"Joe Haldeman - Tool of the Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

 Vavilov had lots of time, since his part of the university had been
shut down. They made a game, if a rather grim one, out of the English
lessons. When Arkady or his wife finally came home from the long
ration line, they would take Nikola's portion of the bread (and much of
their own, which he would never know) and carefully divide it into
sixteen equal portions. Each piece would be a reward for a lesson
properly recited. Hunger turned out to be an effective aid to what
would later be called "the acquisition of languages"-especially during the
hardest times, when an individual's bread ration was down to four
ounces a day. When the siege lifted after nine hundred days, Nikola
was not quite nine years old, but his English was better than that of
most Americans a couple of years older. This did not escape the
government's attention for long.
During the course of the war, for reasons that were important at
the time, the NKVD that had presided over Nikola's parents' deaths
changed its initials to NKGB. In March of 1946, it became the MGB,
and it was the MGB who came looking for young citizens fluent in
English. In 1949 it latched on to fourteen-year-old Nikola Ulinov, with
his huge vocabulary, impeccable grammar, and pronounced Bronx
accent.
They would have to work on the accent, but otherwise he was
perfect. A leader in the local Komsomol, he was an almost fanatic
patriot. (In the jargon of his ultimate profession, you might say that he
was fixated on Soviet Communism as an outlet for the militant
enthusiasm that was the external manifestation of the tensions
generated by his frustrated adolescent sexuality and ambiguous
self-image.) Other factors: He didn't look at all Russian, with his
mother's Aryan features and blond hair. He had no living relatives. He
had been toughened by war and privation; like all Leningraders he had
seen a thousand faces of death, and you either learned to live with that
terrible knowledge or went mad. Nikola seemed to be bleakly sane.
He would make a magnificent spy.
The MGB had gone to a great deal of trouble and expense to
build an ersatz American small town in the middle of an Azerbaijan
wheat field. It was called Rivertown and was supposed to be in Kansas.
 The people who went there were only allowed to speak Russian
once a week (a "self-criticism" session, but most of them looked
forward to it). A few older ones ran shops or taught school or acted as
policemen, firemen, and so forth. Seven of the school-teachers were
transplanted Americans who had grown up in the Midwest. They taught
English and history, but mainly they taught:
How to sit in a public place
When to defer to adults, and when to be rebellious
How to use a knife and fork
The various kissings and touchings appropriate for different stages
of a relationship
How to behave in a public bathroom or shower
How to spend money
What things a small-town boy or girl from Kansas would not know