2
The Old Arbat, the street where the Noskovs lived, was one of the oldest, most historical and beautiful streets in Moscow. However, in his earliest childhood, Mitya did not get to see any of it much. His world was confined to the apartment. More precisely, to his room, which was also the living room, and the kitchen, where he saw Yelena Viktorovna cook and clean. There was also a narrow space between the wall and the bookshelf, where he liked to stand and tug at the loose piece of wallpaper, to reveal old newspaper. Mitya did not know which time, exactly, it came from. There were some young women in old-fashioned dresses in front of a movie theater, and the text below that advertised the theater’s opening.
Having the boy at home was a hindrance for all concerned, but there was no other choice. Mitya would get sick right when the grown-ups attempted to place him in a kindergarten. It was as if the boy learned about the plan, and absorbed the bacteria from the air in the apartment with all the urgency of his little, weak lungs. The minute Mama came to him to offer help packing up for kindergarten, Mitya responded with a thread of brown snot hanging from his nose.
Whenever he had the flu, Mitya lay down on the living room sofa that doubled as his bed, swaddled in many blankets to sweat it out. Sticking to her promise, Alyssa Vitalyevna nursed him. She brought Mitya glasses of warm milk with raspberry jam, vodka, and pepper, and put her lips against his forehead to measure his temperature. Everything around Mitya swam in a fever, and halfway between dreaming and waking, he distinguished his babushka’s soothing whispers. Sometimes she read Pushkin to him. Sometimes she read Tolstoy. Sometimes she talked on the phone. Sometimes she hissed at the TV screen, where another soap opera was unwrapping.
When Yelena Viktorovna came home in the evening, she relieved Alyssa Vitalyevna. She lacked her mother’s force of spirit and had a much grimmer outlook on her son’s fate. She knew she couldn’t have more children—she had had a hysterectomy—and so Mitya was her only bet on motherhood. She enjoyed him when he was an infant, but the older he grew, the more she realized that her son was becoming an entity separate from her. She did not like that. She had no control over her temperamental mother, and though she achieved a bit more success with her husband, controlling him took careful planning and skillful manipulation. And since a foreign object had overtaken her toddler’s body, he simply became a ticking time bomb, over which she had no say.
So Mama came up with the best idea she could. She came to terms with his inevitable death. “I can’t do anything, so I’ll do my best in the circumstances, and he will pass away, slowly,” she mentioned to a colleague. The role of a mother who had lost her child in his prime was, to her, a romantic one, noble, one she could learn to enjoy. So even while the child was still alive, she began practicing.
When nursing sick Mitya, Yelena Viktorovna started out sweet and dreamy. She would talk about Mitya as a baby, perfect in every way. But grief was always lurking around the corner. If she stayed by Mitya’s side long enough, Yelena Viktorovna mentioned the future loss, her whispers breaking down into sobs. “Bedniy moy detochka,” she cried. My poor baby.
Mitya did not die. And then, shortly before he was four, he made it out of the apartment, to kindergarten. Mama’s hand firmly held his as they made their way through the 7:00 AM dusk of the Old Arbat. The world lay around them in its sleepy splendor. Mitya raised his eyes to see the bluish-yellow sky above the buildings of painted yellow brick. He saw a woman on a balcony, her ample breasts spilling across the railing. A man shook violently from behind. Mitya told his mother of the dangerous situation, but Mama led him farther and told him not to look.
The children in kindergarten were the first ones Mitya had encountered closely. His overzealous parents were not pulling him away from the kids this time. The realization that there were real lives outside their apartment, and that people functioned there, and formed their own opinions of him, was a strange discovery. He did not know what to make of the people he met. Two women, Olga and Yevgeniya, took care of the children in his group and helped everyone change into room shoes. All the children were wearing chunky tights like Mitya, in various muted colors, with shorts or dresses or nothing but a sweater, always sagging and bubbling at the knee.
Mitya had spent the morning staring at himself in the mirror that hung by the entrance to the apartment. The tights, the shorts, the flannel of his shirt were all so sad, and his ugliness petrified him. Yelena Viktorovna had cut his hair and she wasn’t any good. She told him not to scratch the red rash on his cheeks, but he couldn’t resist. Now, he saw other children as ugly as him. The kindergarten was enveloped in the dim fluorescent light and in the sour cabbage smell that emanated from the kitchen. It seemed so deliciously disgusting that his little heart started beating faster. He was fascinated with the symmetry of existence.
As Olga and Yevgeniya helped him change into the brown Mary Janes, they summoned a small girl that Mitya had seen before.
“Your mother said Zhenya lives in your building, so you’ll be friends,” Olga said. “Zhenya, you know everything; show Mitya around.”
Zhenya looked at him with the eyes of a calf. She had uneven bangs and green snot in her nose. He knew that her father was in the city police, militsia.
“Zhenya’s mother is our cook, so you listen to her,” Yevgeniya told Mitya with a smirk. “By the way, Zhenya, can you please tell your mother to cook us some green instead of all that cabbage?”
Zhenya stared, still silent.
“She means money,” Olga explained. “Our wages are too low; she should start cooking up some rubles or, even better, bucks so that we can live! Otherwise, we’ll have to start prostituting ourselves!”
Mitya did not know what “prostituting” meant, but he knew that it was impossible to cook money. Otherwise his mother would be doing that instead of complaining about wages, which had been going down lately. Zhenya shrugged and put a finger up her nostril, right into the green.
She did not heed the instructions and did not show Mitya anything. She kept to herself throughout breakfast, class time, drawing time, and outside time, and barely spoke. Mitya started to suspect she didn’t like him.
Mitya didn’t feel like talking to the other children, but it seemed to be the purpose of kindergarten, so he decided to try during playtime.
“Can I be the mother of this doll?” Mitya asked a ponytailed girl playing house.
“You’re a durak,” she responded loudly. “Only girls can be mothers.”
Mitya had never thought about it, but it made sense. His mother was a girl. He sat down on the bench, watching the others frolic with naked dolls, whose hair looked like loofah sponges, and misshapen plush animals. Suddenly, Zhenya, who was left out of the game too, gestured for him to follow her. Because there was nothing better to do, and out of curiosity, Mitya did.
They went into what must have been a bathroom. At least, there were tiles on the walls and potties on the floor. There were twenty of them, all positioned in a circle. The realization crept into Mitya’s head: one of the minders, Olga or Yevgeniya—he wasn’t sure which—had mentioned that there was to be toilet time. Mitya imagined the children sitting on the potties in a circle, and something started tugging at his stomach. Whenever Alyssa Vitalyevna disliked something, she said it wasn’t “dignified.” This setup wasn’t.
Meanwhile, Zhenya, as silent as ever, went up to him. She pulled her tights down and showed him what lay beneath (she was not wearing underwear, unlike Mitya): two folds, a duck’s mouth, bunny ears. Mitya was fascinated. He had something completely different inside his tights: swollen, outward, rounded.
“Why do you have a different thing?” he asked. It was just the two of them, and he didn’t expect Zhenya to answer him.
“I’m a girl, and you’re a boy,” she said, her voice oddly guttural for such a small body.
Mitya saw that Zhenya had green snot in her nose again, slowly climbing down out of one nostril. He watched, not sure if he was to look into the nose, or down there. He had never before considered the things inside his pants, though they tickled nicely sometimes. But now, when Zhenya revealed hers to him with her utter conviction, he realized that this couldn’t be normal. It couldn’t be a thing people did all the time. And yet it beguiled him.
As plainly as she had revealed it, Zhenya pulled her tights back on and led him back to the playroom, where the house was in full play. Boys pretended to come back from work, to dinners cooked by girls, to kiss their doll children. Mitya looked at everyone with a newfound curiosity. Boys had outie things, and girls had innie things. There were no other distinctions, as far as he could see. Boys wore shorts more often, and girls, dresses. Girls had longer hair. Boys were more often acknowledged, and heard. Not Mitya, though. He spent the rest of the day silently, watching, pensive, trying to understand. He observed children through playtime and during mealtime, as they ate the disgusting food that smelled like boiled cabbage. He didn’t want to eat it but forced himself to, so as not to offend Zhenya by refusing her mother’s labors.
During lunch hour, not able to figure out if he was allowed to go to the collective bathroom for individual concern, he pooped his pants. Olga and Yevgeniya found out and reluctantly washed him off with household soap in a sink. His mother had not packed him extra clothes. While his freshly washed tights, shorts, and briefs dried on the radiator, he had to wear his shirt on his bottom: legs inside sleeves, his privates, suddenly so full of meaning, dangling in the buttoned-up neckhole.
Olga and Yevgeniya left before Yelena Viktorovna picked Mitya up. They reminded him to tell his mother about his little accident. Mitya didn’t. Why would he ever speak of something so undignified?
The next day Mitya had the stomach flu. He wasn’t sure if it was from the kindergarten food or the thought of it, but it abruptly ended his kindergarten career. The grown-ups considered Mitya old and self-sufficient enough to be able to stay at home on his own.
Mitya was alone in the apartment when the putsch started. The word reminded him of cabbage, the smell of kindergarten. Maybe it was because it sounded similar to the word puchit. Puchit meant that someone had gas in their stomach and was about to fart. He turned the TV on to watch something, and there was ballet on all three channels. With nothing better to do, Mitya set out to explore the secret lives of his parents and grandmother.
Going through Dmitriy Fyodorovich’s stuff was not fun. Everything he kept was connected to the army in one way or another. There were his medals, photographs of him with his buddies, his army electric razor in a travel case. And of course, his set of army clothes, which he wore for celebrations, including portyanki, long pieces of fabric that soldiers used instead of socks, wrapping them around their feet. There were photographs of Dmitriy Fyodorovich as a boy, too, with his brother. The brother, Uncle Seryozha, had died in the war before Mitya was born, and was not to be mentioned.
Babushka’s belongings were more varied and exciting. Mitya carefully held the space toilet in his hands and tried to imagine how the cosmonauts used it inside the spaceship. He opened her medicine bottles and played with the pills, scanned through the old letters in yellow envelopes in search of juicy details and photographs. Babushka was young and beautiful in them, and often accompanied by Dedushka or small Yelena Viktorovna, who both looked a lot like Mitya.
There was Alyssa Vitalyevna’s bribery compartment, an essential lifeline for anything she wanted done: stacks of candy boxes and sprat tins, rounds of caviar in glass and sealed brand lipsticks. No visit to the doctor, no government bureaucracy proceeding, nothing in life could be accomplished without a voluntary donation to the executor’s family table. In her head, Alyssa Vitalyevna had a clear outline of what deed warranted what delicacy. It usually took her only a second to establish what to take with her to the government office or the dentist. Some more exquisite, particularly laborious occasions also required oiling with the liquids produced by Moscow’s own distillery, Kristall, or, in more delicate cases still, foreign liquors. Alyssa Vitalyevna kept them in a separate compartment, as Mitya knew. The door to that compartment was locked with a key, to protect the precious spirits from Dmitriy Fyodorovich. When anyone mentioned the concealed alcohol, Dmitriy Fyodorovich always denied being interested. Instead, he complained that Alyssa Vitalyevna’s love for corruption was the force driving the country into the ground. In response, she never hesitated to mention that her son-in-law sometimes came home very inebriated, “crawling on his eyebrows,” as Alyssa Vitalyevna put it.
The prettiest things in Babushka’s credenza were her perfume bottles and makeup boxes. Babushka used a lot of makeup; it was evident by the way her skin was always powdery pale, and her cheeks flushed with rouge. And she loved to smell nice. Her perfume bottles were numerous but old, and most of them contained a small splash of yellow liquid on the bottom. Mitya opened and smelled them, then applied the perfume to his skin and put droplets on his tongue to get a taste. They were all the same this way, and only burned his tongue.
What makeup she didn’t carry in her pocketbook dated back to her younger years, maybe the years in which she appeared in the photographs. The boxes were lovely, with interesting pictures, but they had not aged well. Ones that were made from paper had wrinkled. The plastic ones were dirty, and their labels faded. The metallic parts had rusted through, sometimes sealed shut. Mitya opened powder cases and took in the stale, dusty aroma, though the remnants at the bottom were almost inexistent. The powder puffs had dirty stains on them and smelled musty. He wanted to try applying the powder but the odor put him off.
Mama’s makeup was newer. She didn’t have a lot of it, but what she had, Mitya didn’t mind touching. The things she used herself were inside the bottom cabinet of the dresser in his parents’ room. There were a few lipsticks and a compact powder with a dirty mirror that had been used enough for the metal tray to peep through the cake.
Mitya was most impressed by a blue plastic chest with a gold rim. His grandfather had received it as part of his official rations and gifted it to Yelena Viktorovna on her eighteenth birthday. It had everything: a palette of gray, blue, purple, and green eye shadows, cream concealers in different tones, a variety of cream blushes that could double as lipsticks. Mitya liked the two minuscule mascaras in black and brown best. His mother had barely used any, so the small black applicators were clean, and most of the little mounds of blush, eye shadow and lipstick were intact.
He decided to give it a try. He had not been planning, had not thought about it until that moment. But once the tidy pressed cakes of pigment were in front of him, it was apparent that he had to put them on his face.
Mitya had no idea how to apply makeup and sought to figure out what to do with each of the textures and colors. The eye makeup was intuitive: he put some blue and green in thick strokes on his upper eyelids and then darkened his lashes by holding the black mascara on the brush against them, gingerly, so as not to poke an eye out.
With a dusty-pink lipstick, Mitya covered his lips, connecting the lower to the upper in a thick line that disappeared as soon as he closed his mouth. The top lip was challenging: there were two little peaks at the top that he couldn’t make even, so he kept adding more color until the new lip line was halfway toward his nostrils. It looked messy, but as Mitya stepped away from the mirror and squinted, he could see that his lips were now full, voluptuous.
He started to apply the rouge to his cheek with the applicator but soon realized it was much easier with his fingertips. Mitya dipped them in the paint and swept the sticky blush across the apples. The bright pink of his cheeks made him look like he had been running, and he liked the effortlessness of it.
Mitya took off the T-shirt he was wearing and threw it on the floor. Using his thumbs and index fingers, he grabbed at the flesh around his nipples and brought them forward slightly. They were small and pale—he was only five years old, after all—but reminded him of Mama’s breasts, which he sometimes saw when she changed after work. He took off the sweatpants he was wearing, and then his socks and briefs, and threw them all into a pile on the floor, shaking his head and swaying his arms around, as if he were a beautiful, haughty lady.
What he saw in the mirror was not a boy or a girl; it was a woman. Mitya bent his back, put his hands on his hips, and turned around, sticking his butt out so that his outie thing was not reflected in the mirror anymore. He was a beautiful woman, independent and powerful.
Yelena Viktorovna came home a little earlier than her husband that day. They traveled from the factory together, but Dmitriy Fyodorovich had gotten caught up chatting with their next-door neighbor Grishka about the events of the day. Grishka was a talkative man, and even Dmitriy Fyodorovich, who was not someone known for his diplomacy, could be ambushed for a good thirty minutes if Grishka was in the mood and smoking in the stairway enclosure. And now that there was a coup d’état and blockades all over the streets, Dmitriy Fyodorovich struck up the conversation first.
When she entered and saw Mitya in war paint, Yelena Viktorovna was first of all amazed at the level of artistry. She had never been one with an eye for makeup, but her five-year-old son’s face looked more polished than even her colleague Lyudmila’s—and Lyudmila took out her powder puff and mascara every twenty minutes or so.
Yelena Viktorovna was so impressed that she didn’t even consider the deviancy of it all. But, intuitively, she knew she had to do something before Dmitriy Fyodorovich had had enough and returned to the apartment. So she rubbed the makeup off Mitya’s face with soap and Dmitriy Fyodorovich’s vodka. Mitya felt a sharp pain in his eyeballs, as if someone were poking them with a knife, and even thought for a second that the needle must have come out, it hurt so much. But he didn’t mind. He was happy. He had become someone.
When Dmitriy Fyodorovich finally came home after his discussion with Grishka, Mitya listened in on his parents’ conversation. In this way, he learned that he was not the only one going through changes that day. There was something called putsch, and people were putting barricades in the streets. Mitya knew only one meaning of the word barricades: Barricades was the name of a movie theater where Alyssa Vitalyevna sometimes let him join her and Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis on their early afternoon dates. It was usually a fun outing: Khristofor Khristoforovich bought Mitya ice cream, and then they watched cartoons or children’s films, or Indian films where people always danced.
Mitya couldn’t figure out how people would be able to take the cinema apart and put it in the streets. He was concerned that his grandmother and her doctor would not have a place for dates anymore, and Mitya would not get his ice cream. Besides, Khristofor Khristoforovich was nice to sit next to. He smelled like tobacco and unfamiliar herbs, and Mitya liked inhaling that. But his parents were discussing the putsch so energetically that Mitya couldn’t even tell if they liked it or not, if they agreed with each other or not. He wanted to wait until Alyssa Vitalyevna came back home, to ask her.
Alyssa Vitalyevna announced her arrival by proclaiming that she had been to the barricades. That made Mitya stop worrying: surely his grandmother would not let anything happen to her beloved cinema. But for some reason Yelena Viktorovna was worried.
“Mama, why did you go?” she asked Alyssa Vitalyevna. “There are tanks and it’s dangerous.”
“I can’t let them take over my country now that it’s on the precipice of something good,” Alyssa Vitalyevna replied.
Now that he had stopped worrying about the movie theater, Mitya had to start worrying about the whole country.
His father and grandmother did not seem to agree in their opinions of the situation, and they started arguing, talking about someone named Yeltsin, although they couldn’t agree if he was a president or not, and something abbreviated with the letters GKChP. Mitya had no idea what it was, but he knew that ChP was short for chrezvychaynoye proishestviye, an emergency, like when there was a big car crash. Alyssa Vitalyevna also said that there was a ChP whenever Mitya wet himself.
At the dinner table, everyone kept throwing glances at the ballet still on the TV, to see when the emergency news report would come on again. Mitya’s father and grandmother kept bickering.
“An old communist like your late husband would never approve of Yeltsin,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich said to Alyssa Vitalyevna.
“You are a lumpen lacking perspective, and you cannot even imagine the breadth of views that my late husband possessed,” she responded.
“I will go shopping for supplies early tomorrow morning before work,” Yelena Viktorovna said. “Food is always the first to go. I should buy buckwheat and oats, things that keep well. Candles and matches too.”
Mitya thought that if tanks were in the streets, people were arguing, and there was no TV and no food, then, perhaps, everything that had existed in the world before would be no more. And he was right—to a point. In a few months, the USSR, the country in which Mitya was born, ceased to exist. Now he lived in Russia.