This is how the sisters lived. School during winter, camp during summer. When the war was over they entered technical college. Tamara studied to become a cinema technician. Fidgety as she was, she wanted to be close to the film world. She was soon thrown out, as at college one needs to think and Tamara wasn't too good at that. Vera joined food college. Closer to sustenance, so to say. They lived comfortably, one might say. But all three of them were capable of yelling. Tamara and her mother would gang up against the younger sister, or Vera and Dusya would rally against Tamara. All three were sharp-tongued and slightly rude. Dusya received a large number of awards and recognitions. This didn't save her from trouble. In 1947 she started working in a bakery. The spiteful manager with the crooked teeth gave food to her young lover. And three bakery assistants were found with a deficit. In Dusya's case an entire 600 grams were missing. Prison, then got parole. But she was inside for ten months. She doesn't like talking about this now, and not about the blockade either. That's completely understandable: these memories are very painful.
My Nanny
Post-war life was coming together. My father got a comfortable job. He was still fairly influential then. My mother had a secondary technical education. She was working in the Hypronickel Institute and designing beneficiating equipment for Norilsk Nickel. At that time the Institute was situated in the house of Vasilii Engelgardt, adjacent to the Small Hall of the Philharmonic Society. My mother loved walking to work. What a wonderful route she had, from Liteiny Prospekt past the Circus and the Mikhailov Castle, along Nevsky Prospekt to the baroque Engelgardt House.
It was the first summer after the War. We all lived together at the dacha, my father, my mother and I. Of course the dacha was rented. A small wooden house at the shore of the Razliv with a small wooden jetty. In the morning I would ran outside to greet my father. He was fishing already, using a rod and a worm. Next to him a bucket of water full of perches and breams. In the evening my father, together with my uncles and some local men, would pull a drag net across the lake. A wonderful catch. After the war the Razliv was full of fish. My parents bought eels from the fishermen. The big slippery fish escaped from the basin and crawled across the entire allotment. These were my first impressions of a happy childhood.
Of course, not everything was easy. Something was going wrong at my mother's job. Sometimes she would cry because the management was so strict. They started taking me to kindergarten. The kindergarten was situated in a very beautiful building with a wonderful landscaped courtyard off Liteiny Prospekt. My mother used to bring the unattractive nursery teacher makhorka, rough tobacco. When the makhorka was late I would get punished. Evidently the relationship with the teacher wasn't too good. One «misdeed» I remember well. We children were playing hide-and-seek. And I «hid» under the short skirt of a girl. I couldn't understand why the teacher got so angry. I had to stand in the corner for the whole day; I wasn't even allowed to go to the toilet. I wet myself. And in the evening my mother, who came to pick me up on the way home from work, somehow managed to sort it all out. I can't remember that she told me off for the «story with the skirt». But anyway, how could all this have been even remotely serious in comparison with the war that was behind and the 1950s that were drawing near?
My parents were earning comfortably. They decided to hire a household help to do the shopping and cooking and to look after me. That was common at the time. The paradoxes of those days. A family with a child and a household help in one room. In a communal flat. In summer, when I was still very little, I climbed onto the wide sill of the window that opened onto Liteiny Prospekt. And I looked down from the third floor onto the street. Our household help, a jolly, fat girl from the countryside, held me tightly and said: «Alexander Yakovlevich, come down from the window, please. If you fall, your mummy will be angry.»
Later there was another busty girl past her prime. Lyuda, Lyudmila. Before she came to us she used to work for Shapiro, the cinema director. She lived at his place at the corner of Nevsky and Vladimirsky Prospekt. My father remembered that he met the future director of LenFilm when he himself was involved in amateur theatre. The girl would tell us with great abandon about the actors who came to see the director. She especially liked Vitsin, «he's just so funny, no matter what he says, everybody is rolling about laughing». She was very observant, our simpleton girl. Vitsin became famous a lot later, when the film «Barbos the Dog and the Unusual Race» came out. In the end, our Lyuda was after one thing only: to finally find a husband. She evidently disliked the boy she was supposed to look after, i. e. me. No matter what I did, everything irritated her – my escapades, my clumsiness, typical of a child used to being indoors. And the work in our house was not to her liking either. She stayed for a short time only, like the others before her. My mother had the rare ability to maintain good relationships with all of them. I heard that she managed to stay in touch with Lyuda, too, until the latter left for the virgin soil of Kazakhstan a few years later. Probably in the hope to sort out her private life. What happened next isn't very clear. At first something worked out, then it all went bad somehow. Upon returning from the virgin soil she came to see us once on Liteiny Prospekt.
Our family's life changed greatly when Nadezhda Danilovna appeared. I'll begin with a story about Margarita Alekseevna, one of my mother's closest friends. My mother used to call her Margo. They worked together. Margo had no family. She would holiday in Sochi or Yalta. These were the most fashionable holiday destinations for government employees at the time. It seems she also had admirers. The photographs inevitably show a splendid Margo, in her thirties, standing in the foam of the surf with an armful of roses. It's well possible she didn't holiday alone. Margo was an easygoing person. She was always smiling, delicate, well-educated, pronouncing her «r» the French way. She'd evidently seen better times. Margo asked Lyuba and Yasha to help a distant female relative of hers. Perhaps she was not a distant relative but a close one, I don't know. There are many details that I don't know. In those years people knew to keep their mouth shut.
This woman was Nadezhda Danilovna. The only thing that is known about her husband is that he was a Soviet worker at some point; it seems he worked at the savings bank. He vanished before the war, disappeared in the basement torture chambers of the secret police that was so piously guarding the security of the first country of the victorious proletariat. He had evidently been a dangerous man. We don't know what would have happened to his wife and daughter had the war not started. The woman and her daughter, Lyusya, adolescent at the time, ended up under German occupation. They were put in a camp and deported to work in Germany. There, they worked on a farm. Naturally, the mother was afraid for her daughter. She dressed her in a shapeless garment, rubbed dirt and manure into her face and taught her to behave like an old woman. And so they spent the entire war in alien lands. Nobody saw that the scrawny, awful-looking old woman was in fact a pretty young girl. Then the war ended. Everybody returned home. But for those who had been interned in a German camp, new sufferings lay ahead. If you'd been interned that meant you were potentially an enemy of the working people. All of them were sent to the North or to the East for a long holiday in the resorts of the GULAG. The women returned to Leningrad. They wandered about, hiding somewhere, afraid of every policeman in the streets. They were obliged to register. Register and receive a «warm» place in a heated goods carriage going to the Kolyma. Returning citizens were guaranteed a warm welcome by the entire might of the victorious state.
Such a warm welcome the country prepared not just for former camp internees, but also for war invalids. The leaders didn't want to spoil their mood after the Great Victory with the sight of hundreds of thousands of armless, legless, despondent war invalids who were supporting themselves by begging in train stations, in trains and in the streets. How shameful! His chest is covered in medals but he is begging at the street corner next to the bakery. We need to get rid of them as fast as possible. In only a few months the streets were cleansed of this «disgrace».