Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (27 page)

But that…that…[
She weeps for a long time.
] I can’t talk about it…

It was our favorite month, August. We’d gone out to the country, we were inspecting a spider web. Laughing…and laughing, and laughing…[
She is silent.
] Why do I keep on crying? We had a whole fourteen years together…[
She cries.
]

I was cooking in the kitchen with the window open. I heard him talking to his father on the balcony. Igor said, “Papa, what’s a miracle? I think I’ve understood. Listen…Once upon a time, there was an old man and woman and they had a little chicken, Ryaba. The chicken laid an egg, but not just any old one, a gold one. The old man struck it and struck it, but he still couldn’t crack it. The old woman struck it and struck it, but she still couldn’t crack it. A mouse ran by, swatted its tail, and the egg cracked when it fell. The old man cried and the old woman cried as well…” His father said, “From a logical perspective, it’s completely absurd. They struck it and struck it and couldn’t crack it, and then suddenly, they’re in tears! But how many years—centuries, even—have children listened to this fairy tale like it’s poetry.” Igor said, “I used to think that you could understand everything with reason, Papa.” “There are many things you can’t understand with reason. For instance love.” “And death,” Igor said.

From a very young age, he wrote poems…On his desk, in his pockets, under the couch, I would find pages and pages covered in his writing. He would lose them, abandon them, forget all about them. Sometimes, I couldn’t even believe that he’d written them: “Did you really write this?” “What does it say?” I read it back to him: “People go to each other’s houses, / Animals go to each other’s houses…” “Well, that’s an old one. I’ve already forgotten it.” “What about these lines?” “Which ones?” I read them: “Only on branches that are scarred / Can you find the dew of the stars…” When he was twelve, he wrote that he wanted to die. He wanted love and death—his two desires. “You and I are betrothed / With blue water…” More?! Here: “I am not yours, silvery clouds / I am not yours, blue snows…” He’d read them to me. He would! But teenagers write about death all the time…

Poems always filled our home, like speech: Mayakovsky, Svetlov…My beloved Semyon Gudzenko:

When going to their deaths, they sing.

Before that, you can cry.

In battle, the most fearful time

Is waiting to attack.

Do you remember that? Of course it’s in there…Why even ask? We all grew up with it. Art loves death, especially our art. The cult of martyrdom and death is in our blood. Life for aortic rupture
^*5
…“Oh, those Russians, they don’t like to die their own deaths!” wrote Gogol. And Vysotsky sang: “Let me stand a little longer on the edge…” On the edge! Art loves death, but there’s also French comedy. Why is it that we have so little comedy? “Advance, for the Motherland!” “The Motherland or Death!” I taught my students: Lighting the way for others, I am “consumed in the service of others.” I taught them about the feat of Danko,
^*6
who ripped his heart out of his chest and lit the way for others. We never talked about life…No, hardly…Hero! Hero! Hero! Life consisted of heroes…victims and executioners…There were no other kinds of people. [
She screams. She cries.
] Going to school is torture. The children wait for me…They want words and feelings…What should I tell them? What can I say to them?

All this happened…Here’s exactly what happened…Late one night I was in bed reading
The Master and Margarita
by Bulgakov (it was still considered a dissident book, I had been given a
samizdat
copy). I got to the final pages…Remember? Margarita asks for the Master’s release, and Woland, the spirit of Satan, says, “There’s no need to shout it from the mountaintops, he’s gotten used to avalanches and it won’t disturb him. There’s no need for you to intervene on his behalf, Margarita, because he has already been summoned by the one that he so longed to speak to…” Some strange force flung me into the neighboring room, to the couch where my son was sleeping. I got down on my knees and started whispering, like a prayer, “Igor, don’t do it. My darling, don’t do it. Don’t do it!!!” I started doing what I was no longer allowed to do since he had grown big, kissing his hands and feet. He opened his eyes: “Mama, what are you doing?” I immediately recovered: “Your blanket slipped off. I was just fixing it.” He fell back asleep. And I…I didn’t understand what had gotten into me. When he was happy, he’d tease me, calling me a will-o’-the-wisp. I went through life light on my feet.

His birthday was coming up, and New Year’s Eve…Some of our friends had promised to get us a bottle of champagne—there wasn’t much you could buy at the store in those days, you had to procure everything by other means. Through connections. Through friends and friends of friends. We managed to find some smoked salami, chocolates…You were very lucky if you somehow got your hands on a kilo of tangerines in time for New Year’s Eve! Good find! Tangerines weren’t just fruit, they were an exotic delicacy, only the New Year smelled like tangerines. People spent months getting together the delicacies for their New Year’s Eve table. This time, I had stashed away a can of cod liver and a piece of salmon. All of it ended up being served at his wake…[
Silence.
] No, I don’t want to end my story so quickly. We had a whole fourteen years together. Ten days short of fourteen years…

One time, I was cleaning out the storage cabinet and found a folder full of old letters. When I was in the hospital after giving birth, my husband and I would write each other letters and notes every day, sometimes several times a day. We read them aloud and laughed…Igor was seven. He couldn’t wrap his mind around how he could have not existed while his father and I did. I mean, he existed, we would talk about him in the letters all the time: The baby turned over, he just kicked me…He’s moving…“But I died once, and then I came back to you, right?” The question made me go cold. But children—they talk like that sometimes…like philosophers, poets…I should have followed him around, writing down the things he’d say: “Mama, Grandpa died. That means they’ve buried him in the ground and he’s growing now…”

He already had a girlfriend in the seventh grade. It was serious. “Don’t go and marry your first love—or some salesgirl!” I threatened him. I had already gotten used to the idea that I would eventually have to share him with someone else. I was steeling myself. My friend has a son, too, the same age as Igor. She once confessed to me: “I don’t know my daughter-in-law yet, but I already hate her.” That’s how much she loves her son. She can’t even imagine giving him up to another woman. What would have happened to us? To me? I don’t know…I loved him…I loved him like crazy…No matter how hard my day had been, as soon as I opened the door to our apartment, it was as though a light was shining on me from somewhere. Not “from somewhere,” from love.

I had two nightmares. In the first one, he and I were drowning. He was a good swimmer, and once, I’d dared to swim out as far as him. When I turned around to swim back I realized that I wouldn’t have the strength to get to shore. I grabbed onto him with a death grip. He screamed, “Let go of me!” “I can’t!” I held onto him, I was pulling him down. He was able to wrest himself out of my grip and started nudging me toward the shore. Holding me up and pushing me. That’s how he and I made it out. The same thing happened in the dream, only I never let him go. We neither drowned nor made it out of the water. We just wrestled in place…In the second dream, it started raining, but I could feel that it wasn’t rainwater coming down, it was dirt. Sand. It started to snow, but I could already tell by the sound that it wasn’t snow, it was dirt. The shovel drove into the ground like a heart beating, crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch…

Water…He was fascinated by water…He loved lakes, rivers, wells. Especially the sea. He wrote a lot of poems about water. “The quiet star has gone white like the water. Now it’s dark.” Another one: “And only water flowing…Silence.” [
A pause.
] We don’t go to the sea anymore.

The final year…We often had family dinners. Naturally, the conversation would revolve around books. We’d read
samizdat
together.
Doctor Zhivago,
Mandelstam’s poems…I remember an argument we had about what a poet was. What is a poet’s fate in Russia? Igor’s opinion: “A poet has to die early or else he’s not a poet. An old poet is just silly.” That…I missed that, too…I didn’t think anything of it. Everything was always spilling and spilling out of me like I was Santa’s sack…Almost every Russian poet has poems about his homeland. I know a lot of them by heart. I’d recite my beloved Lermontov: “I love the Fatherland, but with a strange love.” And Esenin: “I love you, my meek homeland…” I was overjoyed after I bought a copy of Blok’s letters. An entire little volume of them! In a letter to his mother that he wrote upon returning from abroad, he said that our Motherland had immediately displayed her swinish mug and holy visage…I put the emphasis on the holy visage, of course…[
Her husband comes into the room. He puts his arm around her and sits down.
] What else? Igor went to Moscow to visit Vysotsky’s grave. He shaved his head, which made him look a lot like Mayakovsky. [
She turns to her husband.
] Do you remember that? How I yelled at him? He had incredible hair.

The last summer…He was tan. Big and strong. He passed for an eighteen-year-old. That summer, the two of us went to Tallinn. It was his second time there, so he showed me around, took me down every alleyway. We went through a whole load of money in three days. We were staying in some dormitory. One night, we came back from a walk, holding hands, laughing. We opened the door and went up to the attendant. She didn’t want to let us in. “Ma’am, bringing a man here after 11 o’clock is forbidden.” I whispered to Igor, “Go upstairs, I’ll be up in a minute.” He went and I hissed, “How dare you! That’s my son.” Everything was so much fun! So great! And then all of a sudden, one night, while we were there…I got scared. I was terrified that I would never see him again. Like the fear of something new. Nothing had even happened yet.

His last month…My brother had died. There aren’t many men in my family, so I took Igor along with me to help out. If I had known…He was inspecting it, eyeing death…“Igor, move the flowers. Bring the chairs here. Go buy some bread.” Doing mundane activities side by side with death…it’s dangerous…You risk confusing the two. I can see this clearly now…The hearse arrived. All of the relatives got in, but my son wasn’t there. “Igor, where are you? Come here.” He got in, but there was no room for him to sit down. All these strange signs…Was it the car starting that jolted him? The hearse started, and for a moment, my brother’s eyes flipped open. That’s a bad omen—it means that there will be another death in the family. I immediately got scared for my mother, she has a bad heart. As the coffin was being lowered into the ground, something fell in with it…That’s not good, either…

His last day…The last morning. While I was getting ready, I felt him standing in the doorway, bracing the frame with both hands and watching, studying me. “What are you doing? Go do your homework. I’ll be back soon.” He silently turned away and went to his room. After work, I met up with a friend. She’d knitted him a fashionable sweater, it was my birthday present to him. I brought it home. When I showed it to my husband, he even admonished me: “Don’t you think that he’s a little too young to wear such fancy clothes?” For dinner, I made his favorite chicken patties. He usually asked for seconds, but that day, he picked at them and left them on his plate. “Did something happen at school?” He said nothing. I started crying, a rain of tears. It was the first time in many years that I was crying that hard, I hadn’t even cried like that at my brother’s funeral. And it scared him. He got so scared, I started comforting him. “Try on the sweater.” He put it on. “Do you like it?” “A lot.” A little while later, I looked in on him, he was lying on his bed and reading. In the other room, his father was typing away at the typewriter. I had a headache, so I fell asleep. They say that people sleep more soundly during a fire…I left him reading Pushkin…Timka, our dog, lay sleeping in the hall. He didn’t bark or whine. I don’t remember how much time passed, but eventually I opened my eyes and saw my husband sitting next to me. “Where’s Igor?” “He locked himself in the bathroom. He’s probably in there muttering poems to himself.” A wild, mute fear flung me out of bed. I ran over, I knocked, I banged on the door. I hit it and kicked it. Silence. I called to him, I screamed, I begged. Silence. My husband went to find a hammer or an axe. He broke down the door…And there he was, in his old pants, a sweater, slippers…hanging from some belt…I grabbed him and carried him in my arms. He was soft and warm. I started giving him CPR. Called an ambulance.

How had I slept through it? Why hadn’t Timka felt it? Dogs are so sensitive, their hearing is ten times better than ours. Why…I sat there and stared. The paramedics gave me a shot and I collapsed. In the morning, they woke me up. “Vera, get up. You won’t forgive yourself if you don’t.” “I’m going to give you a good thrashing for that prank. You’re going to get it from me,” I thought. And then I realized that there was no one to thrash anymore.

He lay there in his coffin…In the sweater I’d given him for his birthday…

I didn’t start screaming right away, it took a few months…But there were no tears. I could scream, but I couldn’t cry. It was only when, one day, after I had a glass of vodka, that the tears finally came. I started drinking to make myself cry…throwing myself on people…We spent two days in one of our friends’ apartments without leaving the house. Now I understand how hard that had been on them, how much we tormented them. We needed to escape our house…The kitchen chair he usually sat on broke, but I wouldn’t touch it. The chair stayed right where it was—what if he didn’t like me throwing away something he loved? Neither of us could bear to open the door to his bedroom. Twice, we tried to move, we’d have the documents prepared, raise people’s hopes, pack our belongings. And then I wouldn’t be able to leave. I felt like he was in there somewhere, I just couldn’t see him…But he was there. I roamed the shops, picking out clothes for him: Those pants are his color, that shirt. It was some spring…I’ve lost track of which one…I came home and told my husband, “Guess what? A man got a crush on me today. He wanted to ask me out.” And my husband said, “I’m so happy for you, Verochka. You’re coming back…” I was endlessly grateful to him for those words. I want to tell you about my husband…He’s a physicist. Our friends joke: “You guys are lucky, you got a physicist and lyricist blended in one.” I loved him…Why “loved” and not “love”? Because I don’t know this new person yet, the “me” who survived. I’m afraid…I’m not ready…I won’t ever be able to be happy again.