presses and long, multiple repetitions on the spring apparatus to build up my thighs and back muscles. Four weeks later the fat had shrunk to muscle. At the end of six weeks I could bench-press 130 pounds, which was 20 pounds over the norm for my group at Spartak.
Late one warm Tuesday afternoon after school, I found Coach Karanov in the locker room.
“I’m back, Alexey Ivanovich,” I said. “Will you give me another chance?”
He looked at me thoughtfully, then nodded. “I will, Sasha,” he said, “but only if you’re serious this time.”
And that I was. I never missed another day of practice. Every evening I stayed there after the training was over to work out with weights. When the coach gave us twenty push-ups, I did twenty-one. If we had to run a mile, I ran a quarter of a mile more.
And I began winning matches. I was chosen for the 150-pound class traveling team. It was a real honor to ride the train with my friends on the first road trip to Syzran, where we defeated the Spartak juniors in straight matches. As the wrestling program wound up at the end of that school year, I had the great pleasure of hearing opponents actually groan when they read the roster and saw my name matched against them.
But I wasn’t so successful at School Number Two. The academic standards were high, but I just did not feel challenged intellectually. In fact, by the time I was fifteen, school bored me. I was only interested in wrestling and didn’t have the time for my studies. This attitude, of course, kept me out of the political intrigues of Komsomol and put me in bad favor with the faculty.
Like other bored adolescent boys, I became rebellious and joined forces with two close friends, Vovka Ivanov and Igor Devyatkin, to harass the teachers. We always chose the last table at the rear of the classroom, which the teachers had dubbed “Kolyma,” for the Siberian gold mine prison where the hardest tattooed criminals were banished. One of our favorite targets was a chubby math teacher we scornfully called Mishka. Vovka and Igor helped me make poor Mishka’s life difficult. We booby-trapped his chalk pieces by drilling them hollow and put thumbtacks under the piled lesson forms on his desk so that he stuck his thumb. Once we used a stepladder to tape a chunk of ice on the glass lampshade hanging above his desk, so the water dripped steadily onto his head. But our best prank was when we pulled the pins from the hinges of the classroom door. As Mishka strode into the room, the heavy wooden door clattered on top of him and set off uncontrollable laughter.
He knew where to find the villains. A moment later he grabbed me by the collar and tried to slap me. I wasn’t about to be hit by a butterball like him and twisted his arm behind his back. Ten minutes later I was standing at attention before our principal, “Rema” Alexandrovna, the tough, middle-aged woman who tried to run her school fairly for both faculty and students.
“Zuyev,” she stated coldly, as if she were a State prosecutor, “your mother will be here tomorrow. You are to be expelled.”
Somehow my mother managed to patch things up the next day.
Then my friends and I were caught sneaking wine into the school Red Army party. We shared a bottle with an old cleaning lady, but she informed on us the next day anyway. Again I was hauled before Rema. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” She calmly lifted a printed Ministry of Education form from her desk. “This is your ‘wolf’s ticket.’”
It was a formal expulsion form, the “ticket” to a dead-end life. Any youth expelled from school was excluded from further training, either academic or vocational, condemned to a life of manual labor at best, or even a criminal career.
Again my mother intervened successfully. But my academic record itself was bad enough to keep me from the ninth and tenth years of academic study at the school. In fact, I had no interest in more school. I told them that I wanted to leave classrooms behind and get on with adult life. Rema noted that, in any event, my poor grades probably meant I would flunk the eighth-year exams.
My mother turned from Rema’s desk to glare at me, her face set in anger. “I cannot believe that my son is this stupid.”
“Evidently, Lydia Mikhailnovna,” Rema said scornfully, “he is both stupid and lazy.”
My pride was hurt, which, of course, was what they both intended. “If you give me a chance,” I said, “I’ll show you I’m not stupid.”
For the rest of that spring, I cut back on my wrestling training and worked hard, preparing for the exams. I studied on the train when the team took road trips. I studied on the trolley riding to and from practice. I studied hard at home each night. And when I entered the test rooms that June, I felt confident. The math and science exams were rigorous, but I passed in the upper quarter. I scored high on geography. Soviet political history didn’t interest me much, but I managed a passing grade. I liked military history, and I did very well on the section about the defense of the Motherland. I had made my point. Now no one could call me either stupid or lazy. But I’d had enough of this theoretical classroom study. I still intended to skip the final two academic years at School Number Two and to become an apprentice electrician at Kuybyshev’s electro-technology vocational school.
Being fifteen that summer, I was expected to attend an organized vocational camp or to intern at an industrial institute in the region. Since I was always eager to travel, I managed to land a summer job with a geological survey team attached to the Hydroelectric Institute. The three-man, two-boy team, led by a friendly engineer named Yuri Sokalov, was assigned to the east bank of the Volga, covering a region over a hundred miles long. Our responsibility was to measure the electromagnetic potential in the bedrock so that a complete geological survey chart of the region could be drawn.
It was interesting work. I was just a helper, but I learned a lot about geology and about the grown-up world of men. Yuri took pride in his profession and made sure we did a thorough job. My responsibilities included unloading the heavy steel probes and coils of cable that we used to set up our measurement grids. The first day, the men let me swing the eighteen-pound sledgehammer to drive in the steel stakes and then hook up the insulated cable.
We worked outdoors, in the rye and wheat fields of the collective farms and sometimes along the sandy banks of the Volga. If we completed a day’s assigned survey tract early, the team would go for a swim and fish until after sundown. Some evenings we cooked up our catch in a big sooty kettle over a campfire on the river beach. The men taught us how to make a delicately spiced fish soup they called oukha, which combined the essence of fresh bream and pike with a tang of woodsmoke.
They also taught me how to play cards and drink vodka. Only an idiot drank warm vodka straight from the bottle without food, they said. On the nights when we split a bottle of well-chilled Sibirskaya, I was responsible for laying out the plates of sliced pickles, boiled potatoes, rye bread, and butter. Then, when the thimble glasses were filled, we all made our toast, exhaled loudly, tossed back the cold vodka, and breathed in through a thick wedge of bread before eating a snack.
They never let me drink very much, though. And when I joined the ritual, I remembered the advice my mother had given me after the escapades of the wine at the school party.
“Sasha,” she said, “I can’t tell you not to drink. But always remember where, when, how much, and with whom to drink, and you won’t have trouble in your life.”
One Saturday night that August when we were staying at the dormitory on a dairy kolkhoz, I hiked over to a nearby summer camp that was having a Komsomol dance. This was the kind of camp where well-connected city kids supposedly worked side by side with the farmers to bring in the harvest, but actually wasted a lot of time on the volleyball court. When I entered the camp refectory, I spotted the red paper banners proclaiming the eternal solidarity between urban youth and the collective farmers. Another boring Komsomol affair. But then I saw there were two distinct groups: a handful of self-conscious city kids, including several pretty girls, outnumbered by a crowd of young kolkhozniki in shabby blue work trousers with a telltale wide seam on the leg. Some of the farm boys were drunk. They insisted on cutting in to dance with the city girls, even though the farmers had no idea how to dance to the Beatles or Pink Floyd records the students had brought to the camp.
I saw a pretty blond girl trying to dance with a city boy in a V-neck sweater, but a drunk, lanky farm guy who looked too old to be there kept pushing his way in. When the shorter boy from Samara tried to stop him, the drunk kolkhoznik elbowed him aside and tried to get the girl in a bear hug.
I shoved my way in and told the guy to leave her alone.
He laughed, his mouth full of rotten teeth. “Sit on my dick,” he swore, then threw a clumsy punch.
I dodged the blow, tripped him, and had him in a neck lock before he hit the dance floor. The guy was tall and had heavy shoulders, but he didn’t know a thing about wrestling. Before I could really hurt him, the adult
