Left Behind in the USSR
KRASIKOV, SANA
Left Behind in the USSR White on Black By Ruben Gallego Translated by Marian Schwartz Harcourt. 176 pp. $22.00. Reviewed by Sana Krasikov Contributor, "New Yorker," "Forward" BORN with...
...The aide, apparently duped by a coded message among the scrawls, admonishes the triumphant "retard" for taking advantage of her trust: "The new kid wasn't listening...
...White on Black is consciously antidocumentary...
...But the prospect of going back awakens his anger: "The plane will get me to Russia before my visa runs out__They '11 bar me from seeing the sun, roaming through the city, sitting in a caf...
...Reality, in his case, is a future in "old folks' homes"—dismal boarding houses where the disabled are once again hidden away from view...
...I'll never understand him...
...Attempting to understand his motives...
...The army simply fulfills its role...
...I was trying to understand how the world worked...
...Especially the food...
...At times, his voice lapses into a flat, sing-song repetitiveness...
...The specter of Ignacio looms abstract and unknowable in the chapter's closing lines: "Ignacio didn't come...
...A dead end"—a sort of incantation for what Gallego dubs "the permanent nothing of hospital life...
...You couldn't write about anything bad...
...The Russian Booker, established in 1992, was the first national award to fill the gap in literary honors after the official Soviet prizes were abolished...
...Reviewed by Sana Krasikov Contributor, "New Yorker," "Forward" BORN with severe cerebral palsy at Moscow's Kremlin Hospital in 1968, Ruben Gallego was secretly placed in state custody at age one...
...In a chapter titled "The Letter," Gallego describes another boy with cerebral palsy—also dubbed "a retard" by their caretakers...
...An exasperated aide agrees to send his messy ink drawings to his mother when he assures her the book does not contain a message...
...A number of their residents are veterans, enrolled by their families or voluntarily, out of shame that they would become burdens...
...Despite their gravity, many of Gallego's anecdotes afford the pleasure of humor—after all, it is resistance to absurdity, nonsense and despair that often produces the best humor...
...When she got as far as the typical accusations of callousness and heartlessness, he pushed away from his desk and rolled out into the hallway...
...Everyone would have seen what kind of grandfather I had...
...In a recent interview Gallego compared the Soviet state to an enormous army...
...Until he was six years old, the boy dreamed of his mother...
...One teenager is classified an imbecile simply for being slow to form words...
...At that moment, indifference is replaced by delight, then the delight by dull despair in the face of reality...
...He had hoped that at least one letter on the whole page would be understood...
...By filtering the meaning of those words through a child's perspective, he effectively captures the period when every aspect of life must be examined beyond its face value: "I wasn't simply reading books...
...It doesn't take much for a child to retain his love of the world...
...Leaving Russia in 2000, Gallego eventually found his mother in Prague, where she was working as a correspondent for Radio Free Europe's Russian Service...
...Then I realized, or more likely, it was explained to me," Gallego writes in this memoir, "that my mama was a blackassed bitch who had abandoned me...
...But sometimes, out of innate goodness or professional necessity, the person I'm talking to figures out that inside, I'mjust like everyone else...
...Gallego recasts the home in military terms: "There were no prisoners or wounded in deep reconnaissance...
...Gallego's response to the boy, "The first four letters were unnecessary," is grimly practical given their severe disabilities and austere circumstances: barely having enough food to eat or clothes to keep them warm, having to crawl to the bathroom at night...
...And another: "A home...
...Ignacio didn't write...
...When he begins screaming at night, the other children mollify him with the gift of a 96-page notebook that he fills with "bizarre squiggles and purposeful designs—shapes and signs he alone could perceive...
...I don't understand him...
...The people doing the explaining were nurses and teachers in Soviet orphanages and senior homes where he spent his childhood and most of his youth...
...Gallego envisions his grandfather visiting the orphanage in his Volga...
...Cruel and terrible as it was, it was still my childhood," Gallego says early on...
...They'll explain condescendingly that all those are extras for normal full-fledged citizens...
...Later, talking with the boy alone, Gallego asks him what he wrote...
...My final asylum and refuge...
...The attitude is likewise reflected in Gallego's pared-down prose...
...I obeyed my elders, 1 always obeyed my elders," opens one story...
...The secrecy attending Ruben's separation from his mother is reminiscent of the unacknowledged disappearance of thousands of crippled and homeless Soviet veterans shortly after World War II...
...The author explains: "The entire first page of the first letter he'd written in his life had been covered with the letter M. Uppercase and lower case...
...In 2001, he followed her to Madrid, where he has been living since...
...The extreme diagnoses, inhibiting a child's potential to develop fully into an adult, reflect a longtime national practice of segregating undesirables from the general population...
...Its aim was to help more serious works compete against the "second-grade" best sellers flooding the Russian market...
...It's not all that hard to be a retard," Gallego writes...
...The boy quiets down again, and "a month later they brought wheelchairs to the children's home...
...I wanted to find out how I was supposed to live in this world...
...After two weeks, the notebook is filled up and the boy's screaming resumes...
...According to regulations, anyone who was slowing the group's progress was supposed to shoot himself...
...In a stream of childish longing...
...Each chapter is largely a meditation on its one-word title—"Food," "The Bayonet," "Sinner...
...But in their own letters the foolish parents for some reason always asked specifically about the food...
...Not truth toward others, like frankness or sincerity, but truth toward ourselves...
...The things that were rejected and denied were "things that are also rejected in the army...
...It was only the dull children who gave their letters to the aide," Gallego writes...
...But for the most part Gallego leaves his family past out of his own story...
...An old folks' home...
...His mother, Aurora, daughter of Ignacio Gallego—the then exiled secretary general of Spain's Communist Party—was told by doctors that her child was dead...
...Gallego does away almost completely with dates, place names and other contextual elements, perhaps to avoid turning his story into a compendium of suffering...
...Ignacio didn't call...
...The death of one is better than the death of all...
...As an exposé of Russia's attitudes toward its disabled...
...Perhaps what is most praiseworthy in Gallego's writing is the amount of good faith that comes through...
...White on Black, winner of the 2003 Russian Booker Prize, relates Gallego's nightmarish experiences in those institutions...
...Put another way, it is the moral will not to let one's own outlook sour into cynicism...
...Upon finishing eight of the 10 guaranteed years of schooling, Ruben is moved to a series of "old folks' homes...
...Ruben's own physical handicaps are mysteriously supplemented with verdicts such as "retarded brain activity" and "mental debility' on his medical charts...
...Therefore all letters frequently began with a standard 'Dear Mama, They're feeding us well.'" The new boy, relatively big and strong compared to the others, is afflicted by chronic spasms and in need of a wheelchair no one provides...
...Though autobiographical...
...Gallego does not, however, miss the opportunity to describe how Russia projected its own horrors on its capitalist enemies: As a child he was told that no handicapped people lived in America because they were all killed by the state, presumably to present a sanitized image of the country...
...As an adult, while fulfilling a childhood wish to visit America, Gallego is enthralled with the way so much around him has been adapted to accommodate the disabled...
...There were a lot of wheelchairs, enough for everyone...
...Primarily intended for fiction, it also has embraced personal narratives like Andrey Sergeev's Stamp Album, the 1996 winner...
...Good faith, it is said, is the virtue that governs our relationship to truth...
...The end...
...But he manages to outsmart the orphanage's systematic censorship...
...He does not mention, for example, that the same Ignacio who never visited or called was the man who authored the Spanish Constitution...
...What little we learn about the author's uncommon background is in a chapter named for the car that was the most revered of status symbols in Soviet times, "The Volga...
...White on Black is most disturbing not in its portrayals of material deprivations, meager diets or Sovietstyle lectures on the wards' ingratitude to the state, but in the Russian doctors' deliberate labeling of even limited physical deficiencies as proof of total incapacity...
...They gave the new kid a wheelchair, too...
...The chapter entitled "The Officer" relates the story of a former reconnaissance officer who commits suicide...
...As Gallego observes, a graduate had only to visit the orphanage in his Volga, and he would be asked by the staff to deliver a commencement speech at the end of the year...
...Forming each word with great effort, his friend says: "MAMA, THEY FEED ME BADLY AND WON'T GIVE ME A CHAIR...
...In the army you don't have old women or children...
...A correct instruction...
...This silent backdrop underscores the cynicism and irresponsibility of the people who claimed to be building a system that left no one behind...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
