Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (28 page)

One night, I lay there with my eyes open. Suddenly, I heard a ringing. I clearly heard the doorbell ring. In the morning, I told my husband about it. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said. That night, it happened again. I was awake, I looked at my husband, he had been woken up by it. “Did you hear that?” “I did.” We both got this feeling like we weren’t alone in the apartment. Timka was running around in circles by the bed as though he was chasing someone. I nodded off somewhere, into some kind of warm realm. And I had this dream…I don’t know where we were, but Igor appeared to me in the sweater that we buried him in. “Mama, you call to me but you don’t understand how hard it is for me to come to you. Stop crying.” I touched him, he felt soft. “Were you happy at home?” “Very.” “And over there?” He had no time to answer before disappearing. From that night on, I stopped crying. After that, he would only appear in my dreams as a little boy. But I kept waiting for an older version of him to come so I could talk to him…

This was not a dream. I had only just shut my eyes…The door to our bedroom swung open, and an adult Igor, whom I had never seen before, stepped in, just for an instant. From the look on his face I could tell that he was indifferent to everything that was going on down here. Our conversations about him, our memories. He’s very far from us now. And I can’t bear the thought that our connection is severed. I can’t handle it…I thought about it for a long time…And I decided to have another baby. I wasn’t supposed to, I was too old, the doctors were afraid for me, but I did it anyway. I had a girl. We treat her as though she’s not our daughter but Igor’s. I’m afraid of loving her the way I loved him…I can’t love her like that. I’m crazy! Insane! I cry all the time, I keep going to the cemetery. Our little girl is always with me, but I can’t stop thinking about death. This can’t go on. My husband thinks that we need to leave. Go to another country. Change everything: the scenery, the people, the alphabet. Our friends keep telling us to move to Israel. They call us all the time: “What’s keeping you there?” [
She’s practically screaming.
] What’s keeping us? What?!

I have this terrifying thought: But what if Igor were to tell you a completely different story? Completely different from mine…

AS TOLD BY HIS FRIENDS

“That amazing glue was holding everything together”

We were really young…Adolescence is a nightmare, I don’t know why they say it’s a wonderful time. You’re irrational, you’re awkward, you’re doing everything in your power to stand out, you’re vulnerable from all sides. But your parents still think of you as a little kid, they’re still molding you. It’s like you’re under some kind of bell jar where no one can reach you. It feels like…I remember the feeling very vividly…It was like when I was in the hospital, in an isolation ward, behind glass. With some sort of infection. Your parents pretend (that’s how it feels) that they want to be with you, but in reality, they live in an entirely different world. They’re off somewhere…It’s like they’re close, but actually, they’re very far away…Parents have no clue how serious everything is to their kids. First love is terrifying. Fatally dangerous. My friend thought that Igor had killed himself out of love for her. So dumb! Little girl nonsense…All of the girls were in love with him. Oh! He was so beautiful and he acted as though he were older than all of us, but it also felt like he was very lonely. He wrote poems. A poet is supposed to be standoffish and lonely. To die in a duel. We were all full of childish ideas.

Those were Soviet times…Communist. We were raised on Lenin, fiery revolutionaries, so fiery, we didn’t consider the Revolution an error and a crime. Although we weren’t into that Marxist-Leninist stuff either. The Revolution was something abstract to us…Most of all, I remember the holidays and the anticipation leading up to them. I remember it all very vividly…Huge crowds of people out in the streets. Words roaring from the loudspeakers: There were some who believed in them wholeheartedly, others who believed only some of them, and some who didn’t believe them at all. But overall, everybody seemed happy. There was music everywhere. My mother was young and beautiful. Everyone was together…I remember all this as happiness…Those smells, those sounds…The bang of the typewriter keys, the morning cries of the milkmaids who would come into town from the countryside, “Mo-lo-ko! Mo-lo-ko!” Not everyone had a refrigerator, so people kept jars of milk out on their balconies. String bags full of raw chickens hung from the window frames. People decorated their windows, filling the space between two windowpanes with glittery cotton and green apples. The stray cat smell wafting up from the basements…And how about the inimitable bleach and rag smell of Soviet cafeterias? These things may seem unrelated, but for me, they have all merged into a single sensation. A unified feeling. Freedom has different smells…different images…Everything about it is different. One of my friends, after her first trip abroad—this was already when Gorbachev was in power…she returned with the words, “Freedom smells like a good sauce.” I remember my first supermarket, it was in Berlin: a hundred different kinds of salami, a hundred different cheeses. It was baffling. Many discoveries awaited us after perestroika, countless new thoughts and new sensations. They haven’t even been described yet, let alone integrated into history. We don’t yet know how to articulate them…But I’m getting ahead of myself…jumping from one era into the next…The outside world would be revealed to us later. Back then, we only dreamed of it…About the things we didn’t have, the things we wanted…It felt nice to dream of a world we knew nothing about. We dreamed…and meanwhile, we lived our Soviet lives by a unified set of rules that applied to everyone. Someone stands at the podium. He lies, everyone applauds, but everyone knows that he’s lying, and he knows that they know that he’s lying. Still, he says all that stuff and enjoys the applause. We had no doubts that our generation would go on living that way, so all we ever sought were sanctuaries. My mother listened to the forbidden Galich…and I listened to Galich, too…

I also just remembered how we tried to go to Moscow for Vysotsky’s funeral. The police were kicking people like us off the commuter trains…We yelled back at them, “Save our souls! / We’re going crazy, suffocating…” “Undershot. Overshot. Undershot. The artillery shoots at their own…” It was a scandal! Our headmaster ordered us to show up to school with our parents. My mother came, and she conducted herself perfectly. [
She falls into thought.
] We lived in our kitchens…The whole country lived in their kitchens. You’d go to somebody’s house, drink wine, listen to songs, talk about poetry. There’s an open tin can, slices of black bread. Everyone’s happy. We had our own rituals: kayaks, tents, hikes. Songs by the campfire. There were common symbols by which we recognized one another. We had our own fashions, our own jokes. Those secret kitchen societies are long gone. And gone with them is our friendship, which we had thought was eternal. Yes…Our minds were tuned to the eternal…and there was nothing holier than friendship. That amazing glue was holding everything together…

In reality, none of us lived in the USSR, we each lived in our own social circle. The hikers clique, the climbers group…After class, we’d hang out at this housing department office, and they ended up letting us use one of their rooms. We put together a drama club, I acted in it. There was a literature club. I remember Igor reading us his poems. He imitated Mayakovsky and was incredibly intense. His nickname was “The Student.” Adult poets would come and speak openly with us. From them, we learned the truth about the Prague Spring. The war in Afghanistan. And what…what else? We learned how to play guitar. You had to! In those days, playing guitar was a top priority. We were prepared to listen to our favorite poets and singer-songwriters on our knees. Poets attracted entire stadiums full of people. They had to police them with mounted officers. The word was the deed. Standing up at a meeting and telling the truth was so dangerous, it was as good as a deed. Going out onto the square…It was all such a rush, so much adrenaline, we were so earnest. The word was everything…It’s difficult to believe it now. These days, you have to do something, not just say it. You can say absolutely whatever you want, but the word has no power at all. We’d like to have faith in something, but we can’t. No one cares about anything anymore, and the future is shit. That’s not how it used to be…Oh! Poems, poems…Words, words…

[
She laughs.
] In tenth grade, I had an affair. He lived in Moscow. I went to see him, we only had three days. In the morning, at the station, we picked up a mimeographed copy of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs, which everyone was reading at the time. We had to return the book the next day at four in the morning. Hand it off to someone on a train passing through town. For twenty-four hours, we read without stopping—we only went out once, to get milk and a loaf of bread. We even forgot to make out, we just handed the pages to one another. All of this happened in some kind of fever, a stupor…All because you’re holding this particular book in your hands…because you’re reading it…Twenty-four hours later, we ran through an empty city back to the train station; the public transit wasn’t even running yet. I remember the city that night, walking together with the book in my purse. We handled it like it was a secret weapon…That’s how ardently we believed that the word could change the world.

The Gorbachev years…Freedom and coupons. Ration cards, coupons for everything: from bread to grain to socks. We’d stand in line for five or six hours at a time…But you’re standing there with a book that you hadn’t been able to buy before. You’d know that in the evening, they were going to play a previously forbidden movie on TV that had been kept on the shelf for the past ten years. It was so cool! Or all day long, you’d think about how at ten,
Vzglyad
was going to come on TV…Its hosts, Alexander Lyubimov and Vladislav Listiev, became national heroes. We were learning the truth…that there hadn’t just been a Gagarin, there’d been a Beria…In reality, for me, I’m just a twit, freedom of speech would have been enough because, as it soon turned out, at heart, I’m a Soviet girl. Everything Soviet went deeper in us than we’d ever imagined. All I really wanted was for them to let me read Dovlatov and Viktor Nekrasov
^*7
and listen to Galich. That would have been enough. I didn’t even dream of going to Paris and strolling through Montmartre…Or seeing Gaudí’s Sagrada Família…Just let us read and talk. Read! Our little Olga got sick, she was just four months old, she’d come down with an acute bronchial obstruction. I was losing my mind from worry. She and I went to the hospital, and I couldn’t put her down for a second, she would only calm down when I was holding her upright. Sitting upright in my arms. I kept pacing and pacing with her, back and forth through the corridors. And if I managed to get her to sleep for even a half hour, what do you think I would do? Even though I was beyond exhausted…Guess! I always had
The Gulag Archipelago
under my arm, and I would immediately open it and start reading. In one arm, my baby is dying, and with my free hand, I’m holding Solzhenitsyn. Books replaced life for us. They were our whole world.

Then something happened…We came down to earth. The happiness and euphoria suddenly broke. Into a million little pieces. I quickly realized that the new world wasn’t mine, it wasn’t for me. It required another breed of person. Kick the weak in the eyes! They raised the ones from the bottom up to the top…All in all, it was a revolution…But this time, with worldly ends: a vacation home and a car for everyone. Isn’t that a little petty? The streets were filled with these bruisers in tracksuits. Wolves! They came after everyone. My mother had worked at a sewing factory. It happened so fast…They shut down the factory…My mother would sit at home all day sewing underwear. All her friends sewed underwear too, every apartment you walked into, that’s what they’d be doing. We lived in a building the factory had built for its workers, so everyone in the whole building was sewing bras and underwear. Swimsuits. En masse, they all cut the labels off all their old clothes…And they would ask their friends to do it too, to snip the labels off their clothes—preferably imported clothes—so that they could sew them onto those swimsuits of theirs. Then, in small groups, the women would travel through Russia with bags full of their homemade goods. They called it “Underwear Tourism.” By then, I was in grad school. [
Happily.
] I remember…it was so funny…In the university library and the dean’s office, they kept barrels of pickles and pickled tomatoes, mushrooms, and cabbage. They sold the pickles and used the proceeds to pay the professors. Or suddenly the whole department would be flooded with oranges. Or stacks of men’s dress shirts…The great Russian intelligentsia did what it could to survive. People remembered the old recipes…what they ate during the war…In the hidden corners of the parks and on sloping plots off the railroad tracks, people planted potatoes. Does eating nothing but potatoes for weeks on end count as going hungry? What about when it’s nothing but sauerkraut? I will never be able to eat that again for as long as I live. We learned to make chips out of potato peels and would pass around this wonderful recipe: Throw some peels into boiling sunflower oil and add a generous pinch of salt. There was no milk, but there was plenty of ice cream, so that’s what we made porridge with. Would I still eat that today?

The first thing to go was friendship…Suddenly, everyone was too busy, they had to go out and make money. Before, it had seemed like we didn’t need money at all…that it had no bearing on us. Suddenly, everyone saw the beauty of green bills—these were no Soviet rubles, they weren’t just play money. Bookish boys and girls, us house plants…We turned out to be ill suited for the new world we’d been waiting for. We were expecting something else, not this. We’d read a boatload of romantic books, but life kicked and shoved us in another direction. Instead of Vysotsky, it was Kirkorov
^*8
now. Pop! That says it all…Not long ago, some people came over and we were hanging out in my kitchen, which doesn’t happen too often anymore. We had a debate: would Vysotsky sing for Abramovich?
^*9
People had differing opinions. The majority were positive that yes, he would. The next question was how much he would charge.