The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [12]
The family lived in a hut built by his father for his bride and made of logs floated down the river from the lumber camps in the vast, endless forests of the north. The nearest town, Novosibirsk, consisted of a huddle of wooden huts on the banks of the river Ob, and the only reason for its existence was that the newly completed Trans-Siberian Railway bridged the river at that point.
One of Grigori’s first memories was of being taken by his father to the railway halt to watch a slender, bearded man as he stepped from the train. The man’s pallor had matched the gray skies as he surveyed the bleak landscape and the few poor peasants watching him. His glance fell on the young boy and they stared at each other somberly for a moment. A sad smile lighted the man’s face and he said, “You, boy, are the future of Russia. Never forget that.” As he climbed back on board and the train pulled away, his father told him that the man was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on his way to exile in the depths of Siberia. Many years later, when he was a student, Grigori had read what Lenin had written about Siberia that day. “It is,” he had said, “a barren wilderness with no habitations and no towns.” And Grigori knew he was right because the desolate landscape seemed to merge with eternity and nothingness.
Grigori’s elder sisters both married loggers and went off to live in the far north. He never saw them again. His two brothers married their cousins and settled in the growing town of Novosibirsk, working on the railway, and as far as eight-year-old Grigori could see, they were no better off than his father had been.
Although he had no chance to observe a life any different from his own, something told him that there was more than just this same peasant existence. Sometimes he would stand by the great railway bridge spanning the Ob, wondering how it was built and who had the knowledge to construct such an edifice without it falling down and how they came by that knowledge. He would watch the rare train as it wound its way across the river on its slow journey from Moscow, waving until it faded into oblivion, leaving him wondering about the passengers whose faces he had glimpsed briefly before they disappeared into another world. Those people came from places he had barely heard of, they rode on trains that came from great cities. Grigori didn’t even know what “a city” looked like. He would lie awake at night, listening to the distant hoot of the train whistle sounding mournfully across the flat Siberian plains, and, when he finally slept, it haunted his dreams. The train and its passengers were a mystery, and it was one a poor boy like him could never solve because he was as ignorant and illiterate as his peasant forebears.
As was the tradition, at the age of six he had already been sent to mind the cows along with the other young boys in the village, and at eight he had advanced to looking after the horses. When he attained the age of sixteen, he would be admitted to the skhod, the assembly of the heads of the families, and considered an adult. It was different for the girls of the village. They were given the more menial domestic tasks, fetching water from the river and collecting wood, and generally helping their mothers about the house. There had never been a school in his remote village, but one had been built in Novosibirsk for the children of the local railway administrators and supervisors.
One winter morning Grigori walked the twenty kilometers into the ramshackle town and presented himself at the door of the little wooden schoolhouse. The klassnaya dama stared at him in astonishment. He was small for his age with a peasant’s stocky body and strong legs, and he was bundled up in layers of rough homespun garments, the traditional high-necked shirt and baggy pants topped with a makeshift cloak. He wore rough velenki, felt winter boots bound to his legs with birch bark, and his bushy black eyebrows sparkled with