Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (60 page)

…I heard a woman’s voice calling, “Sergey! Sergey!” Sergey wasn’t responding…A few people were left sitting in the train car in unnatural poses. One man was hanging from a railing like a worm. I was afraid of looking in his direction…

…I started walking, it made me dizzy…All around, I heard cries of “Help! Help!” Someone in front of me was moving like a sleepwalker, he kept going forward then turning around and going back. Everyone went past the two of us.

…At the top of the escalators, two women ran up to me and plastered some rag to my forehead. For some reason, I was freezing cold. They got me a chair, I sat down. I saw them asking other passengers for their belts and neckties and using them to tie off people’s wounds. The station attendant was shouting into the phone: “What do you want us to do? People are coming out of the tunnel and dying on the spot, climbing up onto the platform and dropping dead…” [
She falls silent.
] Why are you torturing us? I feel bad for my mother. [
Silence.
] Everyone is used to it now. They turn on the TV, hear a little bit about it, then go drink their coffee…

THE MOTHER

I grew up in a deeply Soviet time. Totally Soviet. Born in the USSR. But the new Russia…I don’t understand it yet. I can’t say what’s worse, what we have today or the history of the Communist Party. My mind still functions according to the Soviet scheme, in the Soviet mold; after all, I spent half of my life under socialism. All of that is ingrained in me. You couldn’t beat it out. And I don’t think that I’d want to. Life used to be bad, now it’s outright frightening. In the morning, we scatter: My husband and I go to work, the girls go to school, and then we spend the whole day bugging each other: “How’s it going over there? What time do you think you’ll be heading home? How are you getting there?” Only when all of us are together again in the evening do I begin to feel some relief, only then can I take a break from worrying. I’m scared of everything. I simply tremble with fear. The girls admonish me: You exaggerate, Mama…I’m perfectly sane, but I need that protection, that extra layer, my home. Maybe I’m fragile because my father died when I was little—my father loved me a lot. [
She is silent.
] Our daddy fought in the war, he made it out of two burning tanks…He marched through the war and came out alive. Then he got home and they killed him in an underpass.

I was brought up on Soviet books, the things they taught us were totally different. Just an example, for comparison…In those books, the first Russian terrorists are depicted as heroes. Martyrs. Sophia Perovskaya, Kibalchich
^*1
…They died for the people, they were on a holy mission. They threw a bomb at the Tsar. Those young people often came from the aristocracy, good families…Why are we surprised that people like them still exist today? [
She falls silent.
] In history classes, when they taught us about the Great Patriotic War, the teacher would tell us about the heroism of Belarusian partisan Yelena Mazanik, who killed the Nazi
Gauleiter
Wilhelm Kube by planting a bomb in the bed where he slept with his pregnant wife. While their children were sleeping in the next room, just on the other side of the wall…Stalin personally awarded her the Hero’s Star. For the rest of her life, she went around to schools telling the story of her daring feat during bravery lessons.
^*2
No one, not the teacher…nobody told us that the children had been sleeping in the next room…Mazanik had actually been those children’s nanny…[
Silence.
] After the war, people with consciences are ashamed of remembering what they were forced to do in battle. Papa struggled with this…

At the Avtozavodskaya Metro station, it was a boy who’d detonated himself, a suicide bomber. A Chechen boy. His parents later said that he read a lot. Loved Tolstoy. He grew up during a war, surrounded by bombing and shelling…He saw his cousins die. When he was fourteen, he ran away from home into the mountains to join Khattab’s men.
^*3
He wanted to avenge their deaths. He was probably a pure boy with a passionate heart…They made fun of him, ha ha…little idiot kid…But he learned how to shoot better than anyone else and how to throw grenades. His mother found him and dragged him back to their village, she wanted him to finish school and become a tile setter. But after a year, he disappeared into the mountains again. They taught him how to detonate bombs, and then he came to Moscow…[
Silence.
] If he had done it for money, it would have all made sense, but he wasn’t getting paid to kill. This boy was capable of throwing himself under a tank and blowing up a maternity ward…

Who am I? We’re just people…nothing but faces in the crowd. Our life is mundane, insignificant, though we do our best to live. We love, we suffer. It’s just not that interesting to anyone else, no one is going to write a book about us. The crowd…The masses. No one has ever asked me so many questions about my life before, that’s why I’m talking so much. “Mama, put your soul away,” my girls will say. They’re always educating me. Young people today inhabit a world that’s much crueler than the Soviet Union…[
She is silent.
] It’s like life’s not for us anymore, it’s not intended for people like us; it’s somewhere else. Somewhere…things are happening, but they have nothing to do with us…I don’t go to expensive stores, I’m too shy: The security guards give me bad looks because my clothes come from the regular market. Made in China from head to toe. I ride the Metro, it terrifies me, but I do it. People who are more well off don’t ride the Metro. It’s not for everyone—it’s for the poor; it’s princes, boyars, and the taxed masses all over again. I don’t remember the last time I went to a café, I haven’t been able to afford that in ages. And the theater is a luxury now, too, even though there used to be a time when I didn’t miss a single premiere. It hurts…It hurts a lot. We lead this gray existence, and all because we’re not allowed into the new world. My husband brings home library books by the bagful, that’s the one thing we can still afford. We still have our strolls around old Moscow, through our favorite places, Yakimanka, Kitai-Gorod, Varvarka. That’s our shell; these days, everyone has to grow armor. [
She is silent.
] We were taught…Marx wrote that “Capital is theft.” And I still agree with him.

I’ve known love…I could always tell when somebody really loved me. I have an intuitive connection with the people who’ve loved me. It’s wordless. I just remembered my first husband…Did I love him? Yes. A lot? Madly. I was twenty. With a head full of nothing but dreams. We lived with his beautiful elderly mother, she was jealous of me: “You’re as pretty as I was when I was young.” She would take the flowers he’d bring me and move them to her room. Later on, I understood her, perhaps I’ve only just understood how deeply I love my girls, realized just how close you can be with your child. My therapist wants to talk me out of it: “You have a hypertrophied love for your children. You shouldn’t love them like that.” No way, my love is normal…Love! My life…It’s mine…There’s no perfect recipe…[
She is silent.
] My first husband loved me, but he had a philosophy: You can’t spend your whole life with just one woman, you have to know others as well. I gave it a lot of thought…shed many tears…Then finally, I found the strength to let him go. I was left alone with little Ksyusha. My second husband…He’s like a brother to me, and I’d always dreamed of having an older brother. At first, the whole thing troubled me. When he proposed, I didn’t know how we were going to live together. In order to have kids, the house has to smell like love. But he went ahead and moved me and Ksyusha in with him. “Let’s give it a try. If you don’t like it, I’ll take you back to your old place.” And we ended up figuring it out. Love comes in many different forms: There’s mad love, and then there’s love that resembles friendship. A friendly alliance. I like to think so, because my husband is a really good person. So what if I don’t go around in silks…

I had Dashenka…We were always with our children. In the summer, we’d go to their grandmother’s house in the country, in Kaluga Oblast. There was a river there. A meadow and a forest. Their grandmother baked them cherry pies that they still talk about. We never went to the sea, although that was our dream. As you know, honest work won’t make you rich: I’m a nurse, and my husband was a researcher at a radiological institute. But the girls always knew that we loved them.

A lot of people glorify perestroika…Everyone had very high hopes for the future. I have no reason to love Gorbachev. I remember the conversations we’d have in the staff room: “Socialism is ending—what’s next?” “Bad socialism is over, now we’re going to have good socialism.” We waited…pored over the newspapers…Pretty soon, my husband lost his job and they shut down the institute. There was a sea of unemployed people, all of them with college degrees. The kiosks appeared, then the supermarkets where they had everything, like in a fairy tale, only there was no money to buy any of it. I’d go in and come right back out. I’d get two apples and an orange when the kids were sick. How are we supposed get used to this? Accept that it’s how things are going to be from now on? How? When I’m standing in line for the cash register, there’ll be someone in front of me with a shopping cart full of pineapples and bananas…It hurts your pride. That’s why people seem so tired these days. God forbid you were born in the USSR but live in Russia. [
She is silent.
] Not a single one of my dreams ever came true…

[
When her daughter steps into the other room, she tells me this in a half-whisper.
]

How many years has it been? Three years since the attack…No, longer…I have a secret…I can’t imagine getting in bed with my husband and letting him touch me. All these years, my husband and I haven’t had any relations. I’m his wife, and yet I’m not a wife to him at all anymore. He keeps trying to talk me into it: “It’ll make you feel better.” My friend who knows everything doesn’t understand me, either: “You’re amazing. You’re so sexy. Take a look at yourself in the mirror, you’re so beautiful. Your hair…” I was born with this hair…The fact is, I’ve forgotten all about my beauty. When someone drowns, their body becomes completely saturated with water. That’s how I am, but with pain. It’s as though I’ve renounced my body and all that is left of me is my soul…

THE DAUGHTER

…The dead lay on the ground with their cellphones endlessly ringing…No one would brave going over and answering them.

…There was a girl sitting on the floor covered in blood, some guy was offering her chocolate…

…My coat wasn’t completely burned, but it was charred all over. The doctor examined me, and right away she said, “Lie down on a stretcher.” I even resisted: “I’ll get up and walk to the ambulance.” She had to yell at me: “Lie down!” I lost consciousness in the ambulance and only came to in the intensive care unit…

…Why am I silent? I had been seeing this guy, we were even…he’d given me a ring…but after I told him about what happened to me…maybe it’s completely unrelated, but we ended up breaking up. I learned my lesson, it made me realize that you shouldn’t confess things to people. You get blown up, you survive, and you end up even more vulnerable and fragile than you were before. You’re branded a victim—I didn’t want people to see that brand on me…

…Mama loves the theater, sometimes she’ll manage to get her hands on a cheap ticket. “Ksyusha, let’s go see a play.” I decline; she and Papa go by themselves. The theater doesn’t affect me anymore…

THE MOTHER

People often find it difficult to comprehend why something has happened to them, they want to be like everyone else. To hide. It’s an instinct that doesn’t turn off right away…

That suicide bomber boy, and the others like him…They come down from the mountains to tell us: “You don’t see the way they’re killing us. We’re going to do to you what they do to us.” [
Silence.
]

I’m thinking…I want to remember, when was I ever happy? I have to try to remember…I think it was only when the kids were little…

The other day, the doorbell rang, it was Ksyusha’s friends…I sat them down in the kitchen. My first impulse is always to feed the guests, I get that from my mother. For a while, young people had stopped talking about politics. Now they’re at it again. At first, they were arguing about Putin…“Putin is a Stalin clone…” “This isn’t going to last…” “Our whole country is screwed…” “It’s a question of oil and natural gas…” Here’s a question: Who made Stalin Stalin? There’s the problem of responsibility…

Should you only put people on trial if they actually murdered and tortured people or:

should it also be the informants…

the people who took the children of “enemies of the people” away from their relatives and sent them to orphanages…

the drivers who transported the arrested…

the cleaning women who washed the floors after people were tortured…

the director of the railways that conveyed political prisoners to the north in cattle cars…

the tailors who sewed camp guards’ coats. The doctors who did their dental work, took their cardiograms, all so that they could better withstand the stresses of their jobs…

those who stood silent at assemblies while others screamed, “Let the dogs die like dogs!”

From Stalin, the conversation turned to Chechnya…It’s the same thing, again: The ones who kill, who set the bombs off—surely they are responsible, but what about the people who make the bombs and shells at munitions factories, who sew the uniforms, who teach soldiers to shoot, award them medals—are they guilty, too? [
Silence.
] I wanted to cover Ksyusha with my whole body, hide her away from these conversations. She sat there with her eyes huge with terror. She looked at me…[
She turns to her daughter.
] Ksyushenka, I’m not guilty and Papa’s not guilty, either—he teaches math now. I’m a nurse. They used to bring our wounded officers from Chechnya to the hospital where I work. We’d treat them and then, of course, they’d have to go back. To keep fighting the war. Few of them wanted to return, many of them openly admitted: “We don’t want to fight.” I’m a nurse, my job is to try to save everyone…