Eduard Shulman
trans. Peter Constantine
Lyovka Skuratov’s father brought back a Telefunken radio from the war. In the evenings we gathered around it and turned the dial, surprised at how populated the world was. We each had our own interest, but Lyovka’s father was the only one who was interested in the words. Lyovka turned the dial looking for music. It was from him I heard about Gershwin and his blues. Lyovka danced, singing and whistling: “From New York to Kaloo-ougi[1], we all know the boogie-woogie!” Sometimes he would sing something inarticulate that now every fifth-grader can sing, but to this day I can’t.
Kolka Vergin tried to get rid of the static, or what he called “background.” Regardless of what was being broadcast—a voice or an orchestra—he would do everything he could to get rid of the noise and the crackling, and was very angry when nothing worked.
What I liked most was tuning the radio. Like Kolka, I didn’t care what station I landed on. Nor did the “background” noise irritate me. Quite the opposite. The resilient scraping sounds, the modulations and whistling that the radio seemed to wring from the air, moved me. After all, the noises were not birds. And not people. The sky itself was singing—the gray, empty, expanse outside the window. And there I was, listening attentively to the song as others might listen to breaking waves, or the sound of trees.
So we sat by the radio. And the unavoidable moment came that Lyovka’s father had been waiting for and which took us by surprise. A Russian voice came to us through the uninterrupted, metallic crackling. It said: “Mashka the sow had a litter of piglets under the personal supervision of Comrade Stalin.” Then it fell silent. Again there was squealing, crackling, and hooting. We all looked at each other. Had we heard right? And suddenly, surely only to convince us of its reality, the voice broke through again: “Where is Babel?” it asked hoarsely. “Where is Kirshon? Where is Vesyoly?” Perhaps the next name was Pavel Vasilyev. Or Ivan Katayev. Or Klychkov. Or Klyuyev. If it said any of those names, we would not even perhaps have guessed that they were talking about people. What was a babel, a kirshon or a vesyoly? Some technical term? Some sort of fruit? The name of a workers’ settlement? A babel, for instance, might well be a type of berry, a kirshon a nut, Vesyoly a village or a farming community.
Kolka hurried to the radio, trying to stop the crackling. It was the leap of a diver plunging into the deep. The deep raged. Kolka courageously battled the waves.
“Don’t bother,” Lyovka’s father said. “There’s no point.”
We sat before the radio, its size increasing in our eyes with the strength of the sounds it was spewing out. Inside the wooden box was a whole smithy. Someone, holding a gigantic hammer in his red hands, was striking the rails. Smoke, soot, flashing fire. The hand rises and falls mechanically. There’s no time to stop and wipe away the sweat. Then I imagined another scene. An office filled with tables—a small, unpretentious room. There are machines on the tables making noise. I saw wheels, for some reason like the electrical machine they show (or used to show) in physics class. Then a drill. And some sort of engine like a generator. People were sitting at the table, running the machines. They were very serious, deep in concentration. They were wearing headphones. There’s a shift change. They enter the notes of the day into a thick log. But in rare moments, when the boss is absent (these are my childhood fantasies), they would take off their headphones, stick out their long, purple tongues, and say: “Ugh!” Faces swell. The veins on their necks and foreheads bulge, like ropes that are strangling them. Fingers unfasten collars. Lips turn violet.
The actual “radio jammer” (or some contraption like it) is on the banks of the Yauza River, quite near to where the factory worker Astakhov died fighting for freedom in 1917. On the steep, green embankment there is a stone building a few stories high, with black, girded iron towers, oil-rig-like, which however are not drilling the earth but the air, extracting something not for further processing, but for destruction. A fence. Silence. At night, when we walked there with our girls, the howling of dogs could be heard—but that was many years later. Now we were sitting in front of the crackling box, sensing our personal helplessness for the first time.
The feeling of lack of freedom oppressed us. We gathered in the evenings around the radio and listened to the jamming. We became angry. The man who was banging with a sledgehammer against the rails—how stupid, wicked, and foolish he was! How he enjoyed hewing the sound out of the steel! And he hammered relentlessly!
We sat before the radio not because the forbidden fruit was sweet, nor out of a feeling of recalcitrance, and not out of curiosity. We fought for our future as if it were dependent on us and not on some higher forces guiding us. If we surrendered to our fate, if we believed in weakness, our life would lose meaning and perspective.
But the Russian program from far away took its normal course, and we weighed the importance of its information by the amount of noise the jammer was creating. Logic prompted us: the more thundering the noise, the more dangerous the words. We imagined a man running the jammer. He would listen to the broadcast and think, “Hm, this needs to be jammed all the way… but here, I can do less.”
But the oscillations of the “jammer” had their own peculiarities. The machine needed maintenance and lubrication. There might be a short circuit. A wire would break. The liquid that was used to cool the engine could overheat. In winter there was snow, in spring thunderstorms. The truck carrying equipment would get stuck in the autumn mud. While its wheels were spinning, with dirt flying in all directions, and mud-caked soldiers were trying to get beneath the wheels, and while the tractor roamed the black fields with its snout to the ground, trying to sniff out a path, we would get three or four short minutes of unjammed broadcasting. In these few minutes we would learn about events that were now happening far away on the other side of the world where people sleep while we work—and the events would seem close at hand?
Vasya Orlov came to us from America, from Washington D.C., where his father worked at the embassy in a position of moderate rank and importance. Let’s say he was a code officer. Vasya’s mother had also been to America, and Vasya was born in a place there called the Russian House, just as Moscow had its American House near the Soimonovsky Passage—a red brick building with towers and a roof that had jagged peaks like a mountain range. Then the Americans left the American House and the Ethiopians moved in. They often played tennis on the courts that were behind a high fence. A big, black car took their children to school on Arbat Street.
In Washington, Vasya had gone to school on foot. The school had not been far from the embassy. Soviet teachers, who found themselves unexpectedly in America, taught there: It was as if they had gone to sleep somewhere in the province of Kurgan or Tyumen and had suddenly woken up in America. The teachers had been selected from all over Russia. Their names were called out. They were sent from Moscow to the four corners of the earth. Everything was arranged in an old building that looked like a fat woman with protruding brown hips, in a small room with a single window from which one could see, as in a frame, Chistoprudny Boulevard, its colors changing with the seasons.
The teachers, fished out of wooden catalogue boxes, were all distinguished teachers. They had certificates signed and stamped by the highest officials. And then there was a dispatch, sent out over the wires from the capital, flying like a mooring line for thousands of miles, roping in some distinguished Comrade D. or Comrade K. It wound in coils, as if around a black iron post, roping them in. Weighed down with dreams and suitcases, these teachers then headed to the district center. They were brought across the provinces, they were propelled all the way up to Moscow. The brown building, the heavy old woman, handed over its goods to a gray building, a handsome young man of sturdy iron and concrete. Here suits and dresses were sewn for the teachers. In those days, distinguished teachers were mostly village teachers. They were kitted out and dolled up. They were taken to the airport. They settled down in the airplane. They waved.
Berlin, Brussels, London. The “Queen Mary,” Grandmother “Queen Mary,” now long since auctioned off, took them to New York. Highway number such-and-such. Embassy. School.
I got to know about these things in detail, because a certain D.—Nikolai Nikolayevich Deryuzhsky—became our neighbor. And my parents, in their eagerness to make me an engineer, asked him to be my tutor.
About a mile away, beyond two hills, the loud metallic jamming was thundering for all it was worth. People with headphones sat at their posts. And nobody was entering any extraordinary events into the log. Words erupted alongside the jamming. The words overtook me in a roundabout way, on another frequency. And I heard that they had killed, were still killing, and were officially recognizing the dead.
The embassy teacher, comrade K., had climbed up onto the windowsill. I had heard that she had been abducted by force, but managed to climb onto the windowsill. The rope hung all the way to the ground. The wind blew away the white powder with which she had smeared her hands. She grabbed hold of the rough end and slowly climbed out, never to return, giving a few valued workers the opportunity to travel to America as an investigative commission.
With her own two
hands, red and burning from the rope, teacher K. closed all our embassy schools
abroad. The order was given: all
teachers were to return home immediately, all students were to be sent back to
live with relatives. That is what had
happened to my classmate Vasya Orlov.
But that’s a whole other story.