is  huge hand, the hand of a
stevedore, on the card table.
     Oska took aim.  He  raised  his left  hand but quickly brought down his
right. Slap! The Commissar did not have a chance to yank his hand away.
     "What'd  you know! You tricked me that time! Let's do it again. I think
I've got the hang of it. Go on, try again!"
     Oska repeated the manoeuvre, but  his palm came down hard on the table,
since Chubarkov had yanked his hand away  at the very last moment. "Aha!" he
said and seemed very pleased with himself. "Now you put down your paw."


        PAPA SHOWS PROMISE

     A short while  later someone  knocked  and  Papa  entered.  We  quickly
removed our puffed hands from the table  and hid them  behind our backs, for
they were as  red as a goose's feet and  itched  badly from the  Commissar's
slaps. However, Papa must have heard something of what was going on from the
hall.
     "What's wrong with your hands, boys?"
     "Oh, Papa! Come on  in!  We're  playing cat-and-mouse.  The Commissar's
real good at it, too. Even better than Vitya Ponomarenko."
     "He's a  real sharp fellow, your Oska is," the  Commissar  said and  he
sounded a bit embarrassed.  "You have to keep your eye on  him all the time.
But he cheats. He hits you in mid-air, and that's against the rules."
     "No, I don't! I don't cheat! You're real sharp yourself!"
     "This is abominable! Look at your hands! It's unhygienic. Pardon me for
saying so. Comrade Commissar,  but my children are used to more  intelligent
games. This is no way for them to be spending their time."
     "They're getting hardened," Chubarkov said, trying to stick up for us.
     "It's good training! You have to have a good eye and be quick."
     "Nonsense! What a thing to be proud  of! You don't  need any brains for
this kind of a game."
     The Commissar looked at him slyly. "I wouldn't say so. Doctor. It seems
easy when you're on the sidelines,  but it takes some brains. Why  don't you
try?"
     "If you don't mind, I'd rather not."
     "That's a pity."
     "Come on, Papa!"
     "He's scared! Papa's scared!" Oska shouted.
     Papa shrugged. "I don't see what there is to be afraid of. And I  don't
see that you need any brains for it, either. But if you insist. Well...."
     "That's  that," the Commissar said and put  his huge paw  on the table.
"Your turn, Doctor."
     Papa raised his white, antiseptic, surgeon's hand high into the air. He
shrugged disdainfully again and  smacked  the empty table  top in the  place
where  the  Commissar's hand  had just been  lying,  but  had been  suddenly
whisked away.
     We were ecstatic.
     "Well, Doc? You still say there's nothing to it?"
     "One minute.  That  didn't  count. One  minute,  please.  I  think  I'm
beginning to see what it's all about. Very well. You put your hand here, and
I hit from here. Excellent. All right, let's try it again."
     The Commissar,  keeping a  wary eye  on  Papa, placed his  hand  on the
table. He was  ready  to  jerk it away in a  flash. Papa made  several false
moves, and each time Chubarkov's hand jerked slightly. Then Papa pinned down
the Commissar's hand with a sudden loud slap.
     "Oho! You  sure  have  a surgical sledge-hammer,"  Chubarkov  said  and
rubbed his swelling hand. "You'll make a good player. But you won't catch me
napping again, that's for sure."
     "Come on, put your hand down. I have another turn. Wait a minute!" Papa
took off his jacket and pulled up a chair. "We'll see who's the smart fellow
here. Aha!"
     When our aunts peeped into  the  room several minutes  later  they were
flabbergasted.  The  Commissar and Papa were sitting  at the table, one with
his  shirt  out over his  breeches  and  no belt  on and  the other  in  his
shirtsleeves. They were taking  turns  slapping each other's hands  soundly,
missing and slapping the table top.
     "Got you!" said the Commissar.
     "Aha!" Papa boomed.
     Oska and  I were hopping around  excitedly, egging them on, though they
were quite carried away  with  the game as it were. The little table creaked
and swayed under their blows.
     The  sacred  rules  of propriety  hammered into  us by  our  aunts were
creaking and rocking as well.


        ACQUAINTANCES, DESERTERS AND DRAUGHTS

     An elegant army man who wore laced boots moved into the second room. He
carried in his suitcase, examined the room, cleaned his nails, beat a tattoo
on the table with his finger-tips and said, "So".
     "You can always tell a gentleman,"  my aunts, who had been watching him
stealthily, decided and entered to greet the newcomer.
     The  gentleman jumped up, kissed  their hands in turn  and gave each of
the  three one of his  gilt-edged visiting cards.  The  name on the card was
Edmond  Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan. The fine type in the lower left-hand
corner read: "Marxist".
     Despite his fine-sounding name,  Edmond  Flegontovich La Bazri de Bazan
turned out to be completely  non-Schwambranian in character. He actually did
exist,  though, and  was well  known  in Pokrovsk. La  Bazri  de Bazan first
appeared in town shortly  after the revolution and became the editor  of the
Volga  Stormy  Petrel, a  small  newspaper published  in Pokrovsk. He became
famous  after he printed  a banner  headline on Christmas, greeting  all the
readers on behalf  of "the 1918th anniversary of the birth of the Socialist,
J.  Christ". The following  day the paper had a new  editor. At the  time in
question, La Bazri de Bazan was on the Tratrchok  staff. He held the rank of
aide-de-camp for special missions, but since he was chiefly responsible  for
arranging lectures, shows and debates,  he soon found his  rank unofficially
referred  to  as  "aide-de-camp  for  special  intermissions". The  soldiers
nicknamed him Bags-and-Sacks.
     The Committee  to Combat Desertion set up its headquarters in the third
room, and penitent deserters  trooped in  and out all day long. They trekked
in guiltily to the committee, but since they usually took  the wrong turn in
the apartment,  they  would as often as  not lay their  guilty heads  on our
tables and windowsills. They wandered through the rooms and held meetings in
the kitchen.  In  the  mornings they would tramp  into  the parlour  without
knocking and wake Oska and me and  our aunts, who slept on the other side of
the  wardrobes  that  divided the  room.  Our aunts  would  appeal to  their
consciences, but the deserters would assure them that they were no strangers
and would not hurt anyone, after which the men would curl up by the door and
go to sleep.  Whenever a little  girl  came  for  a piano lesson, they would
crowd around  the  piano and  follow  her rippling  fingers  up and down the
keyboard admiringly.  "Just  look at that!.  No bigger'n a  baby,  but watch
those fingers go!" they would say.
     Strangers kept drifting in and  out of every door,  but they all seemed
to  be  desirable acquaintances.  Mamma  soon got used to the draughts.  The
draughts  drew the  red  flags  in through the windows.  The house  became a
thoroughfare, with the corridor serving as  an extension of the street.  For
some  reason or other, no one noticed the gate, and so they  passed  through
our  apartment  to  reach  the  back  yard  from the street.  Day  and night
typewriters clattered overhead  in the army office on the second  floor. One
night they  clattered louder and  faster than usual, and in the  morning  we
discovered that the people upstairs had been testing a new machine-gun.  Tin
pails clanged in the  yard  near the tethering post. Hardened deserters  who
were  under arrest sat around  on  the porch railing. Sentries walked up and
down  with measured steps. Oska hopped and skipped along behind them, trying
to keep  in  step and  looking very intent as he shouldered his  toy gun. He
would peep into Bags-and-Sacks' windows as he paraded back and forth,  since
our manuscripts  were  locked up  in  the  desk  there.  Oska  was  guarding
Schwambranian property.


        THE MARQUIS AND THE MARTINET

     The  Commissar  was reading his way  through the  third volume  of  the
encyclopaedia before going to bed. He had already read the first two volumes
and intended to go through  the entire set. My aunts despised  him in  their
hearts and cautioned me against being too friendly with, as they referred to
him, a  martinet. However, Oska  and I tagged  along  after  him whenever we
could. We accompanied him to the stables to groom the army horses and shared
his dream of big ships.
     Bags-and-Sacks' room reeked  of perfume. Cuff  links,  little  bottles,
boxes,  wine glasses,  cigarette holders  and nail files were  scattered all
over the windowsills. There  was a photograph  of Vera Kholodnaya, a popular
silent  screen  star,  on the  wall.  Bags-and-Sacks was  polite. He  always
stepped aside to let someone pass in the cramped corridor and often  clicked
his heels. My  Petrograd aunt said he was certainly more like a marquis than
a Marxist.  The marquis entertained every evening.  His visitors were ladies
in uniform and men in civilian clothes, the ex-town fathers and ex-volunteer
nurse's  aides.  Bags-and-Sacks'  guests were very  noisy. A  guitar twanged
mournfully far into the  night, while he sang in a grating voice of the King
of France playing chess on  the parquet  floor with  his  jester. Aunt Neces
would wake up and sigh.
     "He's a very fine gentleman," she said. "It's certainly no fault of his
that he has neither a voice for singing nor an ear for music. I simply can't
understand why he insists on singing."
     One day  La Bazri  de  Bazan  got  the Commissar drunk. Chubarkov  kept
refusing, but the  marquis kept coaxing him to  drink. "Go on, drink up. The
proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains."
     After a  while the Commissar came  into  our room in  his stocking feet
with the straps of his breeches dangling. "I'm nearly through with the third
volume,  Doctor,  but  what's the use?  I guess  hauling sacks is my  limit.
That's for sure." And he kneeled over. When someone tried to help him to his
feet he jumped  up and dashed  out into yard. Five  minutes later he entered
from  the street.  He  was tightly belted and every button of his tunic  was
buttoned. He  was  very official-looking. His spurs  jangled. His  face  was
strained and intent.
     "Where's that Army  guy who just made  a  fool of  himself?" he rasped.
"Lolling around drunk, disgracing our Soviet system. Where is he? He's under
arrest! And that's that." He searched the room. Papa  stood  in front of the
mirror,  so the Commissar  would not find himself. Before leaving, Chubarkov
turned in  the  doorway and  shook an unbending  finger at everyone. "See it
doesn't happen again! And that's that!"


        THE SMELL OF SOAP

     A terrible discovery was made one evening. La Bazri de Bazan  had  gone
off somewheres and Mamma wanted to see if the package was still in  the desk
drawer. It was not. The precious package containing the worthless  money and
our manuscripts was gone, as were four bars of fine toilet soap that she had
also  kept  there.  They  were all gone. The  Schwambranian secrets had been
pilfered.
     Papa and Mamma  went back  to the dining-room. We  were gathered around
the table for a meeting of the family council.
     "So that's what your marquis is like," Papa said.
     "Impossible!" all three aunts protested. "You can tell he's from a good
family. The Commissar probably picked the lock and requisitioned everything,
as they say."
     "Such audacity!" Mamma moaned. "And there was the soap, too. I couldn't
care less for the  money. It was just a pile  of paper that should have been
thrown out long ago."
     "Why'd you hide it then?" I asked.
     "Well, you never can tell...."
     We sat around  in silence  for some  time, staring  at the oilcloth. It
seemed that misfortune was spread out on the table like a dead fish.
     Papa rose and said he would notify the authorities.
     My aunts were aghast.
     "You  must be out of your mind!  How can  you complain to robbers about
the doings of robbers? Why, they'll arrest you and shoot you!"
     But Papa  brought  his  fist  down  on  the table  and the  Constituent
Assembly said no more. Then Papa cranked the telephone.
     "The Special  Section, please," he said in a special voice. "It's busy?
Then the Cheka."
     "Shhh!" Aunt Neces said in a frightened voice. She was used to uttering
these words in a fierce stage whisper.
     Two men came to the house shortly afterwards.  They  were both tall and
olive-skinned and  both had  small black moustaches.  They  were  dressed in
leather jackets and looked  like  drivers. Papa had informed  Chubarkov that
they  were  coming,  and  the  Commissar  joined  them  when  they   entered
Bags-and-Sacks' room. The marquis was at home.  He seemed taken  aback for a
moment, but then greeted the unexpected visitors with his usual familiarity.
"Come  on in.  Prenez  vos  places,  as  they say.  May  I  offer  a  little
refreshment?"
     They searched  the room.  The  lost  soap fell  out  of  an  overturned
suitcase.
     "It's ours," Papa said.
     "I must disagree. It's mine," the marquis said.
     The  worthless paper money was  mixed  up  with some other  papers  and
charts. Oska and I exchanged glances.
     One of the men  leafed  through the papers, reading aloud: " 'Letter to
the tsar',  'Battle map',  'Guide to the city of P.'  'Secret Instructions',
'List of conspirators'. What's all this?"
     "I don't  know,"  the  marquis  replied.  He had  turned pale  when  he
realized that this was beginning to smell worse than merely soap.
     "How did you come by all this?"
     "I don't know. My word  of honour. None of this belongs  to me. Nor the
soap. I don't know a thing about it."
     Chubarkov went right  up to him  and cursed through  his teeth. It  was
very much as if he had spat in his face.
     Suddenly Oska made  his way through to the  front. I waved him  back. I
rolled my eyes like a jack-in-the-box, but he paid no attention.
     "That's  ours! Tell him to give it  back, 'cause  it  doesn't belong to
him."
     The two men were examining the charts. They exchanged glances.
     "Mm?" one said quizzically.
     "Uh-huh," the other agreed.
     "Comrades!" I said. "My brother and I were playing, and we hid all this
next to the soap. That's all there is to it," I said.
     "We'll straighten it all out at headquarters," was the reply.
     Then  one  of the men put through a  call. "That you?  This is Schorge.
I've got him here.  Yes, we found it. Yes,  he confessed he stole it. But we
found something funny here. Yes. The boys say it's theirs. Yes. I  doubt it.
What? Both of  them? All  right!" and the  receiver clicked  like a pair  of
heels. He then  went over to Chubarkov and spoke to him. Chubarkov looked at
us awkwardly.
     "I'll tell you what,  boys,"  the Commissar  said. "Let's all go for  a
ride in  an automobile. The chief has specially  invited you  over. He wants
you  both to  tell him all about those papers of yours. And that's that. I'm
going along for the ride. All right? Then that's that."
     My aunts fainted like  so many  tenpins  rolling over. I,  too, felt  a
little  queasy. ' A large automobile took us to the Cheka. The night  rushed
at us. Like  true Schwambranians,  we  were  anxious to  reach the  scene of
adventure.


        TWO SCHWAMBRANIANS AT THE CHEKA

     The office was  still. Two men were bent over our papers.  The light of
the  table  lamp was reflected  on  the shiny bald  head of  the fat man  in
eyeglasses. The other was a Lett. His blond eyelashes fluttered.
     "Well, boys, sit down  and tell us all  about it," the fat man said. He
seated Oska on his desk. There was a Browning gun on it.
     "Is it loaded?" Oska asked matter-of-factly and  then  went back to his
usual tone of voice. "Who are  you?  The chief chief? Are you? Then tell him
to give us our papers. You know how long it took us to draw everything?"
     "We'll do just that,  but first I want you to tell us all about it from
the very beginning. All right?"
     The Lett's  eyelashes  fluttered  again as  he  read our  Schwambranian
letters. I felt very ill-at-ease.
     "This is  just a lot of nonsense!" he said in an angry voice and handed
the papers to the fat man, who looked them over carefully.
     "Where's the city of P.?" the fat man asked.
     "That's Port Folio. The port in Folio."
     "And where would that be?"
     "In  Schwambrania," Oska  piped  up. "It's  a  make-believe country. My
brother discovered it all by himself. We've been playing it all our lives."
     "Your brother's  a real Columbus, isn't he?  Well, if it's only a game,
why'd you hide all this?"
     "So's it would be real secret. It's more interesting when  everything's
secret."
     The  chief  was  intrigued.  He   asked  us  to  tell   him  all  about
Schwambrania.  We  began our  story rather  reluctantly,  but were gradually
carried away by our  old game. We interrupted each other as we spoke of life
on the Big Tooth Continent. We told them what the coat-of-arms stood for and
all  about  the map. We enumerated all  the members of the Brenabor Dynasty,
described the wars,  journeys, revolutions and tournaments,  while Oska even
recalled the name of the last Minister of External Affairs. We stood to sing
the Schwambranian anthem and were about  to  argue  over the  last  cemetery
reforms when....
     The chief was laughing. He was roaring, choking and wiping  his tearing
eyes.  He  slapped his  bald  pate  and shook his head, but  could  not stop
laughing.
     The  angry-looking  Lett was laughing, too.  His body shook, though his
pale  lips did not open and his eyes were shut tight. Something squeaked  in
his throat.
     Oska and I  looked  at them reproachfully. Then we smiled. Soon we were
laughing, too.
     "Oh!  You're  better than  a circus!" the chief  panted. "I thought I'd
die. Ah.... What did you call him? Brenabor? How'd you ever think of it? You
had it all figured out! I haven't heard of anything so good in a long time."
Then he suddenly became serious and said, "Do  you find it very difficult to
govern the country?"
     "It's not too bad. We manage. But sometimes things get mixed up."
     "Why'd you have to invent all that?"
     It  was a serious question.  I took a deep breath and said,  "We wanted
everything  to be beautiful. And everything really  is in Schwambrania.  All
the streets are paved, and all the boys have big  muscles. And parents don't
interfere. And you can have as much sugar as  you like. There are hardly any
funerals, and you can go to the movies every single day. As for the weather,
it's always sunny and it's  cool in the shade. All the poor people are rich.
And everybody's happy. And there aren't any lice at all."
     "You're wonderful boys!" the chief  said warmly. "We've got to make all
these  dreams come  true. And we'll have paved  streets everywhere,  and big
muscles,  and movies every day.  And we'll call off the funerals  and outlaw
the  lice. Just  wait!  It's easier  said than done,  so we'll  call off the
dreaming and get down  to work. I have no time to lecture you, not this late
at night. Look at the younger Schwambranian  yawning. He's opening his mouth
so  wide  he might swallow the whole continent. And  I'm sure your  mother's
worried. I'll phone her."
     The chief took us home in his car. He let Oska toot  the horn before we
said goodbye. He laughed and said he was very happy to have met some members
of  the Schwambranian tribe. He said  we  should  establish Soviet power  in
Schwambrania soon and then stop dreaming and help lay real pavements.
     "What happened to Bags-and-Sacks?" I said, feeling  that  we  were well
enough acquainted by now for me to ask him.
     "We'll send him off  to ... uh ... what's  its  name ... Pi-li-guinika.
You know, he  invented himself, too. But  he's a sleazy character and he was
playing for  money. Well, goodnights,  boys! Happy Schwambranian dreams  and
good real times ahead!"


        NEW VISTAS FOR ROAMING

     We were soon asked to move again. This time we were  given an apartment
on Atkarskaya  Street.  It  was  very far  from  the  centre  of  town.  The
centrifugal forces were at work.
     The actual moving was not  too much of a strain, for  we  had  by  then
become used to  all sorts  of  changes.  The greatness of the  Home  (with a
capital   "H")   had  long  since  been  debunked.  Our  belongings  crawled
shamefacedly into the crowded corners of our new place of  habitation. Since
there  was  not  enough room for everything, a wardrobe and a table wandered
off to our friends' house on the way.
     Our moving coincided with new great changes in Schwambrania. Once again
this  island  roaming  in  search of a  single, common universal  truth  had
undergone  considerable displacement.  After  our  visit  to  the  Cheka  we
approached the goal of all our wanderings in the great wide world.
     However, a  new,  an entirely new  passion gripped  Schwambrania. Three
days later we decided that this passion was at last the truth.
     It was the theatre.
     The Lunacharsky Municipal Theatre was opened in Pokrovsk in the defunct
Dawn Cinema. The troupe was made up of actors from  Petrograd and Moscow who
had  chosen  to  forego  future  fame in the capital  for satisfactory  food
rations in the provinces.
     We  were immediately  captivated by the actors' names, which had a true
Schwambranian ring.  There  was  Enriton,  Polonych and Vokar,  for example.
True, we later discovered that some  of the names had simply been  reversed,
so that a very ordinary Rakov had become Vokar.
     Kholmsky was  head  and  shoulders above  all the other  actors of  the
troupe. He was a  man  of many  talents whom  I met in Moscow  several years
later,  when he  was the manager of the  popular Theatre of Satire. Kholmsky
played  either  villains  or  Napoleons. Besides,  he was the playwright and
designer. The  City Council commissioned him  to do  the murals  for the new
theatre. Soon  the  walls were covered with  centaurs,  troubadours,  muses,
prophets and such like. Kholmsky was a man who was easily  carried  away and
was  liable to run to extremes. He bundled some of  his  painted  characters
into suits of mail, but had not a scrap  of covering left for the others. He
coloured their  bodies purple, which was wholly in keeping with the freezing
temperatures inside  the unheated building. Kholmsky  drew Venus de  Milo at
the  entrance.  He added a pair of arms at  the  suggestion  of the  council
members.  The  inscription  on the  pedestal  was: "Sow ye all  kindness and
wisdom eternal! Sow ye! The people will thank you sincerely."
     The people of Pokrovsk did not like his work.
     "He's supposed to be a Party  man, but he's gone  and drawn a bunch  of
naked  people.  You'd think  the  theatre  was  a  bathhouse!"  the audience
complained.
     Our Petrograd aunt turned out to be a great theatre-goer,  and she took
us  to  every single premiere. In  no time  we  were  able to  recognize the
members of the troupe,  both  coming and  going.  We were mesmerized by  the
theatre. We liked everything about it: the gong, the intermissions, the line
at the box office.
     At the time, the theatre resembled a railroad  station, and the curtain
was often delayed, as were the trains. The floor was littered with butts and
sunflower seed shells. The audience  sat bundled in winter coats with raised
collars. The applause was  wild, no matter that gloves  and  mittens muffled
the sound. All through  the performance the inclined floor of the hall shook
lightly and  emitted a rumbling sound. This  was the people in the  audience
tapping their feet softly to keep their toes warm.
     "The heat is excruciating! There's not a breath of  air!" the  queen on
stage fumed  as she fanned herself, though  steam escaped from  her mouth in
the cold air and she  had on a heavy quilted jacket  under her flimsy robes.
The prompter's whispering steamed upwards from his booth.
     The  audience  reeked  of   disinfectant.  We  were   doused  with  the
foul-smelling  liquid  before going  to the  theatre and  were  inspected by
candle light in the front hall upon returning.


        SCHWAMBRANIA FOR GROWN-UPS

     The Constituent Assembly sometimes went  to a play and  then  spent the
rest of the week criticizing it. Aunt Sary was nearly run out of the theatre
once. The  curtain had just  gone up, and  there was  a strong draught  from
backstage. My  aunt's  voice  complained from  the  front  row:  "There's  a
draught! Shut whatever it is!" She  said this loudly as if the curtain, that
magic veil that separated the two worlds, was no more than a window.
     The audience was truly offended.
     We  were  dying to go backstage. Grisha Fyodorov, an  influential, kind
soul and  the son of  the  troupe's hairdresser, took us to that workshop of
wonders. We were stunned at the sight of the unbelievable, crude props,  the
toy fruit and sackcloth scenery. But we gazed in awe at the grown people who
played  at  other  people's lives every  single day.  This was  better  than
Schwambrania.
     There was a painted inscription in the hall over the stage that read:

     ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE, AND ALL THE MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS
     (Shakespeare)

     This quotation became the new motto of Schwambrania.
     The  Schwambranians took to  the stage. The world was now divided  into
actors and audience. Daytime in Pokrovsk was like a drawn-out intermission.
     "Art takes one's mind  off  one's  dull, uninteresting life," my  aunts
said. "It transports one into a world of beauty."
     They argued  heatedly and  nearly  quarrelled  when they discussed  the
actions  of  the various  characters  in the previous  evening's  play. They
accused  these  invented personages, defended  them, loved  or  hated  them,
exactly  as Oska and I did  when  we played  Schwambrania. That was when  we
decided that the theatre  was  Schwambrania for  grown-ups. They  were  very
serious when they played their game.
     Once, during a  performance  of Sunset, the lights went  out. The  play
continued by the light of kerosene lamps which sent sooty streaks across the
painted sky.  The action was drawing  to  a close. The father had decided to
kill his daughter and had picked up his revolver.
     At that  very moment I noticed  that the lamp  closest to the wings had
begun to smoke badly. The  flame appeared as a tiny fountain over the rim of
the  lamp glass. The  father  walked towards his daughter. The flame reached
the edge of the sackcloth  pavilion. The father raised his gun.  The scenery
was about to catch  fire.  The daughter wrung  her hands. I am positive that
many other people besides myself were aware of the fact that the faulty lamp
might at any moment set fire to the  scenery. However,  the daughter fell to
her knees and  no one said a  word. They were  afraid  to spoil  the murder.
Schwambrania reigned in the theatre. The father cocked his gun.
     The scenery began to smoke.
     "Die, wretched woman!" the father exclaimed.
     "The lamp's smoking!" I shouted, breaking the spell.
     The  nimble actor was  up to par. He turned the wick down with one hand
and killed the ingenue with the other.
     The  theatre  was saved.  However,  no sooner had the curtain come down
than  the people sitting next to  me began scolding, saying that the theatre
was no place for boys, that I might  have waited before I shrieked, and that
now, instead of a murder, they had seen a stupid comedy, and they were sorry
they had  wasted their  money  on  tickets. In my  heart of  hearts I had to
confess that for the first time in my life I had betrayed Schwambrania.


        THE MEANING OF MITAC

     There were  two things  that had been bothering me  for  several years.
These were  an old locomotive that had  sunk  into  the  ground on Skuchnaya
Street  and  the  mysterious  charm-word  "mitac" which had been  a  part of
Annushka's card trick.
     Now, at last, I discovered the meaning of "mitac". A simple street sign
held the answer. It proved  more knowledgeable than the teachers  in  my old
school or the encyclopaedia. I couldn't believe my eyes when I read the word
"MITAC"  on  one of  the houses on Breshka  Street,  now  renamed  Communard
Square. I  ran over  and read  the  following:  "Municipal Institute  of the
Theatre and Cinema".
     Pokrovsk  was captivated  by the theatre. Everybody and his brother was
now  an  amateur  actor. Tratrchok,  the Department of Education,  the  Food
Committee  and Volga  Shipping all had their own troupes. Theatrical studios
mushroomed. Finally, all  the small studios joined forces  to become  MITAC,
which then established a children's  studio.  Since  our  school was  closed
down,  Oska and I enrolled. Stepan Atlantis  and Taya Opilova  soon followed
our example.
     We were  rehearsing a play called Prince Fork de Forkos. The prince was
in love with a princess, but the queen, her mother, was very proud and a bad
lot  in general, and  so the prince was  shown the door.  Then he  broke the
spell  that  had been  cast over a mushroom, and a fairy  came out of it and
gave the  prince  an apricot. The queen  ate it, and her  nose began getting
bigger  and  bigger.  Meanwhile, back on  Rodos  Island,  where  the  prince
lived.... In a word, the plot was very involved.
     Taya Opilova was  the princess. Both  Stepan and  I  wanted to  be  the
prince. We nearly  quarrelled over the part, because the prince was supposed
to declare his love for the princess, and the princess, we felt, would guess
that these were not simply lines from the text. Kramskoi, the director, said
Stepan would be the prince, since  he  was older than  I and taller, and his
voice was deeper. As if I couldn't talk in a deep voice if I wanted to!
     We  coaxed  Forsunov into being the great magician. Grisha Fyodorov was
our makeup man, as he was the son of a real hairdresser in a real theatre.
     Our first performance was at the MITAC. I was the court jester and Oska
was a gnome. His  was a  non-speaking part. We were both jittery. Grisha had
made us up for  our parts. The audience was buzzing impatiently  out in  the
hall, and the sound seemed dangerous, mocking and mysterious. It was time to
begin, but both Stepan and  Forsunov were missing. The director paced up and
down backstage.
     "Curtain time!" the audience shouted and stamped.
     The boys finally showed up. They were sober-faced and in a hurry.
     "So long, Leva!"  Stepan said. "All the Communists have been mobilized.
We're being  sent  to the  front lines. I'm a volunteer.  I had a  hard time
making them take me.  They said I was too young.  But  they finally did. Our
train's leaving soon. Goodbye!"
     Our hands met in a firm handshake. Stepan was silent for a moment, then
cleared his throat and  said softly, "I'll  bet you'll be  seeing Taya  home
alone now.  Well, I don't mind if  it's you. But don't let anyone else  near
her, hear?"
     The  audience  was  in  an uproar. Forsunov went  out in  front of  the
curtain. He had on his knapsack. The audience calmed down. Forsunov adjusted
a strap and said, "The performance has been postponed."
     "Till when?" the people shouted.
     "Till we wipe out the Whiteguards!"


        THE MAN OF THE HOUSE

     A day later Papa left for  the  Urals  Front. Papa was heading into the
thick of the typhus epidemic, for the dread  lice had infested the trenches.
Mamma and my aunts had packed three full suitcases  for him.  Papa took one.
He joked unhappily, saying that he didn't need a thing, since  they wouldn't
put  a burial mound over him  and  he didn't believe in the hereafter. Then,
according to the old Russian custom, we all sat down for a moment of silence
before the journey.
     "All  right,"  Papa said as  he  rose. He  kissed each of  us in  turn.
"You're the man of the house now," he said to me.
     As he  was leaving, he collided with a patient  who was just  entering.
The man moaned and bowed to him.
     "There are no more office hours. I'm leaving."
     "Please, Doctor!  It'll only take a minute!  I can't stand the pain any
more. And  who knows how long I'll have to wait till you get back. You might
even get yourself killed out there."
     Papa looked at the wall clock, then at the man, and  then at us. He set
down  his suitcase. "Take off  your things,"  he said  in  an  angry  voice,
ushering  the man into the office. "Don't forget,  seven drops after meals,"
he said to him ten minutes later as he got into the sleigh.
     After the sleigh  had  borne Papa off,  my aunts walked  away  from the
windows and all three began to wail.
     "No more of that, hear me? Dry up," I said rudely.
     My frightened  aunts stopped  weeping. However, the  stillness that had
descended upon our suddenly empty house was still worse. I clenched my fists
and left the room, my gait very much that of the man of the house.

        ON TERRA FIRMA


        SOME LESSONS TO US AND TO OTHERS

     I don't recall how long it  was after  that, perhaps  a year, but maybe
only a month. There were no calendars in the stores, and so it was difficult
to follow the passing of time, which had somehow lost its  familiar quality.
When  my  old Boys  School uniform  was  traded  for  a slab  of  bacon, for
instance, the days were swallowed up, as it were. Other,  less filling days,
dragged  on like weeks. Endless,  hungry weeks. Our daily schedule was quite
unlike what it had once been. Before, dinner time had been the centre of the
day's  activities, the traditional  hour when the  family gathered, a solemn
repast, a  sacrament, the  ceremony of partaking of food, the main meal, and
the hours were counted off in terms of: "before dinner"  and "after dinner".
Now we often skipped dinner  altogether. We  ate whenever there was anything
to eat. At such times Mamma would say, "Let's have a bite."
     And we ate on the run, standing up, like people at a railroad  station,
since it was impossible to come in physical contact with the icy chairs. The
apartment  was freezing,  and each of  us grudged  sharing the warmth he had
hoarded up in his body with an inanimate thing like a chair.
     We moved about, trying to avoid all cold objects, for they could snatch
away some of our body's warmth. We took turns being the fire-tender. The one
on  duty  would crawl out from  under a pile  of  blankets and drapes in the
morning,  when  the thermometer pointed  to 5°.  The  day's fire-tender, his
teeth chattering,  would  stick his feet into a pair of  icy felt boots  and
start  a fire  in the pot-bellied stove. It would become red-hot  and as the
temperature rose, the inhabitants of our apartment would rise, too. The bare
and empty  sideboard greeted  us with open arms.  Our breakfast consisted of
bland pumpkin mush, watermelon tea and saccharine.
     Mamma  was  now a  Music  School  teacher, but since  the school had no
facilities  for  practising, the lessons were conducted  in our  house.  The
little girls stepped  on the  piano pedals in  their  heavy  felt  boots and
roused  the chilly  innards of the  piano  with  their  icy fingers.  Mamma,
dressed in her  fur coat and gloves, would nimbly lift the  stuck keys  from
under their fingers.
     I,  too, was a  tutor.  A  buxom girl named Anna Kolomiitseva, who  was
older than  I,  came to the  house  to learn the three R's.  The payment for
these  lessons was  pound of meat  a month. It was hard-earned meat.  That's
when 1 learned the  real  meaning of work.  My  pupil  stubbornly refused to
trust  the letters of the alphabet, relying mostly on her own intuition. For
instance, there was her own name, Anna.
     "Aaa-nnn-nnaaa," she drawled. "Oh! It says Annie!"
     One day we were tackling the word "parasol".
     "Paa-raa-ss-sool," she stumbled along.
     "Well? Read it all together," I said.
     "Umbrella."


        ON THE ROAD THERE

     There-beyond sorrow's seas,
     sunlit lands
     uncharted.
     Mayakovsky

     After my pupil had gone, Oska and I went out to look  for straw to heat
the stove a bit. We made  use of its quick-heating qualities to  set out the
dough for bread and took turns  kneading the sticky mass with  our ice-cold,
swollen hands. The job called for frenzied  effort, and we imagined  that we
were pummelling the hated guts of the enemies of revolutionary mankind, from
Chatelains Urodenal to Admiral Kolchak.
     In the evening we all gathered  at the table. There was no electricity.
The single nightlight was only put on on Sundays, which then truly became  a
special day.  The weekdays  were illuminated  by  an  oil wick lamp  with  a
twisted length of cotton for  a wick. It was immersed in a cup of  sunflower
or linseed oil. A  tiny flickering  flame burned  at  the  tip  of the wick,
filling the room with writhing black shadows.
     My aunts  moved  the lamp closer. They  sat in a row, stony-  faced and
somewhat  unreal.  The lamp  cast a  faint light  on them.  The  Constituent
Assembly resembled madonnas in  pince-nez. My aunts read aloud in turn. Then
they spoke of the wonderful past and our ruined lives.
     "My God! What a beautiful life it  was!  Remember the Sobinov  recitals
and the literary magazines, and sugar was fifteen kopecks a pound. And now?"
     "Aunts!" I said in a voice belonging to the man of the house. I sat  in
a dark corner that  was now Schwambrania. "Listen to me! I'm asking you once
and for all  to keep your counter-revolutionary ideas to yourselves. It's no
skin off my nose, but it's wrong to be a bad influence on small children." I
would come closer to the table and  glance meaningfully in Oska's direction.
For some time now I  was aware that I  was  maturing  at a tremendous speed.
This feeling of being responsible for the household, far from oppressing me,
actually inspired  me. I felt that I had become more logical in my thinking,
that the necessary words  came to me  more  easily, that I was  more sure of
myself  in  many ways. I looked  reality  in  the face  now without  fear or
reproach. Our straw  patrol, frozen fingers and pumpkin mush  did not dampen
my spirits.  The  absence of a calendar, eating standing  up and wearing our
overcoats  indoors made  our way of life seem like  something  temporary and
transient, like something that was happening at a railroad station. However,
this was not but  another stage of the Schwambranians' wandering.  Life  was
moving in a definite direction, though  the road was  an unusually difficult
one.
     "Don't worry, Mamma," I would say on the days when there were no lentil
beans,  no kerosene  and no letters from  Papa. "Keep your  chin up. Imagine
that we're on  a very long journey, travelling through deserts and over  all
kinds of high mountains. We're on our way to a new land. A wonderful land."
     "Where  to?  Your Schwambrania  again?"  she would reply in  a hopeless
voice.
     "No, not Schwambrania. A real  land. Who cares about oil wick lamps and
carrying straw, and frozen hands? Honestly, Mamma. Remember our  undesirable
acquaintances, Klavdia and Fektistka? Their whole lives were a hundred times
worse  than what  ours are  now  for just this little while. It'd  really be
unfair if we'd go  straight from  one good life to another. We're just  like
passengers as it is, not helping in any way. And my aunts didn't even bother
to  buy tickets. They should be put off the boat. Papa's  the only one,  and
even though I miss him, I'm glad he's doing his duty at the front lines."
     My   aunts   were  horrified.  "Goodness!  Just  imagine.  They've  had
everything! Even governesses! And look at them now! They're growing up to be
Bolsheviks!"
     1 dreamed of the day Stepan returned. I would  go out to meet him in my
patched felt boots, carrying an armload of rotten straw.
     "Hello, Stepan," I would say. "Give me five (but don't squeeze hard, my
hands are swollen). See? I'm the man of the house now, and I've forbidden my
aunts  to talk like  counter-revolutionaries.  I'm  rather  hungry, but that
doesn't matter. I'll gladly eat pumpkin mush till victory day."
     "Good for  you,"  Stepan  would say.  "Your thinking is all right. Hold
out. Mush is as good as bread."
     "But I  don't want  to be a passenger.  I  want  to be  a member of the
crew!"
     "Well, that's just what you'll be, a sailor of the revolution."
     My daydreams broke off  here, like a  broken reel  in the movies, for I
did not know how to become a sailor of the revolution. And Mamma would never
have let me be one, anyway.


        A