Spring in Siberia

Artem Mozgovoy

Description

“A work of earnest, grounded, and ultimately hopeful testimony of selfhood at the brink." —Ocean Vuong

1985. Russia. As the Soviet Union disintegrates and Western capitalism spreads its grip across their land, the Morozov family finds itself consigned to the remote, icy wastes of Siberia. It is here that their only child, Alexey, is born.

A sweet and gentle schoolboy, Alexey discovers that reciting poetry learnt by heart calms his fears. That winter gales can be battled with self-invented games, and solace found through his grandmother’s rituals and potions. But when Alexey’s classmate, the son of KGB agents, confesses his love, the desire of two boys to be together clashes violently with the mad world around them.

Exploring the healing power of literature, the magic of first love, and the ways our family and homeland can save (or shatter) us, Spring in Siberia is a coming-of-age novel that, in the darkest of times, glows with hope and the yearning for freedom to be oneself – completely.

Sujets

• LGBTQ+
• Vladímir Putin
• Family saga
• Memoir
• Vladimir Putin
• Siberia
• Socialism
• Soviet Union
• Russia
• Perestroika
• World literature
• Queer
• Gay
• Fiction
• Socialisme
• Vladimir Poutine
• Russie

Informations

• Publié par: Red Hen Press
• Date de parution: 04 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781636280714
• Langue: English

Extrait

Spring in Siberia
Copyright © 2023 by Artem Mozgovoy
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.
Book Design by Mark E. Cull
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mozgovoy, Artem, 1985– author.
Title: Spring in Siberia / Artem Mozgovoy.
Description: Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, [2022]
Identifiers: LCCN 2022019279 (print) | LCCN 2022019280 (ebook) | ISBN 9781636280707 (paperback) | ISBN 9781636280714 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Bildungsromans. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PR9100.9.M69 S67 2022 (print) | LCC PR9100.9.M69 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23/eng/20220513
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019279
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019280
The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta George Rosenberg Foundation, the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, the Adams Family Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, Amazon Literary Partnership, the Sam Francis Foundation, and the Mara W. Breech Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

First Edition
Published by Red Hen Press
www.redhen.org
Моей бабушке.
Contents
PART ONE: Spring in Siberia
Chapter One Taiga
Chapter Two Babushka
Chapter Three Eleven
Chapter Four The Black Day
PART TWO: Spring in Siberia
Chapter Five In the Big City
Chapter Six Sixteen
Chapter Seven Better Places
Chapter Eight A Siberian Dream
Acknowledgements
Biographical Note
Spring in Siberia
PART ONE
Chapter One
Taiga
All the beauty of it, all the strangeness. Space with no maps, time with no clocks, destinations with no way of reaching them. So many questions with no wise man to look back at you kindly, knowingly, and explain. The feeling of injustice, of being the plaything of someone’s cruel decision or stupid mistake. But whose? Who ever had the idea of coming to live here? Who decided to make it home for me or for any human being for that matter? I’ve never felt at home here. I’ve always felt alien.
Alien —that was my school nickname. I hated it, both the name and the school. I would wake up at five thirty for classes that started at seven fifteen, feeling that it was not I who should go through this day here but, perhaps, someone else. Perhaps there should be some other little boy who must drag himself through the winter night all the way to the school, four hours before the sun even starts to lighten the sky.
No, it was I.
My mother’s hand would reach in through the doorway, turn on the light in my bedroom, and then disappear. I’d pull myself out of bed and walk to the bathroom: the face I found reflected in the mirror was swollen, pale, vacant. Only two thin brush-marks showed on the transparent whiteness of my face. It was almost as if I had melted into the background, as if I didn’t yet exist.
Ice-cold water on my face, a hard dry towel. I would have breakfast with my dad. Thin cookies with engraved little houses. I’d put butter on one, stick another cookie to it just as my father did. He’d be reading his detective novel with only the occasional slurp of his tea breaking the silence.
After breakfast, I’d put on all my clothes: a sweater and a school jacket, a pair of trousers and double socks, my valenki and mittens, a thin knitted hat, a thick scarf to cover my face and a huge bushy hat on top, then a grey astrakhan fur coat my mom had cut and made for me out of her own. A pair of drawers and, of course, a shirt under all of it. I would be sweating by the time I reached the front door. It’d be hard to bend down, hard to pick up my heavy square backpack and a sack containing a pair of summer shoes to change into at school so that the floors were kept clean—the floors that we, the pupils, had to wash ourselves after class. But the old man at the school entrance wouldn’t let anyone in without their dirty winter shoes changed for clean summer ones. ‘ Smenka !’ he’d yell so loudly for so early in the morning, ‘Change shoes!’
The front door of our flat opens, ‘Bye,’ it closes behind me. Now comes the worst part. I’ve got to walk down the staircase. It’s pitch-dark. I stay immobile for half a minute with my back to the door, giving my eyes a chance to get used to the darkness, but time passes and nothing changes. The world is playing hide and seek with me, and I’m losing the game. Yet I have to move on. I try to feel each step ahead with my right foot, before immersing myself in the darkness. I know by now that the most important thing is not to let fear flood my soul, not to get too scared of that jet-blackness all around. If I let fear in, then I’ll run, stumble, fall, lose the sack with my summer shoes—complete failure.
Why is it always so dark on this staircase? Five floors without a single lamp lit. Why, every time some kind neighbour installs a new bulb, does it lie shattered in pieces the next morning? Do other people like things that way? Me—no. I’m scared, I cannot feel the next stair, I hold tight to a railing. One level—I did it. Now another …
I remember how one morning I was coming down this devilish staircase, when instead of the soothing firmness of the following stair my right foot met something soft, something squashy and rubbery. My next heartbeat was so intense that it lifted me off the ground and dropped me down a whole level. What was that? ‘It’s only Vasia,’ my dad told me later that same evening, with a laugh. ‘Vasia, from the second floor. His wife doesn’t let him in when he’s drunk.’ Only Vasia? Why did my dad laugh about it? There was nothing funny about my foot sinking into the swamp of that Vasia.
I keep on going down. Even if I don’t see them, the stairs are there this time, firm and empty. I reach the first floor not without relief: there’s a patch of light coming through the grimy narrow window above the ceiling from the streetlamp outside. Three walls of the landing are crowded with tin mailboxes, twenty-five of them, five per floor. Most of the boxes are black, hollow, with broken shutters; few are well locked. Ours, in the upper left corner, has its shutter ever-closed and bent slightly—enough for a slim hand to slip inside and check for mail. We’ve lost the key, or maybe never had one.
There’s a more spacious room on the ground floor, a hall of sorts, and I hate crossing it because it always smells so nasty—stale alcohol, bubblegum, and urine—teenagers hang around there each evening and no one kicks them out because they know there are no other places for youngsters to go. Why don’t they simply sit at home and read something? I don’t understand. I make my way through the hall. It grows even darker than before, but it’s level underfoot and quiet. No one is there, nothing but the smell of youth. ‘I don’t want ever to smell like that,’ I think to myself.
Finally, with both hands stretched out in front of me, I reach the heavy, freezing door downstairs, the cold of it coming even through my mittens. I push at the door, but nothing happens. I push it harder and harder … Only a stream of cold wind comes through the narrow gap, but the door won’t open. It’s stuck, it’s frozen. I push it once again with all the weight of my tiny body …
Whoosh!
The door flips open.
The sudden blow to my face!
I can’t breathe!
The night winter wind smashes into me so unexpectedly that I am left gasping for air, I am awake instantly. I cannot inhale, because that air is too cold to be inside me. I can only muffle my little face deeper inside my scarf, step forward and give myself up. The wind is more powerful than any turbine, the snow is sharper than any needle. It hurts, but I’ve got to move on.
After a few minutes of this monotonous effort, of pushing my heavy winter boots through the snow, while leaning into the wind so as not to let it topple me backwards, I begin to get used to it all. My multilayered outfit indeed keeps me warm. I know the way ahead of me, for there’s only one way. It takes about forty minutes before the empty snow-lands reach the ski field of the school and soon after that I can make out a grey cube of cement in the darkness—the Palace of Knowledge, as they call it.
After a while on that path I am fully awake and I even get a little bored. I keep pushing my boots through the snow, I am bored and tired, but I keep on pushing. Keep on pushing through snow. Snow that’s whiter than white. Snow that’s never grey or yellow for it has never, never touched the soil—and therefore rests pure, always pure—and you too, you also stay that way, by walking above it.
To entertain myself on that path to knowledge, I often play the game I invented one morning. It requires me to shut my eyes completely while walking. I think I invented it only because it was warmer that way, with my head fully hidden in my scarf, with no opening left for the freezing world to prise its way inside. It’s impossible to win the game, but perhaps I would find out how far I could go if I were blind. Could I reach the school? The road? The rusty iron fence at the end of the path? To be honest I don’t need to look, I know everything that is there: the thin straight line in the snow only as wide as the steps of the early workers whose feet have made it this morning; the big empty field, covered entirely by diamonds and cut diagonally in two by the route. No lights, no people, no sounds, just me.
And yet …
Yes, lights! The snow shines brightly, reflecting the moonlight. I don’t see it, but I know it’s there.
Yes, people! Someone walked here this morning before me, I ca