Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (46 page)

And the enemy will never force you

To bow your mighty crown

My beloved capital,

My golden Moscow…

I always wanted to be out in the street. I went to all the military parades, I loved big sporting events. I still remember that high! You march in step with everyone else, you’re part of something bigger than yourself…something huge. That’s where I was the happiest. I wasn’t happy with my mother. And I will never be able to fix that. Mama died very soon after she came home. I was only affectionate with her after she was already dead. When I saw her in her coffin, I was suddenly filled with so much tenderness! Such powerful love! She lay there in her old felt boots…She didn’t own any regular shoes or sandals, and mine wouldn’t fit onto her swollen feet. I said so many sweet words to her, confessed so much—could she hear me? I kissed her and kissed her. Told her how much I loved her…[
She cries.
] It felt like she was still with me…I believed it…

[
She goes to the kitchen. Pretty soon, she calls to me, “Dinner’s on the table. I’m always alone, it’ll be nice to at least share a meal with someone.”
]

—

You should never go back to the past. Because…Yes…But me, I practically ran there! I was dying to go. Fifty years…For fifty years, I kept returning to that place…In my thoughts, I was there day and night…

Winter…Most often, my dreams were of winter…It was so freezing cold, there were no dogs or birds anywhere. The air is brittle like glass, the smoke from the chimneys rises straight up into the sky in a column. Or it would be the end of the summer, after the grass stops growing, and everything is covered in a heavy coat of dust. Finally, I…I decided to make the trip. By then, it was perestroika. Gorbachev, the rallies…Everybody was out in the streets. Celebrating. You can write about whatever you want, shout whatever you want wherever you want. Free-dom! Free-dom! No matter what awaited us, the past was finally over. We were waiting for something new to emerge…Impatience was in the air…then we’d get afraid again. For a long time, I was scared of turning on the radio in the morning: What if suddenly it was all over? Like they’d abruptly canceled the whole program? For a long time, I couldn’t believe it was real. I thought they were going to come in the middle of the night and take everyone down to the stadium like they did in Chile…One stadium would be enough for the smart alecks, the rest would shut up on their own. But they never came…They didn’t take anyone away. Instead, they started publishing people’s gulag memoirs in the newspapers. Their photographs. Their eyes! The people’s eyes in those photos! It was like they were staring back at you from the afterlife…[
She is silent.
] So I decided that I wanted to…I had to go there! Why? I don’t know. But I had to…I took time off work. The first week went by, the second week…I couldn’t do it, I kept putting it off: I had to go to the dentist, I hadn’t finished painting the balcony door. All sorts of excuses. One morning…it was morning…I was painting the balcony door and I said to myself, “Tomorrow I’m going to Karaganda.” I remember, I said it out loud to myself, and I realized that I was really going to do it. I was going and that was that. What’s Karaganda? Pure barren steppe for hundreds of kilometers around, burnt out in the summer. During Stalin’s time, they built dozens of camps on this steppe: Steplag, Karlag, Alzhir…Peschanlag…They herded in hundreds of thousands of prisoners. Soviet slaves. Then, after Stalin died, they took down the barracks and barbed wire and ended up with a city. The city of Karaganda…I’m going…That’s it! It was a long journey. On the train, I met a woman, a teacher from Ukraine. She was looking for her father’s grave, this was her second trip to Karaganda. “Don’t worry,” she informed me. “They’re used to strange people arriving from all over the world just to talk to the stones.” She had a letter from her father with her, the only letter he ever sent from camp, “…No matter what, there’s nothing in the world better than the red banner…” That was how it ended…with those words. [
She falls into thought.
] That woman…She told me about how her father had signed a document testifying that he was a Polish spy. The interrogator had turned over a stool, hammered a nail into one of its legs, made her father sit on it and spun him around. That’s how he got his way. “Fine, I’m a spy.” The interrogator: “For whom?” Now it was her father’s turn to ask, “Where do spies come from?” They gave him a choice—he could either be German or Polish. “Say that I’m Polish.” He knew two phrases in Polish,
“dziękuję bardzo”
and
“wszystko jedno.” 
^*2
Just those two phrases. As for me…I don’t know a single thing about my father. One time, my mother let slip that he had gone mad from the torture in prison. Apparently, he started singing all the time…There was also a young man with us in our compartment. The Ukrainian teacher and I talked all night long. Wept…In the morning, he looked at us and said, “It’s all awful! Like some kind of horror movie!” He was eighteen, maybe twenty years old. Lord! We lived through so much and have no one to tell the story to. We tell one another…

I got to Karaganda…Someone started cracking jokes: “Step out! Step out with your belongings!” Some laughed, others cried. At the station, the first words I heard were “
Shalava
…
kurva
…
lyagavye
…”
^*3
The familiar language of the camps. I instantly remembered all those words…Instantly! I froze. I couldn’t stop shaking inside; the whole time I was there, I shook. Of course, I didn’t recognize the town itself, but just beyond the city limits, after the last houses, the familiar landscape began. I recognized everything…the dry needlegrass, the white dust…an eagle soaring up high in the sky. And the names of the villages were familiar—Volnyj, Sangorodok. All former camps. I thought I’d forgotten, but I still remembered. An old man sat down next to me on the bus and noticed that I wasn’t from around there. “Who are you looking for?” “Well,” I began, “there used to be a camp here.” “Oh, the barracks? They dismantled the last of those buildings two years ago. People built themselves sheds and saunas out of the bricks. Took the soil back to their dachas for planting. Put camp wire around their gardens. My son’s place is out there. It’s so, you know, unpleasant…In the spring, the snows and rains leave bones sticking out of their potato patches. No one is squeamish about that sort of thing around here because they’re so used to it. There are as many bones as stones in this soil. People just toss them out to the edge of their property, stamp them down with their boots. Cover them up. It happens all the time. Just stick your hand in the dirt, run your fingers through it…” It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Like I had passed out. Meanwhile, the old man turned to the window and pointed: “Over there, behind that store, they covered over the old cemetery. Behind that bathhouse, too.” I sat there, unable to breathe. What had I expected? That they had erected pyramids? Mounds of Glory?
^*4
The first line is now the street named after someone or other…Then the second line…I looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anything, I was blinded by tears. Kazakh women were selling their cucumbers and tomatoes at every bus stop…pails of blackcurrants. “Fresh from the berry patch. From my own garden.” Lord! My God…I have to say that…It was physically difficult for me to breathe, something was going on with me out there. In a matter of just a few days, my skin dried out, my nails started chipping off. Something was happening to my entire body. I wanted to fall down on the ground and lie there. And never get up. The steppe…it’s like the sea…I walked and walked until finally, I collapsed. I fell next to a small metal cross that was up to the crossbeam in the earth. Screaming, in hysterics. There was no one around…just the birds. [
After a short pause.
] I was staying in a hotel. In the evening, the restaurant was filled to the gills…People drank vodka. I had dinner there one night…Two men sitting at my table got into an argument, shouting at each other until they were hoarse. The first one said, “No matter what, I’m still a communist. We were supposed to build socialism. How could we have broken Hitler’s spine without Magnitka and Vorkuta
^*5
?” The second one: “I’ve been talking to the local elderly…All of them worked or served—I don’t know the right word for what they did—in the camps. They were the cooks, the guards, special agents. There was no other work out here, and those jobs paid well: salaries, rations, outfitting. That’s what they call it, ‘work.’ For them, the camps were work! A job! And here you are talking about crimes against humanity. Sin and the soul. It wasn’t just anyone doing time, it was the people. And the ones sentencing them and guarding them were the people, too—not foreign workers, not people brought in from outside—they were the very same people. Our own men. Kin. Today, you see everybody putting on the striped uniform. Now, everyone’s the victim and Stalin alone is to blame. But think about it…it’s simple arithmetic…Millions of inmates had to be surveilled, arrested, interrogated, transported, and shot for minor transgressions. Someone had to do all this…and they found millions of people who were willing to…” The waiter brought them bottle after bottle…I sat there listening…I listened! And they kept drinking and drinking without getting drunk. I sat there, chained to the spot, I couldn’t leave…The first one: “I was told that after the barracks were already empty, shut down, screams and moans could still be heard coming from them in the middle of the night, carried by the wind…” The second one: “That’s all myth. They’ve started crafting the mythology. Our entire tragedy lies in the fact that our victims and executioners are the same people.” And again: “Stalin entered the Russia of the wooden plow and left it with the atom bomb…” For three days and three nights, I didn’t get a moment of sleep. During the day, I roamed and roamed the steppe. Crawled through it. Until dark, until the streetlights came on.

One day, a man gave me a lift back into town. He was around fifty, or maybe older, my age. He’d clearly been drinking and was apparently feeling talkative. “You’re looking for graves? I understand. You could say that we live in a cemetery. But we…the long and short of it is that people around here don’t like remembering the past. It’s taboo! The older generation has died out, our parents, and the ones still alive keep their mouths shut. It’s that Stalinist upbringing. Gorbachev, Yeltsin…That’s all today…Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Where the wind will blow…” One thing led to another, and I learned that his father had been an officer “with epaulettes.” When Khrushchev was in power, he’d wanted to leave the area, but they wouldn’t let him move. Everyone had to sign confidentiality agreements on the nondisclosure of state secrets—both the people who did time and the ones who kept them in. The guards. No one was allowed to leave, they all knew too much. He heard that they didn’t even allow the guards who convoyed prisoner trains to get away. Working out here, they’d avoided having to fight in the war. But if they’d fought, they could have gone home afterward—there was no way out for them after serving here. The penal colony, the system, swallowed them up forever. The only ones who could get out after serving their sentences were the common criminals and convicts. The gangsters. The rest ended up staying, all together, sometimes living in the same building, sharing a courtyard. “This life of ours ain’t pretty!” was his refrain. He remembered a story from his childhood…How a group of ex-cons conspired to murder a former camp guard for being a beast. When they were drunk, they’d fight and gang up on each other. His father drank like a devil. He’d get wasted and weep: “Dammit! I’ve spent my whole life with my mouth clamped shut. We’re nothing but dust…” Night. The steppe. The two of us riding through it—the daughter of a victim and the son of…what should I call him? An executioner? A small-time executioner…The big-time executioners can’t do without the little ones, you need a lot of people who are willing to do the dirty work. And so we’d crossed paths…What did we talk about? We talked about how neither of us knew anything about our parents, about how they’d kept silent until their very deaths. Taken their secrets with them to their graves. But apparently, something about me got to him, and it really upset him. He told me his father never ate fish because fish, he said, were willing to eat human flesh. If you throw a naked man into the sea, a few months later, there will be nothing but bones left of him. All white. How exactly did he know this? When he was sober, he never said a word, but when he was drunk, he swore up and down that all he ever did was push paper. His hands were clean…His son wanted to believe him, but then why didn’t he eat fish? Fish nauseated him…After his father’s death, he found documents certifying that for several years, he’d served near the Sea of Okhotsk. There were camps out there, too…[
She is silent.
] Drunk…His tongue was loose…He stared at me so hard, it even sobered him up. And once he sobered up, he got scared. I realized he was scared. Suddenly, he became surly, and shouted something like, “Enough digging up the dead! Enough!” I realized…that these people, the children…they’d never been forced to sign anything, but they knew full well that they had better keep their mouths shut. He offered his hand in parting. I wouldn’t take it…[
She cries.
]