Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (44 page)

But, but…I…I can’t go on like this anymore. The last thing I remember was a scream. Whose? I don’t know. Was it mine? Or was it the neighbor screaming? She had smelled gas in the stairwell. Called the police. [
She stands up and walks over to the window.
] It’s autumn. The leaves were just recently yellow…Now they’re black from all the rain. Even during the day, the light seems very far away. It’s dark already in the morning. I turn on all the lamps and keep them on all day long. I can never get enough light…[
She returns and sits down across from me.
]

First, I dreamed that I’d died. I saw a lot of people die when I was little, but later on I forgot about it all…[
She wipes her tears.
] I don’t understand why I’m crying. I already know everything, I know everything about my own life…I dreamt that a whole lot of birds were circling over me. Beating their wings against the window. When I woke up, it felt like someone was standing right by my head. That someone had stayed. I wanted to turn to see who it was, but I felt this fear, like a premonition, that I absolutely should not do that. I absolutely must not! [
She is silent.
] I’m talking about something else…I’d wanted to talk about something else first…not this right away. You asked about my childhood…[
She covers her face with her hands.
] I can smell it already, the sweet smell of coltsfoot…I see the mountains and the wooden tower with the soldier on top—in winter he wears a sheepskin coat and in spring it’s an overcoat. And the metal beds, so many metal beds, all side by side. Side by side…I used to think that if I told someone about this, afterward I would have to run away from that person and never see them again. It’s all so much my own…hidden so deep inside of me. I never lived alone. First, I lived in the camp in Kazakhstan, it was called Karlag, and after the camp, in exile. I’ve lived in an orphanage, a dormitory, a communal apartment…always surrounded by many, many other bodies; other eyes. I got my own place for the first time when I was forty. They gave my husband and me a two-bedroom apartment, our children were already grown up. I would run over to the neighbors’ out of sheer habit, like I had in the dormitory, to borrow bread, salt, or matches. People didn’t like me because of that. But I had never lived alone before, I couldn’t get used to it…I always wanted letters. I was always waiting for envelopes to arrive! I still do that…One of my friends writes me regularly, she moved to Israel to live with her daughter. She wants to know how things are over here, what life is like after socialism…What is our life like? You walk down a familiar street and see a French boutique, German, Polish—all of the stores’ names are in foreign languages. Foreign socks, shirts, boots…cookies and salami…You can’t find anything that’s our own, Soviet, anywhere. All I hear is that life is a battle, the strong defeat the weak, and this is the law of nature. You have to grow some horns and hooves, a thick skin, no one needs weaklings anymore. Everywhere you go it’s elbows, elbows, and more elbows. This is fascism, this is the swastika! I’m in shock…and despair. This is not my world! It’s not for me! [
Silence.
] If I had someone beside me…anyone…my husband? He left me. And I keep on loving him…[
Suddenly, she smiles.
] We got married in the spring, when the wild cherries were in bloom and the lilacs were budding. And when he left me, it was also spring. But he comes sometimes…he comes to me in my dreams and can’t bear to part with me…He keeps talking and talking about something. But during the day, I’m going deaf from the silence. Going blind. The past is like another person to me, a living being…I remember when
Novy Mir
published Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,
everyone was reading it. They were all so shocked! Their conversations! I didn’t understand why everyone was so surprised and suddenly so interested. To me, it was all very familiar territory and totally normal: the inmates, the camp, the bucket…The penal colony.

In 1937, my father was arrested, he’d been a railway worker. My mother flew into action, went to see everyone that she could, did everything possible to prove him innocent, demonstrate that it had been a mistake. She forgot all about me. Forgot I was there. When she finally remembered, she tried to get rid of me, but it was too late. She drank all sorts of poison, took boiling hot baths. And…As a result, she ended up giving birth to me prematurely…but still, I survived. For some reason, I keep on surviving. It’s happened so many times now! Soon, my mother was also arrested, and I was taken into custody along with her—you can’t leave a baby alone in an apartment. I was just four months old. My mother had arranged to send my two older sisters to my father’s sister’s house in the country, but then a notice arrived from the NKVD ordering her to send them back to Smolensk. The authorities were waiting for them at the station. “Your children will live in an orphanage. Maybe that way they’ll grow up to be in the Komsomol.” They didn’t even give us the address. By the time we found them, they were already married with kids. Many, many years later…In the camp, until I was three, I lived with my mother. Later, my mother recalled how often little children would die in there. In the winter, they would collect the dead children in big barrels and leave them like that until spring. By then, their bodies would be gnawed away by rats. They would wait to bury them in spring…that is, what remained of them. After the age of three, children would be taken away from their mothers and moved into the children’s barracks. I start remembering things from the age of four…no, it was probably almost five. In episodes…In the morning, we would see our mothers through the barbed wire fence: They would be counted and led off to work. They would lead them out of the colony, out to where we weren’t allowed to go. When people asked me, “Where are you from, little girl?” I would say, “From the colony.” “The outside” was another world, something incomprehensible, frightening, which didn’t exist for us. It was a desert out there, nothing but sand and dry scrub. I thought that the desert reached to the very edge of that world, that there was no way of life other than ours. Our soldiers guarded us, and we were proud of them. They had stars on their hats…I had a little friend named Rubik Tsirinsky. He’d lead me to the mamas through an opening under the barbed wire fence. When everyone else lined up to be marched to the cafeteria, he and I would hide behind the door. “You don’t like kasha, right?” Rubik would ask me. I was always hungry, and I adored kasha, but I was prepared to do anything to see my Mama. So we would crawl to the barracks to see the mamas, but the barracks would be empty because all the mamas were at work. We knew they wouldn’t be there, but we would go anyway sneaking around, exploring every corner. The metal beds, the metal canister for drinking water, the tin cup hanging from a chain—all of that smelled like mamas. It smelled like earth and mamas…Sometimes, we would find other people’s mamas in there, lying on their beds and coughing. Someone’s Mama would be coughing up blood…Rubik told me that was Tomochka’s Mama, she was the littlest one out of all of us. That Mama died shortly afterward. And then Tomochka died, too, and for a long time, I wondered, “Whom should I tell that Tomochka died?” Since her Mama was dead as well…[
She falls silent.
] Many, many years later I remembered this…My mother didn’t believe me: “You were only four.” I told her that I remembered her walking around in canvas boots with wooden soles and a large tunic sewn from these little scraps of fabric. That surprised her, as well. It made her cry. I remember…I remember the aroma of a slice of melon that my mother had brought me. It was the size of a button, wrapped in a rag. And how one time, the boys called me over to play with a cat, but I didn’t know what a cat was. The cat had come from the outside, there were no cats in the colony, they couldn’t survive in there because there were no leftovers for them to eat, we would pick up every last crumb. We were always looking under our feet for something to eat. We ate grasses, roots, licked pebbles. We really wanted to give the cat some sort of treat, but we didn’t have anything, so we’d feed it our spit after dinner—and it would eat it! It would! I remember how another time, my mother tried to pass me a piece of candy. “Anya, take this candy!” she’d called to me through the wire. The guards chased her away…she fell down…They grabbed her by her long black hair and dragged her through the dirt. I was so frightened, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what candy was. None of the children knew what candy was. Everyone got scared and realized that they needed to hide me, so they pushed me into the middle of our little cluster. The other kids would always put me in the middle, “Because our Anya is always falling over.” [
She weeps.
] I don’t know why I’m crying…I already know all this…I know what my life was like. But there you go…What was I talking about? I didn’t finish the thought…Right? I didn’t finish?

There was more than one fear…There were many fears, both great and small. We were afraid of growing up, afraid of turning five. At five, they’d take us away to the orphanage, and we knew that this was somewhere far away—far away from the mamas. As I now recall, they took me to orphanage number eight in village number five. Everything was numbered, and instead of streets, they called them “lines”: the first line, the second line…They loaded us onto a truck and took us away. The mamas ran after us, grabbing on to the bumper, shouting, crying. I remember that the mamas were always crying while we children cried very rarely. We were not crybabies, and we didn’t fool around. We didn’t laugh. I only learned how to cry at the orphanage. At the orphanage, they beat us hard and often. They’d tell us, “We can beat you and even kill you because your mothers are enemies.” We didn’t know our fathers. “Your mother is bad.” I don’t remember the face of the woman who kept repeating this to me. “My mother is good. My mother is beautiful.” “Your mother is bad. She is our enemy.” I don’t remember whether she’d say the word “kill,” but it was something like that…They’d say something along those lines. Frightening words…terrifying. Yes…I was too scared to even remember them. We didn’t have teachers or tutors—we never even heard of them—we had commanders. Commanders! All of them with long rulers…They would beat us for doing things wrong and also, just because…they’d just beat us. I wanted them to beat me so hard there’d be holes in my body, and they would have to stop beating me. I never got any holes, but I was covered in infected wounds. I was so happy when that happened…My friend Olechka had metal clamps in her spine so they weren’t allowed to beat her. Everyone was jealous of her…[
She looks out the window for a long time.
] I’ve never told anyone any of this. I was afraid…What was I afraid of? I don’t know…[
She falls into thought.
] We loved the night…We’d spend our days waiting for it to come. Dark, dark night. At night, Miss Frosya, the night guard, would come sit with us. She was nice and would tell us the story about Alyonushka and Little Red Riding Hood, bringing us wheat in her pocket and giving a couple of grains to whoever was crying. Lilechka cried more than everyone else; she cried in the morning and cried at night. All of us had scabies, fat red boils on our stomachs, but Lilechka also had blisters in her armpits and they’d burst from being full of pus. I remember that the children would inform on one another, it was encouraged. Lilechka did it more than anyone else…The climate in Kazakhstan was harsh—in the winter, it would be 40 degrees below zero, and in the summer, it was 40 above. Lilechka died in the winter. If only she had made it until there was grass again…In the spring, she wouldn’t have died. She wouldn’t have…[
She falls silent in the middle of a word.
]

We were taught…above all, we were taught to love Comrade Stalin. The first letter we ever wrote was addressed to him in the Kremlin. Here’s how it happened…Once we’d learned the alphabet, they handed out white sheets of paper and dictated a letter to our most benevolent, most beloved leader. We loved him so much, we really believed that he would answer our letters and send us presents. Lots of presents! We’d stare at his portrait and think he was so handsome. The most handsome man in the world! We even argued over who would give up more years of their life for a day of Comrade Stalin’s. On May Day, they handed out little red flags, and we walked around happily waving them. I was the shortest one, so I was always the last in line, worried I wouldn’t get a flag. What if there weren’t enough? They kept repeating, “Your Motherland is your mother! Your Motherland is your mother!” But every adult we ever met, we’d ask, “Where is my Mama? What is my Mama like?” No one knew…the first Mama came for Rita Melnikova. She had an incredible voice. She sang us a lullaby:

Sleep, my little darling, sleep.

All of the lights have gone out

None of the doors squeak,

Even the mouse is asleep…

We didn’t know this song, so we learned it. We begged her: more, more. I don’t remember what else she sang us; by the time she finished, we were all asleep. She told us our mamas were good, our mamas were beautiful. All mamas are beautiful. She said all of our mamas sang this song. We waited for them…and then we’d get terribly disappointed—she hadn’t told us the truth. Other mamas came and they were not beautiful, they were sick and they didn’t know how to sing. We cried, we sobbed…We weren’t crying because we were so happy to see them, we cried out of disappointment. Ever since then, I’ve disliked untruths…I don’t like to daydream. She shouldn’t have consoled us with those stories, we shouldn’t have been lied to and told that our mamas were alive when they were actually dead. Because later on it would turn out…that there was no beautiful Mama, or there was no Mama at all…None!