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». Out of sight, to the islands of Valaam Monastery. To the Kirillo-Belozersky, Goritsky, Aleksandro-Svirsky and other monasteries. So that they weren't in the way of the proletarian leaders building socialism. So that we could all sing together: «I know of no other country were mankind can breathe so freely.» The country of the Soviets punished its victorious invalids for their sufferings, their mutilations, their lost families and homes, for their villages burnt down by the war. Here come your war heroes: a food ration fit for a beggar, barracks, loneliness and complete hopelessness. And later peace and silence in a nameless grave, sometimes in a ditch, with no headstone, no inscription, no cross and not even a Soviet star. Forgive me for getting carried away, I couldn't keep silent about this disgrace of ours. And about the famous post-war toast of the Great Leader, «To the health of the Russian people!»

I don't know how my parents arranged this cover operation. I assume that my father, a war veteran who had distinguished himself before the authorities, somehow managed to get passports for Nadezhda Danilovna and her daughter and register them in our flat. Fact is that they were legalised and thus vanished from the field of vision of the vigilant powers that be. Alas, not for long. During these years, one could only hide for short, very short time from the long arm of those guarding the dictatorship of the victorious proletariat. This is how the women came to be in our room, 30 square meters in size. Nadezhda Danilovna was ten or fifteen years my mother's senior, a simple Russian woman. That's how I saw it. A simple woman with a village woman's headscarf and the intelligence fate bestows on those who are strong and wholesome by nature. And then her daughter. Dressed in simple and elegant clothes made by her mother's skilful hands. Not beautiful. But very pretty and very pure, and at that time very joyful. Exuding that special charm of immediacy and maidenly purity. Where Lyusya lived I don't know. Perhaps at Margo's. But she would often come to our house. And Nadezhda Danilovna moved in with us and became my nanny. At the very first day she questioned me in detail about what I liked and whether I already knew how to read (I wasn't going to school yet then but could read quite well). She cooked soup for me. The plate was large and I finished only half of it. She asked me whether I spat into the plate while eating. I was very surprised at the question – of course not! After that she finished my soup herself.

She soon became one of us. She spent a lot of time with me. And she sewed children's suits from old clothes. Very skilfully. My parents rented a dacha for the summer, and I went to live there with my nanny. My parents would come for Sundays or for the holidays. Nanny taught me many things. She taught me to love the forest and how to tell apart mushrooms, berries, plants and birds. She taught me and the gaggle of the neighbours' children games and tricks. She helped us organise feasts and stage plays. She baked treats for us little ones. When I finally turned seven she prepared me for school and took me there together with my mother. As an adult I often remembered her tactfulness, intelligence and natural wisdom. As if this simple, semiliterate woman had imbibed them from Moist Mother Earth herself. Sayings and tricks. Wisdom she had learned and deduced from her difficult, hard life. I never saw her read. That's how I decided that she must be illiterate. She only looked on from the side when I read my children's books, when I sometimes cried over the fate of the hero of a heroic tale who had died and then was miraculously resurrected with the help of holy water. Do you believe in god, nanny? Sasha dear, for me god is under every bush. The Lord hears my prayer everywhere.

Soon Lyusya passed her entrance exams for the Theatrical Institute on Mokhovaya Street with flying colours. She had prepared the role of an old woman for the exam, modelled in great detail after the years she'd spent in Germany. The selection commission did not doubt her talent. Lyusya became a student, received a stipend and a place and registration in a student hostel. Life was smiling at her. I sensed her good mood. She was always full of joy when she came. She would hug me; we laughed and played a lot. Later I found out that at the Theatrical Institute Lyusya had fallen in love for the first time. Everything was great. The young people planned to get married as soon as possible. Easier said than done. The groom-to-be found out that his beloved had been in a camp. He began to tremble, the fire awakened in the flaming heart of this juvenile heir to the young proletarian culture. He simply had to tell the leadership of the Theatre Institute that he, quite unexpectedly, had found himself right at the centre of an anti-Soviet, perhaps even international, espionage conspiracy. The maidenly dream of happiness crumbled. I don't know what explanations Liusya had to give the confidential, tender guys from the NKVD. Whether it lasted a long time. And what the cost was to her. In terms of energy, of apprehension. Anyway, she was asked to leave the Theatrical Institute. And she had to cut out her life all over again. Lyusya had a quick mind. She entered the Institute for Engineering and Commerce. After graduation she remained there as a lecturer. She had no desire to write a PhD dissertation. Everything worked out, more or less. But I've never again seen her joyful or happy since those days. Until the last day of her life her intelligent grey eyes remained pensive and mostly sad.

Lyusya's sensible mother advised her daughter how to build her life. She introduced her to a widower who had two children, a boy and a girl. Vladimir Petrovich, a bus driver and a stately, handsome man, became Lyusya's husband. He was simpler than her and more stupid. He loved her devotedly. And she allowed herself to be loved. However, apparently she was a good wife. And she managed to become a mother to another woman's children. But she never wanted children of her own. Nadezhda Danilovna decided to move in with her daughter and help her bring up the children. I had grown up a bit by then. I was going to school, year two or three. Before she left us, my nanny sent me to school on my own. For the first time. She asked me all the questions, how to cross the junction, at which light, where to look. When she wanted to attract my attention she would say «Sasha dear, look into my eyes». I looked into her eyes, answered all her questions and left for school by myself. And she tailed me, watching furtively – she wanted to make sure that I was really carrying out all her instructions.

This was not the end of my friendship with my nanny and her daughter. While I was at school I would spend the summer at our rented dacha together with Nadezhda Danilovna, Lyusya and her stepchildren, Vova and Galya, who were younger than me. Together we would explore all the forests, lakes and shooting ranges of the Vsevolozhsk region. We would go swimming and collect mushrooms and berries. Unfortunately, Lyusya went on to have problems with her stepson. When he was older, he started working at a factory and became a Komsomol leader. Vova was a good guy, very genuine and honest. His friends loved him. But then he was invited to work for the security services, something that often happened to Komsomol members at the time. And he found the offer tempting and flattering. Lyusya, on the other hand, couldn't forgive him for working for the security services, which she hated, and cut all ties with him. She didn't forgive him until the day she died. Much later, when Nadezhda Danilovna had passed away, her stepdaughter, Galya, had a daughter of her own. She was called Nadya (Nadezhda). In honour of her grandmother. Galya always considered Nadezhda Danilovna her real grandmother and Lyusya her real mother. Lyusya remained close to Galya and later to Galya's daughter. Such closeness isn't self-evident even between mothers and their natural daughters and grandchildren.

My memories of my nanny and her daughter have always been very important and dear to me. Whenever I told anybody of my beloved nanny I described her as a very simple person who was endowed by nature not only with goodness, but also with insight and a special kind of worldly wisdom. With Galya I was friends all my life. And ten years ago I bumped into Vova. He was an old-age pensioner already and had left the security services. We reminisced about Nadezhda Danilovna and Lyusya. I once again unquestioningly repeated my sacramental phrases about the wisdom of a simple Russian woman… «What simple woman?», he interrupted me, «she was a graduate of the Smolynyi Institute for Noble Girls. They only accepted girls from aristocratic families. Her family weren't simple at all. What do you mean, illiterate? She knew five languages. And her husband was a very senior member of the regional committee.» How do you like that? I was shocked. There goes your simple woman. Your illiterate woman. What a dimwit I was. And how the people of that time knew to keep their mouth shut. They were able to grow into a new skin. To live another's life instead of their own. And to never let the secret out. No to give themselves away with either a word or a hint. And my parents accepted the risk and kept silent. One thing offers comfort: we all genuinely loved each other, my parents, nanny, her daughter and I, the youngest. And was I really that wrong? No, I was right. She was full of goodness. And insight. And worldly wisdom. These things don't come from the Smolnyi Institute. But from a person's own heart. From the difficult life, the hard life that falls to the lot of every person, no matter where he or she lives in the vast expanse of our motherland. From the fields and forests of central Russia's nature. Some people find all this under every bush, as my dear nanny used to say – the goodness, the insight, and the worldly wisdom, too. Just as they find our father in heaven.