Christened With Crosses

MOTHER BRONYA, TAKE ME ON AS A SPY

MOTHER BRONYA, TAKE ME ON AS A SPY

The first conscious memory in my life is linked with the ceiling, Maybe I was ill frequently, or there was some other reason …

I was born out of fear: my father Stepan was arrested for involvement in cybernetics, and my mother gave birth to me two months early.

I liked to lie in bed and travel, looking at the three-layered ornate cornice that decorated the high ceiling in my room. I could look at its fantastic curves for hours, with their strange stems and leaves, and in my mind I would travel along the winding spaces between them, as if through a labyrinth, and if the weather was bad outside, I could hide under the largest of them. At times when it was light, and especially when the sun was shining, I would happily swim over the surface of the ceiling into its center, to the rich baroque rosette, and along the old chandelier with three angels, each of which held three candle-holders with lamps, and I would sink down, tired, back to my bed.

My second memory is linked with baptism and the Catholic Church on Nevsky Prospekt. All of my senses already take part in this memory. That is to say, I don’t understand what is happing, but I absorb what is going on. The priest is doing something with me, boys in white are swinging and pouring smoke from shiny metal toys that look like Christmas decorations. There is a lot of white, a great deal of white – clothes, flowers, light. The smell of smoke is unfamiliar and distant, and it seems to me that everyone is in a bit of a hurry, and that there is something unnaturally anxious about all of this. I usually smile a lot, even suspiciously so for my mother Bronya, but I am not smiling.

I also remember the steps that lead to the church. This was my first ordeal in life (after all, I don’t remember my father’s arrest). For some reason I was forced to walk up them myself – with enormous difficulty, however I could: with my legs, on my knees, with the help of my hands, by rolling up them… I was very young at that time, evidently.

This was the first social entrance in my life, the first theater in my life, the first light in my life, the first music, and the first, still unrecognized love. If this hadn’t been in my memory, then my fate would probably have been different.

It was 1939 when I finally started to talk. I started talking in late autumn, and only in Polish. For Mother Bronya was a Pole, and my Russian father was in prison at the Big House. Before that I only smiled when people tried to talk to me, and in general I smiled more than I needed to. I sat there, smeared in everything imaginable, and smiled… And suddenly I started talking, and I said quite a lot. Mother Bronya, of course, was happy, and even organized a Polish meal: with lentils, carrots, and guests.

The next morning they came for her. First the janitor Faina, a Tatar, came into the corridor, and then came a polite military man with a cardboard folder, and someone after him. The polite military man asked her surname and Christian name, and asked several times whether she was Polish, and the others began to rifle through her things, the tables and beds. I tried to tell them that we did not have any bedbugs, but I lisped, and spoke in Polish. Mother asked Faina to call Janek from the first floor, so that he could take me. When Janek arrived, Bronya blessed me with the Mother of God and kissed me. Felya, my elder brother, sat by the window on a chair the whole time and silently rocked back and forth. He was already strange by then.

Faina, the Tatar, took pity on me, a premature child, and gave me to the Poles on the first floor “for safe-keeping”. She soon also brought Felya, who was very upset: he hadn’t been taken to the Big House, and was told that we were too young to be spies, but would later be sent to some orphanage.

Yes, I was very young. With my Godfather Yanek, a Polish cabinet maker, I travelled under many tables, couches and bunks, and closely studied everything under tables and sundry other “underneaths”, and once in one cranny under a table I found something that was hidden from everyone, and was punished for it.

I must say that I liked Yanek’s profession of cabinetmaker. I especially liked the wood shavings. They looked wonderful, and smelt delicious. I even tried to eat them.

I also remember Felya, after he was injured from beatings at school for his father being a spy, standing by Janek’s large geographical map, running his finger along it and trying to find where our father and Mother Bronya had been taken. Since that time I have always felt a certain hostility towards school. Janek said that our father and mother had been taken to the Big House.

What was this house? And why were spies taken there?

I imagined that in a dense forest with super tall trees, like in the fairytale of “Tom Thumb”, the Big House stood, and inside it lived brothers and sisters, who were spies. And what spying was, no one knew except them. This was a big secret. And this was why the forest was dense, and the house was Big. And little kids like me weren’t taken there, but I still wanted to go. I was left all alone, as my brother Felya died in a madhouse from pneumonia.

I was sent to a state house, and since that time my life became a part of the state. My ignorance of Russian forced me to keep silent again, as my Polish lisping irritated my class mates, and was dangerous for me: they thought that I was mocking them, and I became dumb again for a long time. We were moved from city to city, from west to east, away from the war, and I ended up in Siberia, near the city of Omsk. All the talking boys around me shouted loudly in Russian and even – so that I would understand – swore, and sometimes fought with me:

“What are you hissing for, snake, speak Russian!”

So I learned Russian, and didn’t speak at all until I was four and a half. I agreed with everyone, but didn’t say anything, “acting like Mu-Mu”, pretending to be a mute1. I started speaking Russian unexpectedly even for myself during the war.

1 Mute like the deaf-mute master of the dog Mu-Mu in the famous Turgenev story of the same name.

We were fed from mugs – there weren’t any plates. There were only metal mugs and spoons. Six people sat at a table – six mugs, and a seventh mug with bread cut into strips that stuck out of it vertically. Soup, then the main course, if there was one, and tea – all from the same mug. And this was considered normal. They let us into the dining hall when all the mugs were on the table, and until then, a horde of hungry boys crowded around the door. The doors were opened, and like animals we rushed to our mugs. Once, a pimpled, sniveling “fly-by”, or outsider, was put at our table, and this boy, who ate faster than all of us, unexpectedly licked his dirty finger in front of everyone, and began dipping it in all our mugs. And suddenly I said something loudly in Russian – I didn’t understand it myself, but it was something to do with his mother. The dirty boy froze in astonishment, and the rest were afraid: I didn’t talk, after all, I was deaf-mute – and suddenly I started talking, and quite impressively. Since then I spoke Russian and gradually forgot my first language.

But I’ve become distracted from the most important thing, what worried us orphans of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) at the time, and the problems that we solved among ourselves:

“Can leaders be people, or do they have to be only leaders, and do they have to have whiskers?”

“Who’s better: a spy or an enemy of the people? Or is it all the same? In any event, we’re all together here.”

When boys met for the first time, they asked:

“Are you a spy?”

“No, I’m an enemy of the people.”

“But what if you’re both at the same time, like me for example ?”

And also:

“Why is comrade Lenin a grandfather? He didn’t have grandchildren, after all. Maybe because he has a beard, or because he’s dead?”

“Comrade Stalin is the friend of all children. So that’s means he’s our friend too?”

Our eldest boy couldn’t stand it any longer, and asked the teacher about Stalin. First she got very scared, and then grabbed him by the collar and dragged him to the guard on duty – we heard him crying loudly there. And there were many, many more questions.

I personally believed that spying was not such a bad thing. My Russian father Stepan couldn’t have been bad. He was very fine and handsome – look at the photograph. And my dear mother gently sang me lullabies: “Sleep, my darling child, God protect your sleep…”, or:

Z popielnika na Edwasia

Iskiereczka mruga,

Chodź! Opowiem ci bajeczkę,

Bajka będzie długa2.

2 A spark out of the ash-box

Winks at Eduard.

Come! I’ll tell a story

The story will be long. (Polish)

O Mother Bronya, take me on as a spy. I’ll talk to you in Polish.