Unedited AI-Translation of the original russian book "Истоки моих поступков" by "Никита Капернаумов"
04 april 2026
For those interested in the author"s personality: a reconstruction of the first thirteen years of life up to 2007. One of the largest childhood autobiographies ever (over half a million words across four books). AI comparisons include Proust, Limonov, Knausgård. Here, however - complete anti-literature, no artistry at all, and consistently very deep psychology.
Nikita Kapernaumov, born 1993, from Saratov. Attended kindergarten and school, played sports, rode a bike, saved money. Unrequited crushes from ages 2-3. At 10-11 - broke down. At 13 - involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation, labelled "schizophrenic," and then 20 years in a room in front of a monitor, consumed by destructive envy of other people"s sexual relationships in youth.
_________Book 1
.:.
___Part 1.
.:::.
Maternal Line Backstory.
.::::.
I"ll start with my great-grandmother on my mother"s side. Her name was Alexandra, but my mother and grandmother called her Baba Shura. She was born around the 1910s and, according to my mother, was poor and uneducated. Probably par for the course in the Saratov region in the early twentieth century. Judging by photos from that time - mud everywhere, old women in headscarves, half-collapsed wooden houses - it looks bleak. I hate even thinking about it. Baba Shura"s husband, Grigory Grishin, died in some war between Russia and Finland - in his very first battle, according to my mother. He was buried somewhere near Vyborg. Essentially, everything I"m going to recount about my mother"s side comes from her stories.
Baba Shura was left with two children in Engels - a town directly across the Volga from Saratov, where the river is about three kilometres wide at that point.
Baba Shura came from a large Mordvin family, originally from Serdobsk in the Penza region, bordering Saratov. The Mordvins are a people anthropologically linked to the Finns, though they live in central and even southern Russia. Mostly fair-haired, blue-eyed, short, and small-framed. Their mentality is unambitious and provincial, traditionally associated with rural life and a focus on daily survival. I absorbed the last of these ethnographic stereotypes from my father - he always treated people with such traits ironically and disdainfully, calling them "Mordva" and another, harsher term. My mother also used the word "Mordvin," but for her it applied only to men, describing appearance rather than character. Usually very pale, fair-haired men. Personally, this emphasis on my Mordvin roots affected me in my youth, when I wanted to be descended from pure Russians, from Vikings, only to disappointingly discover that I was descended from the people Vikings enslaved. So this particular complex doesn"t appear in my childhood narrative.
Baba Shura never learned to write and died around 1990. During World War II, as I mentioned, she lived in Engels with two children - my grandmother Klava, born November 1937, and Uncle Tolya. Baba Shura worked as a nurse at a nearby hospital, bringing home leftovers. According to my mother and Baba Klava, they lived in a clay hut, with a dirt floor below ground level. There was a garden plot. Their standard of living was closer to a remote village.
There was no bridge across the Volga back then. Until one was built and opened in 1965, people crossed by ferry. I don"t know the population of Engels and Saratov at the time, but in my era, it was 200,000 and 700,000 respectively.
The climate was extreme: sometimes forty degrees Celsius in summer, minus thirty in winter. The air was very dry - the Kazakh steppes start immediately beyond Engels. Beyond the sun-scorched, frost-bitten, hilly banks of Saratov, the steppe stretches for hundreds of kilometres, only gradually giving way to the forested landscapes associated with central Russia nearer Moscow. The Saratov region is sunny most of the year, with heavy snowfall in winter.
My grandmother Klava addressed Baba Shura formally - "vous" style. Perhaps that was still normal at the time. But the relationship, according to my mother, was as one might expect.
When Klava grew up, she entered the Polytechnic Institute in Saratov, quite a distance from the river. I don"t know the story of her commute. It was probably hell - travelling daily to Saratov, roughly fifteen kilometres, by all forms of transport except planes. Perhaps she lived in a dorm. I don"t know why she chose higher education or what inspired her. Likely, without technical training, there were no decent jobs - the country was industrialising. This was not a university for reading books and becoming a philologist, but an institute for training engineers. She became an engineer, involved in constructing large buildings, eventually specialising in the panelled nine-storey apartment blocks we know.
She graduated and, as was customary, was sent to work for several years in another part of the country - the city of Krasnoyarsk. I know nothing of her life there except that she wore down her front teeth gnawing on pine nuts, as she recounted.
A few years later, she returned to Engels, around age twenty-seven. By then, my grandfather had already moved to a neighbouring street to live with his relatives. From what I gather, Tolya - Klava"s brother - married a small Mordvin woman, Lyusya (they too were Mordvins).
My grandfather Vladimir, or just Vova, grew up with several brothers, raised by his mother in the distant small town of Ershov on the Engels side of the Volga, or more precisely, in a nearby village called Shturm. Somewhere in the steppe, where they had camels instead of horses. My mother said she visited once or twice, and it was extremely poor. She also said that Vova"s mother was huge, loved cooking eggs in fat, which nearly made my mother sick. Despite the dry steppe, there were plenty of lakes with fish nearby, and my grandfather learned to fish. His brothers - let alone his father - died from alcoholism. Somehow, he ended up in Engels studying to be a plumber.
Grandfather Vova was always quiet. One story he told drunk, according to my mother: once at school he made a sentimental or bold remark in class, the kids laughed, and he never spoke freely again. He was rather small, though handsome - dark hair, blue eyes. His face always reminded me of the hero from Gone with the Wind, or more precisely, Michael Madsen in Tarantino films.
He served in the army without incident, as a border guard. His relatives in Engels - not to mention my grandmother"s family - were very Mordvin in mentality: they had no lofty ambitions, wanted nothing beyond sitting on the bench and storing potatoes in the cellar (illustrative of my father"s disdainful stereotypes). My mother said everyone discouraged him from becoming an artist. He was already painting portraits. So he went to the simplest plumbing school and never pursued initiatives again.
My mother knows nothing about her birth. Baba Klava and Grandfather never told her anything. She has no doubt she is their daughter - she clearly inherited their features. Yet she told me that when changing my diapers, Baba Klava would comment, "Ugh, how can you?" and there were many other signs that left my mother - ironically but bewildered - questioning how Baba Klava even cared for her as a small child.
The three - Baba Klava, Grandfather, and my mother - lived together throughout her childhood. I don"t know the exact sequence of apartments they lived in. There was always the main family house on Frunze Street, where Baba Shura lived and where my mother spent much of her childhood. I will mostly call that house simply "Frunze." There were also state-provided apartments Baba Klava started receiving, replacing older ones - a common practice for working people in the USSR. If you had a family, you were given at least a two-room apartment.
The first apartment was probably near Frunze - a five-storey building in the district known as "The Living and the Dead" (built on a former cemetery). My mother said children sometimes found bones in dug-up soil in the yard. The area was also near a key location for my story - the city stadium. A whole block with various sports grounds, football fields, and groves with running paths.
That whole district - "The Living and the Dead," the single-storey blocks around Frunze, and eastern Engels in general - was always very Soviet in my imagination. The USSR promoted a healthy lifestyle and sport. I pictured frequent competitions, games at the stadium, brass bands, diligent working Soviet people and their children, pioneers gathering there on weekends.
Polygraphicheskaya Street runs along the district, a main route: buses went one way to the city centre and Saratov, the other to dachas, the military airfield (one of the country"s main ones), and the main cemetery.
My mother described childhood funerals: the body in a red, almost pink, ruffled coffin laid atop flowers and wreaths in an open truck bed, slowly moving along Polygraphicheskaya Street to the cemetery, followed by a procession of old men and headscarved women. First, the deceased would lie at home for three days according to Orthodox tradition - odd for the atheist USSR. Perhaps my mother"s image of funerals on Polygraphicheskaya came from particularly notable funerals - maybe war heroes, since ordinary city funerals wouldn"t be like that. As for the three-day home traditions with a coffin, formalin basin, and wired jaw - that"s a separate matter of how it imprinted on my neurotic mother.
My mother attended School No. 10 on Telegrafnaya Street, near the Volga. It was at the centre of a district of private homes, like Frunze, often poorer. The locals were simple village folk - outhouses, chickens, the lot.
At Frunze, on the plot where my great-grandmother"s semi-dugout stood, a new half-frame, half-brick house was built. Full brick was expensive and uncommon. These half-wooden ones quickly rotted, creaked, and stank.
The whole family helped with construction. By the time my mother was born, it seems it was done. Green wooden gates, single-storey, faced with orange brick. You enter the yard through the gate, then the porch, into cold vestibules with boots, galoshes, brooms, and dishes in a cupboard. Then the main insulated door leads straight to the kitchen: sink, stove, gas cooker, and table in the corner by the window. On the left, a small living room; ahead, a passage room leading to a tiny room of about three square metres; on the left, another room - the main hall with two windows. The house was about forty square metres. No toilet inside - you had to anticipate, grab a newspaper, put on a padded jacket and galoshes, and, if not too late, run to the stinking wooden outhouse in the freezing dark. Only later, closer to my childhood, did the first small room get converted into an indoor toilet, used solely by me, as the householder - Baba Klava - didn"t want to wear out the system or waste the cesspit, which had to be pumped out by a special service. This could even cause legal issues, since the pit was never legalised.
The school my mother attended had the same problem. Around 1975, there were still no indoor toilets. They were somewhere in the yard - I can only imagine how filthy. There was also a marsh with reeds and ducks.
My mother often said she couldn"t stop laughing in school when everyone giggled. A natural trait, like me. When the teacher ordered silence, others might comply, but not my mother - she got sent out of class.
Since childhood, she picked at her nails - the skin around them always raw, fingers swollen, though her hands were thin and model-like. By my time, her thumbs were the most "eaten," especially in the dirt that never fully washed off after cleaning potatoes.
For a while, she did gymnastics - not at the city stadium (not yet built), but in a building in the city centre near the main square and park. Her classmate Lena Semenova trained with her. Initially, she did well, but when risky jumps over logs began, she quit.
She also attended music school for piano. The teacher beat students" hands with a pointer.
Her family then consisted of: great-grandmother Shura, grandmother Klava, grandfather, my mother, Baba Shura"s son Tolya, his wife Lyusya, and the sons of the last two - Valera and Yura. Valera, I know, was three years older than my mother. All eight gathered at the Frunze family house for holidays.
Valera and Yura were both reddish, at least Valera. Valera had a moustache, and his eyes were close together, giving him a boiled-crayfish look in my childhood. Their mother, Lyusya - whom I"ll call Aunt Lyusya - was simple, modest, and worked as a nurse.
In this poor, neurotic environment, Valera apparently grew up mischievous and obsessed. When I was about nineteen, my mother told me a story from her childhood: she, Valera, and a neighbour peer played in the Frunze yard, and in the shed, Valera made a sexual advance. She told no one, kept it as leverage, and only then, when telling me, had she ever told Baba Klava during an argument.
Such "rapes" (experienced as such due to her neuroticism) weren"t rare. Once, walking past the stadium en route to Frunze, a man verbally harassed her with sexual hints. She remembered this vividly. She also described Engels city park as a place notorious for perverts.
But there was one actual attack - I"ll mention it later.
Grandfather was advancing in his career and now worked at the city power plant. According to my mother, he and his crew would crawl through manholes around the city at night, headlamps strapped to their foreheads, fixing who-knows-what. And in the evenings, he indulged in his inherited taste for alcohol. Grandma Klava couldn"t stand it and threw tantrums-sometimes even hitting him. At least, she certainly hit my mother. Eventually, things escalated to the point where grandfather would grab a knife and threaten to stab her, running after her around some table, according to my mother. Naturally, she was terrified. At those moments, grandfather would tell her to go to another room, only to get even angrier at how grandma Klava"s rages affected their daughter. According to my mother, that was the tone of her entire childhood. In other words, the problem wasn"t so much a drinking grandfather, but how grandma Klava nagged and provoked him into rage.
After failing to summon the courage to use the knife, grandfather would retreat into his gloomy solitude, and grandma Klava redirected her anger onto my mother, punishing her for the slightest misstep. My mother once recounted a time when her anxiety was so intense and prolonged that she went two days without sleep, seeing stars in the air before her eyes, and skipped school the next day.
Only grandma Klava physically punished and tormented my mother-and only when grandfather wasn"t around. After I turned eighteen or twenty, my mother would recall her childhood and her relationship with Klava in such a fury that she called her "a goddamn bitch" and swore she would kill her once we returned to Engels (by then we were living in Saint Petersburg). She believed grandma Klava deserved prison for the way she had treated her. Their relationship remained difficult throughout my mother"s childhood and escalated in her adult years-even fights with police reports filed against each other.
My mother often said that as a child she wished her parents would just disappear-not die, just be gone.
There were stories and photographs of them travelling to seaside resorts. On one trip, my mother recalled a stormy day when no one dared go to the sea-except grandfather. He went out into the rain to the shore "to meet the elements." Mother and grandma went to see what he was doing. He stood on the cliff"s edge, seemingly challenging the storm-probably drunk.
He loved disappearing to be alone and drink. I think his fishing trips were mostly for that. He didn"t have a car at the time, but by my early childhood he had a three-wheeled scooter with a sidecar. Presumably, he had it even before I was born, and he used it to go fishing. When I was six, he bought a car, and we started fishing together as a family of four; by then, he already knew the Engels riverbank and the fishing spots well.
They didn"t stay long in the house in "The Living and the Dead" district-they were allocated a new apartment and moved. It was a little farther from the family home, in a district known as "by the First School," named after the main school there. I don"t recall any interesting stories about that apartment, except that grandfather nearly burned it down once by forgetting to turn off the gas.
Soon, around my mother"s teenage years, grandma Klava-by then seasoned from working at the reinforced concrete plant-received a third and final apartment: a three-room flat in the centre of Engels.
Grandma Shura would throw fits whenever there was a prospect of grandma Klava moving too far from the family home. When Klava was offered a permanent position in Krasnoyarsk after graduating, Shura forbade it outright, and Klava returned.
The first two apartments had been close by. But when Klava was offered a move from the flat near the First School, the choice was either a two-room in Saratov or this three-room in central Engels. At the thought of Klava leaving for Saratov and the family routine being disrupted, Shura threatened to hang herself. So, the three-room flat on Lev Kassil Street, sixteen, was agreed upon. This is where my childhood would unfold. I"ll describe the apartment in detail when I start on myself. Lev Kassil Street is named after a Soviet children"s writer, whose little house was right under the apartment windows. The building is panel-built, six entrances, one hundred fifty meters long. The flat was a corner unit. It was a ridiculous flat-but at least it wasn"t Saratov. From Lev Kassil to Frunze Street-it"s three kilometres.
I also remember my mother saying they had offered Klava not only the three-room flat but also two one-roomers-or even a combination of one one-room and one two-room. That would have been "for the kids, for the future." But that was unacceptable to grandma. Throughout her life, she could not abide the thought that anyone, least of all my mother, should simply inherit a whole flat when grown. The attitude was that my mother had to earn her apartment herself, through blood, sweat, and long years of work, just like her. My mother often recalled grandma"s words during arguments: "Earn it yourself."
Honestly, I can hardly picture grandma Klava and grandfather living in apartments, let alone that three-room one. In my time, they lived in the family house. Nevertheless, it happened, and here"s what I remember about their life on Lev Kassil from my mother"s stories.
Not that anyone in the family was musical-just following a trend at the time-grandma and grandfather bought a piano for Lev Kassil. It cost several months" wages and six men carried it in.
Once grandfather came home drunk and fell asleep in the hallway amidst the shoes. Grandma and mother just stepped over him-he had even pissed himself.
When grandma Klava finished bathing, for some reason-probably the same disgust that made her avoid changing diapers-she didn"t skim the floating soap scum from the water. My mother had to clean it later. She also had to wash grandfather"s hellish socks, which she said nearly made her vomit.
There were no physical displays of affection between the three-no hugs, except maybe formal ones on birthdays.
As I understand it, shortly after the photo of grandma Klava in her early thirties-looking reasonably feminine with long hair-she cut it short.
From what my mother observed, there was never any romantic relationship between them. They slept in separate beds. Grandma slept on her back, hands under her head. Grandfather slept in rarely washed sheets, always howling in his sleep. My mother, too, screamed in her sleep throughout my youth, recounting nightmares inspired by her childhood. Grandma, apparently, did not.
Pigeons tried to settle and nest on the balcony, but grandfather scared them off-my mother said he even shot at them, though with what is unclear, as he never had a gun or hunting knife. Moreover, as my mother always put it, he was the kind who "wouldn"t harm a fly." I vaguely remember stories that he and other workers were issued rifles at work to cull pigeons, but likely only on industrial grounds, not where people lived.
Grandma Klava and grandfather worked in institutions located on Engels" industrial outskirts. I visited their workplaces once-they were the greyest places I"ve ever been.
I"ll give a bit of detail about the city layout, though it"s all visible on Google. From the district with Frunze Street and our family house to central Engels run several streets. Persidskaya (which I often call Persian Street) was crucial in our story and the one we took most often-it was the nearest route to the centre-leading to the Children"s Park, where there was an Orthodox church in my time. Across the street from the Children"s Park is the main city square, with access to the city park and embankment-or, turning left from the Children"s Park, after three hundred metres you reach Lev Kassil. Between the Children"s Park and the Volga lies the city fair-the main trading hub. Distances were short; the city was small.
Another parallel street, Telegrafnaya, closer to the Volga, was quiet, lined with one-storey houses, and led directly to the main square. Nesterova Street had buses to Saratov, as well as trucks and funeral vehicles. Telman Street passed by the previously mentioned First School, but in my mother"s and my childhood it was two lanes, mostly with trolleybuses heading to grey multi-storey residential areas in the city"s eastern industrial side. One of those districts was called Khimvolokno-nothing there except industrial zones and an old city cemetery.
The stadium was near the intersection of Poligraficheskaya and Nesterova. These two streets, in my memory, were festooned with artificial wreaths on poles and trees-commemorating those who had been crushed there.
Seeing that the home atmosphere with both parents was always tense, my mother liked spending time at Frunze. The family house stood at the edge of a long ten-to-fifteen-metre elevation (we also called it "the mountain"), stretching north to south across the city. Frunze Street ran along this slope. Parents said that thousands or millions of years ago, this was the left bank of the river-so all the lower city had been underwater. In the pre-Soviet era, the city often flooded-museum photos show people in boats among houses. Later, a dam and embankment were built, though it didn"t eliminate the mud. Engels is otherwise flat, famous for mud in rainy days due to no drainage.
Thus, the family house on the elevated edge overlooked the west-central Engels, the Ferris wheel, and even Saratov, at least where the bridge met the city.
In winter, there were snow and ice slides. The local population was poor, semi-rural, and the children rough hooligans. Boys in ragged coats, open earflaps, like little bums, and freckled, nasty, tripping each other. Mother remembered it, and I remember similar children in my own youth. So she went to the slopes with grandfather, who watched from above.
In her time, the most popular slide ran along Persidskaya Street-from the hospital where grandma Shura worked (by then an oncologist) down about two hundred meters to the local bathhouse. By my time, cars were sometimes there, and sledding had stopped.
Around this period began a series of deaths on Frunze Street. The first was uncle Tolya, Klava"s brother-some cancer. Probably his case made the deepest impression on my mother. Aunt Lyusya embalmed the body with formalin, tied the jaw, and the stench filled the house. Mother remembered all this with anxious humour and became a necrophobe.
There would be two more funerals in the same house. Neighbours (mostly elderly as the young moved to high-rises) also died there. This is why the house and area are associated with death in her dreams.
In my mother"s adolescence, there were frequent so-called "evening" or "nighttime outings." Originally, when I first recorded these stories, this happened as follows: after a home argument on Lev Kassil, when nobody spoke to anyone-my mother would silently get ready and leave for Frunze to see the calmer grandma Shura. I won"t remove this version because I remembered it for my youth. Later, when revising the text, she described these night trips differently; the only reliable version is that the outings started from Frunze. After uncle Tolya"s death, my impressionable mother developed nightmares and panic, imagining a coffin in the far yard or shed. Later, she even dreamed of a vertically moving ghost-like dead grandma Shura. In her youth, she couldn"t bear staying at Frunze and went silently to Lev Kassil, followed by grandfather. She went silently because, in their family, nobody hugged anyone and mental health stories were taboo.
What else about my mother"s childhood... In the place of the Frunze neighbours I will call the Gavelys, a Romani family lived during her time. Once, she climbed a fence, stepped on a nail, and literally hung upside down until rescued and taken to the nearby hospital. The city hospital, oncology, and morgue were all within a hundred metres of Frunze.
At some point, grandma Klava also had a dacha-built from some kind of concrete blocks, ten kilometres from Frunze. My mother associated the dacha with "hard labour." Like the cold corner three-room flat, it was a failure-sun-scorched, clay ground, no advantages like a nearby beach. Many dachas were near the Volga, but hers was a completely different story. By the end of her teens, my mother hated going to the dacha.
In Saratov Oblast, there was nothing to do; food was scarce. Same in all Soviet provinces, but Saratov was strategically important-aircraft plant, military airfield, other factories-so it was especially closed. Meat and sausage were problematic-hence the phrase "to Moscow for sausage."
Through grandma Shura, whose relatives were spread across the country, our family had distant relatives in Latvia (then part of the USSR). Mother visited them a couple of times; everything there was abundant-like Moscow.
If Saratov was like that, Engels was even more backward. Television had two channels. Nobody had jeans.
I never thought I"d end up telling the goddamn USSR story like some old man. But it was necessary to describe my mother"s childhood.
By now, she had finished school and, as she says, was almost the only one in her class to pursue higher education. The others went to trade schools or straight to work. One strange classmate, who dyed his hair green, eventually died or disappeared.
Almost forgot-one classmate was in love with her and trailed her around. I"ll tell that story another time.
In her final year of school, she attended preparatory courses in Saratov and got a taste of life there. The institute she intended to enter was the same one grandma Klava had attended.
Now back to geography and locations.
Saratov is on the other side of the Volga, across a bridge. To get to that bridge from the centre of Engels, you would take a bus - usually the one that went past the main square and the city museum. Then the bus went along a few small streets and areas, each named either after some communist figure or after industrialisation and labour - streets like Trudovaya, Rabochaya, Lesozavodskaya. On the right, past the tall embankment, you"d pass the beach. Then came the Glue Factory, stinking for kilometres around. After that, the bus would turn right and soon reach the bridge.
The bridge is three kilometres long, high, with three lanes of traffic, considered beautiful and a local landmark. It crosses over the beach in the middle of the Volga and reaches the Saratov side near a ten-storey residential building popularly called "the Pentagon." Alongside the "Pentagon," transport would either continue along the hilly Sokolova Street or, if it was public transport, turn left onto a small street, then cross the bridge over the Glebuchy Ravine, then follow more small streets on both sides before turning right onto Saratov"s long main street, Moskovskaya, which ultimately ends at the main railway station, the final stop.
Of course, I"ll be describing the streets and locations in central Saratov many more times. For now, I just want to outline my mother"s route to the institute.
I myself never went to the Polytechnic Institute and probably never saw it - only passed it a few times by car or bus, with my mother or father pointing it out: "There"s the Polytechnic Institute," but I still couldn"t tell exactly which building it was.
This institute, the Polytech, is almost at the foot of the hills, on the other side of the railway running along Saratov. Basically - far from central Saratov, and aside from going there, there was no reason to be in that area.
To get there, you had to get off the Engels bus at Astrakhanskaya and Moskovskaya, stand on the freezing bus stop while young people, who had chosen a "humanities" education, went into their university behind you - and then ride a cold tram for about fifteen minutes to reach the institute.
I don"t know for sure what she took to cross the Volga. If it was the popular trolleybus number nine, which stopped running in 2004, she would have had to board it near the Engels museum, where the terminus was. It depended on where her route began. But whenever we talked about the mud in Engels, she often remembered how Baba Shura would see her off and take her galoshes when she, wearing shoes meant for Saratov, got on bus 249. So either the route started from Lev Kassil"s apartment (and she rode the empty winter trolleybus number nine, or a crowded bus), or from Frunze, when she got on a still relatively empty bus at Poligraficheskaya.
In any case, as I understand it, she needed to get to the intersection of Moskovskaya and Astrakhanskaya in Saratov, where the tram to Polytech ran.
She said that before entering the institute, she wanted to become a ballerina - she even had the right figure. I don"t know why she didn"t try that path, since she often told stories about growing up and independence, saying no one guided her about her future and profession - she herself decided to go to Polytech, first taking preparatory courses, and then enrolling at around sixteen. Baba Klava probably hinted, in her own way, that she should go there.
In school, she had a classmate who, as I mentioned before, had a romantic interest in her. He carried her schoolbag home, probably gave her flowers, all that. She wasn"t interested in him. For now, that"s all I know about him; he will appear in my childhood.
Then, around sixteen, someone named Kozlov appeared. I don"t know how much of a jerk this Kozlov really was, but from what I gathered, she didn"t like him. I also don"t know where she met him. He was maybe eight or ten years older than her. I remember a couple of her stories involving him.
Once she went to his house, in Engels near the First School, where his parents were. His father also showed her affection in funny ways. When she was leaving and putting on her high boots, she screamed - felt something inside. His father tossed a brush there. Everyone laughed. And she, by the way, liked him more than his son - she always said so.
Later, Kozlov"s mother would call my mother asking, "When will you two get married?" Kozlov also liked to test people"s love for him, which my mother, naturally, did not like. So when they met on the beach years later and it turned out his life had gone poorly, my mother reminded him of those pointless tests. That"s all I know about Kozlov.
Then there was a cyclist. I don"t know how he appeared, but my mother clearly liked him more than the previous ones. By then, the USSR was in its last gasps, and borders would soon open. This cyclist - a fan of long-distance trips - promised to take my mother to Europe, to France. I don"t know how serious he was, maybe just a talker.
During the USSR, citizens were constantly being assigned somewhere - for work, military service, or other placements.
Before the institute, newly admitted students were sent to summer jobs, completely unrelated to their future profession. That"s how my mother and her future classmates ended up in Balakovo - a town 130 kilometres from Saratov - to either dig potatoes in collective farms or do work at a nuclear power plant under construction. They did such work more than once.
My mother remembers living in a dormitory there, or even a new but unfinished building without facilities - with a bucket for peeing at night. She told me about local perverts who gathered near their lodging, but nothing serious happened.
In general, she started studying architecture, and she liked it.
She made friends at the institute. The first was Shurygina, a Jewish girl: big nose, no chin, bat-like ears. The second was Rita Chyornaya, an unusual surname. She was slightly chubby, hair not very long, with a rough, cigarette-tinged voice. She could get into a car with a stranger and go god knows where. Such behaviour was unacceptable to my mother, but they still remained friends.
My mother said she got a room in a dorm. Shurygina"s father helped with light bulbs there, but my mother spent only one night - the place was crawling with cockroaches.
She told me how she and her classmates worked on assignments and projects late into the night, how interesting it was, and how she didn"t want to go home. Someone would often offer her to stay the night in Saratov.
Once she returned home very late, almost at night. There was no way to call Baba Klava. And public transport across the bridge was no longer running. She was beautiful, and people always helped her. On the Saratov side, there was a traffic police post, and she went to them. I don"t remember exactly, but either they offered to take her across the bridge, and she agreed, or they put her on a trolleybus returning empty to Engels depot - maybe both happened on different nights. While crossing the bridge, she met Baba Klava in a taxi, coming from Engels to look for her. This shows Baba Klava"s care - despite the punishments at home.
Another time, late at night at the intersection of Moskovskaya and Chernyshevskogo Streets, she was heading to a bus stop when, as usual, some pervert stuck to her until someone from the second floor of a passing building poured a bucket of water on him.
Baba Klava still ran the show, so summer still meant mandatory trips to the dacha. During that time, a major sexual assault occurred. The dacha settlement was far from the main highway, and for some reason - maybe no buses - my mother had to walk there alone. Fields of sunflowers on both sides. A rapist grabbed her and tried to push her down. But someone drove by in a car, as she told me, and saved her. The man fled, but the driver took her straight to the dacha, scolding my grandparents for letting her walk such a reckless route. Even if Baba Klava relaxed her grip after that, she restored balance with other demands or corporal punishment. It was strict. My mother often recalled things like the first time she accidentally said "damn" while decorating the Christmas tree at sixteen, and Baba Klava smacked her on the lips. When my mother began wearing makeup and freer youth clothing, Baba Klava called her a "slut."
After the cyclist, my mother had a new relationship - with a teacher and examiner at the institute, Uncle Seryozha, as I called him.
He came from Rostov-on-Don. He was Armenian or half-Armenian, with almost grey eyes, and not dark-haired (more like bald, at least in my time). In childhood, his poor mother sent him to an orphanage - a common practice, my mother explained. When the child grew up and could support himself, he returned home. He served in the army, studied at a well-known Rostov architecture institute, then moved to Saratov with other young architects, and by then held a senior position at the Polytechnic Institute with a promising future. He was almost twice my mother"s age and already had a family - a wife and a couple of daughters.
Relationships with a teacher in Soviet times were already frowned upon, but classmates were further outraged because my mother was more attractive than them. Her looks always gave her advantages, but also conflicts with peers everywhere. My mother and Uncle Seryozha got close during a semi-informal institute event. She was around nineteen.
While studying, she went with Rita to relatives in Latvia and, with an architect"s eye, examined local cathedrals, arches, and cobbled streets. She told me about visiting the Riga Cathedral to hear the organ - tombs of kings, Gothic vaults, stained glass - inside cold as a crypt. She brought back sets of postcards we looked at when I was very small. They sketched local architecture, visited a park - bigger and more forest-like than parks in Saratov or Engels - and she often recalled bending to pick a huge fly agaric mushroom, only to find a moose in front of her - apparently also after mushrooms, but late.
They went by local train to the sea - or a bay - to Jūrmala, a famous Soviet resort and music festival venue. The sand was pale or greyish, cold even in summer, and no one went deeper than knee-deep. Relatives welcomed my mother warmly - not Rita, who behaved too wildly for the strict European mentality. Locally, Russians were generally looked down upon.
From Latvia, my mother brought clothing novelties - denim shorts or something like that. She says she was the first to wear such things on Frunze Street.
In summer or holidays, she had many trips. She told me it was normal to go to Moscow for just two weekends, or once she missed a train, ran after it as it moved, friends and the conductor shouting for her to jump in the last carriage - she still didn"t catch it; the train picks up speed while the runner loses ground. She always wanted to live in Riga or Moscow because of memories.
Most trips were with Uncle Seryozha. He had a car. They didn"t take trains - only the car. From these trips, she remembered what driving to Moscow was like - only six hours, whereas the train took fifteen. They also went south - Rostov and the sea, as I understand. She always said: "Oh, where haven"t I been!"
It"s hard to understand why she fell for him. Neither in my time nor then, according to her, did he have the typical macho charisma or sense of humour so important to her (my father attracted her with that). In my childhood, after hours with Uncle Seryozha, she would tell me: "Oh, he"s so boring." He had bulging eyes and a mustache, reminding me of a walrus, and in my time, his face was a constant source of amusement between him and my mother.
Perhaps his silence and lack of humour reminded my mother of her own father, to whom she felt sympathy but could not express it. Both were older - grandfather more so - somewhat henpecked (to some extent), yet unavailable: grandfather because of his reserved nature, Uncle Seryozha because he was already a family man and could promise nothing beyond an affair.
Also, Uncle Seryozha was jealous, touchy, and his pride was easily wounded. According to my mother, he could even blackmail her - threaten to get her expelled if she wasn"t loyal. She says that when she disappeared for health reasons, he used his connections to verify her claims about calling an ambulance, and so on. Even in my time, he remained temperamental - could drop her from the car and drive off, after which they didn"t talk for a while.
Eventually, my mother became pregnant by him. When she told Baba Klava, it caused a scandal - she was thrown out of the house, but not seriously, more for drama. Baba loved that. My mother declared she would keep the child. That"s how it was, as I understand.
Giving birth was, of course, unwise, and my mother had an abortion.
A small note about "not seriously." This is a basic psychological trait in our family (from both sides): no one is ever serious when threatening. So if someone threatens to hang themselves, they don"t really mean it, and the threatened person, while understanding it"s a game, behaves as if the threat is serious - so that later, yielding, they can blame future misfortunes on being pressured.
My mother said she was completely clueless at some final exams, and Uncle Seryozha literally answered for her.
He was advancing in his career, already head architect of Engels in the city administration. He helped my mother get a job there, where she immediately worked among important people - which caused resentment but no one challenged her, seeing her protector.
In those years, two residents of Frunze passed away. Yura, the son of Baba Klava"s already deceased brother, died while serving in the army. No one ever found out exactly what happened. He served in a distant part of the country and, according to my mother, had been a rebel in his youth - although, as she put it, it was always "for the right cause," meaning against injustice. Perhaps this somehow related to his end. His brother Valera even travelled to the place where he served to find out, but it seems he was stopped by the entire military secrecy. Allegedly, Yura shot himself.
Baba Klava recalled: "Your mother cried so hard when she came here and saw the wreaths and everything - she ran out of the house and sat on the bench, sobbing."
Then Baba Shura passed away. I never saw any of those three deceased - not even in photographs.
Before her death, Baba Shura - the owner of the ancestral house on Frunze - needed to bequeath the house to someone. Aunt Lyusya and Valera, it seems, were already living in their own two-room apartment in a neighbouring district on the outskirts of Engels. My mother says that at first, Baba Shura willed the house to Baba Klava and Aunt Lyusya, split down the middle for some reason. But then a sensible neighbour from the lower street, a woman named Ilyina, came by and persuaded the illiterate woman, and everything went to Baba Klava. Yet Aunt Lyusya, through her marriage to Uncle Tolya, also had a stake in the house, so it was decided to pay her and Valera some money.
Then all the country"s crises hit, wiping out everyone"s savings - including that paid share, as well as what my grandparents had saved for a car. That"s probably the whole mess - along with other events - that soured Aunt Lyusya"s relationship with my Baba Klava. Even now, at the time of writing, Valera still lingers in Frunze with his sons, taking advantage of the perennial rift between my mother and Baba Klava, waiting for our Baba Klava to pass so that new inheritance opportunities might arise.
Meanwhile, my mother had an acquaintance - I don"t remember her name - but I always remembered where she lived: near the entrance to the Saratov city park, at the intersection of Rakhova and Novouzenskaya streets, in a ten-storey panel building.
When my mother spoke of her, she always seemed like one of those women (perhaps even fictional, because I never met anyone like them outside of fairy tales) whose main occupation was matchmaking - arranging and managing other people"s personal lives.
It was through her that my mother learned the then-popular post-Iron Curtain method for young women to arrange their lives, known as the "inter-girl" approach - that is, finding and marrying a man from abroad (nothing like this will ever happen in my story; I"m just recalling everything I can).
And it was through her that my mother met my father.
It happened at someone"s birthday - either this acquaintance"s or her husband"s. I don"t know the details of that birthday or how exactly they met, but I do know the details of another apartment party that happened soon after - and it was at that party, foolishly, that I was conceived.
But first, of course - about my father.
.:.
___Part 2.
.:::.
Background on my father"s side and my earliest remembered year.
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Throughout my autobiography, I will refer to my father simply as "father," even though in childhood I called him "dad." This relates to the central themes of my childhood story, particularly its ending - it will all become clear, so I won"t waste time explaining now.
My father"s mother, Valentina - whom I will call Baba Valya - was, as I recall, the twelfth and youngest in her family. Her family, as I understand it, was not as poor as my maternal great-grandmother"s family. According to my father, they were involved in something like trade and lived almost in central Saratov, with all its opportunities (the "centre or outskirts" theme is also one of the stereotypes my father instilled in me).
Still, Baba Valya had no real sense of thrift or financial literacy; for example, she had absolutely no desire to save money, which eventually led to a rather foolish life for her and my father in their small one-room flat.
Baba Valya completed only the mandatory primary school. Perhaps she was too busy with household chores - being the youngest and last, always serving her older siblings - and that shaped her entire future calling. Her family lived in a separate house near the Sennoy Market, the city"s main bazaar with a thousand stalls of all kinds. From there, it was about a ten-minute walk to the university (which I will later call "ES GU") on Astrakhan Street, and the main railway station of Saratov was nearby. Although I visited that house a couple of times, I can"t remember exactly where it was.
Living in that part of the city, near markets and the like, meant - in my stereotype - that they were unlikely to be cultured, and their activities were not intellectual. Although ES GU was nearby, the city centre and the residences of the urban intelligentsia were associated with the main square and areas down to the Volga, especially around Lipki Park. People living near Sennoy Market were more involved in trade, repair work, and car services. That was my stereotype, based mostly on my father"s obsessive storytelling.
In her youth, Baba Valya even took motorcycle driving lessons and obtained a license. Children of intelligentsia probably wouldn"t learn motorcycles - they"d go to conservatory courses instead. She never learned to swim, suggesting her family rarely spent weekends at the Volga or on beaches.
She was very talkative and told many life stories, though I remembered almost none of them - as a child, they didn"t seem exciting enough to stick; later, when I lived with her in adolescence, I hardly listened at all, just nodded, absorbed in my own thoughts.
Most of her brothers and sisters dispersed across the USSR - some to Latvia, others near Saint Petersburg - and Baba Valya visited both places. Once she spoke of a platonic relationship with a young man in Saint Petersburg. I barely paid attention. But when, at about age ten, she told the story of a pervert on a bus - feeling something rubbing her back or buttocks, seeing a whitish substance on her clothes, and stepping off in disgust - I listened.
In my youth, she liked talking about men and her desire to be "with some old man" ("old man," since she was already aged) - someone to talk to, live with, give each other massages, even share a bath. But the bus incident clearly affected her; sex was a problematic topic.
Saratov had a large aviation factory, strategically important, around which a whole residential district grew, called Zavodskoy - with five- and ten-storey buildings of various eras. Located on the southern stretch of Saratov along the Volga, the district had only two roads in and out. Baba Valya somehow got a job at the factory, commuting daily until she received a two-room apartment there when my father was about twenty-two. Later, she worked at the factory sanatorium, doing everything from cooking and cleaning the pool to hosting visiting Soviet officials - acting as both janitor and entertainer.
Workers from all over the USSR came to this factory, including - as I understand - my paternal grandfather from a town near Odessa, Ukraine. I say "as I understand" because I don"t know exactly why he was there, but living in a large house near the factory implies he worked there, since almost all nearby residents were factory employees.
They did not marry. Apparently they could have, but one evening, according to Baba Valya, my grandfather heard someone arguing, picked up a metal object to intervene, and was mistakenly arrested by the militia. He served a few years, then, for some reason, did not reunite with Baba Valya and returned to Ukraine. He wrote her to come with her son, but they did not go.
When my father was a few years old, Baba Valya had another relationship, which produced Larisa - my father"s full sister. This man was shady - Baba Valya didn"t even tell his story - and my mother later learned he may have been a murderer who went to prison.
I remember little of my father"s childhood. He, like Baba Valya, told many stories; he was considered eloquent in our family. I listened with interest to his humorous, mocking tales, though his past itself never gripped me as my mother"s did. His past seems free of suffering. Though neurotic with many phobias, he was always optimistic, carefree, and unaffected by serious topics like prison or war. He even loved the USSR - which I will mention repeatedly - while I hated the grey, ugly Soviet past and had to endure stories about it.
There were three in the household: Baba Valya, my father, and Larisa. My father spoke of riding little Larisa to school on a bicycle. Baba Valya was indulgent and never scolded him, though chores were shared and difficult. There was some adult relative - maybe one of Baba Valya"s brothers - nearby, a car enthusiast with a garage and tools. He once owned, or saw, an American car, which impressed my father.
My father loved and soldered radios in youth, enjoyed Soviet magazines on ships and technology, liked Western-produced films about Indians, and from his teens watched football and biathlon on TV.
In other respects, he always lived among women, influenced by them. Baba Valya was overprotective and indulgent. Coupled with how unmanly he became as an adult, one could fairly assume he was a mama"s boy. The USSR, judging by why he loved it, was like an overprotective mother.
He finished all eleven grades of school but did not go to university, so he served the mandatory two years in the army. I asked why he didn"t avoid it, as most did. He said men didn"t do that. There was postwar heroism and national pride. Service was a duty, though even then, it was possible to avoid it by attending university.
He described the draft as a lottery: recruits stood before officers, names called, groups assigned. A rumour circulated that the next group would go to the Baltic - the more developed western Soviet republics (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania) - where everyone wanted to go. My father requested that group, not realising until days later from the train window that he was on the third luggage berth, in the steppe with camels.
In Uzbekistan, he was initially assigned to guard a male prison. There was an incident where a prisoner rebelled and theatrically cut himself under their guns. This, he said, gave him a lifelong fear of police, prisons, and criminals. The rest of his service was in a women"s prison. He told stories that interested me only in the sense of wasted years.
There were no hazing incidents. He spoke of eating mulberries, visiting local bazaars, and one comrade causing chaos by taking a gun into the city. Fellow soldiers bragged of rivers in their hometowns; my father astonished them with tales of the Volga. Two years in prison service gave him, besides phobia, a mild interest in prisons - sometimes he lingered on TV films about them.
Nothing remarkable in his army service, apart from the initial shock.
After the army, he still didn"t know what to do. He had no clear goals or hobbies, no mentor except one uncle, no influences to guide him. He experienced no real childhood trauma, so wasn"t psychologically scarred. He became a romantic - uselessly, untrained where romance could matter. He read books, but gravitated to films and filmmaking. Saratov offered no cinematic education.
He went to ES GU near Sennoy, initially geography - expecting adventures and expeditions. Soon he realised it would only lead to a dull government job or occasional Siberian trips. He switched to journalism, found it equally dull, and dropped out entirely, joining the staff of a local documentary film studio - immediately interesting, without four years of study. This studio was on Moscow Street, near the intersection with Oktyabrskaya.
The staff worked across the USSR filming documentaries. He saw a Soviet film star live and worked in a theatre college, shaking Evgeny Mironov"s hand, who would become one of Russia"s most famous actors.
I recall many stories he told - mostly about misfortune, enough that as a child I thought of him as a loser.
Once, while waterskiing, he fell, losing his trunks.
One winter, climbing a slippery street in central Saratov, he saw two children ahead: a girl fell, rolling down - he caught her, it was a dwarf; the other "child," her husband, looked outraged.
Another time, sent as a student journalist to cover a factory or farm, he wore rare Czech leather shoes gifted by someone, stepped ankle-deep in oil in a garage.
At a party, a man of thirty impressed everyone with encyclopedic quotes; my father, more artistic, told him he had no opinion of his own. The man punched him in the face.
At another gathering, someone needed to defecate, toilet locked. He climbed a windowsill, exposed himself - a couple entered, saw the scene. Not my father, but he told the story, illustrating misadventures.
He knew people who attended parties, so wasn"t socially isolated.
I know little of those years, and neither does my mother. She believes he was a drug addict then. I teased: "You were probably doing drugs?" He joked: "Of course, sitting under the toilet shooting up. What else could I do?" By the time I revised this text, my mother speculated he may have been in prison during those years, despairingly thinking she had got herself into trouble.
Regarding his sex life, he once told me, when I was about nineteen, that after the army, at twenty, a friend had invited him to a student party in a dormitory full of silly country girls, and that"s where he lost his virginity. For my father, it had no consequences, but the friend"s girlfriend got pregnant, and he was forced to marry her - and by the time he told me this, they were still living together in some grotesque arrangement, while keeping in touch with him.
Mom says she heard rumours that before her, he had an affair with a woman who had to have an abortion.
I can"t imagine anyone loving him. To me, he always seemed like a classic "friend-zoner" - though in his youthful photos he looks confident and presentable. He also always seemed to me a man of low sexual drive. I"ll describe this side of him later.
Baba Valya had an acquaintance, a contemporary of hers, named Nina Fyodorovna. Nina Fyodorovna saw that my father was wasting time with no career prospects without a higher education. She convinced him to go back to university, and he did. This time he chose the philology faculty, specialising in Russian literature. For some reason, going to Moscow or Saint Petersburg to study something he truly loved - cinema - was out of the question. I spent my whole life assuming I knew why, but by my thirties I realised things weren"t always so simple.
So at that time, he was in his third year of four, around twenty-four or twenty-five, when he met my mother, a year older, at that birthday party. Soon after, as I mentioned, there was another flat party they attended together.
That flat party was for another birthday - a friend of my father, as I understand - in an apartment on the western outskirts of Saratov. Starting from the Sennoy Market, there are a series of districts named "Dachnaya number..." up to ten for the farthest, and this was Ninth Dachnaya, as I recall. Very bleak residential areas with Khrushchyovka blocks.
Mom says they got drunk, which was extremely unusual for her, and she was sick, which was awful. She recalled that when she and my father were having sex there, she asked him to stop, but he didn"t, and in the end, she didn"t care anyway - she was so drunk. Everything happened utterly stupidly: neither their higher education nor mom"s puritan upbringing helped.
Early in the morning, they were at the bus stop near the circus and the Covered Market - one of the busiest places in town - waiting for a bus to Zavodskoy. My father was so carefree that he lay down on the asphalt at the bus stop. Mom says this was one of his typical theatrical gestures. At the time, it amused her.
They went to Zavodskoy, to the two-room apartment on Penzenskaya Street that Baba Valya had recently gotten through her work at the factory, where, after leaving her family home - possibly after the death of that car-loving uncle - some relatives of hers, they - Baba Valya, my father, and Larisa (twenty at the time) - now lived together.
Mom often recounted how strange it seemed that my father, who had to commute daily to the centre for university (where he was almost the only male in the group) and supposedly hated living in apartments, especially proletarian districts, made no attempt to move out and live separately from his women. But at that point, mom just wanted to escape her life with her parents, especially Baba Klava, who, even after stopping the beatings (after mom had hit her back somewhere in her student years), continued to oppress her psychologically. They still lived on Lev Kassil, while the Frunze house was rented to students.
For some fateful reason, mom was temporarily not in contact with Uncle Seryozha at that time. Maybe she hadn"t praised him for a construction project he designed, and he got offended, or maybe she was simply tired of his childish sensitivity and shut down.
All circumstances were favourable for mom to connect with my father"s side (more accurate than saying "with my father"). The home atmosphere in Zavodskoy was the complete opposite of what she was used to. Everyone joked, no one had headaches, no one threw tantrums or created scandals. I owe my existence to that mess she wanted to escape. Otherwise, mom might have met my father a little longer, seen all his oddities, had an abortion, and that would have been the end of the story. She said as much herself.
Mom often remembered asking my father about the pregnancy, whether to keep me, and he answered firmly "Yes" (I always imagine him saying this, lying on the asphalt at that bus stop near the circus). She trusted him, as a man, to take responsibility for the decision.
I don"t know exactly if mom moved in with them immediately after the events at Ninth Dachnaya or later, after the wedding. She recalled Baba Klava arriving at the wedding with bed linen and things for her from home - assuming there might be none in the Zavodskoy apartment.
The wedding was held a hundred metres from the apartment, right in the prophylactic clinic where Baba Valya worked. Baba Valya ran the event. Mom didn"t buy a wedding dress: she wore simple clothes. This wasn"t an indication that my father couldn"t afford a dress (though he probably didn"t have the money). More likely, mom never fully aligned with typical women - she never liked children, dolls, and all that - so she probably didn"t want a dress herself.
Guests were there as at a normal wedding. Mom"s friend Shurygina attended, along with Rita, one of whom was a witness. As far as I understand, Ivan, who later became Larisa"s husband, first appeared and met her there. Mom tried to set up the unattractive Shurygina with someone - probably Ivan - but it was useless. I visited that clinic in early childhood (and I pronounced "prophylactic clinic" in the feminine) - it had a dining hall like a restaurant, a couple of pools, and guest rooms with beds - so I think the event looked decent. A friend of mom"s filmed the wedding from the neighbouring house in Engels, and the videotape was at our house during my childhood, but I was never interested in watching it. I remember seeing only a few seconds - and that was it.
Mom now had her own bed linen and started living permanently at Baba Valya"s.
In the summer of "92, or maybe "93, mom and dad went with someone to a holiday base while I was present. I don"t know the details - just to give an idea of their leisure and travel. There were no trips to other cities. These holiday bases were small clusters of primitive guesthouses, with frogs in the rooms and outdoor facilities - usually on islands, of which there are thousands along the Volga. Mom said these islands and bases were havens for fugitives, especially in the "90s.
Larisa started dating Ivan. He had moved from Ulyanovsk, up the Volga, and lived in central Saratov on Kiseleva Street, near Chapaeva Street, the Circus, and the Covered Market - the city centre. Mom recalls that there was never meat on Baba Valya"s table - but as soon as Ivan was about to visit, meat would appear, as Ivan wasn"t used to poverty. The two-room apartment never had hot water, and Baba Valya ran between the kitchen and bathroom with buckets of boiling water.
Money for the young family largely came from Baba Klava in Engels. Baba Valya took it, and mom says she never even asked how it was spent. She was always "too busy" - always "too busy." She recalls my father lying on the sofa, reading books, going to university, and entertaining three cohabitants in the evenings with conversation. He often said, "I want to be paid for reading books."
When Ivan came to sleep with Larisa, my father and mom - with me inside her - moved the bed from the bedroom to the living room. Baba Valya probably slept in the kitchen.
Larisa was about twenty, as I said, with no education beyond primary school - and she apparently never studied anywhere else. Mom says she went to parties, came home drunk, and was sick. If my father had a mentor in the form of that uncle, Larisa had none except Baba Valya - who couldn"t develop anything intellectual or practical. Baba Valya always presented herself as well-mannered, cultured, almost knowing aristocratic etiquette - after all, she worked in a hotel dealing with important people - and always modest, and so on. Yes, that was true, but besides that, she had nothing. All the rules about table manners, all that Jack Dawson dinner etiquette - it doesn"t advance you in life. Just a form, a wrapper. My father caught the same foolish belief - lecturing on manners and gentlemanly ethics, claiming how many writers wouldn"t have worked if they weren"t dressed as gentlemen. In the end, both Baba Valya and he - were in the shit.
Mom says she lost all romantic interest in my father within the first months. Baba Valya was everywhere, all the time. She was the epitome of an annoying, intrusive woman. As if it weren"t enough that my father and mom were a separate family and should live separately, she barged into their bedroom in the mornings under the pretext of opening a window, aired the room, fussed around, put some snack on the table - just to make her mark. My father enjoyed it. Mom says it felt like she married Baba Valya. As I said, I think my father naturally had a low libido.
Mom started to find it unbearable, but focused mainly on her pregnancy and the impending birth, which was near.
Of course, my father wasn"t entirely useless. At some point during the pregnancy, mom fell ill and needed a hospital, and for some reason there were no other options. My father carried her all the way from their home on Penzenskaya Street, 25, to the bus stop - about two hundred metres if on Penzenskaya, or seven hundred if on Enthusiasts Avenue. Mom weighed around sixty kilos then.
At the intersection of Moskovskaya and Sobornaya, there"s a brick building - formerly a maternity hospital - where I was born on 3rd March "93. Caesarean section. In my childhood, sitting with mom at the clinic, she often told the doctors a story about how I was mishandled during delivery - something with forceps - and something got damaged. She even pronounced a diagnosis. But the doctors saw no signs or traces.
After the operation, she wasn"t given me for some time - as I recall, almost a couple of days. I don"t know why, but it was standard practice. Children weren"t handed to mothers immediately, unlike in films.
When mom was finally given the child, it wasn"t me. The nurses had switched babies. If it weren"t for my dark eyes, I probably wouldn"t be writing this now. In short, everything was absurd and typically Soviet.
A few days later, mom returned home in Zavodskoy with me - the fifth resident of the apartment.
Mom told me my first stool after two weeks of healing was as thick as an arm. As a child, I couldn"t believe such a thing could pass.
I"ve started including small (and sometimes large) obscene details, unavoidable in psychological self-examination, and therefore abundant in my autobiography, because I want to give a full account of what I remember - especially what influenced or impressed me.
They named me Nikita. Although the name derives from a Greek root, it has no Western European equivalents (Nicolas or Nick is Nikolai; the French-Canadian Nikita is female), and from all the information I found in my youth, Nikita as a male name is exclusively Orthodox Russian. Just a note, in the spirit of the one about Mordovian roots at the beginning. I hated my name as a child - for its feminine perception, and later for its untranslatability into English.
The meaning of my surname - later. My father got it from Baba Valya, who was never married and never changed her name. Mom became Kapernauomova through marriage; she was previously Bogomazova (meaning "one who paints icons with oil").
Once, walking from the clinic with me, mom and dad met the man whose surname I was to bear. Or rather, he saw them and approached. My father hurriedly took mom by the elbow and led her away, though this grandfather shouted something friendly. He had lived in Saratov until then, then moved to his Dzhankoy, from where he wrote and invited Baba Valya with my father - but they didn"t go.
The ages of my closest relatives at my birth: mom - twenty-six, dad - twenty-five, Baba Klava - fifty-five, Grandpa Vova - fifty-three, Baba Valya - forty-six, Aunt Larisa - twenty-one.
Baba Valya, my father, and Larisa always hid things from mom. They didn"t explain about my father"s father, or that Baba Valya got a second apartment - a one-room flat - in a building under construction nearby.
They weren"t secretive only towards mom. My father"s family, headed by Baba Valya, was foolish and therefore superstitious. In the first weeks of my life, mom says, they didn"t allow outsiders into the apartment or let anyone see me, to protect me somehow. There was a woman named Zinaida Fyodorovna, who I don"t remember and never saw again, who was very close to Baba Valya. Some kind of clairvoyant, extremely superstitious - she guided Baba Valya in all matters and, I think, was responsible for most of her nonsense.
All this was strange to my rational mom, but she didn"t pay much attention at the time.
Once, she says, she needed to relieve excess milk, and my father sucked her breast, then said he almost vomited. I"m simply recalling everything I can from mom"s stories of that time.
There are stories about my father and Ivan flying in a small plane for business, and about a gypsy woman tricking my father out of a valuable ring. Around the same time, another gypsy swindled him out of a pile of money in the park. Gypsies in Russia - for clarity - aren"t like in Guy Ritchie"s "Snatch," where they look like ordinary white Europeans. Here, they are tanned, dark-haired, and the women wear traditional clothes. They appear occasionally in my childhood story.
Ivan was an aspiring businessman. Short, small-built, and quiet - like Grandpa Vova. But while Grandpa Vova"s quietness came from some swallowed resentment, Ivan"s was natural to his personality and attachment style. My father called him a spy, but I think Ivan didn"t like it. Ivan was easily offended, our family said. I suspect my father called him a spy only privately. Usually, overbearing Baba Valya kept her distance from Ivan.
Ivan was confident and calm. Though living in central Saratov, he didn"t attend university, as far as I know, though maybe some college. My father said that once Ivan turned eighteen, he went to Poland, bought some goods, and came back to sell them. This was Russia in the era when anyone who needed money started hustling: the USSR was over, and people were allowed to get rich. Yet Ivan"s trip to Poland contradicts the fact he should have been conscripted at that age (only higher education could save him - not college). I don"t know how he avoided the draft. I don"t recall him ever being in the army.
In short, he was an aspiring businessman. He didn"t drink - or hardly at all - understood nothing of sentimentality, was quiet, very confident, and had connections (I don"t write "friends," as mom says he sometimes betrayed friends for money, and she once called him a "heartless bastard"). My father was a business partner for a while. When I asked about the criminal era in our country, he told stories of their first steps - selling cigarettes, furniture, anything. But Ivan even sold cigarettes - profiting from others" addictions - he was not picky, unlike my father, who was selective and feared crime, police, and law. Ivan continued to earn, grow, and live a man"s life - with a car, business, everything - while my father fell behind, remaining "under Baba Valya"s skirt," as mom and I say. My father doesn"t argue - he calls himself a dreamer.
My father was finishing university; he told me his thesis was on the Scandinavian Edda. My mother remembers that he studied lazily, and she even helped him with English. How she could help him, I don"t know - she herself knew only a few words in English.
She tells that sometimes he would come home, and his breath would stink like some kind of shit, as if he had been smoking some kind of shit somewhere. To these stories she always adds, addressing me: "It was all fun back then, pity about you," meaning that one shouldn"t have had a child with someone like that.
Some time passed after I was born - maybe a few months - and my mother started to recover, and life in that cramped forty-five-square-metre two-room apartment with me, my father, Grandma Valya posing as husband, Larisa, and Ivan - who had also moved in - began to wear on her. Grandma Valya constantly, in that tiny eight-square-metre kitchen, entertained new guests. She brought them from the sanatorium - she liked to please different important people, hoping to get in their favour, maybe even gain something. But mostly it was her acquaintances - mostly shallow women, though there were also the opposite type, like that Nina Fyodorovna. This Nina belonged to the type of Grandma Valya"s acquaintances who, on the contrary, exploited her shallow nature and, even while helping her in some ways, primarily thought of their own advantage. Later, this Nina worked at "Faberlic" and aggressively sold all sorts of unnecessary products to Grandma Valya.
There were no prospects of moving to a separate apartment, and my father didn"t have a stable job. Of course, it was hard to find work back then - but vacancies existed. He just didn"t like those jobs - they were physical and stupid. My mother recalls how once Grandma Valya told her: "No, Sasha won"t work." She also often told me that later, when she repeated those words - or simply explained that my father wasn"t working - to her own parents, who were digging in the garden on Frunze Street at the time, my grandfather literally dropped his spade.
And no one told my mother about another apartment that Grandma Valya had acquired. My mother says that Grandma Valya - a hyper-protective provider, obsessed with her children"s welfare - seized any opportunity to get some living space. She tells how she served wealthy elderly Jewish women, washed them after death, organised memorial services and feasts, always hoping to get something from their relatives. But she never got anything. Grandma Klava and my grandfather owned a three-room apartment and a house on Frunze. So there"s reason to believe that my father"s side decided to keep the new apartment secret, perhaps hoping my mother"s parents would offer something to the young family. In retrospect, this made things even worse for my mother: my father knew about the second apartment and stayed silent along with the others. But my mother"s parents, as I said, especially the dominant Grandma Klava, didn"t give up property easily.
In short, there were no scenes or scandals in that two-room flat in Zavodskoy. My mother simply got tired of that life, packed her things, and in November "93 moved with me to Engels, to an apartment on Lev Kassil Street with Grandma Klava and my grandfather. My father stayed with his people and eventually moved with Grandma Valya into that new one-room flat nearby - on Enthusiasts Avenue - where Grandma Valya settled in the kitchen for the rest of her life, and my father in the living room. The one-room flat was on the ninth floor, just like the two-room flat. Larisa and Ivan stayed in the two-room flat.
By then, the country was in the middle of the fuss known as "privatisation," which meant not only the future oligarchs taking over factories but also citizens taking ownership of the apartments they lived in or had some rights to. All the flats issued to people for work, like to my grandparents and Grandma Valya, and plots of land where private houses stood - all of it, by application, often through bureaucratic hurdles, was becoming private property.
A key factor in whether a resident had the right to formalise ownership was the Soviet-era, very bureaucratic concept of registration - the address in the passport where a person was supposed to live and the district in which they could access state-provided benefits like hospitals, schools, and so on. The registration address was also the first place the police or other authorities would go if they needed to find someone. A registered person could not be deregistered without their consent or that of their guardian, which made selling the property impossible for the owner. And if the registered person was a child, they automatically claimed a share during privatisation. Moreover, as far as I remember, the parent of the child also had to be registered or even have a share in the apartment with the child.
So, moving with me to Lev Kassil Street to my grandparents (that"s how we always called them, stressing the last vowel), in order to tie me to the children"s clinic in Engels and for me to even continue existing there, my mother had to register me at that address. As I understand it, this was done, and this - the moment when all the legal consequences, that is, my mother effectively becoming the apartment"s owner, became clear - marked the start of a lifelong psychological struggle between my mother and Grandma Klava.
Without "earning it," without "breaking sweat or blood," and after all the trouble - being tied to and giving birth to a non-working joker - my mother would get the result of thirty years of Grandma Klava"s work at the factory. For Grandma Klava, this was a nightmare, and it began what she was best remembered for. She followed my mother to housing offices, calling her a fraudster. The end result, as my mother often recounted, was that Grandma Klava gave up and transferred the apartment to her with a curse. And the aunts in the offices still asked my mother: "Is she normal?" I just don"t know exactly when this final privatisation happened - when I was one year old or slightly older.
At the beginning of "94, the grandparents finally and permanently returned to their ancestral home on Frunze, and the students moved out. But contact between my mother and Grandma Klava was by no means severed. All those tantrums and dramas were normal for Grandma Klava. And such dramas with my mother always happened - that"s why I said the psychological struggle that started with the move from Lev Kassil Street was a new one, i.e., just the latest.
There was even less of a rift with my father"s side, and he visited - or more or less lived with us - regularly. He took me to the building at 1 Lenin Street, near the Engels pier, which will feature heavily in my story later. In that old building there was some institution giving out free baby food. I don"t remember much of that.
Closer to the age when memory kicks in, more for love of books than for money, my father started selling books from a small stand on the street near the Engels city library. I mention this mainly in the main narrative. The "90s and racketeering, from my childhood recollections, seemed to bypass our region - my story will feature almost zero episodes of this - but even my father has memories on the topic: at first, some guys in tracksuits approached him hinting at tribute, and he gave them some children"s puzzles.
My mother needed money to live, so she had to find work again. That is - Uncle Sergey. As I already mentioned, he was the chief architect of Engels. She called him, they resumed relations, and what happened next - I didn"t really follow where he placed her. She was always somehow employed back then, but his main help in those golden years of her short architectural career was giving her clients, or simply jobs, which she spent my entire childhood drafting at home on the board. But she wasn"t business-minded or financially savvy. Quite the opposite.
She often recalled taking three thousand for a project when others had been charging ten for ages. She didn"t even think about rising prices - she was a fool. And no one advised her, of course, and she didn"t discuss money matters with anyone - after she initially learned that when it came to salaries and money, no one would help, and only ruin relationships if you asked. (Her work experience, for which she was always employed somewhere, counted for nothing, and she gets the minimum pension: "They need proof from colleagues, and no one will help me.")
In her early adulthood, even before I took an interest in money, she held her savings for a whole year, invested them in an apartment in a building under construction, and sold it once it was finished for the same amount - never even considering that prices had risen. How could someone live like that until forty-five? "Golden years," "golden vein" - that"s what she called the times when she was drafting projects. But we lived like the absolute middle class, closer to poor, while her acquaintances built cottages, changed cars, bought new tech instantly. She often recalls with delight: "Three thousand, another three thousand, like manna from heaven!" She was just comparing to poverty, physical labour, and "golden" meant that the money came for calm drawing at home, not for selling herring at the market. And the fact that those three thousand were even less than what one could get at the market didn"t bother her. Her mindset is the same even now, rummaging through bins to sell cardboard: "Wow! Walked around - and sold cardboard for a pie!"
I piled up these details so you can draw an even more important conclusion: she was problematic. The demoralising consequences of difficult relationships with one"s mother are known today as internet memes. My mother literally spent my entire youth recalling her fights with Grandma Klava. But beyond that, I know my mother"s "foolishness" from myself - in a more general sense. When I lose focus on something, I start failing at it. There"s no focus because other problems gnaw at me.
For example, now, at the stage of final edits, my mind is already at that point where I choose the wrong option out of two obvious ones. The same can be said about excessive meticulousness - then the focus is on details, not the task.
In short, my mother - problematic. And especially then - perhaps even more so. And I definitely sensed it.
I gradually move on to describing myself.
I consider the first two years of life the most decisive for the formation of the psyche (apart from and after genetic factors), though, naturally and unfortunately, I remember nothing from the first year.
My mother says I cried a lot as an infant, and was very hard to calm. When she lived with me in Zavodskoy, my father"s cousin, who inherited, as I understood, the house of Grandma Valya"s family near the Sennoy market, visited. Her name was Aunt Sveta. My mother says I would scream like I was being cut, and couldn"t be calmed until she left. I later saw this woman as an adult. Ordinary. The same age as my parents, maybe slightly younger. Character-wise - like Grandma Valya: flirtatious, optimistic. If there was fear, as seems likely, by analogy with other episodes, it might have been this: Aunt Sveta was blonde. I might have confused her with my mother - only I knew it wasn"t my mother. And altered mother, altered relatives - this is even scarier than my basic fear of losing loved ones. There they are, nearby, and clearly gone.
After moving to Engels, my mother and I visited my parents in Zavodskoy again - still in the two-room flat (that"s how my mother calls my father"s side: "yours"). I cried again, only now at Ivan"s mother - Tatyana; she apparently came over. With her, it wasn"t clear what caused it. Small, kind woman, hair dyed beet-red.
Also, when we still lived with them, a poplar grew right by my window, and it was struck by fire lightning - I screamed violently.
In short, I cried constantly, and often vomited in public transport. Also, my penis was constantly erect. My mother recounted all this.
She often remembers that I tore my toys (though this was years after infancy). I clearly remember occasions when I tore toys and things between ages three to six and older. Yet among my "victims," my mother often mentions, for example, some paper game that she says I tore at four, which I don"t remember. The game was from her childhood, so, being highly sensitive to my attitude toward it, she could have misremembered it - in reality, I might have torn it in those first years.
My grandfather bought me a toy crane, which I would throw from the cradle and demand it back - and repeat in a loop. I don"t remember. My mother told me in autumn "19.
She used to take me in a simple baby stroller, though I don"t remember it. In my earliest memory, I may have seen it folded in the vestibule, but soon it disappeared.
My mother says we constantly went to the city park, and I played there with peers, including Dasha Serebryakova, who will appear in my story around age ten. I don"t remember these park games at all. This was, it seems, summer "94.
Well, that"s probably all I can recount before beginning the autobiography. Pun intended... The main text will start in another style, and it will last - for quite a while, up to a certain point.