Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (65 page)

—My husband and I had gotten divorced…I’d sued for alimony, but he just wouldn’t pay it. My daughter had enrolled at a private college, we weren’t making ends meet. A friend of mine knew an American who had started a business in Russia. He was looking for a secretary, but he didn’t want a model with legs up to her neck, he needed someone reliable. My friend recommended me. He was very interested in our way of life, there was a lot that he didn’t understand. “Why do all Russian businessmen wear patent leather shoes?” “What does ‘grease a palm’ mean, and ‘it’s all under control’ or ‘it’s bought and paid for?’ ” Those kinds of questions. But he had big plans: Russia is a huge market! They put him out of business in a very banal way. In fact, it was child’s play. He put a lot of stock in what people said. If someone told him something, he’d believe it. He ended up losing a lot of money and decided it was time to go home. Before he left, he invited me out to a restaurant with him. I thought that we were just saying goodbye, but he raised his glass: “Let’s drink! Do you know what we’re drinking to? I haven’t made any money here, but I did manage to find myself a proper Russian wife.” We’ve been together for seven years now…

—We used to live in Brooklyn…Surrounded by Russian speech and Russian stores. Here in America, you can be delivered by a Russian midwife, go to a Russian school, work for a Russian boss, confess to a Russian priest…Yeltsin, Stalin, and Mikoyan are varieties of salami they sell at the store…Next to the chocolate-covered
salo
…Old men sit around on the benches, playing cards and dominos all day long. Holding their endless debates about Yeltsin and Gorbachev. There are Stalinists and anti-Stalinists. You walk by and overhear them saying, “Did we need Stalin?” “Of course we did.” Even as a little kid, I knew all about Stalin. When I was five…I remember my mother and I were at a bus stop, as I now know, not far from the district KGB offices, and I kept whining and crying. “Don’t cry,” my mother implored me. “Or else the bad people who took Grandpa and lots of other people away will hear us.” And she began telling me all about Grandpa. Mama needed someone to talk to…When Stalin died, at our nursery school, they sat us all down to cry. I was the only one who didn’t. Grandpa came back from the camps and got on his knees in front of my grandma. All those years, she’d done so much on his behalf…

—There are suddenly lots of young Russian guys here in America walking around in Stalin T-shirts. Putting hammer and sickle decals on their cars. They hate black people…

—We’re from Kharkov…From over there, America seemed like paradise. The land of opportunity. My first impression when we got here was that back home, we’d been trying to build communism, but here the Americans had actually succeeded. A girl we knew took us to a store that was having a sale. When we got here, my husband only had one pair of jeans, and I needed a whole new wardrobe. A skirt cost three dollars, jeans were five…ridiculous prices! The smell of pizza…good coffee…In the evening, my husband and I opened a bottle of Martini and a pack of Marlboros. Our dreams had really come true! Although, at the same time, we were forced to start from scratch at the age of forty. When you get here, you automatically go down a few rungs—forget about the fact that you’re a director, an actress, or graduated from Moscow University…My first job was as an orderly at a hospital, emptying bedpans, washing floors. I couldn’t do it. I started walking dogs for these two old men. Then I was a cashier at a supermarket…It was May 9—for me, the most important holiday. My father fought through the whole war, he made it to Berlin. I was telling my coworkers, and the senior cashier goes, “We won the war, but you Russians did well, too. You helped us.” That’s what they teach them in school. I nearly fell off my chair! What do they know about Russia? That Russians drink vodka by the glassful and there’s a lot of snow there…

—We came for the salami, but, as it turns out, the salami is not as cheap as we’d imagined…

—We leave Russia as brains and arrive here as hands…Migrant workers…My mother writes that the Tajik janitor back home has already managed to bring all of his relatives to Moscow. Now they work for him and he’s the boss. Tells them what to do. His wife is always pregnant. They slaughter a ram for their holidays right in the courtyard. Under the windows of Muscovites. And they grill their kebabs out there, too…

—I’m a rational person. All that wishy-washy stuff about the language of our grandmothers and grandfathers is nothing but sentimental nonsense. I stopped letting myself read Russian books or look at the Russian web. I want to beat everything Russian out of myself. Stop being Russian…

—My husband was very eager to leave…We brought ten cases of Russian books with us so that our kids wouldn’t forget their native language. In Moscow, at customs, they opened all of our suitcases, looking for antique books, but all they found was Pushkin and Gogol…The customs officials had a good laugh at us…I’ll still put Radio Mayak on sometimes to listen to Russian songs…

—Oh Russia, my Russia…my beloved St. Petersburg! How I wish I could return! I’d go at the drop of a hat…Glory to communism! Home! Even the potatoes here taste like total garbage. And Russian chocolate is simply divine!

—Do you miss buying underwear with ration cards? I remember studying and taking tests on communism…

—The Russian birches…and then more birches…

—My sister’s son speaks excellent English. He’s a computer guy. Spent a year living here before going back home. He said that today, living in Russia’s more interesting…

—I can also tell you that lots of people there also live well now. They have jobs, houses, cars, everything. But they’re still afraid and want to leave. Their businesses could be taken away, they can be put in jail for no reason…get beaten up in the lobbies of their buildings at night…Nobody lives by the law over there, neither at the bottom nor at the top…

—The Russia of Abramovich and Deripaska…Luzhkov
^*6
…Is that really Russia? The ship is sinking…

—Where we really ought live is Goa…and go to Russia to make money…

—

I step out onto the balcony. People are smoking and continuing the conversation: Are the people leaving Russia today the smart ones or are they dupes? At first, I didn’t believe my ears when I heard someone inside singing “Moscow Nights,” our favorite Soviet song. When I go back into the room, everyone is singing along. I am, too.

Nothing in the garden stirs,

Everything ’til morning is still,

If you only knew, just how dear they are

Oh, those Moscow nights…

*1
An island in the Pacific Sea that has alternated between Russian and Japanese rule since the nineteenth century. The USSR seized Sakhalin from the Japanese during World War II.

*2
A political commander is a military political commissar responsible for the political education of the troops, lecturing on ideology and the Party line.

*3
Footwraps are pieces of cloth wrapped around the feet, serving the same purpose as socks. They were common before socks became widely available.

*4
A press cake is made of the solids that remain after something (grains, nuts, olives, etc.) has been pressed to extract the liquids. It is often used as animal feed.

*5
The owner of a tented stall selling everyday goods.

*6
Oleg Deripaska (1968–) is a Russian businessman and the owner of the largest aluminum company in the world. Yuri Luzhkov (1936–) was the mayor of Moscow from 1992 to 2010 and co-founded United Russia, the ruling political party.

AS TOLD BY GAFKHAR DZHURAYEVA,

DIRECTOR OF MOSCOW’S TAJIKISTAN FUND

“A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden”

I know so much about death. Someday, the things I know will drive me insane…

The body is a vessel for the soul. A home. According to Muslim custom, a body must be buried as quickly as possible, preferably the same day, as soon as Allah has taken the soul. In the house of the deceased, we hang a scrap of white cloth from a nail, and it stays there for forty days. At night, the soul flies home and perches on the cloth. It listens to familiar voices and feels glad. Then it flies back.

Ravshan…I remember him well…the usual story…They hadn’t been paid in six months. He had four kids back in the Pamir region, then his father got very sick. He went to the construction bureau, asked for an advance, and they refused him. That was the last straw. He went out onto the porch and slit his own throat with a knife. They called me…I went down to the morgue…That strikingly handsome face…Unforgettable. His face…We took up a collection. It’s still a mystery to me, the workings of this inner mechanism: Nobody has a kopeck to spare, but if somebody dies they’ll instantly raise the necessary amount, people will give the last of whatever they have to help the person get buried at home and rest in their native soil. So that they won’t have to remain on foreign soil. For that, they’ll give away their last hundred rubles. If you tell them that someone needs to go home, you’ll get nothing; say a child is sick, they refuse; but if there’s been a death, here you go. They gathered all those crumpled hundred-ruble bills in a plastic bag and brought them to me, placed them on my desk. I took the money down to an Aeroflot ticket office. To the manager. The soul will fly home of its own accord, but shipping a coffin is pretty expensive.

[
She
picks up a stack of papers from her desk and begins to read.
]

…Police entered an apartment occupied by migrant workers, a pregnant woman and her husband. They started beating the husband in front of the woman because the couple didn’t have the proper resident registration documents. She started hemorrhaging—both she and her unborn child died…

…In the suburbs of Moscow, three people went missing, two brothers and their sister…Their relatives, who had come from Tajikistan to search for them, turned to our organization for help. We called the bakery where they had been working. The first time, they told us, “We don’t know anyone by those names.” The second time, the owner himself came to the phone: “Yes, I had some Tajiks working for me. I paid them for three months and that same day, they all took off. I couldn’t tell you where they went.” That’s when we went to the police. All three of them had been found bludgeoned to death and buried in the woods. The bakery owner started making threatening phone calls to the fund: “I have people everywhere. I’ll bury you, too.”

…Two young Tajiks were taken to the hospital in an ambulance from a construction site…They spent all night in a cold waiting room, and nobody helped them. The doctors didn’t conceal their feelings: “Why do you black-asses keep showing up here?”

…One night, a group of riot policemen rounded up fifteen Tajik street cleaners, marched them out of the basement where they had been living, threw them down on the snow and started beating them. Stomping on them with their steel-toed boots. One fifteen-year-old boy died…

…A mother received her son’s body from Russia. Without any of his internal organs…You can buy anything on the Moscow black market, everything a person has: kidneys, lungs, livers, pupils, heart valves, skin…

These are my brothers and sisters…I was born in the Pamir region myself. I’m a highlander. For us, good soil is worth its weight in gold; where we come from, they don’t measure wheat by the bag, they measure it by the
tubeteika.
^*1
We’re surrounded by towering mountains. Compared to them, everything man-made seems childish. Like a toy. You live with your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds. You’re up so high, it’s like you’re already in the next world. The sea is completely different, it draws you in like a magnet, but the mountains make you feel protected, they stand guard over you. Like a second set of walls for your home. Tajiks aren’t warriors; when enemies invaded our land, our people would hide up in the mountains…[
She is silent.
] My favorite Tajik song is a dirge about leaving your native land. I cry every time I hear it…The most terrifying fate for a Tajik is leaving his Motherland. Living far away from her. A man without his homeland is like a nightingale without a garden. I’ve been living in Moscow for many years now, but I always surround myself with things that remind me of home: If I see a picture of the mountains in a magazine, I’ll cut it out and put it on my wall. The same goes for pictures of flowering apricots and fields of white cotton. In my dreams, I often pick cotton…I open up the boll, it has very sharp edges, and there’s a little white clump in it, like cotton, almost weightless. You have to take it out without scratching your hands. In the morning, I wake up tired…I always look for Tajik apples at the Moscow markets, they’re the sweetest ones in the world; Tajik grapes are sweeter than sugar cubes. When I was little, I dreamed that one day, I’d see the Russian forest, mushrooms…I thought about how I would go and meet those people. That’s the other half of my soul: the peasant hut, the Russian stove,
pirozhki
. [
She is silent.
] I’m telling you about our lives…about my brothers…To you, they all look the same: black hair, unwashed, hostile. From a world you don’t understand. A stranger’s grief that God has deposited on your doorstep. But they don’t feel like they’ve come to live with strangers, their parents lived in the USSR; Moscow used to be everyone’s capital. Now, they get jobs and shelter here. In the East, they say you shouldn’t spit in the well you drink from. When they’re in school, all Tajik boys dream of going to Russia to make money…They’ll borrow from everyone in their village to buy their tickets. At the border, Russian customs officers ask them, “Who are you going to visit?” And they all answer “Nina.”…For them, all Russian women are Nina…They don’t teach Russian in school anymore. All of them bring their prayer rugs…