5

The book Mitya was reading was called Dinka. It was his mama’s favorite when she was a child, she said, as she gave it to Mitya. “Lena Trofimova,” her maiden name, and “1968” were inscribed on it in a childish cursive, the letters so round they could burst. Mitya was reading it for the third time. Dinka, the main character, was a willful girl, growing up in a family of revolutionaries in pre-Soviet Russia. She was unlike her proper and well-behaved sisters; she didn’t want to be what girls should be. Grown-ups often reprimanded Dinka for acting out, for swimming in the river without taking her dress off, for getting into trouble. She made a friend, a pauper boy, Lyonka. To make him like her more, she pretended to come from poverty too. Dinka wore a torn, dirty dress whenever she went to see her new friend. She also befriended an old man who played the barrel organ, and followed him around, singing songs, as orphans did.

Mitya read about Dinka with sweet abandon; he ached to set foot into the world in which she lived. He wanted nothing more than to go with Lyonka and her to look for the cliff where Stenka Razin, a Cossack rebel leader, had sat and plotted his uprising against the tsar. Dinka and Lyonka lived on the river Volga, and around them were fields, forests, birch trees—vast, un­bounded freedom in which to lose themselves, in which to roam free. Mitya, on the other hand, had nothing. Even his room and his bed were not his own, invaded by a threatening presence.

Mitya wished he could befriend a pauper child and make money by singing songs, as Dinka did. This way, he wouldn’t have to stay around Vovka in the daytime. Maybe he could wear a dress while singing. He didn’t mind if it was a torn one. But he did not know how to do it alone. He was afraid to do it alone. He wanted someone.

His family was out of the question. He avoided Vovka and Papa, while Babushka and Mama had no time for him, too busy with their own things. Mitya had not made any friends at school, either, and it was too late to try: the relationships had been established. When Mitya came up to any of his classmates, it was always unpleasant. In the best case, they made fun of the cracks in the corners of his mouth or his cheap shoes.

Zoya, the girl who shared her desk with him—pretty, always well dressed, with short hair and a mullet—responded to him politely when Mitya asked her about something, usually related to schoolwork. But Mitya could see her stare at the burn on his chin, squeamish. Mitya got it from spilling hot tea all over himself when Papa struck him for not refilling the kettle. Mama blew on the burn and put Vaseline on it; she told Mitya always to ask if anyone else would be drinking tea besides himself. As if there were any behavior that would prevent Dmitriy Fyodorovich from getting angry with Mitya for the smallest things.

Alyssa Vitalyevna had stopped taking Mitya to school because it conflicted with her work. He was on his own, so he chose to stop going to classes half the time while it was still warm and walked around the streets. He knew Tatiana Ivanovna wouldn’t care. He was looking for pauper boys, for regular boys alone in the street, for girls in dirty dresses, for anyone as lonely as himself.

Mitya saw Roma boys with dirty faces on the New Arbat, the more modern avenue running parallel to the Old Arbat. But they were always in groups, rowdy, loud, and he was too shy to talk to them. He saw a boy who played his violin close to their building, a couple of paper bills always in the violin case. But when Mitya approached him during a break he was taking, a woman came out of nowhere and told Mitya to go away.

On one of his truant walks, Mitya went into the Dobrolyubov Library on Novinskiy Boulevard. The sign said that it was the first multimedia library in the country. It had computers inside, and he decided that maybe computers would make him feel less lonely. The woman at the reception desk told him they could only admit minors after their parents signed them up. So he asked Mama, fearing that she would refuse. But he mentioned how he liked Dinka and wanted to read more books. Yelena Viktorovna didn’t mind. In fact, she wished that everyone in the family would join a library so she would have more peaceful time to herself at home. She picked Mitya up after school the next day and took him there. From then on, Mitya spent a lot of time at the library, but quite soon found out that computers, just like books, were not exactly a substitute for human friends.

One day, while skipping school, Mitya went to the playground next to his building. It was always empty except for bomzh Valerka, the homeless man who slept in the communal hallways at night and tended to crows during the day. He had a puffy red face, which, Babushka explained, came from all the drinking. But despite his bad habits, he never stank up the hallway. That was why he was allowed to stay. Mitya never dared to go this close to home during class time. But he often sat on the bench in the corner of that playground after school, with a book.

“Would you like to meet the ladies?” Valerka asked him, pointing at the crows. Valerka used the polite form of you: he thought that being courteous was most important, even when one’s hygiene was lacking. Mitya had never been addressed like that, in particular by a grown-up.

“Of course.”

Some of the crows were perched on Valerka’s shoulders; some sat on the green fence beneath where he stood.

“This is Avdotya Philippovna,” Valerka said, introducing the crow on his right shoulder, then pointed to the left one. “This is Mariya Nikitichna. The ones on the fence are Evdokiya Matveyevna, Ekaterina Petrovna, and Lidiya Olegovna. You’ll meet the others when they come back from scavenging.”

The formal names of the crows amused Mitya immensely, but he did not ask Valerka why he named them this way. He also did not question why Valerka thought that all the crows were females. He thought that Valerka must have known. He could tell them apart somehow, after all.

Valerka found that telling apart birds and children was much easier than telling apart men walking home after work in their suits. This was why he respected birds and children much more than men in suits.

“How do you make them sit on your shoulders?” Mitya asked.

“By being kind,” Valerka replied. “If you treat all god’s creatures kindly, they will come to you.”

He smiled and revealed the few teeth that were left in his mouth. His nose was swollen like a spud, and his lower lip hung low into his wiry beard. Valerka’s hair was matted, his clothes dirty, and he smelled faintly of urine and strongly of alcohol. His face was soft, softer than any Mitya had seen.

“Do you promise to be kind to animals, druzhok?” Valerka asked. The child in front of him had kind and sad eyes, and he thought that he could trust such a child with the most important things.

Mitya nodded. He had no idea why he would want to be unkind to the beautiful crows that sat on Valerka’s shoulders, or to any other animal at all. He did not wish to be cruel to anyone, not even Vovka. He also liked that Valerka didn’t call him a boy or a girl but “druzhok,” a genderless “little friend.”

Valerka and Mitya became friends. Mitya saved bread from his meals and gave it to Valerka and the crows. Valerka thanked him profusely. He usually refused to eat the offering himself and said that he preferred the liquid bread, which, Mitya knew from Papa, was beer. But the crows ate the meal with gusto and allowed Mitya to pet them on their small heads. He did and felt their slick feathers beneath his fingers and their fragile skulls.

The crows liked the small person and his soft fingers.

Once, on the weekend, when Mitya came over to see Valerka earlier than usual, he found him without the crows.

They had flown home for a while and should return soon, Valerka explained. The crows did not tell him when they’d be returning, and he didn’t ask, it was like that between them. But they would return. They always came back.

“Do you ever go home yourself?” Mitya asked Valerka.

“Oh, druzhok. I don’t have one. Not anymore. Now my home is here.”

“But what happened?”

“I lost our savings, and my wife told me to go away,” he said, his face still kind. It was a while since anyone had asked him such questions. Everyone else, even when giving him money, or beer, would scrunch their noses and turn away quickly, hoping to avoid the smell.

“How did you lose the money? In the street?” Mitya wondered.

Valerka grinned.

“No, I was a partner in MMM—you know MMM, druzhok? With the advertisements on TV. Lyonya Golubkov, who got rich and bought a fur coat for his wife. Well, I didn’t get to purchase the fur coat. I bought the shares and got nothing, and my wife kicked me out. It’s been two years.”

Mitya remembered the advertisements. Papa saw them, too, and he bought shares, but then Babushka heard that people were not getting their money from MMM, and she told him to stop investing. They were all fighting a lot at that time, Mama trying to reconcile her mother and husband. In the end, Vovka’s mom, Aunt Sveta, had lost her dead husband’s car because of MMM. She couldn’t drive and didn’t use it, but it was still pretty bad. There was no use in arguing anymore, so Papa stopped doing MMM, and Babushka stopped pestering him.

Mitya was sorry that nobody had told Valerka that MMM was crooked. He looked into the homeless man’s sweet face, tears pooling up in his eyes, and thought that he must miss home a lot. Mitya wondered if maybe they could have him live with them. Vovka lived with them, and he hurt Mitya. Valerka had never hurt Mitya. Mitya would share his sofa with Valerka. He would take a bath if he had one, wouldn’t he? He could drink beer with Papa and teach him some kindness too. And Mitya would even tell him about the needle.

Something told Mitya that his parents would never agree. But he made a decision to put away a percentage of the money that Mama gave him for sweet buns at the school cafeteria every day. He planned to give it to Valerka once he gathered a hefty sum.

One day, when Vovka had gone to visit his mother, and everyone else had left for work, Mitya rushed to his apartment and started dressing up. He did not want anything elaborate; a quick transformation into Devchonka. So he put on a dress, put on some lipstick and some eye shadow, and went out into the hallway. He was wary of someone else seeing him, so he did not take the elevator and walked down all fourteen flights of stairs. Mitya made it to the front door and out into the courtyard, taking a left to the playground.

Valerka did not seem to see the difference. “Zdravstvuyte, druzhok,” he greeted Mitya with a smile and went on to relay the news of the crows’ health and exploits. A few of them had found colorful beads that Valerka had put in his pocket. Lidiya Olegovna had found a coin. Ekaterina Petrovna was not feeling well and stayed by his side. Mitya listened to Valerka talk, nervously tugging on the hem of his dress, waiting for any sign of hostility. Maybe Valerka talked like this to any child that came his way?

But then Valerka said: “You don’t need to bring us bread today, druzhok. Someone threw a loaf of bread out, with some mold in the middle, so the ladies had a feast.” And it was clear that he knew that it was Mitya in front of him.

The crows perched on Valerka’s shoulders and the nearby fence, recognized Mitya too, and croaked happily. Avdotya Philippovna sat down on his shoulder for a while, tickling him with her claw. She was the friendliest bird, but would never do something like that to a person she didn’t know from before. It had taken Mitya a few weeks to earn the privilege of Avdotya Philippovna’s embrace.

Valerka enjoyed watching his child friend bond with the crows. He liked how the child’s face was painted, and the dress too. It was festive, and there were so few festive things in his life.

Despite the warm welcome, Mitya couldn’t stay outside wearing the dress for too long, in case someone else saw him and wasn’t as friendly. He said his goodbye to Valerka and the crows and went back up the stairs, triumphant.

He had shown Devchonka to someone, to a whole crowd, and nothing terrible had happened. They still liked Mitya. Could it possibly mean that he wasn’t deviant, wasn’t bad or spoiled? Was he something different, unique, that grown-ups—at least, most of them—were not able to understand?

After that day, when Mitya went to the bathroom at night, he sat there thinking of all the possibilities were he to venture out into the world as Devchonka. He closed his eyes and imagined. Here he was wearing a beautiful lace-trimmed dress. He came to school, and everyone suddenly saw him for what he was, a beautiful girl, not a tiny boy. Everyone fell in love with him, the mean kids, his deskmate, pretty Zoya, Tatiana Ivanovna. The custodian Semenovna put down her push broom and admired the glow of Mitya’s golden curls and his glossy red lips.

Mitya imagined going to the grocery store across the road from their building in a pink T-shirt, hot shorts, his hair in pigtails, and the woman at the cash register smiling at him and saying: “What a beautiful girl you are.” Mitya imagined coming home from school in a skirt and a puffy fur coat, like Zoya’s, and Alyssa Vitalyevna greeting him, calling him “vnuchka,” granddaughter. She would tell him she had a doll for him, a late birthday gift. Wouldn’t Mitya just look at how much alike he and the toy were!