The House of Special Purpose Read Online Free PDF Page B

friend of my youth was a boy named Kolek Boryavich Tanksy, whose family had lived in Kashin for as many generations as my own. We had many things in common, Kolek and I. We were born only a few weeks apart, during the late spring of 1899. We spent our childhood playing in the mud together, exploring every corner of our small village, blaming each other when our escapades went wrong. We both came from a family of sisters. I, of course, was blessed with only three, while Kolek was cursed with twice that number.
    And we were both frightened of our fathers.
    My father, Daniil Vladyavich, and Kolek’s father, Borys Alexandrovich, had known each other all their lives, probably spending as much of their boyhood in each other’s company as their sons would thirty years later. They were passionate men, both of them, filled with degrees of admiration and loathing, but their political opinions diverged considerably.
    Daniil treasured the country of his birth. He was patriotic to the point of blindness, believing that man was given life for no other purpose than to obey the dictates of God’s messenger on earth, the Russian Tsar. However, his hatred and resentment of me, his only son, was as incomprehensible as it was upsetting. From the moment of my birth, he treated me with disdain. One day I was too short, the next I was too weak, on another I might be too timid or too stupid. Of course, it was the nature of farm labourers that they wanted to breed, so why my father saw me as such a disappointment after already siring two girls is a mystery. But nevertheless, it was how things were. Having never known anything different, I might have grown up believing that this was howall relationships between fathers and sons were cultivated, were it not for the other example that played out before me.
    Borys Alexandrovich loved his son very much and considered him to be the prince of our village, which, I suppose, means that he thought himself to be its king. He praised Kolek constantly, brought him everywhere with him and never excluded him from adult conversation in the way that other fathers did. But unlike Daniil, he nurtured an obsession with criticizing Russia and its rulers, believing that his own poverty and perceived failure in life was entirely the result of the autocrats whose whims dictated our lives.
    ‘One day, things will change in this country,’ he told my father on any number of occasions. ‘Can’t you smell it in the air, Daniil Vladyavich? Russians will not stand to be ruled over by such a family for much longer. We must take control of our own destinies.’
    ‘Always the revolutionary, Borys Alexandrovich,’ my father replied, shaking his head and laughing, a rare treat, and one which was only ever inspired by his friend’s radical pronouncements. ‘All your life spent here in Kashin, tilling fields, eating kasha and drinking kvas , and still your head is full of these ideas. You will never change, will you?’
    ‘And all your life, you have been content to be a moujik ,’ said Borys angrily. ‘Yes, we work the land, we make an honest living from the soil, but are we not men like the Tsar? Tell me, why should he have everything, be entitled to everything, own everything, when we live out our days in such poverty and squalor? You still say prayers for him every night, don’t you?’
    ‘Of course I do,’ said my father, starting to grow irritated now, for he hated even engaging in any conversation which criticized the Tsar. He had been bred with an innate sense of servitude and it flowed through his veins as freely as his blood. ‘Russia’s destiny is inextricably linked to that of the Tsar. Think, only for a moment, of how far back this generation of rulers goes.To Tsar Michael! That’s more than three hundred years, Borys.’
    ‘Three hundred years of Romanovs is three hundred years too many,’ roared his friend, coughing up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it on the ground between his feet without shame.