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  You could always spot a Komsomol member, we joked, by the hole in the seat of his pants — worn by sitting through endless, deadly boring meetings.

  At first I tried to balance my schoolwork with wrestling, mainly because there were many subjects that interested me, particularly the hard sciences. The teachers proudly emphasized the “Soviet” contributions to science, although I learned that many of the breakthroughs — such as Mendeleyev’s periodic table — had been made by prerevolutionary Russians. Nevertheless, I was fascinated by mathematics and physics. Biology was also one of my favorite classes, although the textbooks seemed to waste a lot of time straining to link the laws governing natural processes with Marxism-Leninism atheism. And these books also strained hard to avoid the one issue we were all fascinated by, sex.

  The school subject that I liked the best, however, was geography. My geography textbooks and atlas were endlessly engrossing. I could spend a whole evening curled up on the Caucasian rug reading about the tribes along the Amazon River or the gold mines and oil fields of the Siberian taiga. Sergei, a friend from school who lived nearby, also loved geography. He was in a motocross club, which took as much of his free time as the Spartak wrestling did of mine. But we always found a few hours each week to “study” geography together. Many winter nights we would sit at my kitchen table with the atlas open before us, playing a game.

  “Find Atlanta in America,” Sergei would challenge, staring at the second hand of his watch.

  I would have fifteen seconds to find that city or river.

  Playing the geography game with Sergei made me think about America. The teachers taught us that America was a large, rich country, which had been settled in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries just like Russia under the czars. I had a feeling that Americans were probably not much different from us. But then in history classes, which focused heavily on the Revolution and the Great Patriotic War, we were taught that American capitalists had tried to keep their country out of the war so that the Nazis could destroy the Soviet Union. After Pearl Harbor, the capitalists conspired with British imperialists to delay the Second Front until the Nazis had almost bled my country white.

  In these same history classes, though, I learned that American lend-lease weapons, including the rugged P-39 Airacobra, flown by Soviet aces like Alexander Pokryshkin, had helped turn back the fascist hordes. And, of course, I remembered my grandmother’s stories about the American yellow shoes that had kept my mother’s feet from freezing, and the canned food, powdered eggs, and chocolate that had saved the family from starvation during the war. But I was taught that, although the whole world had been united to defeat the Nazis, the Americans’ invention of the atomic bomb had renewed their imperialist ambitions. And now the Socialist Motherland was the principal target of those nuclear weapons. That made me both sad and angry.

  But I couldn’t really hate everything about the West, especially their music. Every Saturday night I tuned our shortwave radio to the Voice of America to listen to the rock music show. Although I didn’t understand more than three words of English, I memorized the lyrics to songs by Three Dog Night, Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Maybe the music was just propaganda, as the Komsomol leaders warned us, but it certainly was exciting.

  However, politics really did not interest me much. In school we learned that Stalin had inherited the mantle of the Great Lenin and had gone on to lead our country to victory in the war. Then, we were taught, certain personal “excesses” had tarnished his place in history. Outside of school, people usually avoided talking about Stalin. And when they did, it was with a mixture of respect and fear, a strange, grudging reverence. Sometimes at my grandmother’s house, I would overhear whispered conversations in the kitchen, when the older people would talk about the Stalin years. They might mention the “Black Raven,” which was apparently a police car that had come in the night to take people away. Where it took them, I had no idea.

  Later, my mother brought home a copy of Roman Gazeta that bore the yellow cardboard “Restricted” tag from her institute’s library. When asked about this, she said the issue contained the famous novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by a writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I had never heard of him. He certainly wasn’t mentioned in my literature books at school.

  “What’s it about?” I asked mother.

  “It’s not for you, Sasha,” was all she said.

  She didn’t hide the book, despite the yellow label. I hoped there might be some sexy passages. So one evening when I got home early from practice, I sat down in the kitchen and began to read the book. I was shocked that my mother should choose such a work. The language was terrible, with all these crude, antisocial convicts and their prison guards exchanging foul insults like “fucker” and “shit face.”

  I read enough of the book to trouble me. Why would a major literary magazine in Moscow publish this kind of thing? Then I heard on the radio that Solzhenitsyn was “a disgusting person, who has sold his soul to imperialist circles.”

  But literature was less important than wrestling. I was now on the morning class schedule at school, so every afternoon I ran from the commuter train depot all the way to the Spartak sports complex. The coach had weeded out the habitual latecomers and had instituted a good-hearted punishment for those who were occasionally late. My group would line up in a double rank with everyone clutching a gym shoe. The latecomer had to run this gauntlet, once if he was less than two minutes late, two or three times if he arrived more than five minutes after roll call.

  My first year I’d been able to master the standard tactics of classical Greco-Roman Olympic wrestling that Coach Karanov had such trouble hammering into the skulls of many of the other boys. And the linked sequence of grips, throws, and countergrips had come easily to me, long before the other guys understood them. In fact, whenever the coach needed someone to demonstrate new tactics in the ring, he usually chose me.

  But when we finally began our interclub matches against teams from SKA, Dynamo, or Trud, I was consistently defeated in the ring. I knew how to maneuver, but I was just not strong enough to make my holds stick or to toss my opponent. Most of the fellows in my weight class were my height. However, they were a lot thinner, with taut, wiry muscles.

  For the next two seasons, I muddled through with a mediocre record. Then one afternoon at the Spartak complex, I overheard two boys from the Metalurg team going over the roster for the matches.

  “Who’s this Zuyev?” a boy asked his friend.

  “Oh, don’t worry about him,” the other fellow answered. “He’s a weakling.”

  I stepped back in the hallway, my ears burning with embarrassment. And as if to prove their point, I lost both my matches that afternoon within three minutes.

  That was a Saturday afternoon. All day Sunday I moped about the apartment, trying to decide what to do. I simply couldn’t face the continued embarrassment of defeat, knowing deep down that I was potentially one of the best wrestlers at the Spartak complex. Then I made my decision. The Kuybyshev Aviation Institute had an excellent gymnasium, with a complete weight room equipped with bodybuilding apparatus. The next afternoon I was there, requesting use of the facilities. Officially you had to be sixteen to work with weights, and I was not yet fifteen. But the coach there was sympathetic and signed me on.

  For the next six weeks I took the electric train to the Aviation Institute every evening instead of to the Spartak complex. As far as Coach Karanov knew, I had simply dropped out, another disappointed student wrestler. But I had another plan. Before, I had never tried systematically to increase my strength, muscle tone, and endurance. Now I worked at it. My mother even borrowed barbells from someone at her office for me to use at home. And one of the first things I did was stop eating sweets. Instead of chocolate pastries and honey rolls, I ate bowls of kasha, chopped beef, and salad, and I asked my mother to stock the refrigerator with fresh fruit and milk.

  At the Aviation Institute weight r
oom, I began with light barbells and worked myself up to heavy bench presses and long, multiple repetitions on the spring apparatus to build up my thighs and back muscles. Four weeks later the fat had shrunk to muscle. At the end of six weeks I could bench-press 130 pounds, which was 20 pounds over the norm for my group at Spartak.

  Late one warm Tuesday afternoon after school, I found Coach Karanov in the locker room.

  “I’m back, Alexey Ivanovich,” I said. “Will you give me another chance?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully, then nodded. “I will, Sasha,” he said, “but only if you’re serious this time.”

  And that I was. I never missed another day of practice. Every evening I stayed there after the training was over to work out with weights. When the coach gave us twenty push-ups, I did twenty-one. If we had to run a mile, I ran a quarter of a mile more.

  And I began winning matches. I was chosen for the 150-pound class traveling team. It was a real honor to ride the train with my friends on the first road trip to Syzran, where we defeated the Spartak juniors in straight matches. As the wrestling program wound up at the end of that school year, I had the great pleasure of hearing opponents actually groan when they read the roster and saw my name matched against them.

  But I wasn’t so successful at School Number Two. The academic standards were high, but I just did not feel challenged intellectually. In fact, by the time I was fifteen, school bored me. I was only interested in wrestling and didn’t have the time for my studies. This attitude, of course, kept me out of the political intrigues of Komsomol and put me in bad favor with the faculty.

  Like other bored adolescent boys, I became rebellious and joined forces with two close friends, Vovka Ivanov and Igor Devyatkin, to harass the teachers. We always chose the last table at the rear of the classroom, which the teachers had dubbed “Kolyma,” for the Siberian gold mine prison where the hardest tattooed criminals were banished. One of our favorite targets was a chubby math teacher we scornfully called Mishka. Vovka and Igor helped me make poor Mishka’s life difficult. We booby-trapped his chalk pieces by drilling them hollow and put thumbtacks under the piled lesson forms on his desk so that he stuck his thumb. Once we used a stepladder to tape a chunk of ice on the glass lampshade hanging above his desk, so the water dripped steadily onto his head. But our best prank was when we pulled the pins from the hinges of the classroom door. As Mishka strode into the room, the heavy wooden door clattered on top of him and set off uncontrollable laughter.

  He knew where to find the villains. A moment later he grabbed me by the collar and tried to slap me. I wasn’t about to be hit by a butterball like him and twisted his arm behind his back. Ten minutes later I was standing at attention before our principal, “Rema” Alexandrovna, the tough, middle-aged woman who tried to run her school fairly for both faculty and students.

  “Zuyev,” she stated coldly, as if she were a State prosecutor, “your mother will be here tomorrow. You are to be expelled.”

  Somehow my mother managed to patch things up the next day.

  Then my friends and I were caught sneaking wine into the school Red Army party. We shared a bottle with an old cleaning lady, but she informed on us the next day anyway. Again I was hauled before Rema. “This is what you want, isn’t it?” She calmly lifted a printed Ministry of Education form from her desk. “This is your ‘wolf’s ticket.’”

  It was a formal expulsion form, the “ticket” to a dead-end life. Any youth expelled from school was excluded from further training, either academic or vocational, condemned to a life of manual labor at best, or even a criminal career.

  Again my mother intervened successfully. But my academic record itself was bad enough to keep me from the ninth and tenth years of academic study at the school. In fact, I had no interest in more school. I told them that I wanted to leave classrooms behind and get on with adult life. Rema noted that, in any event, my poor grades probably meant I would flunk the eighth-year exams.

  My mother turned from Rema’s desk to glare at me, her face set in anger. “I cannot believe that my son is this stupid.”

  “Evidently, Lydia Mikhailnovna,” Rema said scornfully, “he is both stupid and lazy.”

  My pride was hurt, which, of course, was what they both intended. “If you give me a chance,” I said, “I’ll show you I’m not stupid.”

  For the rest of that spring, I cut back on my wrestling training and worked hard, preparing for the exams. I studied on the train when the team took road trips. I studied on the trolley riding to and from practice. I studied hard at home each night. And when I entered the test rooms that June, I felt confident. The math and science exams were rigorous, but I passed in the upper quarter. I scored high on geography. Soviet political history didn’t interest me much, but I managed a passing grade. I liked military history, and I did very well on the section about the defense of the Motherland. I had made my point. Now no one could call me either stupid or lazy. But I’d had enough of this theoretical classroom study. I still intended to skip the final two academic years at School Number Two and to become an apprentice electrician at Kuybyshev’s electro-technology vocational school.

  Being fifteen that summer, I was expected to attend an organized vocational camp or to intern at an industrial institute in the region. Since I was always eager to travel, I managed to land a summer job with a geological survey team attached to the Hydroelectric Institute. The three-man, two-boy team, led by a friendly engineer named Yuri Sokalov, was assigned to the east bank of the Volga, covering a region over a hundred miles long. Our responsibility was to measure the electromagnetic potential in the bedrock so that a complete geological survey chart of the region could be drawn.

  It was interesting work. I was just a helper, but I learned a lot about geology and about the grown-up world of men. Yuri took pride in his profession and made sure we did a thorough job. My responsibilities included unloading the heavy steel probes and coils of cable that we used to set up our measurement grids. The first day, the men let me swing the eighteen-pound sledgehammer to drive in the steel stakes and then hook up the insulated cable.

  We worked outdoors, in the rye and wheat fields of the collective farms and sometimes along the sandy banks of the Volga. If we completed a day’s assigned survey tract early, the team would go for a swim and fish until after sundown. Some evenings we cooked up our catch in a big sooty kettle over a campfire on the river beach. The men taught us how to make a delicately spiced fish soup they called oukha, which combined the essence of fresh bream and pike with a tang of woodsmoke.

  They also taught me how to play cards and drink vodka. Only an idiot drank warm vodka straight from the bottle without food, they said. On the nights when we split a bottle of well-chilled Sibirskaya, I was responsible for laying out the plates of sliced pickles, boiled potatoes, rye bread, and butter. Then, when the thimble glasses were filled, we all made our toast, exhaled loudly, tossed back the cold vodka, and breathed in through a thick wedge of bread before eating a snack.

  They never let me drink very much, though. And when I joined the ritual, I remembered the advice my mother had given me after the escapades of the wine at the school party.

  “Sasha,” she said, “I can’t tell you not to drink. But always remember where, when, how much, and with whom to drink, and you won’t have trouble in your life.”

  One Saturday night that August when we were staying at the dormitory on a dairy kolkhoz, I hiked over to a nearby summer camp that was having a Komsomol dance. This was the kind of camp where well-connected city kids supposedly worked side by side with the farmers to bring in the harvest, but actually wasted a lot of time on the volleyball court. When I entered the camp refectory, I spotted the red paper banners proclaiming the eternal solidarity between urban youth and the collective farmers. Another boring Komsomol affair. But then I saw there were two distinct groups: a handful of self-conscious city kids, including several pretty girls, outnumbered by a crowd of young kolkhozniki in shabby blue work trouse
rs with a telltale wide seam on the leg. Some of the farm boys were drunk. They insisted on cutting in to dance with the city girls, even though the farmers had no idea how to dance to the Beatles or Pink Floyd records the students had brought to the camp.

  I saw a pretty blond girl trying to dance with a city boy in a V-neck sweater, but a drunk, lanky farm guy who looked too old to be there kept pushing his way in. When the shorter boy from Samara tried to stop him, the drunk kolkhoznik elbowed him aside and tried to get the girl in a bear hug.

  I shoved my way in and told the guy to leave her alone.

  He laughed, his mouth full of rotten teeth. “Sit on my dick,” he swore, then threw a clumsy punch.

  I dodged the blow, tripped him, and had him in a neck lock before he hit the dance floor. The guy was tall and had heavy shoulders, but he didn’t know a thing about wrestling. Before I could really hurt him, the adult monitors intervened and hauled him off to sober up.

  The girl’s name was Marina. She thanked me, then jotted down her phone number in Samara. “Please call me before school starts again,” she said. All in all, I thought hiking back to the dormitory in the cool starlight, it had not been a bad night.

  When I went to see Marina back in Samara at the end of the summer, I took a bus to Microrayon 4, a neighborhood of well-made twelve-story brick apartment blocks along a broad, tree-lined avenue named for Cheluskin, a famous Soviet pilot. This was the nicest district in the city. People called it Micro-Israel, because many of the famous Jewish scientists from the institutes were supposed to live here. On the ground floor of Marina’s building there was a row of nice shops and cafes.

  When I went into Marina’s podyesd, the babushka in the concierge box gave me a stern look, as if I had no right to be there. The elevator was clean and ran smoothly. The landing on Marina’s floor had only four doors. I stood there for a moment, wondering if I had the right building. It seemed impossible that only four families lived on each floor of this large building. But I wasn’t lost. Marina greeted me, led me into their long sitting room that faced the street. They had four tall, double-glazed windows and a balcony with a wrought-iron table and chairs. In the vestibule off the entrance, I saw the doors of two bedrooms and the open doorway of a kitchen that was almost as big as the main room of my apartment.