Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (43 page)

A few days later, our whole street buried Akhrik…Akhrik was an Abkhazian boy I knew. He was nineteen. He’d gone to see his girlfriend one evening and gotten stabbed in the back. His mother walked behind his coffin. One moment she’d be weeping, the next, she was laughing. She’d lost her mind. Only a month ago, we’d all been Soviet, now we were a Georgian, an Abkhazian…an Abkhazian, a Georgian…a Russian…

Another guy I knew lived on the next street over…I knew him by sight; I didn’t know his name, just his face. We’d say hi to each other. By all appearances, a normal guy. Tall, good-looking. He killed his old teacher, a Georgian. Killed him for teaching him Georgian in school. He’d given him bad grades. How could he do that? Can you understand it? In Soviet school, everyone was taught that all men are friends…friends, comrades, and brothers. When my mother heard about it, her eyes got very small, and then they got huge…Dear Lord, protect the trusting and blind! I spend hours on my knees in church, praying. It’s quiet there…although it’s always full of people now, all praying for the same thing…[
Silence.
] Do you think you’ll be able to? Are you hoping that it’s possible to write about this? You are, aren’t you? Well, go ahead and hope…I don’t have any hope.

I would wake up in the middle of the night, call out to my mother…My mother would be lying there with her eyes open, too. “I was never as happy as I was in my old age. And then, all of a sudden, we’re in the middle of a war.” Men are always talking about war, they like weapons—young and old alike…while women like to remember love stories. Old women tell stories of how they were young and beautiful. Women never talk about war…They just pray for their men. My mother would go see the neighbors and every time, she’d come home petrified. “They burned a stadium full of Georgians in Gagra.” “Mama!” “I also heard that the Georgians have been castrating Abkhazians.” “Mama!” “They bombed the monkey house…Then, one night, the Georgians were chasing someone thinking it was an Abkhazian. They wounded him and heard him scream. Then the Abkhazians stumbled upon him and thought it was a Georgian. So they started chasing him and shot at him. Finally, when it started getting light out, they realized that all along, it had been a wounded monkey. So then all of them—the Georgians and the Abkhazians—declared a ceasefire and rushed over to save it. If it had been a human, they would have killed him…” There was nothing I could say to her. I prayed for everyone. I turned to God: “They walk around like zombies, convinced that they’re doing good. But is it possible to do good with a machine gun and a knife? They go into people’s homes and if they don’t find anyone, they’ll shoot the livestock or the furniture. You’ll go into town and see a cow lying in the middle of the street with her udders full of bullet holes…shot-up jars of jam…They can’t stop shooting. Make them see reason!” [
She is silent.
] The TV broke, we only got sound, no picture…Moscow was somewhere very far away.

I would go to church and talk there…I’d talk and talk…Whenever I saw anyone in the street, I’d stop them and talk to them. Eventually, I started talking to myself. My mother would be sitting next to me, listening, and suddenly I’d realize she was asleep. She’d get so tired, she’d fall asleep on her feet. She’d be washing the apricots and fall asleep. While I was all wound up, talking and talking, about what I heard from other people and what I’d seen myself…How a Georgian, a young Georgian, threw down his machine gun and started screaming, “What have we come to? I came here to die for my Motherland! Not to steal other people’s refrigerators! Why are you going into strangers’ homes and stealing their refrigerators? I came here to die for Georgia…” They led him away, stroking his head. Another Georgian stood up straight and walked toward the people shooting at him: “Abkhazian brothers! I don’t want to kill you, don’t shoot me.” He was shot from behind by his own comrades. And then…I don’t know whether it was a Russian or a Georgian, but he jumped under a military vehicle with a hand grenade. Shouting something. No one could make out what he was trying to say. The vehicle was full of burning Abkhazians…They were screaming, too. [
She is silent.
] Mama, Mama…My mother covered every windowsill in our house with flowers. She did everything in her power to try to save me. She’d tell me, “Look at the flowers, darling! Look at the sea!” My mother is very special, she has an exceptional heart…She’d confess to me, “I wake up so early, the sun is just coming through the leaves, and I think to myself, ‘If I go look in the mirror right now, how old will I be?’ ” She suffered from insomnia, her feet hurt, she’d worked at a cement plant for thirty years, but in the morning, she wouldn’t remember how old she was. She’d get up, brush her teeth, look at herself in the mirror and see an old woman staring back…Then she’d make breakfast and forget. I would always hear her singing…[
She smiles.
] My mother…my sweet friend…The other day, I had a dream about leaving my body…I rose way up into the sky…it felt so good.

I can’t remember what came earlier and what happened later. I don’t remember…at first, the looters wore masks. They’d pull black stockings over their faces. But pretty soon, they stopped bothering. You’d see one walking by, holding a crystal vase in one hand, a machine gun in the other, and a rug draped over his back. They took TVs, washing machines…women’s furs, dishware…Nothing was sacred, they’d pick through children’s toys in bombed-out houses…[
She lowers her voice to a whisper.
] Now, when I see a regular knife at the store, a normal kitchen knife, it makes my skin crawl…I never used to think about death. I went to school, then medical college. I’d study and get crushes. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and lie in bed dreaming. When was that? It seems so long ago…I don’t remember anything from that life anymore. I remember other things…how they cut off a boy’s ears so that he wouldn’t listen to Abkhazian songs. They cut off this other guy’s you know what…so that his wife wouldn’t have his kids. There are nuclear missiles out there, airplanes and tanks, but people still get stabbed with knives. They run pitchforks through them, chop them up with axes…It would have been better if I had lost my mind…at least I wouldn’t remember anything. A girl on our street hanged herself…She was in love with this guy, and he’d married somebody else. They buried her in a white dress. No one could believe it: How could she die for love at a time like this? Maybe if she had been raped…I remember my mother’s friend Sonya. One night, they butchered her neighbors…a Georgian family she’d been close to. And their two little kids. Sonya would spend all day in bed with her eyes closed, refusing to go outside. “My girl, why go on living?” she’d ask me. I spoon-fed her soup; she couldn’t swallow anything.

In school, they had taught us to love armed men…Defenders of the Motherland! But these, they weren’t like that…and it wasn’t that kind of war. They were all just boys, boys with machine guns. When they’re alive they’re terrifying, and when they’re lying there dead, they’re helpless—you feel sorry for them. How did I survive? I…I…I like thinking about my mother. How in the evenings, she would spend a long time brushing her hair…“One day,” she promised, “I’ll tell you about love. But I’ll tell you the story as though it happened to another woman and not me.” She and my father had really loved one another. It was true love. My mother had been married to another man before him. Then, one day, while she was ironing his shirts and he was eating dinner—and this could have only happened to my mother—she suddenly declared, “I’m not going to have your children.” So she got her things and left. Some time later on, my father appeared…He’d tag along behind her, waiting for hours for her outside her house, getting frostbite on his ears in the winter. He’d just walk beside her, admiring her. And then, one day, he kissed her…

My father died on the eve of the war…it was heart failure. One evening, he sat down in front of the television and died. As if he just stepped out…“So, little girl, when you grow up,” my father had big plans for me. And—and—and…[
She bursts into tears.
] Then it was just me and my mother. My mother, who is afraid of a mouse, who can’t sleep if she’s home alone. She would cover her head with a pillow to block out the war…We sold all of our valuables: the TV, my father’s gold cigarette case—a sacred item, we held onto it for a long time—my gold cross. We’d decided to leave, but in order to leave Sukhumi, you had to bribe the officials. The military and the police both needed to be paid off, which meant you needed a lot of cash! The trains had stopped running. The last ships had left long ago, with refugees packed onto their holds and decks like sardines. We ended up only having enough money for one ticket…one one-way ticket to Moscow. I didn’t want to leave without my mother. For a month, she begged, “Go, my little girl. Go!” But I wanted to go to the hospital, take care of the wounded…[
Silence.
] They didn’t let me take anything on the plane except for my purse with my papers in it. No clothes, not even the pies my mother had baked. “You have to understand, we’re operating under wartime conditions.” The man going through customs next to me was dressed in civilian clothes, but the soldiers all addressed him as “Comrade Major” and loaded his suitcases for him, these big cardboard boxes. They loaded his cases of wine and mandarins onto the airplane themselves. I cried…In fact, I cried the whole way there. A woman with two little boys comforted me—one was her son, and the other one was her neighbor’s. Both of the boys were bloated from hunger. I didn’t want to go…I didn’t want to leave, not for anything…My mother tore me away from her, pushed me onto the plane. “Mama, where am I going?” “You’re going home. To Russia.”

Moscow! Moscow…I spent my first two weeks in Russia living at the railway station. People like me…there were thousands of us at all of the train stations in Moscow—Belorussky station, Savelovsky, Kievsky. Whole families, with children and old people. From Armenia, Tajikistan, Baku…living on the benches and on the floor. Cooking their food there. Washing their clothes. There are outlets in the bathrooms, and next to the escalators…You pour some water into a basin, stick in an electric heating wand, throw in some noodles, a little meat—soup’s ready! Porridge for the kids! I think that all of the railways stations in Moscow must have reeked of canned food and
kharcho
soup. Pilaf. Children’s urine and dirty diapers. People would dry them on the radiators, on the windows. “Mama, where am I going?” “You’re going home. To Russia.” So there I was, at home. No one had been expecting us. No one came to meet us. Nobody paid any attention to us at all, nobody asked any questions. Today, all of Moscow is nothing but one great big railway station. A caravanserai. My money ran out very fast. Twice, men tried to rape me: The first time it was a soldier and the second time, a policeman. The policeman pulled me up off the floor in the middle of the night. “Where are your documents?” He started dragging me to the police room. His eyes were crazed…I screamed my head off! Apparently, that scared him…he ran off shouting, “You little idiot!” During the day, I would wander the city…I stood on Red Square…In the evenings, I’d roam the grocery stores. I was always hungry; one time, a woman bought me a meat pie. I didn’t ask her to…She had been eating and she saw me watching her eat. She took pity on me. Just that one time…but I will remember that “one time” for the rest of my life. She was an old, old woman. Poor. I was willing to go anywhere, do anything rather than sit at the station…sit there thinking about food and my mother. Two weeks went by like that. [
She cries.
] At the train station, you could occasionally find a piece of bread in the trash, a gnawed chicken bone…That’s how I lived until one day my father’s sister showed up. We hadn’t had any contact with her for a long time—was she dead or alive? She’s eighty. All I had was her phone number. I called every day, and no one ever answered. It turned out that she’d been in the hospital. I’d been positive that she was dead.

It was a miracle! I had been waiting for it and then it happened. My aunt came to get me: “Olga! Your aunt from Voronezh is waiting for you in the police room.” Everything suddenly went into motion, everyone was abuzz…The whole station wanted to know: Who had come? Who was getting picked up? What last name? Two of us ran over to see: There was another girl with the same last name but a different first name. She’d come from Dushanbe. She cried so hard when she found out it wasn’t her aunt…That she wasn’t the one being taken home…

Now I live in Voronezh…I work odd jobs, wherever they’ll hire me—I’ve been a dishwasher at a restaurant, a security guard at a construction site, I sold fruit for this Azerbaijani until he started hitting on me. Right now, I’m a surveyor. It’s a temporary position, of course, which is too bad—it’s interesting work. My diploma from the medical college was stolen at the railway station in Moscow. Along with all of my mother’s photos. My aunt and I go to church together. I kneel and beg: “Oh Lord! I’m ready now—please take me! I want to die right now!” Every time I go, I ask Him: Is my mother dead or alive?

Thank you…Thank you for not being afraid of me. For not turning away like the others. For listening. I don’t have any girlfriends here, no boys pursuing me. I talk and talk…About how they lay there, so young and handsome…[
She has a crazy smile.
] Their eyes open…with their eyes wide open…

—

Six months later, I got a letter from her: “I’m joining a monastery. I want to live. I will pray for everyone.”