The Forbidden Cabin stands abandoned, maimed and ruined amid tall weeds and overgrown bushes. Its windows are dark and reflect nothing; nothing inside, nothing outside. No glass. Black. Black weeds.
The counselors would probably skin us alive if they saw us go there. There would be a punishment of a special order. The Forbidden Cabin has a broken porch, they say. It is off limits, they say. It may as well not exist. It is a black hole. It is Forbidden.
It does not exist for me, personally. If you ask me, I have no desire to go. It is not on my map. I am ignoring it.
I would rather swing back and forth, back and forth for hours, as the dusk becomes thicker, as the day bears on and wears off, and I kick my legs up and down, up and down, and I look at the tops of the poplars come up and away, up and away. I would be on the swings all evening, and it would keep me busy, too busy to go to the Forbidden Cabin and do what I am supposed to. (And not supposed to.)
I did not ask to be sent to this stupid camp. And I did not ask to be anyone’s stupid girlfriend.
I am just happy on the swings. Not happy, but reasonably, manageably sad. I know that it will be fourteen more days, and I am just about done swinging this day into night. Fourteen days more, and they will take our moist mattresses and thin cold cotton blankets away; the blue-stamped sheets will be put in a pile in a corner of the counselors’ room; we will sweep moldy breadcrumbs and stray candy wrappers out of our shared nightstands, we will drink our final half-glasses of acidic apple juice in the drafty plywood canteen, and chuck our uneaten cold kasha with congealed margarine puddles on top into the trash, and we will be loaded onto the factory bus, the bus of my freedom and salvation, and we will be taken to the bus stop in front of the factory, and the hot city asphalt will greet me with its wonderful toxic breath, and my dad will pick me up and take me home, and I will be so happy for once to see my scary grumpy dad who never talks.
Manageably sad is not the worst.
Zhanna runs by the swings, giggling. Her face is red. She shouts something to me, but as she is shouting in secret, it comes out pretty quiet, and as I happen to be high on the swings and going really fast, I can pretend that I do not hear her, that I am very busy.
She runs along, and I do not get off the swings to run with her to the Forbidden Cabin.
Maybe I am no fun. Maybe they are no fun.
Zhanna is silly. When the bigger boys come to our bedroom after bedtime to tell us ghost stories, all the girls tuck themselves in under their blankets and lie there very modest, only their noses showing. Zhanna, in her nightie, sits up all the way hatched from the blanket, and drops one nightie strap off her shoulder, and just sits there with her naked shoulder and her missing teeth and her boy haircut, sticking out like a sore skinny tan thumb. Her nightie is like what grown women wear, blue, synthetic and thin-strapped; I don’t know where her parents bought it, I never saw these for sale for third graders.
There is thin lace on the straps, dirty, filthy-gray. There is nowhere for us to launder our clothes, or to shower, and camp is thirty days and thirty nights long. They don’t even let us swim in anything. The pool is drained, and the little creek is off limits. “You’ll drown and we’ll go to prison!” they say all the time. By the time camp ends, we are all crusty. “You’ll go to the Forbidden Cabin and be up to God-knows-what, and we’ll go to prison! You’ll let the older boys come into your bedroom after hours, and be up to God-knows-what, and we’ll go to prison!” Seems like there are a lot of pedagogues in prison.
Zhanna brokered this stupid girlfriendship, and now she wants me to go the Forbidden Cabin and do it all properly.
I am not getting off these swings. If I get off the swings, someone else will get on them, and I will have to while away the hours before bedtime on the ground, which is seven times slower.
I only agreed to be his stupid girlfriend for Oksana, by the way.
Oksana has freckles all over her face. Oksana has curly brown hair. Oksana has plum eyes. Oksana is great. Oksana was my best friend in preschool. I was so surprised and happy to meet her again in this stupid camp.
Oksana’s parents lifted her from camp, barely a week in, and took her to a Black Sea resort.
Oksana had a boyfriend in camp. His name was Sasha, and I did not even know what he looked like, although he was in our troop. And I had zero interest in what he looked like.
Not getting off the swings. Do whatever cursing and shouting you have to do, you small asshole boy underneath. I am kicking higher. Yeah, try throwing pinecones. Ha! You missed, dumbo!
And then, a couple of days after Oksana left, on a dusky evening like this one, I was sitting on my bed, which is the fourth counting from the door, just one away from the window, and I was glad it was not right by the window because, if in the middle of the night the boys break in through the window, it’s the girl in the window-side bed who gets it, whatever “it” is.
And so, I sat, reading Jules Verne and feeling very hungry, and I was just about to ask if anyone had a piece of candy or bread, without much hope, because parent visit day had been two days before and all the care package food was long eaten.
And Zhanna walked in with a silly mysterious smile on her face, and waltzed up to me, and said in a special secretive voice: “The boys want to talk to you. Will you talk to them?”
The boys? To me?! What in the hell would boys ever want with me?
And then she went back to the door, and opened it, and beckoned in three boys, first Igor, then two more, with no names and no lines, behind him.
Igor sat down on my bed and looked at me with his electric galactic glacial gaseous mystical chiffon blue eyes which he could turn on and off. They were like a fridge light: sometimes you open the fridge and the light comes on, and sometimes you open the fridge and it doesn’t, and you never know which it is going to be.
And he turned his eyes on. And he said:
“Sasha, as you know, is without a girlfriend now. Since Oksana left. He is asking you to be his girlfriend instead. Please, agree. Please, agree. Please. We all have girlfriends.” He motioned to his own girl who was far, far, far prettier than I would ever, ever, ever be. “Don’t be a meanie? Please, agree?”
That was how I got suckered into being a girlfriend of someone whose face I did not even know properly.
(And it turned out I did not like him in the slightest.)
And now I have to go to the Forbidden Cabin, if I dismount the swings.
Zhanna is running past the swings again, in the other direction. Her face is shining happy and she is dramatically fixing her clothing, which is in ostensible disarray.
“See?” She rubs her face red. “See? I have to rub all this off before the counselors catch me! Or they will see I was kissed all over!” Fast words, glee and little bits of spit tumble out of her mouth where half the teeth have been lost to cavities. “Oh, and Sasha asked me! To tell you! That he is breaking up with you! Because you won’t go kissing in the Forbidden Cabin! And he does not think you are pretty! And he said Oksana was so much prettier! And he does not love you anymore! I am his girlfriend now!”
She runs away, rubbing her neck to remove the telltale signs of neck kissing.
The Forbidden Cabin of Dissolution and Ecstasy is drowning in late shadows, its green plywood back crumbling into darkness.
The mosquitoes are on the prowl.
I am going to pee, and look for a piece of bread in my bag, and put on socks before I go to bed so that I freeze slightly less underneath the voile blanket, and re-read Jules Verne, and have trouble falling asleep, and lie awake in the pitch-black room, and wait for the reveille.

Some girls seem to be born blessed with an innate sense of propriety.
They dress just right, they dance elegantly, their grades or romantic choices are never a subject of peer discussion, no one points and laughs at them.
They do not accept invitations to host a talent show while clad in a swimsuit top and harem pants, and they certainly do not announce the show’s intermission as their own personal bathroom break.
I, on the other hand, do that. I did that. I did once say onstage to a few hundred peers, “Now we will have a fifteen minute entr’acte, and I am going to pee.”
When I was a schoolkid (i.e. when being a laughingstock mattered the worst) I often landed myself in something, or some other entity landed me in it.
Either way, I landed.
Allow me to share two personal embarrassments related to the Soviet culture and wound around my formidable 3rd Grade teacher Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
(Yes, I know that the word “wound” visually creates a syntactic maelstrom in the sentence above.)
In 3rd Grade, we were given an assignment to memorize a few stanzas of our own choosing from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Vladimir Il’yich Lenin.” We were to recite the excerpts in class in front of everyone.
Such poem was indeed found in my home library.
I leafed through.
Fancy words caught my eye.
Fancy curly-wurly made-up words caught my eye.
The part with the fancy words began with “Capitalism, in the years of his youth, was an okay guy, a hardworking one…”
I memorized the part with the fancy words and I brought it to school in my small idiot birdmouth.
And there I stood in class, in front of thirty ten-year-olds, singing a tale of capitalism’s spoliation:,
“He built a palace/ Which makes the mind boggle/ More painters than one/ Have crawled over its walls/ Its floors are Empire-ic/ Its ceilings Rococcal/ Its walls are Louis the Fourteenth/ the Quartorze!”
Aleksandra Fyodorovna the teacher and assigner of Mayakovsky poems looked at me like a chicken.
Really, the expression of her eyes and the tilt of her neck were chicken-like.
The kids around me were like, WTF?
I went on: “It’s surrounded by mugs which are of a piece/ With both faces and butt-cheeks/ The ass-faced police!”
Sit down, Anya. Maybe be normal next time, and pick something properly didactic.
Sit down.
Next!
Next, we had a school-wide Marching and Singing Parade.
For those innocent: the Marching and Singing Parade is an annual school-wide event in which each class puts on Parade uniforms, names itself via the teaching staff’s suggestions after a Soviet war hero, and marches around the school gym shouting out cadences, waving flags, drumming drums and being alternately at attention and at ease.
What’s this tight-knit marching group?
It’s our Young Pioneer troop!
Sound off! Soviet!
Sound off! Union!
(I made up the last two lines in this marching cadence just now.)
Aleksandra Fyodorovna the teacher and taskmaster appointed me to carry the flag of our troop during the Parade.
Trouble is, we were not Young Pioneers yet in 3rd Grade.
We were pre-Pioneers, October Kids, and so we were not yet technically marching fodder. We were admitted into the Pioneer and Komsomol Parade through some odd decision of the teaching staff.
Our school’s staff seemed to be quite into all things military; I mean, a year before the fateful Parade they had shown us, second-graders, WWI documentary reels illustrating the effects of nerve gases on human physiology.
(I am still unable to sleep.)
So we the weetle October Kids were to march in the school-wide Parade, which apparently posed issues for Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
She decided that we had to march differently, to indicate that we were not full-grown marchers yet.
Specifically,  she instructed me not to carry the red flag vertically, like the Pioneers did.
I was to carry the flag at a slant.
And so I did.
What did I know?
Didn’t know any different.
I marched out with the half-lowered flag, leading the troop behind me into
a gym full of finger-points and sneering laughter.
Apparently, carrying the flag lowered is a giant marching faux-pas.
The flag HAS to be upright UNLESS it’s a funerary procession.
And no Soviet leader happened to die or be interred that day.
They laughed, and teased, and laughed, and teased, for days, and weeks, and months.
“Did you think you were at a funeral? What a moron! Who died? Moron! Sound off! Ha-ha! Sound off! Moron!”
I don’t know if Aleksandra Fyodorvna got upbraided in the teacher’s lounge afterwards, for trotting out a ten-year-old with a funerary flag during a joyous Soviet occasion, but she never did apologize to me for wrecking what little social cred I had.
I got moved to a new school after the elementary. That school, too, had Marching Parades. In one, I stood at ease; I overheard whispers behind me:
“In this other school, this one stupid chick marched out with the flag lowered! — No shit! Ha-ha! What a moron!”
Sit down, Anya.
Sit down.

Hooray Women’s Day! I was taken to a cardiac ICU once. Not for cardiac purposes; for drinking vodka. Upon the fresh ruins of the Soviet Union, a situation like that was not extraordinary. I was a nineteen-year-old female, and my then-boyfriend brought me along to a vodka gig in a hospital.
Boyfriend was in a short-lived attempt of a band. Their frontman worked nights in the ICU. The rest of the band came, and they drank, shouted, fought and sang, and their lead guitarist played acoustic in the little room off the beeping patients.
They sang some Beatles. I knew some Beatles.
The lead guitarist, who had not said a word to me all night, or at any band practice previous, never thereafter, not in the street, not in a tree, said to my boyfriend, past my face:
“She has a voice like The Mamas and the Papas.”
The frontman, who had not said a word to me all night, or at any band practice previous, never thereafter, not in the street, not in a tree, suddenly stood swaying, blocking my exit as everyone trickled out, and said to my face:
“Oh won’t you stay! Just a little bit longer! Oh please please please! I don’t know where you’re going to! Yo-mama-don’t-mind-wop-wop-doo-wop!”
Or something to that effect.
“Stay the night!” he said. “Why are you with him? Come on! He can go! Stay the night!”
And he shoved my boyfriend aside.
Well, I didn’t stay but that’s not the point.
The point here is the triangulation of conversation.
It’s not about objectification, oppression, aggression, macro, micro, nano; it is about who-said-what-to-whom-and-why-it-went-that-way-and-which-parts-I-care-about.
The triangulation of motivation.
And mostly – mine.
While a young woman, I was herded through situations. I was an infusorium. I was intelligent but dumb.
Now I am stupid and wise.
The progressive transparency laid over the “Mamas and Papas” part of the dialogue says: she is referred to in the third person because she is an object.
I object.
I now think that the guitarist did not speak to me directly in part so no one would think he’s flirting.
“She has a voice like The Mamas and the Papas”: observational.
“You have a voice like The Mamas and the Papas”: invitational.
(Just to be clear, I don’t. Mama Cass is divine and I am terrestrial.)
With occasional exceptions, relationships between girls and boys at that time in Russia were romantic or none.
That’s why the frontman spoke to me directly. He wanted to go from none to romantic.
And I said nothing then; an infusorium, I crawled around what other people did on my pseudopodia, a lot.
I mean, a lot more than I do now.
Now, it saves me that I really do not want to be an object. I mean, I do not need to be a subject and an object at the same time; I don’t want to be noticed and picked; I don’t need to be praised or found pretty, or special; I don’t need both agency AND acknowledgement, agency AND admiration.
I just like agency.
Agency is enough and plenty.
I can build everything else for myself out of agency alone, with the help of oh, maybe, the theory of mind.
As my subjecthood ripened, I realized: I don’t want to be With the Band.
I want to be In the Band.
In my late twenties I found I don’t like it that men, in Russia, will shake hands with each other but not with me, a woman.
And so I said: I want to shake hands, too.
And I reach out my hand and shake theirs.
No one has slapped me yet.
Once in my early twenties I came to a house-party of a Russian classmate, a very intelligent person who, for some young idiot reason, segregated the party like a public restroom: into Males (living room) and Females (kitchen.)
I surveyed the kitchen, greeted the females in a friendly manner, acknowledged that I did not really know any of them and their discussion at the moment was of no interest to me, got off the chair, went into Males, most of whom I knew well, sat down and joined the drinking and the conversation.
No one slapped me.
I sweep the micro-shit with a micro-broom into micro-trash.
If that cardiac ICU party happened today, I would not just sit there with an insipid smile. I would look in the eyes of the guitarist and say:
“You are an excellent guitarist but I question the validity of your claim re my voice according to the Fach.”
I would look in the eyes of the frontman and say:
“You are blind drunk right now. I love your singing because your voice box is attached to your feelings box; however, now is not the time for telling you this, as you are blind drunk. I will not be staying the night. Thank you for thinking about me that way! If I ever wanna stay the night, I’ll reach out.”
And I will reach out, too.
Happy Women’s Day!

“Do you like candy?
Sure do!
Have you ever had (mumbled very quickly) pikupterdsandeetums?
What?
It’s fancy candy! Really yummy! You can only get it in Moscow! Have you ever had (mumbled very quickly) pikupterdsandeetums?
Uh… Maybe?
Ha-ha-ha! Pick-up-turds-and-EAT-THEM! You ate TURDS!”
Juvenile Soviet backyard scatology.
Taunts.
“Shut up, you inner-long-johns stench!”
“Oh, look, you are singing! With that voice! Your voice is only good for yelling ‘Occupied!’ from the shitter!”
“How long are you gonna be in the shitter? Did you swallow a rope?”
Taunts, comebacks, chants.
“Buy an elephant!
I don’t want to.
Everyone says they don’t want to, everyone says they don’t want to. Buy an elephant!
No!
Everyone says no, everyone says no. Buy an elephant!
Leave me alone!
Everyone says leave me alone, everyone says leave me alone. Buy an elephant!
Leave me alone!..
…Came a voice from the dumpster!
I said shut up!
…Came a voice from the dumpster!
I’m gonna punch you!
…Came a voice from the dumpster!
You are the voice from the dumpster!
…Came a voice from the dumpster!
Oh, you think you are so smart! You’re smart like a swan ‘cept you swallow no seeds and you swim like a stone! Your words are like farts in the water!
…Came a voice from the dumpster!”
A see-saw.
“I’m up here in space, you’re down there in the waste! I’m up here in space, you’re down there in the waste! — I am sad, you think it’s funny! You get shit and I get honey! — Ha! This song is tired, it’s time it got retired! — But… — But! But! But! You smell flowers with your butt! — Do not teach the educated! Time you baked some shit and ate it! — I’ll give your noggin a good swat, you’ll fly away on your pisspot! — Your words are like farts in the water!”
Breaking into song.
“Once an American man/ stuck a finger up his can… — Solve this riddle for me, something no one knows/ What shoots you in the foot but hits you in the nose?”
“Once upon an early morning/ I peeked around the neighbor’s fence/ Where a tan Moldavian lassie/ Used her hand to wipe her ass/ I went pale and I went red, I felt like saying to the lass/ Here’s a piece of paper! Take your finger out your ass!”

Netsuke.
Netsuke, at the top of the pyramid.
At the bottom, wrappers.
For junior collectors, candy wrappers, cleaned, spread, straightened, stacked in boxes, or pressed under books on bookshelves. Value-free wrappers off karamel’ki the hard candy from your corner Produkty store, kept to pad volume; chocolate candy wrappers, somewhat more desirable; rare wrappers with foreign words on them. Foreign words graduated in bragging and trading value: Estonian words cheaper than English, Kazakh cheaper than Estonian.
Chewing gum wrappers. The domestic trinity of orange, strawberry and mint, boring in the metropolis of Moscow, rare and elusive in the provinces, a.k.a. everywhere else. Wrappers off the domestic Coffee Aroma gum. To Americans, coffee may seem like a strange gum flavor, yet it was perhaps the most available one in the USSR. Gum wrappers brought back by kids whose Army parents were stationed in Germany and Eastern Europe: super-valuable.
Pocket-sized calendars. Glossy, matte. Calendars commemorating cities, whether Leningrad or Blagoveshchensk; calendars themed on nature, transportation, industries, the glories of keeping money in a savings account, the glories of travel to Sochi.
If your family has traveled to Sochi, collections of shells and chicken gods. Chicken gods are pebbles with natural holes in them.
Matchboxes.
Matchboxes collected for their labels.
To match matchboxes, little villages of matchstick architecture, crafted on dreary winter nights when there is nothing on TV.
Model airplanes. Model airplane collections require dedication from your parents, not just you. Model airplanes are not candy wrappers; funds and resources are needed.
Pins and badges.
Pins commemorating cities, events, achievements, revolutionaries. Pins with Lenin heads; Fit for Labor and Defense pins; Moscow Olympiad 1980 pins.
Pins pinned to red fabric display banners sewn specifically for that purpose by your grandma.
Stamps. Beginner stamps, which can be bought at any newspaper kiosk: Cuba, Sochi, Moscow Olympiad 1980, Yuri Gagarin, Bela Kun. If you keep at it, one day you might grow a scruffy beard, obtain (not buy) a turtleneck sweater, and graduate from amassing these useless paper rectangles to real philately, which means “collecting stamps that are thought important by bearded dudes wearing turtlenecks.”
Also, after you get that beard, you can start collecting books with matching covers.
The Lives of Outstanding People series: Jack London, Gogol, Balzac, General Franco, Schubert, Sun Yat-sen. Two shelves’ worth of Lives is a decent collection.
The Library of Foreign Literature, rare on the periphery of the country: Kobo Abe, Stanislaw Lem, Robert Sheckley. The more, the better.
The Library of World Literature, 200 volumes in toto: Beowulf, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Diderot, William Thackeray, Pablo Neruda, the Goncourt brothers, and poetry of the socialist countries of Europe. Hard to get. Twenty volumes or more is a good collection. You may want to try ways to discourage people from borrowing those volumes. Get your own ex libris stamp; no dishonest borrowers will be able to claim your Boccaccio as theirs.
A more drastic protective measure is to write this popular poem on a sheet of paper, and tack the paper on the shelf:
“Don’t give my shelves those greedy looks! We will not let you borrow books. To let your friends just come and borrow, you’d have to be a total moron!”
(Не шарь по полкам жадным взглядом! Здесь не даются книги на дом. Лишь только полный идиот знакомым книги раздает.)
No, not a joke.
If you collect Books with Matching Covers for the impressive display they make, you may also consider collecting Oriental rugs and vases of cut crystal.
If you collect Books with Matching Covers because your turtleneck and your beard want them, you may also consider philately and netsuke.
Netsuke, at the top of the pyramid.
In the USSR, private property is banned; personal property is allowed.
Personal property.
Objects collected on dreary winter nights when there is nothing on TV.
Objects which never become subjects anaphorically.
Objects.