Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories

The Bicycle Race

206 The Bicycle Race I’ve been writing this story my whole life. From the time when I first started to mix the paint of words. When I began to combine the pieces of life, those which occurred in reality, with imaginary circumstances (plot twists, phrases, movement, arrivals of characters in a story). I didn’t invent the courtyard of my old house on the corner of Novosiltsevskaya Street and Engels Prospect. The courtyard was there. And also the communal laundry in the back of the courtyard. And the black trunk of a bird cherry tree. And the gamboling of lilac leaves. And the TB clinic nearby. And the little garden on the site of a church which was razed to its very foundation during the Revolution. Just as the song goes: “. . . forthwith the old foundation, and then. . . .” And there were a couple of other two-story stone buildings, faced with yellow stucco. The same architecture and color as my old building, the laundry, and the TB clinic. And most likely, the church demolished by the proletarians was in the same style as the other buildings. Then, to the desperate accompaniment of “The Internationale,” the church was razed to its foundation. All these buildings had been part of an almshouse before the Revolution . Where did all the old men and women disappear to? I don’t know. How did we all end up living in our house? I couldn’t say. Our courtyard was full of legends and lore. But my story has little to do with either the church or “The Internationale.” Perhaps there’s a slight connection to the yellow color of the age-old The Bicycle Race | 207 stucco covering the walls of our house and the TB clinic. Yellow, the color of unfaithful love. The color of infidelity. Red, the color of true love. All-incinerating. Novosiltsevskaya Street flew past our house like a black arrow. Or it seemed to us that it flew past us, because during the bicycle races the street was suffused with lightning-fast movement, speed, racing cyclists, all of the things that aroused our imagination, recreating the visual metaphor of a hero, fortune’s favorite, Hercules. No trams, buses, or trolleys ran on Novosiltsevskaya Street. On the left side of our street there was a vast park on the grounds of the Forestry Technical University. On the right, a procession of wooden frame cottages. It was an ideal place for a bike race. The walking patients from the TB clinic were bored out of their minds. On long summer days they roamed about the park under the centuries-old oak trees like lost souls, or even strayed into our courtyard to watch us play bat or skittles. In the yard there was some talk that the patients were contagious, that they spread Koch’s bacilli and one could get infected. But we didn’t chase away the sick ones. Our hero was the famous cyclist Shvarts. Or Cherny (“Black”), as frenzied fans chanted his name, literally translated from a Jewish one into a Russian one. Everyone was a fan of Shvarts. He was the idol of the postwar crowd. He was about thirty, swarthy, lean, swift. When he raced to the finish line, his likeness to a black arrow was especially apparent due to a graphic correspondence: his helmet , resting above the line of a pedigreed Jewish nose, gave him a slant of surplus speed that always hit the target. The target was victory. Shvarts won every time. The finish line happened to run in front of our building. Shvarts would fly across, slow down, and roll to the very end of the cast-iron, spiked fence of the Forestry Technical University. There he would turn around, undo the pedal straps, jump off the bike, and walk up to us, smiling jubilantly. I’ve never since seen anyone with such a radiant smile. The smile of an ancient conqueror-hero. Hercules, David, Jason. 208 | DI N N E R W I T H S TA L I N A N D O T H E R S T OR I E S The bike races happened every summer. Several times throughout the short Leningrad summer. Maybe every month. Or even every week. On Sundays. In the postwar years, the only day off was Sunday. All of Leningrad, or at least, everyone from the Vyborg Side of Leningrad where I...