![]() Hadn’t I read “War and Peace”, after all? Not knowing what to order I chose the thickest volume from the display and promised myself I would read it to the end no matter what. I demanded that mother take out a subscription for me in her name, then I was allowed to take a book. I also thought I understood why translation was a profession second only to medicine in its sterile attire. Even the queue behaved differently from all other Soviet queues: everybody was so polite, so patient, so soft-spoken. I immediately felt that I wanted to belong to that world. And there were no kids, as no-one under 16 could get a subscription. Even the compulsory Lenin statue was not like the one at school, 3-meters high and gilded, but small, sort of cubist, very chic. In socialist Moscow of 1969 it looked like a miracle of modernity, a temple of light. The building was brand new, all glass and steel. To interest me in reading books in English (the language I was studying at school without enthusiasm), my mother took me to the Moscow Library of Foreign Literature, recently reopened after renovation. I didn’t understand much, but I developed a lifelong habit of reading difficult books. I was probably the youngest living creature in the world to read the two volumes of “Anna Karenina” and the four volumes of “War and Peace”. Of course when I was alone I read them all, to the last page. I was not to touch them until I was old enough to understand them. At home there was a bookshelf up very high where, mother told me, were the books for adults. She was a schoolteacher, she knew how to manipulate people. When she saw that I was hopeless at chemistry and physics and that I showed little interest in biology, she started pushing me towards the second option. She wouldn’t be more specific, so I took it as an axiom. She would start speaking about my future and say with conviction that in our country there were only two “clean” professions – firstly, medicine, secondly, literary translation. If not a doctor – then a literary translator. The second cleanest profession in the USSR
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