1
BEFORE THE GREAT WAR， when I was a boy， we used t
dream of what life was like in Enemy Number One.
It was a time when dreams were precious. Terror hun
like a fog in our city， and even though we were very young， w
still knew about the midnight arrests and the deportations goin
on all around us. And what we didn t know， we could sense fror
the fear-etched faces of our parents， who would talk even to us i
heroic and heavy phrases of socialist realism like we heard frol
the loudspeakers at the May Day military parades. It was as
our parents were afraid that we would turn them in.
Enemy Number One seemed like a distant paradise to us theJ
We knew all about it from the pages of smuggled copies of L/~
magazine. Of course it was dangerous to be caught reading suc
a foreign magazine. (But how were we to know you could be sht
for it?) All we cared about was hurrying home after school， runni~
throtrgh the freezing streets where steaming horses wheezed undo
heavy loads and streetcars clanged and clattered among the grin
ragged throngs.
No one was home in our apartment for at least an hour aft，
school， so my brother Yuri and I spent those precious momen
staring into the pages of Life， with its photographs and advertis
ments of all those sleek people and those big Cadillacs and tl
skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. My imagination would sta~
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