but while the thoughts of Larissa Lvovna, which most likely hovered over her future little boy, were so personal she could not and would not share them with sleepy six-year-olds, it soon became apparent that Nina Ivanovna’s thoughts in that dusk hour could quite innocently be shared with children tired out by the long, bustling day. “When I sit like this on this chair,” she began one evening in a quiet, melodious voice, as if beginning a fairy-tale, “I am thinking that the beautiful time called Communism will soon arrive.” She said this with great conviction, as though she were talking about something certain and close at hand, like the dawn of the next day. As if we had but to close our eyes, slip through the darkness in our sleep, unnoticed, and a new happy time would dawn by itself. “Close your little eyes.” We listened to her, eyes closed. “This will be a time when everyone is happy: you, and your parents, and your camp mothers.” “And how about kindergarten? Will there be kindergartens?” “Yes, yes,” she would assure us. “But I don’t want kindergarten!” “Then there won’t be. There will be kindergartens for whoever wants them, and not for anyone who doesn’t.” “How about going to summer camp?” “Everyone will go to summer camp.” “And Mummy?” “Yes, and Mummy, and all the mummies.” From then on, when it was her shift and Nina Ivanovna sat herself down on the chair in the central corridor, somebody would always pipe up: “Please, tell us!” So again and again, adding new details and always referring to science, of course – as though that reference could strengthen the dreams of six-year-olds – she would tell us about that future time, a time akin to our dacha days, smelling of sun-baked wild roses, soft tarmac tar and the fresh water of the Gulf.

After waiting until everyone had fallen asleep, the camp mother would head for her little wooden cabin, leaving us to the night nanny, who patrolled our dorms like a night-watchman, then lay herself to sleep on the sofa right by the main entrance. I closed my eyes. For a while, dreamy inertia would conjure the sandy tracks, green burdock above the ditches, the uneven crowns of the tall pines – everything which tomorrow would bring, if I could but slip through the insignificant night-time. Night-time encroached on my eyelids with every second, ready to close in, but at the very last minute, it swerved. Because that other time would come, the time of my night nannies. Clad in white gowns, plump, their faces flat, almost indiscernible; ‘faceless’ as I would put it now. They were like the kindergarten cooks. The cooks never came out into the dining room. I saw them cooking, once, stirring something in huge cauldrons marked with red letters and numbers.

The night nannies didn’t sit in the chair in the central corridor the three dormitories opened onto. They didn’t need this common vantage point, since all the children were asleep, waiting unawares for insignificant night-time to pass. The night nannies were mine, teaching none but me. They would sit on the edge of my bed so lightly it didn’t even squeak under their plump, faceless bodies.

Pull your nightie as high as you can, right up under your armpits. Lie on your back carefully so as not to wet the covers. Now you can fall asleep, but not with the light, unnoticeable sleep which carries you to the morning; no, with the short, brief not-until-morning sleep. But should you sleep through to the morning – the night nannies think neither of their children nor of Communism – both the other nannies come, the day one and the night one, and both start shouting that you wet the bed again, that you’re a freak, not like other children. “This one only knows how to piss herself! Look at her! Take off all your piss-drenched stuff, and scram! Now we’ve got to wash everything after her! Eh, bloody freaks!”

Now I’m waking up, my hand pats something wet. Be careful, don’t wake anyone. They’ll laugh if you do. Slip out of bed, blanket to one side. Rejoice that your nightie is dry, rejoice that the window is open and the night is as dry as the nightie. Rejoice that the window ledge is low enough to clamber on to, rejoice that your legs are dangling out of the window, that your hands are holding the sheet. Patiently, not letting your eyes close, wave, wave, wave your wet stain until it turns yellow. Whatever you do, don’t close your eyes, you have neither parents, nor nannies. Until it is dry, until the yellow stain, until their inevitable pale dawn, until the dance of the autumn leaves, until you see stars… So you sit in fear and trembling in the open window, the ground below your feet, the sky above your head, the boys below, the girls behind, and you don’t dare fall asleep because the wet stain still shines tallow yellow, and no-one but us will come to you, because you are a freak, but we are compassionate, and so shall it be forever.

They would leave with dawn’s first light, and I would climb down from the window ledge, deftly spread the sheet, and fall asleep. When the sun rises, they are not by my bed. I sleep utterly freely, unnoticeably, lightly, waiting for the inevitable morning – with the others. They saved me again, and will not return before nightfall.