And now I would like to get back to my childhood for a little while, to the very first photo, the one where I am with my Grandma. That picture is taken in the courtyard of a wooden apartment building in Losinka 60, Yaroslavskoye Highway. There! I found one more picture from the 1930’s, one with the children from that courtyard. You-hoo, is anybody still alive?
Here, too – Grandma’s dacha – Mom would bring me in summer, while Misha and Grandma’a daughter, my aunt Lena lived there year around.
Misha’s father wasn’t the only one to perish in the camps, his mother did as well.
All this I’ve learned only in recent years from archival documents. From the same documents I [have] learned that Grandma ended up in the apartment building in Losinka after her own house was expropriated. As yet, I haven’t gotten around to finding out the fate of this expropriated house. And my own vague memories of Grandma and Losinka are colored in a piercing feeling of a simple, countryside, summer-and-grandma kind of happiness.
I even remember the summer day when the war broke out: June 22, 1941.
I was eight, older than in the photo.
By the way, I think on that very day a great movie by Romm “The Dream” came out.
The movie starred the young Ranevskaya and Plyatt. I have always remembered the film’s title, but I only got to see it twenty years later.
It was from my father’s arrest order (that I first saw only in the summer of 2004) that I learned my parents’ address at the time: 24, Yermolayevskiy Pereulok, Apt. 5. I started frequenting Yermolayevsky Pereulok. At first, I could not find it – that is, there is no building with this number any more, and all around everything looks somewhat mysterious. The “evil” Bulgakov apartment from which people used to disappear is nearby, on Sadovaya, and not far, at the turn from Yermolayevsky onto Bronnaya, the place where Berlioz’s head was cut off.

My mother never spoke of that address, and in general, the subject of my father’s arrest was never discussed in my presence when I was a child. In all my questionnaires I always wrote that my father died in 1935. It was true.
I also got to fill out questionnaires after my father’s rehabilitation papers had arrived. It was in 1958, around the same time my Mom received some money – father’s salary for two or three months. She turned hysterical.
By the way, in the twilight of the Soviet era, some time in the 80’s, a new cute question appeared in questionnaires, or in the required autobiographical section indicate your late parent’s place of burial.
I used to fill out such questionnaires (as often as every three or four years, when I had to confirm my “Certificate of Form ¹1” – access to “top secret and vital” classified state secrets (t. s. v.).
I had to fill out these forms because I was one of the designers of an anti-missile radar system. So, even after my father’s rehabilitation, I never responded that he was buried somewhere in a Novosibirsk camp, but instead wrote that I didn’t know, having been only two years old at the time of his death.
“Neither I nor my closest relatives have been on trial or under investigation.” “I don’t have relatives abroad.”
If only once – say, at entering college – the point had come up in my questionnaires as to whether I was a son of a victim of political repression … One could say that I had succeeded in my country mainly due to an oversight.

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