Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (64 page)

The second day…

I bought a rose. I had practically no money, but I went down to the market and bought the biggest rose I could find. And here’s another thing—can you explain it? A gypsy woman came up to me, “Let me tell your fortune, honey. I can tell by your eyes that…” I ran away from her. What did I need my fortune for? I could tell for myself that the mystery was standing right there in the doorway. The mystery, the secret, the shroud…First, I went to the wrong apartment—a man opened the door, an undershirt drooping off of his body, visibly wasted. He saw me standing there with the rose and froze: “Fuck!” I went up to the next floor…A strange old woman in a knitted beret peered out at me through the chain: “Lena, it’s for you.” That evening, she played the piano for us, told us stories about the theater. She was an old actress. They had a big black cat, the household tyrant, who took an immediate dislike to me, although I don’t know why, I tried to get him to like me…Their big black cat…While the mystery is happening, it’s like you’re not there. Do you understand what I’m talking about? You don’t have to be a cosmonaut, an oligarch, or a hero, you can just be happy and experience everything there is to experience in a regular two-bedroom apartment—fifty-eight square meters, a full bathroom—surrounded by old Soviet junk. It got to be midnight, two in the morning…I had to go, but I didn’t understand why I should ever leave this house again. More than anything, it felt like a memory…I’m looking for the right words…It was as though I was remembering something that I had forgotten for a very long time; now it was all coming back to me. I reconnected. Something like that…I think it’s like…what a person experiences after spending many days in a monk’s cell. The world suddenly appears to you in all of its infinite detail. All of its contours. Its secret becomes as accessible as any other object—say, a vase—but in order to understand this, it has to be painful. How can you understand something unless it hurts? It has to come with a great deal of pain…

…The first time anyone explained anything to me about women I was seven, it was my friends…they were seven, too. I remember how excited they were when they figured out that they knew and I didn’t—like, now we’re going to open your eyes. They started drawing me diagrams with sticks in the sand…

…I realized a woman was a different kind of being when I was seventeen. Not from reading it in a book—I felt it on my skin, the feeling of something utterly different from myself so close to me, this huge difference that shocked me with its starkness. There’s something hidden inside of the vessel of woman that I will never have access to…

…Picture the soldier’s barracks…It’s Sunday. No planned activities. Two hundred men are holding their breath in front of a television watching aerobics, women in skin-tight outfits exercising on the screen…The men sit frozen like the statues on Easter Island. It was a real catastrophe if the TV broke, the person whose fault it was could have been killed. Do you understand? This is all about love…

The third day…

You get up in the morning, and you don’t have to run off anywhere because you remember that she exists, you’ve found her. Sorrow loses its hold on you…You’re not alone anymore. You suddenly become aware of your body…your hands, your lips…You start paying attention to the sky and the trees outside your window. For some reason, everything appears very close, it has all grown claustrophobically close to you. Things like this only happen in dreams…[
A pause.
] In the evening paper, we found an ad for a dreadful apartment in a dreadful neighborhood in the new buildings at the edge of town. All weekend long, from morning till night, men sit around in the courtyard swearing, playing cards and dominoes for bottles of vodka. A year later, we had our daughter…[
A pause.
] And now, I’ll tell you about death…Yesterday, the whole city buried one of my classmates, he was a police lieutenant…His coffin got shipped in from Chechnya and they didn’t even open it, they wouldn’t show his mother the body. What was in there? There was a gun salute and all that. Glory to the heroes! I went with my father…His eyes sparkled…Do you understand what I’m talking about? People aren’t prepared for happiness, they’re ready for war, for ice and hail. I don’t know any happy people other than my three-month-old daughter…I’ve never met anyone else who’s happy…Russian people don’t expect to ever be happy. [
A pause.
] Everyone sane is taking their children out of this country. A lot of my friends have already left…They call me from Israel and Canada. I’d never thought about leaving before. Leaving, leaving…I started considering it only after my daughter was born. I want to protect the people I love. My father will never forgive me. That I am sure of.

A RUSSIAN CONVERSATION IN CHICAGO

We met again—this time, in Chicago. The family had more or less settled into their new home. A group of Russians got together, Russian food and Russian conversation. In addition to the eternal Russian questions, what is to be done and who is to blame, there was another one: to leave or not to leave?

—

—I left because I got scared…Every revolution we have ends in people taking advantage of the disorder to rob one another and pummel the kikes. There was a real war going on in Moscow. Every day, someone else would get blown up or murdered. In the evening, you couldn’t go out on the street without a fighting dog. I got a bull terrier…

—Gorbachev opened the doors of the cage and we made a run for it. What did I leave behind? A shitty two-bedroom apartment in a Khrushchyovka. It’s better to be a well-paid cleaning woman than a doctor scraping by on a bum’s salary. We all grew up in the USSR: In school, we collected scrap metal and loved the song “Victory Day.” We were raised on the grand fairy tales about fairness; on Soviet cartoons, where everything is clearly delineated: This is good and this is evil. A kind of corrected version of reality, a world where everything was in its right place. My grandfather died at Stalingrad for his Soviet Motherland, for communism. But what I really wanted was to live in a normal country. I wanted cute curtains, little cushions, for my husband to come home from work and put on his robe. The Russian soul isn’t so strong in me, I don’t seem to have very much of it. I skipped out to the States. Now I eat strawberries in the winter. There’s tons of salami here, and it’s not a symbol for anything at all…

—In the nineties, everything was fun and magical…You looked out the window and saw a protest on every street corner. But soon enough, the fun and magic ran out. We’d asked for the free market, and that’s what we got! My husband and I are engineers, but so were half of the people in our country. They didn’t stand on ceremony with us: “You’re out with the trash.” And yet we were the ones who had brought about perestroika, we were the ones who had dug communism’s grave. Now we were useless. I’d rather not think about it…Our little girl would say she was hungry, but there was nothing to eat in the house. There were notices up all over town: I’ll buy…I’ll buy…“I’ll buy a kilogram of food”—not meat, not cheese, but a kilogram of any kind of food at all. We were happy if we managed to get our hands on a kilo of potatoes. At the market, they started selling press cakes,
^*4
like in wartime. Our neighbor’s husband was shot in the hallway of our building. He was a
palatochnik.
^*5
He lay there for half a day, barely covered by a newspaper. In a puddle of blood. You’d turn on the TV: A banker was killed over here, a businessman over there…In the end, a gang of thieves took over everything. The time is coming when the people will descend on Rublevka. With axes…

—They’re not going to go after Rublevka, they’re going to attack the cardboard boxes at the markets, the ones that the migrant workers live in. They’ll start murdering Tajiks and Moldovans…

—I don’t give a fuck about anything! They can all drop dead. I’m going to live for myself…

—I decided to leave when Gorbachev returned from Foros and said that we weren’t rejecting socialism. In that case, I’m out! I don’t want to live under a socialist system! That way of life was boring. From a young age, we knew that first we would be Little Octobrists, then Pioneers, then join the Komsomol. Our first salary would be sixty rubles, then eighty, then, toward the end of our lives, it’d go all the way up to 120…[
Laughs.
] Our class leader in school tried to spook us: “If you listen to Radio Liberty, you’ll never get into the Komsomol. And what if our enemies learn of this?” The funniest part is that she lives in Israel now…

—I used to be on fire with the Idea, more than just your typical citizen. Thinking about it makes me want to cry…The putsch! Tanks looked so crazy in the center of Moscow. My parents came into town from the dacha to stock up on groceries in case civil war broke out. That gang! That junta! They thought that all they had to do was call in the tanks and that would be enough. Like people only wanted one thing, food, and as long as you gave it to them, they would agree to anything. The masses swept the streets…The nation awoke…It was only for a moment, it lasted one second…Like some seed had suddenly germinated…[
Laughs.
] My mother is a flighty person, she goes around without a thought in her head. She’s completely removed from politics and lives according to the principle that life is short, you have to take everything you can get in the moment. But even she went out to the White House with her umbrella slung over her shoulder…

—Ha, ha, ha…Instead of freedom, they gave us vouchers. That’s how they divvied up the wealth of a great nation: our oil, our natural gas…I’m not sure how to express these thoughts…Some people get the bagel, others get the bagel hole. You were supposed to use the vouchers to buy stocks from various enterprises, but very few people actually knew how to do that. Under socialism, we were never taught how to make money. My father would bring home these weird advertisements for companies like Moscow Real Estate, Oil-Diamond-Investa, Norilsk Nickel. He and my mother would argue in the kitchen, and in the end they sold everything they had to some guy in the Metro and spent the money on a cool leather jacket for me. The whole lot. That jacket is what I wore to America…

—We still have our vouchers. In thirty years, I’ll sell them to a museum…

—You can’t even fathom how much I hate that country…I hate the Victory Day Parade! All those prefab concrete apartment blocks with their balconies crammed full of jars of pickled tomatoes and cucumbers. They make me sick…All that old furniture…

—The Chechen war began…Our son would have had to enlist the following year. Hungry miners showed up to the capital to bang their helmets on the Red Square cobblestones. In front of the Kremlin. It was hard to tell where all of this was headed. The people in Russia are magnificent, they’re treasures, but you can’t live there. We left for the sake of our kids, turning ourselves into the foundation for them to build on. But now they’ve grown up and they’re terribly distant from us…

—Um—um—um…How do you say it in Russian? I forget…Emigration is the norm, Russian people can’t live where they’d like to, where they’d be most interested in living. Some people leave Irkutsk for Moscow, others leave Moscow for London. The whole world has become a caravanserai…

—A true patriot can only hope for Russia to be occupied. That someone comes and occupies it…

—I worked abroad for a while and then returned to Moscow…I was conflicted: I wanted to live in a familiar environment where I could find any book on the shelf with my eyes closed, like in my own apartment, but at the same time, I wanted to blast off into a world without limits. Am I staying or going? I couldn’t decide. It was 1995…Then, one day, I was walking, as I remember it now, down Gorky Street, and there were two women in front of me having a loud conversation…I couldn’t understand what they were saying—but they were speaking Russian! I was dumbfounded! There’s no other word…It was bewildering…They were using these new words and, more importantly, unfamiliar intonations. Tons of southern dialect. Even their facial expressions were somehow different…I had only been gone a few years, but already I was a foreigner here. Time was moving at a clip, it simply bolted by. Moscow was filthy—what capital city sheen?! There were heaps of garbage everywhere. The dregs of freedom: beer cans, brightly colored wrappers, orange peels…everyone was munching on bananas. It’s not like that anymore. They’ve all had their fill now. I realized that the city I used to love, where I had been so happy and comfortable, no longer existed. Real Muscovites were either sitting at home horrified, or they’d already left. Old Moscow had receded and a new population had moved in. I wanted to pack my bags and flee right then and there. I hadn’t even been that afraid during the August putsch
.
When that happened, I was intoxicated! There was a photocopier at our college, we’d make copies of flyers, and then my friend and I would drive them down to the White House in my old Zhiguli; we went back and forth past the tanks. I remember how surprised I was to see the patches on their armor. Square metal patches, screwed on with regular screws…

In all the years I’d been gone, my friends had continued to live in a state of total euphoria: The revolution had succeeded! Communism had fallen! For some reason, everyone was positive that it would all end well simply because Russia was full of educated people. Plus, it’s an incredibly wealthy country. But Mexico is rich, too…The thing is, you can’t buy democracy with oil and gas; you can’t import it like bananas or Swiss chocolate. A presidential decree won’t institute it…You need free people, and we didn’t have them. And they still don’t have them there. In Europe, they’ve been tending to democracy for the past two hundred years with the same kind of care they devote to their lawns. At home, my mother cried: “You say that Stalin’s bad, but he led us to victory. And now you want to betray your Motherland.” One of my oldest friends came over. We were drinking tea in the kitchen. “What happens next? Nothing good, not until we shoot every last commie.” More blood? A few days later, I submitted my application to leave…