The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia by Svetlana Grobman

Author:Svetlana Grobman [Grobman, Svetlana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780692312285
Amazon: 0692312285
Barnesnoble: 0692312285
Goodreads: 24977130
Publisher: Musings Publishing
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Summer camp: I am fourth from the right in the third row

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE ELEPHANT

We are visiting Father’s older sister on her birthday. The scratched wooden door of her apartment flies open and Aunt Masha herself appears on the threshold.

“Come in, come in. I’m almost done,” she says and turns back to the kitchen while my family heads toward the room with a table set for a typical Muscovite feast. I walk at the end of our short column. Another boring gathering with my father’s family. Well, at least this does not happen often. For one thing, Father does not get along with his two sisters very well. For another, Father’s parents do not pay much attention to Tanya and me, directing all their love toward our three boy cousins.

I have nothing against the cousins, though. It is not their fault. It is just that two of them are much younger than me, and the older one is as dull as his parents. And how could he not be? Nobody among Father’s relatives plays a musical instrument or tells jokes, or does anything fun. I do not think they even read books. As for this apartment, there is nothing interesting here either. In fact, if not for its lack of a bookcase, Aunt Masha’s apartment would be an exact replica of our own, and also of every other apartment I have ever stepped into—one gloomy room per family with a shared kitchen and bathroom out in the hall.

Wearily, I look around the space stuffed with bulky furniture and papered with faded floral patterns, and my gaze stops on a dark wooden dresser in the corner. The dresser is covered with a white crocheted doily, on top of which I spot something new—seven white elephant figurines, a current Moscow fad. I step closer and look carefully at the figurines crowded in the center of the dresser as though ship-wrecked. The largest elephant is about three inches tall and the smallest is so tiny that only a child with her attention to small details can make out his ears and trunk.

I cannot take my eyes off the elephants. Pale and shiny, they radiate the allure of a faraway country where women wear bright-colored saris, paint red dots on their foreheads, and sing love songs in high tremulous voices; and where men ride elephants, swallow fire, and charm snakes. I know this from a book of Indian tales I read recently. That book was so interesting that I could not put it down. I finished it in bed under my blanket with a flashlight, perspiring from the thrill of the stories and the lack of ventilation.

Behind me, a birthday party goes through its usual stages. The adults—my parents, grandparents, and other relatives—are gathered around the table in the middle of the room, toasting loudly to my aunt’s health. Their enthusiasm, fueled by a disarray of bottles, steadily increases, and they pay no attention to anything around them. My sister and cousins are assembled in

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