Madness Treads Lightly

CHAPTER 2

Tobolsk, September 1981

He liked recalling his childhood. Each time he would drag up an especially hard, painful episode and start reproducing it mentally in all its details. The more agonizing the details, the longer he dwelled on them.

He’d grown up a quiet, dutiful boy. His mother watched his every step, his every breath.

“You’re the grandson of a legendary Red commander,” she would repeat. “You have to be worthy of your grandfather. He was a great man.”

The little boy didn’t really understand what it meant to be worthy of his grandfather. A stern, broad-faced man with a blond mustache wearing a leather jacket and a shoulder belt gazed at him from the many portraits, large and small, hung all over the apartment. There was nothing else on the walls—no pictures or calendars, just portraits of his legendary grandfather. On his mother’s desk there were small bronze busts of the two great leaders, Lenin and Stalin. Venya Volkov always gave his all, dusting their small, cold faces and scrubbing their bronze eyes and mustaches with tooth powder. Venya Volkov always tried his hardest. Cleaning the apartment had been his chore since he was seven, and his mother assiduously checked the quality of his work.

Once, noticing a white spot under Stalin’s eye—tooth powder—she’d slapped the boy’s cheeks. He was ten at the time.

He wasn’t surprised at the punishment. He considered it wholly deserved. But for the first time he was struck by his mother’s perfectly calm, indifferent face. Methodically dealing those ringing slaps, she stared into her son’s eyes and repeated, “There are no accidents in life. There’s always an intention behind carelessness. Carelessness is a crime.”

Lots of his classmates were beaten by their parents, but it was mainly the fathers doing the beating—on a bender, or hungover, or if the kid just turned up at the wrong time. Fathers spanked them or used their belts. And the mothers, as a rule, interceded.

Venya Volkov was beaten by his mother, but always on the cheeks, with the flat of her hand, so it didn’t hurt. His cheeks just burned afterward. She never did it because she was drunk or angry. She didn’t drink at all. She was always sober, even-tempered, and calm. His father didn’t intercede. He was very quiet and unremarkable, as if he weren’t there at all. He worked as an engineer in a bread factory, where he spent days on end, and sometimes even nights. His mother never beat Venya in front of his father, not because she was afraid, it was just that his father was so rarely at home. And Venya didn’t tell his father anything.

He never told anyone anything.

His entire paternal upbringing came down to one line, repeated endlessly, like a mantra: “Your mama is the purest, most principled person in the world. She’s a saint. Everything she does is for your good. You should be proud of your mother and obey her in everything.”

His mother was the Communist Party secretary at the same bread factory. She was always elected deputy to the City Council, and her photograph was displayed in the central square, on the “City’s Best” honor board.

He obeyed her but he wasn’t proud of her. Someone who gets his cheeks slapped at least twice a week is hardly going to be proud of anything or anyone. Now, sitting in his small, smoke-filled office, Veniamin Volkov, head of the Culture Department of the Tobolsk Young Communists Committee, a tall, blond, and skinny twenty-six-year-old, was gazing at the papers spread out on his desk, and, for the umpteenth time, replaying one of the most painful scenes of his childhood.

…It was an icy Siberian February with penetrating, stinging winds. Venya had forgotten his gym uniform and was running home for it between classes.

Venya flew through the blizzard. He was afraid of being late for gym because his teacher would be sure to note it on his record.

His father was home with the flu. Thinking he must be asleep, Venya quietly opened the door with his key. He froze on the threshold.

Strange sounds were coming from his parents’ room—the rhythmic creaking of box springs and soft, muffled groans, a man’s and a woman’s.

Venya tiptoed up and peeked through the cracked door. Two naked bodies were writhing on his parents’ bed. One belonged to his father, the other to their young neighbor, Larochka, a twenty-year-old library student. Venya had heard she was home with the flu, too.

This Larochka from the apartment across the way, a small, pudgy little brunette with a turned-up nose and merry dimples, had long provoked a strange feeling in Venya that he couldn’t make sense of or define. He ran into her every day. Once as they were leaving the building, he for high school, she for library school, she patted the boy affectionately on the cheek in passing as she ran lightly down the creaking wooden stairs.

She smelled of sweet, cheap perfume, and her round, brightly lipsticked little mouth was always a little bit open, as if ready to spread into a delighted smile. Her large snow-white teeth shone wetly, and her two front teeth were a little bigger than the others, which made her round little face seem funny and touching.

Venya stood there looking at the two bodies bouncing rhythmically on the bed. He saw their faces and the agonizing bliss written on them, saw their closed eyes and slightly bared teeth.

He didn’t immediately realize what they were doing. At first the rhythmic bouncing reminded him of another memory, of two stray dogs copulating near the garbage cans behind the school. Only later did he realize that his father and his pretty neighbor were doing the same thing.

All the obscenities, all the mysterious, burning, forbidden conversations in the school toilets, all the anatomical drawings on walls were about this. This was why his pudgy neighbor used bright lipstick and sweet perfume, why millions of women on earth did the same, and why there were films, books, and even music about it. Heroes suffered for their love, schemed, shot themselves, went crazy. For the sake of what? For the sake of this ugly rhythmic twitching? For the sake of this filth?

And this and only this was where children came from.

But the worst was the sudden tension in his groin. A searing, almost tingling pain filled his lower belly, and Venya went as taut as a string. A minute later he felt something wet and sticky in his underpants.

He came to his senses out of revulsion for himself. The two on the bed were busy with what they were doing and didn’t notice him. It all lasted no more than five minutes, but to Venya it seemed an eternity.

Trying not to breathe, he dashed for his room, changed clothes quickly and silently, neatly folded his soiled trousers and underpants, and stuffed them under his pillow.

Fifteen minutes later he was in the locker room. He hadn’t forgotten his uniform and was just a little late—the bell hadn’t rung yet but his classmates had already changed for gym class.

The head of the Culture Department of the Tobolsk Young Communists Committee tore his light, transparent eyes from the papers spread on his desk and looked out the window. The day was clear and sunny. Birch leaves tinged with bright yellow grazed the window, trembling ever so slightly in the warm wind. The birch grew right under his window. It was very old. Its thick, rough trunk had blackened as if charred.

There were lots of trees in Tobolsk, most of the buildings were wooden, and the fences were made of thick, unhewn timber. They didn’t spare the forest—there was taiga all around. The city park, almost as dense as the taiga, began at the banks of the Tobol and receded into the distance, becoming utterly primeval. In the daytime there wasn’t a soul; in the evening, not a single light.

“Veniamin, are you going to dinner?” Galya Malysheva, the instructor from the next department, asked as she glanced into his office. She was young but quite stout, with a bad wheeze.

He startled, as if caught red-handed.

“Huh? Dinner? No, I’ll go later.”

“Always working. You’re our businesslike one.” Galya grinned. “Watch out, you’ll get so skinny no one will marry you.” Laughing at her own joke, she closed his office door and Venya listened as her heavy steps receded down the hallway.

I really should go have dinner, he thought, and he tried to remember the last time he ate. Yesterday morning probably. He could barely force a bite down at the time. He knew that in the next few days, if he did force himself to swallow any food, it would take colossal effort. But he had to eat something, otherwise he’d pass out from hunger. And insomnia.

The fits had been getting more frequent. They used to come once a year and last no more than a couple of days. Now they happened every three months and lasted nearly a week. He knew it was only going to get worse.

First, a dull, hopeless sorrow would come over him. He tried to fight it, coming up with all kinds of things to do and ways to entertain himself—he read, he went to the movies. It was all useless. Sorrow grew into despair, and an acute self-pity came to the throat of the obedient little boy no one loved.

Previously, he had blocked his despair with a few vivid pictures from the past. He knew the root of his illness was there, in his dark, icy adolescence. So was his medicine.

Fifteen-year-old Venya never told anyone about what he’d seen at home on his parents’ bed. But after that blizzardy February day, he started looking differently at his parents and at himself. Now he knew for sure that everyone was lying.

He’d never had much to do with his father before, and he was used to viewing him merely as a gratuitous and pointless attachment to his strong, powerful, and respected mother. Now this justification of her maternal cruelty dissipated.

He’d often heard his father say, “Mama knows best. Your mama loves you very much and does everything for your good.” Venya himself would repeat it like a spell: “This is for my good, so I’ll grow up strong.”

Never once did his mother pity her son, even when he was sick or when he scraped his elbows or knees. “Pity belittles a man!” Never once in her life did she kiss him or pat his head. She wanted her son, the grandson of the legendary Red commander, to grow up strong, without any sloppy endearments. Now Venya knew, though, that she simply didn’t love him.

He realized that the only reason his mother slapped him, arranged weeklong boycotts, and said such mean things in her calm, icy voice was because she liked being in charge, she liked humiliating and torturing someone who was weak and defenseless.

Now, though, he knew an important adult secret that concerned his mother, not as a Party leader or the perfect Communist but as an ordinary woman who was neither very young nor very attractive. No Party committee or public opinion could help. Here she was defenseless.

He could hurt her whenever he chose. That finding out about her husband and young neighbor would hurt her, Venya had no doubt.

But he said nothing. He carried this shameful adult secret inside himself with care and a pounding heart. He observed with particular vindictive satisfaction each time his sweet little neighbor respectfully greeted his esteemed mama, and as his mama, out of Party habit, shook the soft little hand of her pudgy rival, not even suspecting she was a rival.

The secret tried to come out, but he realized it was a single-use weapon. Tell it, and it’s not a secret anymore. But he was dying to tell, if not his mother, then one of the three most closely bound to the secret. He was dying for the fun of someone else’s fear, a grown-up’s fear.

One day, he couldn’t help himself. Meeting his neighbor on the staircase he said softly and distinctly, straight to her face, “I know everything. I saw you and my father.”

“What do you know, Venya?” The neighbor raised her narrow eyebrows.

“I saw you in the bed when you were…” He wanted to say the well-known obscenity but couldn’t bring himself to.

Her gentle little face fell a little, but it wasn’t the effect Venya had been expecting. Sure, she was frightened, but not very.

“I’ll tell my mother everything,” he added.

“Don’t, Venya,” the girl pleaded quietly. “That won’t make it easier for anyone.”

In her round brown eyes he was suddenly amazed to discover pity. She was looking at him with sympathy. This was so unexpected that Venya lost it. She didn’t fear him, she pitied him.

“You know what?” the girl offered. “Let’s you and me talk this all over calmly. I’ll try to explain it to you. It’s hard, but I’ll try.”

“Fine. Try.”

“Only not here, on the stairs,” she said, suddenly realizing. “If you want, we can go for a little walk, as far as the park. Look what nice weather.”

The weather really was marvelous, a warm May twilight.

“You see, Venya,” she said while they were walking toward the park, “your father is a very good person. So is your mother. But she’s too strong, too harsh for him. Every man wants to be strong, so you shouldn’t judge him. You’re smart, Venya. Life is full of surprises. If you’re afraid I’m going to wreck your family, that’s not my intention. I just love your father very much.”

She spoke and Venya listened in silence. He couldn’t figure out what was going on inside himself now. His head was spinning from her sweet perfume. A small blue vein was pulsing on Larochka’s milky white neck.

“If you tell your mother, she won’t forgive him. Or me. She just doesn’t know how to forgive, that’s why being with her is so hard for your father. But you have to learn how to forgive, Venya. There’s no living without it. I understand, at your age it’s very hard.”

There wasn’t a soul around. Larochka was so carried away, she wasn’t looking where she was going. Thick roots of old trees poked up out of the ground. The girl tripped and went sprawling on the grass. Her checked wool skirt hiked up, exposing the edge of her nylon stockings, her pink garters, and her soft, creamy white skin.

Venya collapsed on her with all his whole strong, greedy fifteen-year-old flesh. He started doing to her what his classmates had talked about in such juicy detail, what he’d seen his father do to her that blizzardy February day on his parents’ bed.

Larochka cried out, but he managed to cover her mouth and nose with his hand. She kicked and writhed under him and started to choke. Not letting her breathe, let alone cry out, he managed to turn her over onto her back and hold her trembling, clenched thighs down with his knee.

She resisted as hard as she could, but Venya was large, a head taller than his pudgy little victim. Not for nothing did he get top grades in gym; not for nothing was he the school gymnastics champion. He could do fifty chin-ups in a row and had already passed his army physical.

He was actually surprised at how easily and quickly he managed it all. After he got up and buttoned his fly, he glanced at the sprawled, practically trampled body on the grass. In the thickening twilight he could see the red traces of his fingers on her gentle little round face. For a fraction of a second he thought that she might have died. But right then, as if in response, he heard her weak, pathetic moan.

“You’d better not tell anyone,” Venya said calmly. “That won’t make it easier for anyone. You have to learn how to forgive, Larochka. There’s no living without it.”

He turned on his heel and strode off quickly for home.

Before going to bed he washed everything he was wearing—his trousers, flannel checked shirt, warm knit jersey, even his underpants. His things seemed permeated with the smell of sweet, cheap perfume.

A few days later he heard that Larochka had dropped out and signed up for the Virgin Lands Program. Soon after, her elderly parents, their neighbors in the apartment across the way, vanished as well. People said they’d moved to another town, maybe even Tselinograd. But Venya ignored the talk. He didn’t care.