Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (70 page)

“…They’re pillaging…tearing Russia into little pieces…slicing up the big pie!”

That godforsaken war! It had been going on somewhere far away…Far, far away…And then, it came into my home. I’d hung a cross around Olesya’s neck…It wasn’t enough. [
She weeps.
]

A day later, they brought us her body…The coffin was all wet, it was leaking…We wiped it down with bed sheets. The military administration kept telling us to hurry up, hurry up…Hurry up and bury her. “Don’t open the coffin. Nothing but mush in there.” But we opened it anyway. We clung to the hope that it had been a mistake. On television, they kept saying, “Olesya Nikolayeva…Twenty-one years old…” They had her age wrong. Maybe it was another Olesya? Not our girl. “Nothing but mush…” They issued us a death certificate: “Premeditated self-inflicted gunshot wound from a service weapon to the right side of the head…” What do I care about a piece of paper! I wanted to see her for myself, touch her. Caress her with my own hands. When we opened the coffin, her face was alive, it looked good…There was just this little hole on the left side of her head…so small, tiny…just big enough for a pencil. Another untruth, just like her age: The bullet hole was on the left side of her head and they said it was on the right. She’d gone off to Chechnya with a military police detachment with people from all around Ryazan, but only the ones from her police department helped with the burial. Her comrades. And all of them had the same question: What suicide? This is no suicide, she’s been shot from a distance of two or three meters…While the administration kept putting pressure on us. They’d help us, rush us along. They brought her back to us late at night, and the very next morning, at noon, we were already burying her. At the cemetery…Oh…You should have seen how strong I was—I was possessed with superhuman strength…They’d nail the coffin lid shut but I could have ripped it right off, I would have pulled the nails out with my teeth. None of her superiors had come to the cemetery. Everyone turned their backs on us, starting with the state…Then the church: They didn’t want to hold a service for her, she was a sinner…God wouldn’t accept the soul of a suicide. How could they? How could they do that? I’ve started going to church…I’ll light a candle…One day, I approached the priest: “Can it really be that the Lord only loves perfect souls? If that’s true, then why do we need Him at all?” I told him everything…I’ve told this story so many times…[
She falls silent.
] The priest at our church is young. He broke down in tears: “How are you still alive and not in a madhouse? Dear Lord, grant this woman the heavenly kingdom!” He prayed for my little girl…But people kept gossiping, saying she’d shot herself over a man. Or that she’d done it because she was drunk. Everyone knows that they drink nonstop out there. Men and women alike. The pain, it’s enough to drown in…

When she was packing, I’d wanted to tear everything up, smash it all to pieces. I had to hold myself back, I couldn’t sleep. My bones felt like they were breaking, spasms went up and down my whole body. I would have these dreams…I wasn’t quite asleep…Eternal ice, eternal winter. Everything a silvery blue…Sometimes, I’d see her and Nastya walking and walking over the water but never reaching shore. Nothing but water all around…I could always see Nastya, but Olesya would disappear…suddenly, she’d just be gone…I would get scared in the dream, too. “Olesya! Olesya!” I called to her. She’d reappear. But not as a living person, but as a portrait…a photograph…With a bruise on the left side of her face. In the same spot the bullet went through…[
She is silent.
] And that was just when she was packing her suitcase…“Mama, I’m going. I’ve already submitted my documents.” “You’re a single parent. They have no right to send you there.” “They’ll fire me if I don’t go, Mama. You know how it is: Volunteering is compulsory. But don’t cry, they’re not shooting anymore, they’re just rebuilding. My job will be to guard the construction sites. I’ll go down there and make some money like everyone else does.” Other girls from their department had already done their tours of duty, and everything had been fine. “I’ll take you to Egypt and we’ll see the pyramids.” That was her dream. She wanted to make her Mama happy. We were poor…We barely had anything to our names. You go into town and everywhere you look, you see ads: Buy a car…take out a loan…Buy now! Just pick it up and take it home! In every store, there’s a table in the middle of the sales floor, sometimes two, where you can sign up for credit. There’s always a line in front of those tables. People are sick of being poor, they’re all hankering to live a little. Meanwhile, I don’t always know what I’m going to feed my family, even the potatoes run out. And macaroni. Sometimes, I wouldn’t have enough for the trolleybus fare. After technical school, she enrolled at the teacher training college to study psychology. She went there for a year, and then we couldn’t afford tuition anymore. She had to quit. My mother’s pension is one hundred dollars a month, and that’s how much mine is, too. The people at the top, they’re pumping all that oil and natural gas…Those dollars aren’t trickling down to us, they’re going straight into their pockets. Regular people like us go to the store as though we’re going to a museum, just to look. And on the radio—it’s like subversive propaganda or something to incite the masses—they try to tell us to love the rich! That the rich are going to save us! That they’ll give us jobs. They show us how they vacation, what they eat…their houses with their swimming pools…personal gardeners, personal chefs…like the gentry used to have in Tsarist times. In the evening you’ll turn on the TV, and it’s so gross you’ll go straight to bed instead. A lot of people used to vote for Yavlinsky and Nemtsov
^*1
…I was a social reformer, I voted in every single election. A true patriot! I liked Nemtsov, I liked that he was young and handsome. Then everyone realized that the democrats had their eyes on the good life, too. They’d forgotten all about us. People are nothing but dust, specks of dust…Now the people have once again turned to the Communists. There were no billionaires back when they were in charge, everyone had a little bit, and that was enough for us all. We all felt like human beings. I was like everyone else.

I’m a Soviet, and so is my mother. We were building socialism and communism. Children were taught that selling was shameful and money couldn’t buy happiness. Live honestly and give your life to your Motherland—the most precious thing we have. My whole life, I had been proud of being Soviet, but now I’m somewhat embarrassed about it, like I was dumb for believing in it. We used to have communist ideals, now the ideals are capitalist: “No mercy for anyone, because no one has any mercy for you.” “Mama,” Olesya would tell me, “you’re still living in a country that hasn’t existed for a long time. You can’t help me.” What have they done to us? What have they…[
She stops abruptly.
] There’s so much I want to tell you! So much! But what’s the most important thing? After Olesya’s death, I found an old notebook of hers from school, it had an essay in it called “What Is Life?” “I want to describe the ideal that mankind should strive for…” she’d written. “The purpose of life is whatever makes you rise above…” I was the one who had taught her that…[
She bawls
.] She couldn’t even kill a mouse, and yet she went off to a war zone…All I know is that it was all wrong, but I have no idea what actually happened. They’re hiding it from me…[
She screams.
] My daughter died without leaving a trace. They can’t do this! During the Great Patriotic War, my mother was twelve, they were evacuated to Siberia. Even though they were just children, they put them to work at a factory for sixteen hours a day…Just like the adults. All for a pass to the cafeteria where they would be served a bowl of noodles and a little piece of bread. Just a bit of bread! They were making shells for the front. Children would die at their work stations because they were so little. It made sense to her why people were killing each other back then, but she can’t understand why they’re doing it now. No one can. This filthy war! Argun…Gudermes…Khankala
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…Whenever I hear those words, I turn the TV off…

I have the certificate right here: “Premeditated…gunshot wound from a service weapon…” Leaving Nastya behind…She’s only nine…Now I’m both her grandmother and her mother. I’m sick, all cut up by surgeons. I’ve had three operations. My health is terrible, and how could I possibly be healthy? I grew up in Khabarovsk Krai. In the middle of the taiga. We lived in barracks. Oranges and bananas—we’d only ever seen pictures of them. To eat, we had noodles…macaroni and powdered milk…Every so often, canned meat. Mama was recruited to the Far East after the war, when they called on the youth to master the North. They recruited them as though they were sending them to the front. Only destitute people like us went to the great construction sites. People without hearth or home. “For the fog and the fragrance of the taiga”—that’s the songs, the books. In reality, we were bloated from hunger. It was hunger that drove us to great feats. I got a little older, and then I too went to work at the construction site…Mama and I helped build the Baikal-Amur Mainline. I have a medal, “For the Construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline,” and a whole stack of certificates. [
She falls silent.
] In winter, it would be minus 50 degrees, the ground was frozen a meter down. The tall white hills. When they’re covered in snow, they get so white, you can’t even see them in good weather. Can’t make them out. I loved those hills with all my heart. Everyone has a big Motherland and their little homeland. That’s my personal homeland. The barracks had thin walls, the bathroom was outside—but we were young! We believed in the future, and our belief was unflagging. Plus, our lives really did improve year after year: No one had a TV—no one!—and then, suddenly, they were everywhere. We lived in barracks, and then they started giving people their own apartments. They promised: “The current generation of Soviets shall live to see communism.” That meant me…I was going to get to live under real communism?! [
She laughs.
] I enrolled in a university distance-learning department and got a degree in economics. You didn’t have to pay tuition fees back then—who would teach me anything now? For that, I am grateful to the Soviet state. I worked at the district executive committee in the finance department. I bought myself a beaver lamb coat…a nice goat down shawl…In winter, you bundle up until all that’s left is your nose sticking out. I’d travel around to collective farms conducting audits. At the collective farms, they raised sables, Arctic foxes, minks. By then, we weren’t too badly off. I bought my mother her own fur coat. And that’s when they decided it was time for capitalism…They promised that when the Communists left power, everyone would be happy. We’re not a trusting people, we’ve been through too much. Everyone stocked up on salt and matches. “Perestroika” sounded like “war” to us. Then, right in front of our eyes, they started pillaging the collective farms…and the factories…After that, they bought them all up for kopecks. We’d spent our whole lives building, just to watch it all be sold for a five-kopeck piece. The people were given vouchers…They cheated us…I still have mine in the china cabinet. Olesya’s death certificate…and those useless pieces of paper…Is this capitalism? I’ve seen plenty of our Russian capitalists, and they weren’t all Russians, either; there were Armenians, Ukrainians. They took out huge loans from the government and never paid them back. Their eyes gleamed like the eyes of prisoners. That characteristic gleam I’m all too familiar with. Where I’m from is covered in camps and barbed wire. Who do you think mastered the North? It was the prisoners and us, the poor. The proletariat. But that’s not how we thought of ourselves back then…

My mother made a decision…the only way out was to return to Ryazan. Go back to where we came from. There were already shootings, people were divvying up the wealth of the USSR. Grabbing whatever they could, tearing it to bits…The bad guys took over, and the smart ones became the idiots. We’d built it all then handed it over to the gangsters—that’s what happened, right? We left the north empty-handed, with nothing but our household junk. Leaving the factories to them…the mines…We rode the train for two weeks, lugging back our refrigerator, our books, our furniture—the meat grinder, the dishes, all that stuff. For two weeks, I looked out the window: There is no end nor boundary to the Russian soil. This Mother Russia of ours is all too “great and bounteous” to ever be properly run. It was 1994. Yeltsin was already in power…What awaited us at home? At home, the school teachers moonlighted for Azerbaijani grocery stall owners selling fruit and
pelmeni
. In Moscow, the market stretched from the railway station all the way down to the Kremlin. Beggars seemed to have suddenly appeared out of nowhere. But all of us were Soviet! Soviet! For a long time, everyone was ashamed, uncomfortable.

I once had this conversation with a Chechen at the market…The war had been going on for fifteen years already, they’d come to escape it here. They’re fanning out through all of Russia…getting into every corner…even while we’re supposedly at war with them…Russia is fighting the Chechens…that so-called “special operation.” What kind of war is this? The Chechen I talked to was young: “I’m not out there fighting, lady. My wife is Russian.” I heard this story once—I’ll tell it to you, too…A Chechen girl fell in love with a Russian pilot. This handsome guy. By mutual agreement, they decided he should take her away from her parents. He brought her to Russia. They got married. Everything was by the book. Their son was born. But she kept crying and crying, she felt so bad for her parents. Finally, they wrote them a letter: “Please forgive us, we love each other…” And they sent them greetings from her Russian mother. But all those years, her brothers had been looking for her, they wanted to kill her for bringing shame on their family—she’d not only married a Russian, but a Russian who’d bombed them. Killed their people. The return address led them directly to her…One of her brothers murdered her, then another one showed up to take her body home. [
Silence.
] This filthy war—this catastrophe—has come into my home. Now I collect everything…I read everything I can about Chechnya. I talk to everyone I meet…I’d like to go there. So they can kill me there. [
She cries.
] I would be so happy. That’s how strong my maternal love is…I know a woman…There was nothing left of her son, a shell had hit him head-on. “It would make me feel so much better,” she confessed to me, “if his remains were resting in his native soil. Even if it was just a little piece of him…” That tiny bit would be enough to make her glad…“You got a son or something, lady?” that Chechen had asked me. “Yes, I have a son, but my daughter was the one who died in Chechnya.” “Russians, I want to ask you: What kind of war is this? You kill us, disfigure us, and then you treat our wounds in your hospitals. You bomb and loot our homes, then you rebuild them. You try to tell us that Russia is our home, but every day, I have to bribe the police not to beat me to death for the way I look. Pay them not to rob me. I have to convince them that I haven’t come here to kill them and that I don’t want to blow up their houses. They could have killed me in Grozny…But they might also kill me here…”