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. |