monitors intervened and hauled him off to sober up.
The girl’s name was Marina. She thanked me, then jotted down her phone number in Samara. “Please call me before school starts again,” she said. All in all, I thought hiking back to the dormitory in the cool starlight, it had not been a bad night.
When I went to see Marina back in Samara at the end of the summer, I took a bus to Microrayon 4, a neighborhood of well-made twelve-story brick apartment blocks along a broad, tree-lined avenue named for Cheluskin, a famous Soviet pilot. This was the nicest district in the city. People called it Micro-Israel, because many of the famous Jewish scientists from the institutes were supposed to live here. On the ground floor of Marina’s building there was a row of nice shops and cafes.
When I went into Marina’s podyesd, the babushka in the concierge box gave me a stern look, as if I had no right to be there. The elevator was clean and ran smoothly. The landing on Marina’s floor had only four doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering if I had the right building. It seemed impossible that only four families lived on each floor of this large building. But I wasn’t lost. Marina greeted me, led me into their long sitting room that faced the street. They had four tall, double-glazed windows and a balcony with a wrought-iron table and chairs. In the vestibule off the entrance, I saw the doors of two bedrooms and the open doorway of a kitchen that was almost as big as the main room of my apartment.
Marina’s living room looked like something out of a European magazine: oriental rugs, Scandinavian furniture, and even a bar with tall swivel stools. Through the glass bar front I saw bottles of imported Scotch whisky, Italian liqueurs, and French brandy. A big Japanese tape recorder sat next to their color television set. When I’d peeked in the kitchen, I had seen a tall refrigerator with double doors. Nobody that I knew lived this way.
The men on the survey crew had joked scornfully about the shishka, the Party “bosses,” whom you found at the top of any organization. Whenever the crew’s work orders were fouled up or a piece of equipment was late in arriving, the men would blame the shishka, who were probably all too busy stocking their apartments with luxury goods to sign the paperwork. Now I was standing in one of those apartments, which I had only imagined were the fanciful subject of frustrated jokes before.
Marina offered me a whisky, but I settled for a stick of American chewing gum instead. She showed me her French and Italian fashion magazines, then told me she attended a special school where all the classes were taught in English.
“All the classes?” I asked. “Even physics and chemistry?”
“Yes,” she said proudly. “We speak, read, and write English all day.”
This was amazing. I wondered how far she had to travel to attend such a school. “What do your parents say about your going away?”
She seemed confused but then answered nervously. “Sasha,” she said, “the school is here in Samara.”
When you learned foreign languages, there were lots of interesting professions open to you. “How do you apply for this school? What’s the exam like?”
“The school,” she said, “is not like you think. Your parents have to have the correct position for you to enter.”
I took in the silk Kirghiz carpets, the bar, and the Finnish furniture. “What does your father do?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, “he is on the city’s Party Committee.”
Riding the commuter train back out to my neighborhood, I felt a moment of regret that my mother did not have the blat needed to secure me a place in one of those special schools. The devil take all of them, I thought. I would become an electrician, land a good job in one of the aircraft factories, and make money on the side repairing the shoddy work the State construction enterprises did in all the new apartments.
But when I went back to School Number Two to collect my academic records before registering at the electro-technology school, I found Rema had locked up my files. She was gone for vacation. Then Coach Karanov called me down to the Spartak center. He explained that Rema Alexandrovna had asked him to talk sense to me. Apparently students in the vocational school were not encouraged to compete in sports competitions within the Russian Republic.
“Sasha,” he said, “you’ve got a real chance at the 170-pound championship. The team needs you.”
Once more I sensed my mother’s hand in this conspiracy. But the chance of traveling to Moscow and winning a weight-division title was a lot more appealing than earning money as an electrician. I had struggled too hard to throw away my chance at a title. Most of the boys I knew wore their hair long, fashioned after the pictures of Western rock stars we sometimes saw in magazines. That was how you got the girls. But wrestlers could not wear long hair because that just gave your opponent another handle to grab. It wasn’t fair, but I knew you had to give up one thing you wanted to have something else you wanted more.
That September I began the upper form of advanced academic courses to prepare students for professional institutes and universities. But my first love was still wrestling. I traveled with the Spartak senior team now, coached and refereed the juniors. Because I correctly assumed Rema had conspired with Coach Karanov to keep me in the academic program, I thought she would not mind if I missed a few days’ classes traveling with the team. I was wrong. My homeroom teacher, Ludmilla — “the Rat with Glasses” to me and my friends — turned me in to Rema for unexcused absences.
Once more Rema dangled the dread wolf’s ticket over her desk blotter. “It’s not too late to throw you out.”
I got her point. From then on, I had to be a student first and a wrestler second.
All ninth- and tenth-year boys were required to attend twice-weekly military training classes at the school. Our instructor was a rather indecisive retired Army lieutenant colonel named Nikolai Gusev. I didn’t care for the mindless drill ritual in the school yard, but I enjoyed handling Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades and studying famous battles like Stalingrad and Kursk. Still a rebel, however, I made it plain to the good comrade lieutenant colonel that military training was not my favorite class.
The next summer I was not eager to sweat through another vocational camp, doing the same work as the men but earning only twenty rubles a month. Oleg, a friend of mine, said his father could get me in as a summer replacement worker at a local machine-tool factory that produced precision boring and milling machines and lathes for the aircraft plants and for export. When I took the job, I hoped to make contacts that might lead to an apprenticeship at the plant. Skilled professional toolmakers earned 500 rubles a month and had access to cheap vacations on the Black Sea or Baltic.
Even as a summer replacement, I would earn 150 rubles a month, a great salary for a kid of sixteen. Maybe I couldn’t yet afford real blue jeans, but I had already ordered my first pair of bell-bottom slacks from the girls at the fashion design school.
A master tool and die maker named Alexander Konstantinovich was my mentor in the export shop. I had heard a lot about the high-quality work at the plant. Machine tools from this factory were exported around the world, where they earned hard currency and compared favorably to similar products from West Germany or America. So I was shocked the first day on the job to find the assembly floor practically silent with Inen lounging around in groups playing cards and dominoes.
My mentor explained the situation. It was the first workday of the month, in this case July. All the factories that supplied us parts and raw materials were also beginning the month. They would not be required to complete their month’s quota under their ministry or directorate’s all-important Plan for thirty days. Neither would we. So all across the industrial heartland of the Russian Republic, workers like these sat around the factories, watching the clock, smoking to kill time.
But at our plant the men eventually got bored with card games and used expensive machine-tool steel to make kitchen knives for their wives. Konstantinovich taught me how to weld beautiful stainless-steel anchors that I could peddle to men with small fishing boats on the river.
Then, in the third week of the month, our regular quota of metal stock and electrical supplies began arriving. Things got busy. But still the tool and die makers and assemblers only completed ten machines a day. That was the norm. They were paid the maximum rate to meet that norm. If they completed more than that number, they risked having the norm increased by the factory bosses. So we worked slowly to produce only ten machines every workday.
By the end of the summer I had lost any illusions about a satisfying career in Soviet industry.
But I certainly wanted to pursue some kind of profession to match my interest in technology. One Sunday
