Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (36 page)

You should know that the birds helped us, too…When a magpie hears a stranger coming, it will always squawk. Give out a warning signal. They’d gotten used to us; the Germans smelled different: They wore cologne, washed with scented soap, smoked cigarettes; their overcoats were made of excellent military baize, their boots well polished. While we only had hand-rolled tobacco, our feet were wrapped in rags, our shoes made of woven cowhide and strapped to our feet with belts. They had woolen undergarments…We’d strip their dead down to their underwear! Our dogs would eat their hands and faces. Even animals got sucked into the war…

Many years have passed…half a century…but I’ve never forgotten that woman. She had two kids. Little ones. She’d hidden a wounded partisan in her cellar. Someone informed on them…They hanged the entire family in the middle of the village. The children first…Her screams! They weren’t human, they were animal…Should people risk making such sacrifices? I couldn’t tell you. [
Silence.
] Today, people who weren’t there write about the war. I don’t read any of it…Forgive me, but I can’t…

We liberated Minsk…For me, that was the end of the war. I was too young, they wouldn’t let me enlist in the army. I was fifteen. Where was I supposed to live? Strangers had moved into our apartment. They tried to get rid of me: “You dirty kike…” They didn’t want to give anything back: neither our apartment nor our things. They’d gotten used to the idea that us Jews were gone for good…

[
A discordant chorus.
]

The fire burns bright in the little stove

Sap drips down the logs, like tears

In the mud hut, the accordion sings

About your smile and eyes…

—The people weren’t the same after the war. I myself came home crazed.

—Stalin didn’t like our generation. He hated us. We’d tasted freedom. For us, the war meant freedom! We’d gone to Europe and seen how people lived there. When I would walk past a monument of Stalin on my way to work, I’d break into a cold sweat: What if he could read my thoughts?

—“Back to the stables!” they told us. And so we went.

—The democraps! They’ve destroyed everything…now we’re rolling around in shit…

—I’ve forgotten everything…even love…but I still remember the war…

—I fought with the partisans for two years. In the forest. After the war, for seven years, eight years…I couldn’t even look at men. I’d seen too much! I had this apathy. My sister and I went to a sanatorium. People courted her, she’d go dancing, but all I wanted was peace and quiet. I ended up marrying late. My husband was five years younger than me. He was like a little girl.

—I went to the front because I believed everything they wrote in
Pravda.
I fired guns. I had this passionate desire to kill! Kill! It used to be that I wanted to forget it all but couldn’t, now it disappears on its own. One thing I remember is that in war, death smells different…Murder has a particular smell. When it’s not a lot of people, but just one lying there, you start to wonder: Who was he? Where is he from? Someone out there must be waiting for him…

—Near Warsaw, an old Polish woman brought me her husband’s clothes: “Take everything off. I’ll wash it. Why are you all so filthy and thin? How did you manage to win the war?” How did we manage to win?!

—Oh, please…Put away those violins…

—We won, indeed. But our great victory didn’t make our country great.

—I’ll remain a communist until my dying day…Perestroika is a CIA operation to destroy the USSR.

—What stayed with me? The most hurtful part was how much the Germans hated us. Our way of life, our daily lives…Hitler called the Slavs rabbits…

—The Germans invaded our village. It was spring. On the very next day, they started building plant beds and a toilet. The old people still talk about how those Germans planted flowers…

—In Germany, we’d go into people’s homes: The closets were filled with so much high-quality clothing, so many linens and knick-knacks. Heaps of dishes. Before the war, they’d been telling us that people were suffering under capitalism. Then we saw it all for ourselves and said nothing. Try praising a German lighter or bicycle—they’ll slap you with Article 58 for anti-Soviet propaganda. For a brief while, they let us send packages home: A general could send fifteen kilograms, an officer ten, and a private five. We flooded the post office. My mother wrote me, “We don’t need any more packages from you. Your packages will get us all killed.” I’d sent them lighters, watches, some silk fabric…huge chocolate bars…so big that they’d thought they were soap…

—No German women between the ages of ten and eighty were left unfucked! The generation born there in 1946 are “the Russian people.”

—War erases everything…It already has…

—Here it is—victory! Victory! Throughout the whole war, people fantasized about how well they would live afterward. They celebrated for two or three days, and then they wanted something to eat, they needed clothes to wear. They wanted to live again. But there was nothing to be had. Everyone walked around in German uniforms. Adults and children alike. They’d mend them and re-mend them. We bought bread with ration cards, waiting in kilometer-long lines. Rage hung in the air. You could get killed over nothing.

—I remember…the clamor, all day long…Invalids rolling around on homemade boards with ball-bearing wheels. The roads were paved with cobblestones. They lived in basements and sub-basements. They’d get wasted and lie around in the gutters. Beg. Trade their medals for vodka. They’d roll up to the bread line pleading, “Please let me buy a little piece of bread.” But the lines were full of exhausted women, “You’re alive, my husband is in his grave.” They’d chase them away. When life got a little better, people started outright hating the invalids. No one wanted to be reminded of the war, everyone was busy living in the here and now. One day, all the invalids were cleared out of the city. Policemen caught them and tossed them into cars like they were piglets. Swearing, squealing, yelping…

—We had an Invalids’ Home in our town. Full of young men without arms, without legs. All of them with medals. You could take one home…They issued an order permitting it. Many women yearned for masculine tenderness and jumped at the opportunity, some wheeling men home in wheelbarrows, others in baby strollers. They wanted their houses to smell like men, to hang up men’s shirts on their clotheslines. But soon enough, they wheeled them right back…They weren’t toys…it wasn’t a movie. Try loving that chunk of man. He’s mean, hurt, and he knows he’s been betrayed.

—Oh, Victory Day…

A WOMAN’S STORY

—I’ll tell you about my love…The Germans rode into our village in big cars, the tops of their helmets gleaming. Young, cheerful. They pinched the girls. At first, they paid for everything: chicken, eggs. No one believes me, but it’s the honest truth! They paid with deutsche marks…What did I care about the war? I was in love! I only had one thing on my mind: When was I going to see him? He’d come and sit next to me on the bench and look at me, unable to look away. Smiling. “What are you smiling about?” “Oh, nothing…” Before the war, we’d gone to school together. His father died of tuberculosis, his grandfather was declared a kulak, and they sent him and his family off to Siberia. He remembered how his mother would dress him up as a little girl and tell him that if they ever came for them, he should run to the station, jump on a train, and leave. His name was Ivan…He always called me “my Lyubochka…” That was the only name he had for me…It wasn’t in the stars for us, we weren’t destined to be happy together. The Germans came, and soon after, his grandfather returned. He came back full of hatred, of course. Alone. He’d buried the whole family in exile. He told stories of how they’d taken them down Siberian rivers, unloaded them in the depths of the taiga. Gave them a single saw and axe for twenty or thirty people. They’d eat leaves, gnaw on bark…His grandfather despised the communists! Lenin and Stalin! As soon as he returned, he started taking his revenge. He’d point them out to the Germans: This one’s a communist…and that one…Those men would be taken off somewhere…It took me a long time to understand what the war was…

I remember the two of us washing a horse in the river. The sun! We dried the hay, and it smelled so good to me! I didn’t know anything, I’d never felt that way before. I’d been a simple, ordinary girl, and then I fell in love. I had this prophetic dream…Our river was not very deep, but I saw myself drowning in it. I was sucked in by the undertow, and suddenly I was underwater. I didn’t understand how or with what, but someone started lifting me up, pushing me up to the surface, except for some reason, I was naked. I swam back to the shore. It had been night, and now it was morning. Many people—our entire village—were standing on the shore. I stepped out of the water naked, completely naked…

One of our neighbors had a gramophone, so that was where we young people hung out. We danced. Told fortunes about who we would and wouldn’t marry using the Book of Psalms, pinesap, beans…With sap, the girl had to go into the forest and find an old pine; a young one wouldn’t do because it had no memory. No powers. All of this is real! I still believe in it today…With the beans, we’d put them into little piles and count them: odds, evens. I was eighteen. Again, of course, they don’t write about this kind of thing in books, but…our lives were better under German rule. The Germans reopened the churches, dissolved the collective farms, and redistributed the land—two hectares per person, one trailer for every two farmers. They established a firm tariff: In autumn, we’d give them grain, peas, potatoes, and one pig per household. They’d get their due, and we’d keep the rest. Everyone was satisfied. Under Soviet rule, we’d been poor. The brigadier would put down a tally mark for every workday. In autumn, in payment for all our workdays, we’d get a big fat nothing! Now we had meat and butter. It was a totally different life! The people were happy that they had gotten their freedom. We started living according to German rules…If you don’t feed your horse, you’ll get whipped. If you don’t sweep the road in front of your yard…I remember the conversations: We got used to the communists, now we’ll get used to the Germans. We’ll learn to live the German way of life. That’s how it was…It’s all so vivid to me, to this day. At night, everyone was afraid of the “forest people” who would come into our homes uninvited. One night, they came to our house: One had an axe, and the other one was carrying a pitchfork. “Hand over the
salo,
mother. And the moonshine. Don’t make too much noise.” I’m telling you how it happened in real life, not how they write about it in books. At first, people didn’t like the partisans…

We set a wedding date…After Dozhinki, the harvest festival. After we’d finished working the fields, and the women had laid a wreath on the final sheaf. [
She is silent.
] My memory grows dimmer, but my soul has not forgotten a thing…The rain started after dinner. Everyone ran in from the fields, and my mother came crying, “Oh Lord! Oh Lord! Your Ivan has signed up with the police. You’ll be the wife of a Polizei.” “No! I can’t be!” My mother and I wept. In the evening, Ivan came over. He sat down, not daring to raise his eyes. “Ivan, my darling, why didn’t you think of us?” “Lyubka…My Lyubochka…” His grandfather had forced him into it. The old devil! He threatened him: “If you don’t sign up with the police, they’ll ship you off to Germany. Then you can say goodbye to your Lyubka! Forget about her!” His grandfather had his own dreams…he wanted his daughter-in-law to be German…The Germans played their propaganda films about Germany, about how good life was over there. A lot of the younger boys and girls believed it. They’d leave. Before setting off, they’d throw them goodbye parties. A brass band would play. Then they’d board the trains in their little shoes…[
She gets pills out of her purse.
] My health isn’t that good anymore…The doctors say that medicine is powerless to help me…I’m going to die soon. [
Silence.
] I want my love to live on. I won’t be here anymore, but people will be able to read about it…

War raged all around us, but we were happy. For a year, we lived together as man and wife. I got pregnant. Our house was right next to the railway station. The German divisions would head to the front, their soldiers all young and full of life. Belting out their songs. They’d see me and shout, “Mädchen, kleines Mädchen!” And laugh. Then there were fewer and fewer young soldiers—old ones took their place. The young ones had been joyful; these ones were somber. Their excitement had run out. The Soviet army was beating them. “Ivan,” I’d ask him. “What will become of us?” “There’s no blood on my hands. I’ve never shot anyone.” [
Silence.
] My children don’t know about any of this, I’ve never confessed it to them. Maybe at the very end, right before I die…I’ll tell you one thing, though: Love is a kind of poison.

Two houses down from us, there was another guy who liked me, he’d always ask to dance with me. I was the only one he ever danced with. “Let me walk you home.” “I already have a chaperone.” He was a good-looking guy…Went off into the forest and joined the partisans. People who’d seen him said that he now wore a
kubanka
hat with a red ribbon on it. One night, there was a knock at our door. “Who is it?” “Partisans.” That guy and another, older one, had come to see us. My suitor started in: “How have you been, Mrs. Polizei? I’ve been wanting to call on you for a long time now. Where’s that little husband of yours?” “How should I know? He didn’t come home today. He’s probably spending the night at the garrison.” Suddenly, he grabbed my arm and threw me against the wall: You German puppet, you floor rag…He called me a—I can’t say it but it starts with
w
and told me to go f…Told me I’d gone with a German toady, kulak spawn, and pretended to be a virgin with him. That’s when he made to reach for his gun. My mother fell to her knees in front of him: “Go ahead and shoot, boys. When I was young, I was close with your mothers. Let’s give them something to cry about, too.” My mother’s words had an effect on them. They talked among themselves and left. [
Silence.
] Love is something very bitter…