Christened With Crosses

STATE HOUSE

STATE HOUSE

Pictures from remote years, which once seemed ordinary and uninteresting to us, drill themselves into our memory as time goes by, revealing themselves in all kinds of unexpected details.

In the savage times when millions of adults were fighting to the death in the European part of Russia because of two whiskered leaders, far away in Siberia everything was calm. Our life in a model orphanage of the NKVD, hidden in the village of Chernoluchi on the bank of the Irtysh River in remote Siberia, was nothing remarkable. We lived our lives in a state house, as the people said, but in warmth and under the roof of a solid four-story brick building – even if it was a former holding prison, which had become too crowded for adults and was given over for use as an orphanage. The institution became popularly known as the “children’s crosses”. Traces of feeding troughs remained on the doors of the wards, and prison bars had yet to be removed from some of the windows. But they didn’t bother us, on the contrary, and we managed to hide things between the frame and the bars. Our regime was very strict, almost prison-like: wake-up call, exercises, face washing, breakfast, study or work, lunch, sleep, brainwashing, supper, toilet hour, and sleep again – as prescribed by the last person to wear pince-nez in the Soviet Union, the marshal of the NKVD, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria. But we slept in our own beds with sheets on them, and on Communist holidays and on the birthday of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin – the 21st of December every year – we got without fail a piece of bread with butter on it for breakfast.

Everything was fine and dandy. The children of sentenced parents were called foster-children, and the supervisors were called fosterers. We called the guard “comrade watchman”, and the cell was attractively called an isolation ward. Above us all, like a star on a cap, hung the boss, Toad. She was the boss of the bosses: “you can’t approach her from behind, and face to face you’ll fall over”.

Officially, the inhabitants of the orphanage were divided into four levels: the eldest, the older boys, the boys of medium age, and the youngest. The age different between the levels was two to three years. Unofficially, according to the internal situation, the most important older guys called themselves dudes, and the next eldest were called lads. They lived together on the fourth floor and occupied several wards. We, the medium aged, preschoolers from six to eight, were called pipsqueaks, and lived in two wards on the third floor. Opposite us, across the staircase, also in two wards, lived the little kids – under the age of six, in our language called mites. The half of the floor that belonged to them was locked up, and we only saw them in the canteen or the yard, and through barred windows. On the doors of the wards, our names were scratched: dudes, lads, pipsqueaks, mites.

The left side of the second floor was occupied by the canteen, or as we called it the gobblery or scoffery, and the kitchen. On the right, below us, was the large assembly hall named after Dzerzhinsky, with a portrait of Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky on the central wall. Below the portrait was a long presidium table, with a red tablecloth on it, and rows of benches by the table. This hall was almost always empty. We were only allowed inside on holidays, when we were made to stand in line during ceremonies and visits by bosses. Behind the wall with the portrait of the goat-bearded Felix, there was another decent-sized room – for meetings of the fosterers and bosses of the orphanage. None of us had been in this room, but we knew that on weekends and holidays, the guards got drunk and celebrated behind the back of their legendary leader. On the side walls of the hall, two enormous paintings hung in frames – “Stalin in the Turukhansky region”, and “The Young Leader among the workers of Baku”, which the dudes called “Gangsters’Assembly” or “Offloading of Rights”.

On the way to the canteen between the first and second floor, on a heavy pedestal that was painted to look like dark red marble, there was a white plaster bust of Grandpa Lenin surrounded by flower pots, which we secretly called “Baldy in the garden”. Before Victory Day it was suddenly painted bronze, and the criminal hooligans immediately renamed it “Bronze tank on holiday”.

The first floor belonged entirely to the orphanage board and its departments. To the right, by the main entrance to the reception, there was a corridor with the guards’ search room, where boys were examined in line after they came back to the orphanage after taking a walk or working. But we adapted to these searches and deftly hid the valuable things we had found outside, by handing them along down the line.

Behind the search room, in a former cell, there was an isolation room and sanitary checkpoint, where new kids were taken – they were kept in quarantine for several days, given treatment and then sent up to the wards.

In the next two wards there was a medical section – one of the most terrifying places in the orphanage, in our language the croakery or kaputka. Few of the children who were taken there returned upstairs. This section was led by a nurse called Absolute Drip. Her assistant, a deaf-mute nursing aide, a dirty animal whose stench killed flies, did not clean up, but simply spread filth around. In summer, the orphans who were doing forced weeding in the shed ate unwashed vegetables out of hunger, and died in Kapa’s section from intestinal diseases. Once, after an excess number of children died at the medical section, some commission of officers with epaulets came along and gave the local bosses a dressing down. After they left, we saw the head of the orphanage cursing in foul woman’s language and punching Kromeshnitsa’s savage eyes with her pudgy fists.

The corridor ended with two cells. They had been prisoners’ cells in the preliminary holding area, and remained so, nothing there had changed. In one of the cells, a strange inscription had been scratched on the wall a long time ago: “Some get a tator, others get a lator”. Among the pipsqueaks, lads and even the dudes, there were rumors that these cells were haunted by the ghosts of two tormented prisoners of the consignment prison, and that at night they came out onto our staircase, and passing Baldy, also a former prisoner, they went up to the second and third floors. God forbid you should fall into their clutches – they would take you away from this world to the next. We often heard some kind of prolonged groans and strange howls coming from the staircase at night. Perhaps it was just the wind.