Snow in May

Although my mother had reprimanded Tolyan and me when she caught us talking to the prisoners through the fence, we became friendly with many. The scent of the Khrushchev Thaw was in the air; their hopes for freedom were high. At night we snuck in through the spaces between the barbed wire and hid cigarettes in agreed-upon places. In return, the prisoners carved toy guns out of wood and left them for us in secret spots.

By the mid-sixties, half of the town’s population consisted of ex-convicts, some living and working side by side with ex-guards. Many former prisoners were criminals, but there were equally many people with higher education who were not allowed to leave Magadan—doctors, teachers, geologists, engineers. My father knew and worked with many of them. He was in charge of the petroleum supply for the whole region. Whenever I asked him what those people had been imprisoned for, his response was: For having a long tongue. Writers, artists, and musicians of national fame had sat in the Magadan camps, and productions at the local theater were on par with those in Moscow and Leningrad, but back then we kids didn’t understand. Schools until recently didn’t teach this layer of history. Besides, our heads were crammed with mischief. There was no space for anything else.

Tolyan and I were unruly but quick-witted enough to get through school with minimum effort. And we were lucky. Our skinny backsides were forever saved by bells, snow days, and convenient illnesses—our teachers’ or our own. We were called to the blackboard only on the days when we had, on a hunch, prepared our lesson. Everyone smoked in the bathroom, but only Tolyan and I never got caught. We skipped piano lessons and went sledding on our folders, leaving our parents to puzzle over why our sheet music was always wet.

We crawled through the small underground tunnels by the old cinema, which we called “the catacombs.” What with the mysterious trapdoor at the end of one tunnel—behind which there surely lay a chest of Kolyma gold guarded by the ghost of the first prospector, Bilibin—the risk of death by suffocation or drowning didn’t enter our minds. We stole still-hot bread from the city bakery as the slow, fat baker loaded the trays into the truck bound for grocery stores. Tolyan was my upstairs neighbor, and I spent hours at his place watching music programs on TV and staring at the blurry black-market photographs of Swedish porn magazines that had been confiscated from the photo lab at the university by Tolyan’s father, the senior detective at the police headquarters. We also played with his spare revolver, until one day it shot and shattered the crystal chandelier. Now that I think of it: that massive defitsit chandelier was probably a very serious bribe.

In eighth grade, we were suspended from the Young Pioneers brigade for bad behavior and, free of “volunteering” duties, spent the summer hiking and grilling shashliks. In those days, my big passion was zoology, and on weekends I helped out at the small zoo in the Park of Culture and Leisure. There was a yellowed polar bear named Yulka, an emaciated fox, a balding eagle, and a sad-eyed deer. Though Tolyan didn’t care for such proximity to the creatures of the north (the cages were rather stinky) he tagged along, unable to bear exclusion from any of my activities.

In the last year of school, all the girls in our grade, at once, gained weight and developed acne. Self-conscious and closed in, they were useless for either friendly or romantic purposes. On top of that, the stadium where we played soccer in the summer and hockey in the winter was put under yearlong renovation, leaving us with nothing else to do but study for university entrance exams.

In the spring, a recruiting commission from the Riga Red-Bannered Civil Aviation Engineers Institute of the Lenin Komsomol arrived in Magadan. Riga was not Paris, but it was as far west as any of us had dreamed of getting back then. “Civil” sounded good, patriotic without trying too hard. “Aviation” sounded even better—steel wings and navy-blue uniforms, an exhilarating touch of grandeur and freedom.

Five hundred students competed for thirty spots reserved for recruits from the Magadan region. There were several facultets at the Riga Institute, and everyone wanted to get into automatics, the precursor of computer science. No one knew what it entailed exactly, but everyone wanted to dive into the stream of progress. Tolyan and I had passed physics, mathematics, and chemistry with an identical number of points. Together we crammed for the last exam—literature—and could, as far as I remember, tell Dostoyevsky from Raskolnikov.

The weekend before the literature exam, my parents and my younger sister, Angela, went for a walk in the Park of Culture and Leisure, the same park that used to house the now extinct zoo. There they ran into the head of the Riga recruiting commission, a Jewish fellow named Ginzburg. My father had already managed to meet him and mention me as a promising young aviator. So when this Ginzburg heard that I, along with the rest of the student herd, was storming the walls of the automatics facultet, he advised my parents that I should instead apply to be an economist. Next, he delivered the famous analogy that would change the course of my life.

“Here’s the difference between economics and automatics.” Ginzburg addressed my mother, a woman of rare beauty, with ashen hair, blue eyes, and the shapely yet sturdy figure of the Venus de Milo. “The economist sits in front of the calculating machine, while the automatics specialist sits behind it. With a screwdriver! Who do you think makes the decisions?”

My parents rushed home. Without taking off her astrakhan hat, my mother told me about the screwdriver. I hated screwdrivers. I associated them with my bike, which had to be fixed all the time as I rode the thing down hills, stairs, curbs, and through just about anything in my way. I took my mother’s cold, velvety hands and warmed them with my breath. She laughed brightly. Her gold tooth gleamed in the back of her mouth like a little bell. Back then, I saw her as a conservative, middle-aged woman whom I had to beg to add one more centimeter of flare to the hem of my fake jeans. Now I am astounded at how young she had been that spring, only thirty-eight. “Don’t worry, Mamochka,” I said, “I’ll be all right.” I passed the literature exam and, as a highly ranked candidate, had my first choice of the facultets. Ginzburg transferred my application from one pile to the other.

Tolyan’s parents had also gone for a walk in the Park of Culture and Leisure that weekend, and his mother was just as beautiful as mine (gymnast’s figure, curly blond hair, dimples). But they didn’t run into Ginzburg. At the time I was still able to tamper with Tolyan’s destiny. I told him to quit automatics and become an economist, like me.

We blazed into Riga in black trench coats. Pins with Magadan’s coat of arms—a golden deer flying over the turbulent blue water against a scarlet background—burned on our lapels, just above our hearts. Right away we were sent to pick potatoes for a month at a local kolkhoz. Upon our return, we received navy-blue uniforms and caps and were made to cut our long hair and nascent mustaches.

At university we excelled in the economics of civil aviation, army logistics (our required military specialization), and caught up on sleep during the lectures on Marxism-Leninism. Our dorm room, which we shared with six other guys, stank so much of sweat, feet, cigarettes, vodka, and food we had forgotten to refrigerate that in order to fall asleep, we put handkerchiefs soaked in cologne over our noses.

But outside was Riga, so European and clean, so different from Magadan and even Moscow. Only a fool would sleep all night in such a city. Around every corner were coffee shops with five-kopeck espressos and cheap restaurants decorated in grand style and named after Riga’s sister cities: Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Dallas. Street kiosks sold Polish and East German newspapers full of pop music charts, photographs of beautiful models, and of the Beatles—our paper window into the West.

To supplement our student stipends, Tolyan and I worked part-time jobs. First, at the candy factory, which we were fired from for stealing candy. Then, at the vodka distillery, which we were fired from for getting massively drunk. Finally, I settled as a night guard at the glass container storage. While Riga, the captive European princess, slept dreaming of freedom, I listened to the Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Liberty, broadcasting news from around the world in Russian. The container storage was located on the Daugava River, where reception was the clearest in the whole city. Tolyan worked on the chipping floor of a match factory, inhaling sawdust all day. For the damage to his lungs he was given a free bottle of milk daily. His lips were constantly coated with a film of fine sawdust, and at the most inopportune moments he would break out into a violent cough. But we made enough money to finance our modest student fancies: Elita cigarettes, holodets at a favorite café, an occasional ticket to a car race or an organ concert at the Dom Cathedral, and copious amounts of vodka, wine, and the famous Riga Black Balsam.

Tall, blue-eyed, and wavy-haired, we were at the peak of our boyish handsomeness. Latvian girls looked at us with admiring fear of our seeming worldliness. So what if we got roughed up by the Latvian guys a few times? There were plenty of Russian girls in Riga, too. We barely noticed how five years of lectures, exams, dances with live bands, and standup comedy competitions clattered past and disappeared around the corner.

We graduated with red diplomas and the rank of junior lieutenant, having passed even the Marxism-Leninism exam, and received priority distribution back to Magadan because of our family roots. My family by then had moved west: my parents to Ukraine, the country of their birth, and Angela to study chemical engineering in Moscow. Through my father’s connections, they left me the best thing a young bachelor could ask for: not just a room in a kommunalka—which would have been the allocation for a single person without children—but a private one-bedroom apartment with its own bathroom and kitchen. All this without having to wait in line!

We were glad to be back. Magadan, in those days, was the third-most coveted place of employment, after Moscow and Leningrad. Now that there were no Gulag prisoners, someone had to develop the region, and the government encouraged permanent migration with double salaries and benefits that increased every year. The town experienced a real boom as young people streamed in to take advantage of the “long ruble” and the stores stocked better than those “on the continent,” which is what we called the rest of Russia. I got a position as a schedule engineer at the Aviation Administration. Tolyan began working in the passenger relations department at the airport and moved to Sokol, the airport township fifty-four kilometers from Magadan’s city center.

Our mustaches had finally asserted themselves. Mine approached the coarse bushiness of the “walrus,” while Tolyan braved the slight curvature of the “petit horseshoe.” With the cool Baltic wind still whistling in our heads, we set out to stretch the balloon of our reckless youth to its limits. We played tennis and went to the movies with the prettiest girls in town, quickly earning the nicknames “tennisists the penisists.” In the winter, we sledded down the glaciers on oilcloth mats, then spent hours searching for lost hats, mittens, and boots. People in Magadan said about me: Tolik, he’s a good guy, smart, handsome, reads books, has a good job. But he has this friend in Sokol, Tolyan, who will be the ruin of him. Tolyan’s neighbors in Sokol said the same about the good, handsome, educated Tolyan and the bad influence of his debaucherous friend in Magadan—me.

Time rushed by slowly. Historians and journalists coined catchy terms: Khrushchev’s Thaw, followed by Brezhnev’s Stagnation. Tolyan and I still juggled the same activities: tennis, skiing, drinking, blurry days at work, and girls, with whom we broke up as soon as their slippers and bathrobes appeared in our bachelor apartments. Minimal responsibilities, minimal rewards. By the time I was twenty-seven, a sense of my own stagnation began to nag at me. When will my real life begin, I wondered, and what was it, exactly, this real life, the one I’d spent so many years preparing for in school? I didn’t share these thoughts with Tolyan; he was wholly in his element and happy.

One Saturday in March, when we were twenty-eight years old, Tolyan and I went skiing with several of our friends from the Aviation Administration. This particular slope, our favorite, was in the near wilderness and could only be reached by a rope lift. Over the years we had built a cabin up top and with every trip hauled food, alcohol, and gasoline from the bottom of the hill.

March was my favorite time to ski. The snow was still powdery, yet the sky was already bright blue and high. Compared to February’s temperatures and ferocious winds, it seemed almost tropically warm. The deep-frozen dwarf birches and low spruce shrubs were beginning to straighten their shoulders and push through the dense icy crust, buzzing with the electricity of the new sun. We buzzed with them, drunk on the heady spring air. The town was visible from the top of the slope: a white matchbox labyrinth cradled in the snow leopard–colored mountains. As we conquered the hills and drop-offs and caught sight of Magadan during the brief moments we were airborne, it felt as though we were flying toward it. And a part of us, the young, dreamy part of our souls, escaped and beat in the wind awhile longer after our skis hit the ground.

By five o’clock, everybody was getting ready to leave. Tolyan and I skied down first to have the mountain to ourselves. I led the way.

The air was thickening fast. Unexpected bumps lurched from under my skis. Gangs of dwarf birches sprang up out of nowhere on the turns. My heavy backpack was disrupting my balance. Halfway down the slope an invisible force tripped me. Before I fell, I heard a crunch like splintering dry wood. My skis had snapped off. My left boot was facing backward. It wasn’t pain, but the sight of that bizarre angle that made me nauseous. I pulled up my unharmed leg to my chest and began to moan.

Tolyan skidded by me a minute later. When he saw my leg, for a millisecond, a spark of anger animated his alarmed expression, the way he flicked the ice from his mustache and threw down his hat. (He had realized that we wouldn’t make it to the dance that night.) Then, just as quickly, his face took on the noble grip of determination.

“Don’t move.” Tolyan picked up his hat and jammed it on my head with its woven visor backward. I’d lost mine during the fall. Then he took off his skis and began the trek up the slope to the cabin to alert the others.

It was quiet. The world was expressed solely in shades of gray, as though somebody had sketched the scraggy trees and slope curves on white paper with a graphite pencil. I felt a sharp pain in my elbow and my back was sore, but the leg didn’t hurt. I barely perceived it as a part of my body. The snow Tolyan had picked up with his hat was dripping slowly down my neck. I was dizzy, yet I also felt a feral, jealous ownership of my body. My blood rattled as if I’d been plugged into a giant central life support system. I was hot and unafraid.

Dark fog saturated the air. Suddenly, I became convinced that the encroaching shadows of the mountains were about to absorb me into their indifferent landscape, make me a flat, black figure—of a man or just a log—invisible to my rescue party. This thought made me tranquil. If only I could send my parents a message that they shouldn’t worry, that I would continue my life, except not as Tolik but as an acorn or a little shard of ice.

I spotted a fallen cone next to a tuft of spruce bush needles. The composition looked remarkably like a miniature palm tree, and, for some reason, making this simple connection moved me to tears. I wanted to take a whiff of the spruce, a smell I associated with magic since childhood—probably because of the New Year tree—but I couldn’t lean far enough to reach it. I stared at the petals of the cone until they began to quiver, drawers about to open into another world. I felt like I was about to faint and began to hum under my breath. “Michelle, my belle …” And then I heard the voices of my friends calling out my name as they descended the slope.

Somebody had already skied down to call the ambulance from the bus stop, they told me. They hoisted me onto a wooden board and tied me down with rope. Tolyan and tall Oleg picked up the front end, and the shorter Slava and Artyom picked up the back. We inched down. When they ran out of war songs, they sang the discotheque anthems of the day, liberally interpreting the English lyrics: Shizgara, yeah baby Shizgara for Shocking Blue’s “Venus” and Just give me money, that pha-ra-on for the Beatles’ “Money.” It was getting darker every moment. My pain came to from the shock and began to howl. Finally, I saw the headlights of the ambulance flash from the bottom of the hill.

The last thing I remember before the operation is pleading for the doctors not to cut my ski boot. My Yugoslavian skis and boots were my most prized possessions and had cost a month’s salary. The diagnosis was closed fracture of the fibula and tibia, spiral, comminuted. Tolyan had stayed with me in the hospital late into the night.

This all happened on March 8, International Women’s Day. We had planned to attend a big dance at the Palace of ProfUnions later that evening. While I was enjoying the post-bone-setting morphine haze, Tolyan tried to call our girlfriends to let them know what had happened. But they had already left for the dance.

Mine was Lily, a little hourglass-shaped Jewish olive, with amber-clear eyes and a bead of a birthmark above her lip that drove me crazy. She was engaged to a rising Jewish academic, which I didn’t see as a problem at the time, at least not my problem. Lily ran to my apartment every other night. Who was I to stop her?

She visited me at the hospital three times. Each time the sight of me in bed with my broken leg in traction, supported by various slings, weights, and levers, brought her to tears. Poor Lily would put her bag on the stand near the bed—although many of my other, less mindful visitors simply hung their bags right on the weight—and stand shyly by my side. Then, her hands would hover above my full-leg cast, brush against my arm, and land over her mouth. She would kiss my forehead so tenderly that a wave of itching sensations rushed down my broken leg. I would seize my metal scratcher, insert it down my cast, and poke about savagely, moaning from pleasure and pain, which would trigger another bout of tears from my beautiful Lily.

The fourth time, it wasn’t Lily who came but her mother. Our affair had come out.

“You almost ruined my daughter’s life,” her mother yelled in a deep, operatic voice. She was fat, almost a perfect square—the kind of woman Lily would probably become in her older years, after having children. “I’d kill you if you didn’t look so miserable. I’d make sure you’re an outcast in this town.”

Suddenly I wanted to laugh, though her threats were far from empty. Lily’s father had a high position in the local Party Committee. In Magadan, where everyone knew everyone’s business, reputation was important.

Lily’s mother went on detailing my lack of morals, of sympathy for a young girl’s heart, of respect for their family and my family, of respect for myself. Lack, lack, lack. But the blade had narrowly swung clear of both Lily’s head and mine, and I wanted to celebrate. My broken leg had saved my career. Moreover, it provided a blameless, romantic exit from my relationship with Lily. I knew all along that she wasn’t the girl I’d marry even if her engagement broke up, and our inevitable separation, if protracted, could have taken a much uglier form.

Tolyan wasn’t so lucky. He was smitten with Anya, an air-headed girl with a lean figure and a voice that went with campfire guitar as smoothly as vodka goes down with salted herring. While Tolyan nursed me at the hospital, Anya let herself be swayed by a former classmate of ours, a certain Seryoga, at the Women’s Day dance.

“You didn’t have to stay at the hospital. You could’ve just gone to the dance,” I said when he told me the news.

“That didn’t occur to me.” Tolyan gave me a shaming look.

“Well, she showed her true nature. Why do you need a girl like that?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. There’re always more. Seryoga will play with her and dump her soon enough. That’s the way he is,” he said, picking up my metal scratcher. “What’s this for?” He put it in his mouth and chewed, making a disconcerting sound. “Brutal age, rough manners, nyet romantismy,” he concluded with a quote from one of our favorite films.

I spent another month at the hospital. Tolyan and I grew out our hair, mustaches, and beards, which made us look like nineteenth-century Russian merchants. When he visited, we drank tea in character—out of saucers—and flirted with the nurses. After I’d been moved home, friends and girls stopped by to help with groceries and laundry, and to make sure I followed doctor’s orders of three hundred drops of vodka daily. I enjoyed three more guilt-free months of reading. I was a big fan of Thornton Wilder then. While reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I wondered, just like Brother Juniper does in the novel, whether there was any logic in who got into accidents or became the victim of various unfortunate events. Of course, breaking a leg was a disaster not on the same scale as dying in the collapse of a bridge. Still, maybe I’d been plunged into this parallel, slower life to learn a lesson. Maybe Lily’s mother was right: it was time to grow up. That meant getting married. Surprisingly, this thought no longer threw me into panic.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered unduly in heavy self-reflection. Apart from a few physical inconveniences, I loved living in my favorite striped mohair robe, away from my job, which didn’t prove to be as exciting as I’d imagined when I went off to the aviation institute in Riga. I was often awake at five in the morning after reading all night to hear the first birdsong of the day. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” had just made its way to the northeast and played from the radio in every open window. Sometimes, when reading or watching soccer on TV, I’d forget about my white underwear boiling in a giant pot. The water and bleach would spill onto the stove and then the floor, and this way the whole kitchen would clean itself in minutes. Life was good.

In July, the doctors removed the cast. Later I’d find out that the fibula had grown back at a slight angle: the soles of my left shoes would now forever develop holes before the right ones even showed signs of wear. I hobbled outside on crutches to exercise my legs. The stream of friends and well-wishers thinned. Everybody had gone on vacation. Tolyan and I played Battleship over the phone, unable to do any of the things that made the cold summer in Magadan bearable. (Tolyan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find another tennis partner.) Finally, his father helped us obtain two-week passes to a sanatorium on the Black Sea and off we went to seek a cure for our bachelors’ ennui.

It was there that I met my future wife, Marina, who was on vacation with her friend Lenka. I still remember my Marina’s green bikini and the giant sagging straw hat, which was quite ridiculous, but on her seemed utterly stylish. Under the hat she had fantastic bangs. On top of it all, she was that mythical creature—an actual pianist and a piano teacher—whereas Tolyan and I, and everyone we knew then, had quit the fashionable, parent-ordered piano lessons after a year of family-wide suffering. A funny story: when I had first asked her what she did for a living, she said that she worked as an instructor. I, however, heard “on a tractor” and was considerably impressed, for days picturing her astride a tractor in the fields of golden wheat, her cheeks red and eyes shining.