Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (26 page)

*20
Nikolai Ostrovsky (1904–1936) was a Soviet social realist writer best known for his novel
How the Steel Was Tempered
.

*21
Boris Nemtsov (1959–2015) was a prominent politician under Boris Yeltsin, holding several important government posts. He later became an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and was assassinated in Moscow in February 2015.

AS TOLD BY HIS MOTHER

This feels like betrayal…I am betraying my feelings, betraying our lives. Our words…They were only ever intended for us, and here I am letting a stranger in. Is this stranger a good or a bad person? It doesn’t matter anymore. Will they understand me or not…I remember there was a woman selling apples at the market who would tell anyone who listened about how she’d buried her son. Then and there, I promised myself that would never be me. My husband and I never talk about it; we weep, but each of us do it in private so that the other one doesn’t see. A single word is enough to make me break down. The first year, I couldn’t get ahold of myself at all: Why? What made him do it? I want to think…I console myself: He wouldn’t leave us like that…he just wanted to try it out, have a look…They’re so curious when they’re that age: What is going on over there? Especially boys…After he died, I combed through his notebooks, his poems. Scoured them like a bloodhound. [
She cries.
] A week before that Sunday…I was standing in front of the mirror brushing my hair…He came up to me, put his arms around my shoulders, and we stood there like that, looking in the mirror and smiling. “Igor,” I pressed myself against him, “You’re so handsome. It’s because you’re a love child. Born of a great love.” He hugged me even tighter: “Mama, you are, as usual, incomparable.” I get a chill every time I wonder whether that day, when we were standing in front of the mirror, he was already thinking about it…Was he thinking about it then?

Love…It feels strange to say that word out loud. To remember that there’s such a thing as love. There was a time when I thought that love was greater than death…that it was more powerful than anything else in the world. My husband and I met in tenth grade. The boys from the neighboring school came to our school for a dance. I don’t remember our first evening together because I didn’t see Valik, my husband; he saw me but didn’t come up to me. He didn’t even see my face, just my silhouette. But it was as though he heard a voice telling him, “This is your future wife.” That’s what he later confessed to me…[
She smiles.
] Maybe he made it up? He’s a dreamer. But magic was always with us, it has always carried me through the world. I was happy, insanely happy, irrepressible—that’s the way I used to be. I adored my husband, but I also liked to flirt with other men, it was like a game for me. You walk along, they look at you, and you like being looked at—so what if they fall just a tiny bit in love with you? “And what have I done to deserve all these gifts?” I’d often sing along with my beloved Maya Kristallinskaya. I ran through life, and now I sometimes regret that I don’t remember it all because I’ll never be that happy ever again. You need a lot of energy for love, and I’m a different person now. I’ve grown ordinary. [
She is silent.
] Sometimes I’ll be in the mood, but more often than not, it’s unpleasant to remember the way I used to be…

Igor was three or four…I was bathing him. “Mama, I love you like the fail Tsalina.” We’d had to fight hard for the letter
r
…[
She smiles.
] You can live on things like this, it’s what I live on now. The mercy of my memories. I pick up every crumb…I’m a schoolteacher, I teach Russian language and literature. A typical scene from our home life: I’m at my books, he’s in the pantry. While he’s getting the pots, pans, spoons, and forks I prepare for the next day’s lesson. He’s grown up. I sit and write and he sits at his desk writing, too. He learned how to read very young. And how to write. When he was three, we memorized poems by Mikhail Svetlov: “Kakhovka, Kakhovka—my darling rifle…/ Fly, hot bullet, fly!” I have to pause here and explain…I wanted him to grow up to be strong and brave, so the poems I’d pick out for him were all about heroes and war. The Motherland. Then, one day, my mother took me by surprise: “Vera, quit reading him those war poems. The only game he ever plays is war.” “But all little boys like to play war.” “Yes, but what Igor likes is when people shoot at him and he falls down. He likes to die! He is so eager to fall over dead, he seems to enjoy it so much it scares me. I hear him shouting to the other boys, ‘Shoot me and I’ll fall.’ Never the other way around.” [
After a long pause.
] Why didn’t I listen to my mother?

I gave him military toys: a tank, tin soldiers, a sniper rifle…He was a boy, he needed to become a warrior. The instructions for the sniper rifle read, “A sniper must kill calmly and selectively…First, he must get to know the target…” For some reason, this was considered normal, it didn’t frighten anyone. Why? We had a war mentality. “If tomorrow war should break out, if tomorrow we must depart…” I can’t find any other explanation. Today, it’s less common for children to be given swords and guns…Bang! Bang! But back then…I remember how surprised I was when one of the teachers at school told me that in Sweden I think it was, they’d outlawed war-related toys. How are you supposed to raise a man? A defender? [
Her voice breaks.
] “Keep your eye on death, on death / You poor singer and rider…” At every single gathering, without fail…Within five minutes, we’ll be remembering the war. We’re constantly singing war songs. Is there anyone else in the world like us? The Poles lived under socialism, too, and the Czechs, and the Romanians, but none of them are quite like this…[
Silence.
] I don’t know how I’m going to survive. What should I hang on to? What…

[
Her voice suddenly drops to a whisper. But to me, it feels like she’s screaming.
]

…When I close my eyes, I see him lying there in the coffin…But we were so happy…Why did he decide that death was a beautiful thing…?

…My friend took me to a seamstress: “You have to sew yourself a new dress. Whenever I’m depressed, I have a new dress made…”

…In my dreams, someone keeps stroking my head…The first year, I would run off to the park to scream…I’d frighten the birds…

He’s ten years old, no, probably eleven…After a long day at school, I barely make it home with two big shopping bags. I come in. Both of them are on the couch—one with a newspaper and the other one with a book. The apartment’s a huge mess—unbelievable! There’s a mountain of unwashed dishes…You can imagine how happy they are to see me! I pick up the broom. Barricade myself with chairs. “Get out of here!” “Never!” “Eenie, meenie, miney, mo—which one of you should I thrash first?” “Mamochka-devotchka, don’t be angry,” Igor gets out first, he’s already as tall as his father. “Mamochka-devotchka” is what he called me at home. He made it up…

In the summer, we’d usually go south, “to see the palm trees that live closest to the sun.” [
Happily.
] I remember words…our words…We were fixing to warm up his stuffy nose. It’d leave us in debt until March, we’d have to scrimp and save: first course—
pelmeni,
second course—
pelmeni,
and with tea—
pelmeni
. [
Silence.
] I remember a brightly colored travel ad for sunny Gurzuf. And the sea…Rocks and sand bleached by the sea and the sun. I still have lots of photos, I have to hide them from myself. I’m scared…They kill me inside. I immediately break down…One time, we tried to go on vacation without him. We made it halfway before turning back. “Igor!” we burst into the house. “You’re coming with us! We can’t go without you!” With a cry of “Hurray!” he jumped up on me, wrapping his arms around my neck. [
After a long pause.
] We can’t go on without him…

Why didn’t our love stop him? I used to believe that love could do anything. Again, I’m…again…

It’s in the past…He’s not with us anymore…For a long time, I was simply in a daze. “Vera,” my husband called out to me. I didn’t hear him. “Vera…” No response. Then suddenly, hysterics! I started screaming, stamping my feet, yelling at my mother, my beloved mother, “You monster, you Tolstoyan monster! And you raised us to be freaks just like you! What did we hear from you our whole lives? You have to live for others…for a higher purpose…throw yourself under a tank, go down in an airplane for your Motherland. The rumble of the Revolution…Heroic death…We were taught that death is more beautiful than life. That’s why we grew up to be monsters and freaks. And that was how I raised Igor. It’s all your fault! Your fault!!!” My mother crumpled and suddenly became very small. A little old lady. It was like a knife in my heart. For the first time in many days, I actually felt pain. Before that, even when someone on the trolleybus put a heavy suitcase down directly on my toes, I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t until my toes swelled up that night that I remembered the suitcase. [
She cries.
] I should pause here and tell you about my mother…My mother is from the generation of the pre-war intelligentsia. She’s one of the people whose eyes sparkled with tears whenever the Internationale played. She lived through the war and never forgot how a Soviet soldier had hung a red flag on the Reichstag. “Our country was victorious in such a horrible war!” Ten, twenty, forty years passed…and she would still repeat those words to us like an incantation. Like a prayer…It was her prayer. “We had nothing, but we were happy!” My mother’s conviction in this was absolute. There was no arguing with her. She loved Leo Tolstoy, “the mirror of the Russian Revolution,”
^*1
for
War and Peace,
and because the Count wanted to give everything he owned to the poor in order to save his soul. My mother wasn’t alone, all of her friends were like this, too—the first generation of Soviet intelligentsia who had grown up on Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov
^*2
…on Marxism…Could you imagine my mother sitting down and embroidering something or going out of her way to decorate our house with porcelain vases or little elephant figurines…Never! That would be a pointless waste of time. Petit bourgeois nonsense! The most important thing is spiritual labor…Books…You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough to last a lifetime, but you can’t live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky. You’re part of the grand scheme of things, there’s a grand scheme…That’s how they lived…

…There’s an old cemetery in the center of our town. Full of trees. Lilacs. People stroll through it like it’s a botanical garden. Not many old people go there, so the young laugh and kiss. Play their stereos…One night, he came home kind of late: “Where have you been?” “I went to the cemetery.” “What made you suddenly want to go to the cemetery?” “It’s interesting. You get to look people who are no longer there in the eye.”

…I opened the door to his room…He was standing at full height on the windowsill; our windowsills aren’t sturdy or level. We live on the sixth floor! I froze. I couldn’t even scream, it was like when he was little and he would climb out onto the skinniest branch in a tree or up onto the high old wall of the ruined church: “If you feel like you can’t hold on anymore, just fall toward me.” I didn’t scream or cry because I didn’t want to startle him. I crept back out of his room along the wall. Five minutes later, which felt like an eternity to me, I went in again—he’d hopped down and was walking around the room like normal. I jumped on him, kissing him, hitting him, shaking him, “Why? Tell me, why?” “I don’t know. I just wanted to see what it was like.”

…One morning, I saw funeral wreaths outside of the next building over. Someone had died. All right, so they died and that’s that. I came home from work and found out from his father that he had gone over there. I asked him, “Why? We don’t know those people.” “It was a young woman. She lay there so beautiful. And I had thought death was a scary thing.” [
She is silent.
] He was circling it…Something was pulling him toward the beyond…[
Silence.
] But that door is closed…We don’t have access to the other side.

…He’d nestle into my lap: “Mama, what was I like when I was little?” I’d start telling him…how he’d waited up for Father Christmas by the door. He would ask what bus he could take to the Thrice-Ninth Kingdom, the Thrice-Ninth Country.
^*3
He saw a Russian stove in a village and waited all night for it to take off running like in the fairy tale. He was very trusting…

…I remember how one time, there was already snow on the ground…He ran up to me: “Mama! I kissed someone today!” “You kissed someone?” “Yep. I went on my first date.” “And you didn’t tell me you were going?” “I didn’t have time. I told Dimka and Andrei and the three of us went together.” “Is that how you go on dates, three at a time?” “I was too scared to go alone.” “So how were the three of you all on a date?” “It was great. She and I walked around the slide holding hands and kissing while Dimka and Andrei stood guard.” Oh Lord! “Mama, can a fifth grader marry a ninth grader
^*4
? I mean, if it’s really love…”