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4 Volodovo In the summer, Yuri and I were sent back to the village. As soon as Mama discovered that her grandson had not been christened, she resolved to rectify this unforgivable sin. Behind Vasya and Katya's backs, she christened him in the village church, renaming him "Yegor." When my brother and his wife came to visit, they soon learned what Mama had done. "We've been under Soviet power for twelve years now," Vasya raged at her. "You are living in the past!" But Katya viewed the whole thing as a big joke. She laughed heartily and kept begging Mama to tell her about the christening over and over againhow Yuri didn't want to climb out of the font, how he splashed water everywhere and giggled all through the proceedings. When Vasya's family returned to Moscow, Mama refused to let me go with them. "I don't want her twiddling her thumbs in Moscow. Let her go to the fifth grade here. Five kilometers is a long walk, but she can handle it. I heard Lomonosov walked all the way to Moscow from Arkhangelsk in search of knowledge." "That's right," said Vasya. "Besides, I used to walk to primary school four kilometers away from our village, in all kinds of weather." "The elders say that Volodovo had a school and a teacher to educate the peasant children, in the old days before the tsar freed the serfs," Mama added, looking pointedly at Vasya. "What tsar?" "Alexander the Second. Haven't you seen the cast-iron bust in the bam? That's Alexander the Emancipator," said Mama. "That's news to me." "My uncle, Father Gavril, told me we used to have a teacher here in 1859 who was also a tailor and a shepherd," Mama told us. "The school had eight girls and eleven boys. We had twenty homesteads in the village, all farmers. "Thank God we at least have the comprehensive school in Novo," she went on. "They just opened it. You'll go there," she told me. And so it was decided. But Mama wasn't finished. "Our village was in the Baranyegorsky Parish then," she recalled. "The parish had such a lovely church, with a high bell tower. That bell was so loud, you could hear it even in our village, calling us to Mass. But Soviet power destroyed all that. "We had a village elder. We settled all our problems together, at village meetings. We didn't have to go running to the regional authorities ten miles VOLODOVO 13 away for every little thing, like we do today. It's always the same thing: whenever you go, they're at lunch, on break, in a meeting, or they're just 'not in today.' So you trudge ten miles back home through the mud with nothing to show for your pains," she held forth. "Are you saying you lived better before the October Revolution?" Vasya demanded. "Absolutely," Mama shot back. "There was order. If you sinned, you went to church and confessed, and your soul rested easier. If you had a complaint , you went to the village elder, a few doors down. He settled disputes fairly because he was one of us. He knew our village, and we knew him. He wouldn't stand for these false accusations!" "Enough, Mama!" I interrupted. "How can you keep glorifying pre-revolutionary times? Look around! What have we inherited from those days? The past has given us nothing but poverty and ruins. Socialism is a new start for us!" "Oh, my little daughter! You don't know how it was! The Great War, then the Revolution, the Civil War-it's brought us only destruction, tears, and bloodshed. After the Revolution, the commissars1 tore everything to pieces and spread their blasphemy-" "Stop it, Mama!" I cut in, breathlessly. "Let's not fight about it anymore." *** That year I entered the fifth grade in the new school in the village of Novo. Seven of us from Volodovo walked ten kilometers round-trip every day, in all kinds of weather-bitter cold, downpours, in mud and snow up to our knees. When I advanced to the sixth grade, only two students remained: Nastya Raskazova and I. Because we were second-shift pupils, we came home from school very late. In the autumn, the trip was especially difficult because of the early darkness and the muddy, treacherous road. We preferred walking tl1rough the fields to entering the woods...

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