Lara Shapiro - Rebecca. End of USSR, Yekaterinburg in early 90s, or Lessons on survival in difficult times

On the third day, they were found. Rebecca was locked in her room, – to think about her behaviour. – Reason: – leaving the little sister unattended. – The sister was four years old at that time. – My mother is foolish, – Rebecca thought, sitting in the room – I had a DIPMISSION, how I would reach China with a four-year-old child?

Igor and Lyuda were from an intelligent family and ended with a “behavior lecture”. But Yurka and Pavlik were beaten by their stepfather with a rubber hose. Harshly. There was no healthy place on them; they were blue and black. Rebecca’s mother blamed her: – look at what you brought to people. – Mom guessed who the initiator of this crazy idea was. So, at nine years old, Rebecca realized the meaning of the phrase: “We are responsible for those we tamed.”

Then there was Russia and high school. An ordinary school with a military bias. Lessons of military training, almost every day and field exercises called “Zarnitsa”. Probably, it was necessary. Posters and slides with details of the consequences of chemical, nuclear, biological, gas and other attacks, vivid pictures of mutilated human bodies were imprinted in memory for life.

And again, she only heard that they were about to being attack, now by America. They should be prepared, and if the US kill the entire Soviet army, then they will have to defend the country, despite their young age. They were brought up in the spirit of “who, if not you?” And “in life, there is always room for a feat.” They made to be soldiers. Their childish minds were pressed to such an extent that Rebecca could not stand it. She was coming home sobbing: – Mom, they’ll kill us all tomorrow. And it will not be the worst. The worst will go to those who survive. Mom, the Americans have four plans for attack, and all four have Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg in the first place. – Mom planted Rebecca in front of the world map, explaining: – Look to America and to the USSR. America is three times smaller than us. When they will defeat one-third of our territory, we will defeat them all. – It reassured, but not for long.

They did not have classes at school, instead they had platoons and companies. When it came time to join the Komsomol, Rebecca was accepted in the first stream and was immediately elected as a Commissioner and a platoon commander. That is how they studied: first, regular classes, and then military classes, where the command – “Gases!” – sounded all the time, where they were groomed to be solders – assembling and disassembling a Kalashnikov assault rifle, shooting from a standing position, from a lying position – climbing a rope, throwing a grenade, climbing through a fence, through the fire, run stair bridges on feet, by arms, on speed.

– soldier Zaplatinskaya, how do you throw a grenade?! You will undermine yourself on it, not the enemy!

– Comrade Senior Lieutenant! I’ll wait for the enemy to come closer and kill all at once!

– Soldier Zaplatinskaya!

– Yes, Sir!

– To the blackboard!

– Yes, Sir!

– Tell us the device of the Modernized Combat Vehicle.

So her childhood and youth passed.

Our generation is a generation of mammoths. We will die out soon. And there will not be those who grew up and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that is no longer on the map. Lev Nikolayevich Kassil has such a novel, “three countries that are not on the map,” you know? No, the modern generation no longer knows. They did not read Kassil; they do not even know whether he was a writer or a poet. They would not give Gogol’s first name or patronymic, they would not remember a single Ukrainian poet, and if they remember, by chance, Taras Shevchenko, they will undoubtedly google in search of his middle name. His middle name was Grigoryevich. Eh, what will you do if Google is turned off? It is not as if they read little; they do not read at all, in our understanding.

But we had read. Oh, how we had read! We were the most readable nation in the world! We knew all the classical literature of Russia, England, France, Germany and America, better than all these nations combined. A person who did not read Dickens was not considered an intellectual among us.

We did not have Internet; there were no mobile phones, TV only showed congresses of the CPSU, harvesting, and smelting steel. Therefore, to know the world, we read. We read passionately, recklessly, binge, forgetting about food and sleep, and even forgive me such a gastronomic detail, enduring to the last to tear away from the book and go to a toilet. I am afraid that the current generation will not even understand what I mean.

Kindergarten, we are five years old, we still do not know how to read, so the teacher arranges the chairs in a circle, in the centre herself, reads to us Agnia Barto, about the bear, who was dropped to the floor, and his paw was torn off. Now he has cotton sticking out of a hole, and he is unattractive. The teacher read about the horse, whose hair was combed smoothly, about Tanya the muddler, who dropped the ball into the river. Oh, probably the ball was beautiful, yellow, with blue stripes. – Slumber you, Tanya! I would not lose such a ball. Now here you are, standing still and roaring like a fool, instead of running, grabbing a stick and get a ball from the river! – And the teacher continues to read about the unfortunate bunny, his painful fate and the evil owner; about a fat bull, who only knows that he is puffing and sighing, he broke all the boards and now he is going to fall somewhere.

But most of all I liked Gianni Rodari’s poems “What the crafts smell like?” – the whole book is one odorous sweet roll, then the brain was already disconnected and thought only about the roll. Maybe, with raisins. Or with poppy seeds. Or with jam.

Still terribly liked Berestov’s poems, isn’t it magical:

“How we study the life of sharks?

Their nature, customs and habits?

And here is how – we cry out “Attacks!”

And run away as little rabbits.”

You run, yell, the shark is on its tail is jumping after you – an intrigue, not a verse.

Or here:

“if you take all these puddles

and combine it into one,

it turns out that the puddles

Almost like the ocean.”

Imagine what a turn of events, however! Everyone wants to go to the Black sea, they wait a whole year, they save up money, and it is not always possible, but you do not need to go anywhere, you need to collect all the puddles after the rain and, voila, the black sea under the windows!

Then, we learned to read ourselves. And there was a mysterious poet ASPUSHKIN and the moon. Now I do not remember what was before – ASPUSHKIN or the moon. But then it was just some kind of magic spell:

“Through the wavy mists

the moon is sneaking.

To the sad glades

it pours light, sadly”

I read this spell to the moon, in winter, standing on the summer terrace, on the cold floor, barefoot, sticking my nose to the window and standing on tiptoe to be closer to the moon. I read it every night, before going to bed, so that the moon was not so lonely there, in a black sky. And I learned all the available verses of ASPUSHKIN and howled at the TV, in romance songs, I was grateful to him for the fact that he also loved the moon and did not leave it alone. Although ASPUSHKIN turned out to be A.S. Pushkin, but that was no longer important.

He also liked to drink tea in the winter with his old nanny, when “the storm covers the sky with darkness, twirling snow whirls”. Even all the time, he asked: “where is the mug? The heart will be more cheerful.” Our winters, too, always “howled and cried from the storm”. And I also liked to drink tea from a large mug at such moments. From this, indeed, the heart became more cheerful, especially if tea is with raspberry or currant jams.