Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (39 page)

He didn’t like being questioned…He had this bravado…always trying to make light of everything…this prisoner’s habit of hiding everything serious behind jokes. The bar is higher for them. For instance, he never said the word “freedom”—it was always “the outside.” “Here I am on the outside.” At rare moments, he’d tell stories…But he’d tell them so vividly, so avidly…I could just feel the happiness he’d taken out of there: like when he’d gotten his hands on some tire scraps and tied them to his felt boots. When they were transferred, he was so happy to have them! Another time, they’d gotten half a sack of potatoes…And somewhere “on the outside,” while they were working…somebody had given him a big hunk of meat. That night, in the boiler room, they made soup: “And it was just so good! So wonderful!” When they released him, they gave him a reparation payment for his father. They told him, “We owe you for the house, the furniture…” It ended up being a lot of money. He bought a new suit, a new shirt, new shoes, a camera, and went out to the best restaurant in Moscow, the National, where he ordered the most expensive things on the menu, and cognac and coffee with their signature dessert. At the end, when he’d eaten his fill, he asked someone to take a picture of him at the happiest moment of his life. “Then, when I got back to my apartment,” he recalled, “I caught myself thinking that I didn’t feel any happiness. In that suit, with that camera…Why wasn’t there any happiness? At that moment, the tires and that soup in the boiler room came back to me—now that was real happiness.” And we’d try to examine it…like…what makes happiness? He wouldn’t have given up his years in the camp for anything in the world…he wouldn’t have changed a thing about his life…That was his secret treasure trove, his wealth. He was in the camps from when he was sixteen until he was almost thirty…Count that up…I asked him, “But what if they’d never arrested you?” He’d make jokes to avoid answering, “I would have been an idiot zooming around in a bright red sports car. The latest model.” Only at the end…the very end, when he was in hospital…For the first time, he discussed it with me in earnest. “It’s like when you go to the theater. From your seat in the audience, you see a beautiful fairy tale—a carefully decorated set, brilliant actors, mysterious light, but when you go backstage…As soon as you step into the wings, you see broken planks, rags, unfinished and abandoned canvases…empty vodka bottles, food scraps. There’s no fairy tale. It’s dark and filthy…It’s like I’d been taken backstage…Do you understand?”

…They threw him in with the criminals. He was just a boy…No one will ever know what happened to him in there…

…The indescribable beauty of the Great North! Silent snows…and the light on the snow, even at night…To them, you’re just a beast of burden. They trudge you out into nature and then bring you back at night. “Trial by beauty,” he called it. His favorite saying was, “His trees and flowers turned out much better than His people did.”

…About love…How it happened to him for the first time…They were working in the forest. A column of women was being led past them on their way to work. The women saw the men and stopped dead in their tracks, refusing to go any further. The convoy commander yelled, “Forward! Keep moving!” But the women held their ground. “Forward, dammit!” “Citizen commander, let us go see the men, we can’t stand it anymore. Or we’ll scream!” “Are you nuts? You’ve lost your minds! You’re possessed!” They stood there: “We’re not going anywhere.” The orders: “You have half an hour. Disperse!!!” In the blink of an eye, the column shattered. But they all came back on time. On the dot. They came back happy. [
She is silent.
] Where does true happiness lie?

…He wrote poems in there. Someone informed on him to the head of the camp, “He’s been writing.” The head of the camp called him in: “Write me a love letter in verse.” He remembered what that man had asked him to write but was too shy to tell me. The head of the camp had a lover somewhere out in the Urals.

…His journey home, he rode on the top bunk. The train took two weeks across all of Russia. That whole time, he lay there on the top bunk, afraid of coming down. He would only smoke at night. He was scared that his travel companions would offer him something to eat and he’d break down in tears. Tell them everything. And they’d find out he’d come from the camps…Distant relatives of his father’s took him in. They had a young daughter. He hugged her, and she broke down in tears. There was something about him…He was an insanely lonely person…even with me. I realize that even with me, he was lonely…

He proudly told everyone, “I have a family now.” Every day, he was enthralled by our regular family life; he was very proud of it. But the fear…no matter what, the fear…He didn’t know how to live without it. Sheer terror. He’d wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, afraid that he wouldn’t finish his book (he was writing a book about his father), that he wouldn’t get a new translation to do (he was a technical translator from the German), that he wouldn’t be able to provide for his family. What if I suddenly left him…First, it was fear, then came the shame for being afraid. “Gleb, I love you. If you wanted me to become a ballerina, I would do it. I would go to the ends of the Earth for you.” He survived the camps, but in normal, civilian life a cop pulling him over was enough to give him a heart attack…a phone call from the building management…“How did you make it out of there alive?” “My parents loved me a lot when I was little.” We’re saved by the amount of love we get, it’s our safety net. Yes…only love can save us. Love is a vitamin that humans can’t live without—the blood curdles, the heart stops. I was a nurse, a nanny…an actress…I was everything for him.

I consider us lucky…It was an important time—perestroika! It felt like a celebration. Like any moment now, we would take off flying. Freedom was in the air we breathed. “Gleb, your time has come! You can write about everything and publish it.” Most of all, it was their time…The era of the sixties dissidents…Their triumph. I saw him so happy: “I lived to see the total victory of anticommunism.” His most important dream had come true: Communism collapsed. Now they’ll take down the Bolshevik monuments and get Lenin’s sarcophagus off Red Square; the streets won’t be named after murderers and executioners anymore…It was a time of great hope! The sixties dissidents—people can say what they like about them, but I love them all. Were they naïve? Romantics? Yes!!! He read the papers all day long. In the morning, he’d run down to the Publisher’s Union kiosk by our house with a big shopping bag. He listened to the radio and watched TV nonstop. Everyone was a bit nuts at the time. Free-dom! The word itself was intoxicating. We’d all grown up on
samizdat
and
tamizdat.
^*3
We were children of the word. Literature. You should have heard how we talked! Everyone used to speak so well! I would be cooking lunch or dinner, and he’d be next to me with a newspaper, reading to me, “Susan Sontag: Communism is Fascism with a Human Face,” “And this…listen…” That’s how we read Berdyaev, Hayek
^*4
…How had we lived before those books and newspapers? If only we’d known…Everything would have been different…Jack London has a story about this: You can live in a straightjacket, you just have to suck it up and get used to it. You can even dream. That’s how we’d always lived. So how were we going to live now? I didn’t know, but I imagined that all of us were going to live well. There were no doubts in my mind…After he died, I found a note in his diary: “I’m rereading Chekhov…‘The Shoemaker and the Devil.’ A man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for happiness. What kind of happiness does the cobbler imagine for himself? Here’s what it looks like: Riding in an open carriage wearing a new jacket and calf boots, next to a fat, large-breasted woman, holding a ham in one hand and a big bottle of bread wine in the other. He doesn’t need anything else…” [
She falls into thought.
] Apparently, he had his doubts…but we’d been so desperate for something new. Something full of kindness and light and justice. We were so excited, running around to every protest and rally…Before that, I’d been afraid of crowds. Of the mob mentality. I had always felt alienated from the crowd, those parades marching through the streets. The banners. But now, I liked all of it…such familiar faces all around—I’ll never forget those faces! I miss that time, and I know a lot of other people do, too. Our first trip abroad. To Berlin. Hearing us speaking Russian, two young German women approached our group. “Are you Russian?” “Yes.” “Perestroika! Gorby!” And they hugged us. Now I wonder, where did those faces go? Where are those beautiful people I saw in the streets in the nineties? Did they really all leave?

…When I found out he had cancer, I was up all night, in tears, and in the morning, I ran to the hospital to see him. He was sitting on the windowsill, all yellow and very happy. He was always happy whenever his life changed. First, it was the camps, then it was exile, then freedom, and now this…Death was just another change of circumstances…“Are you afraid I’m going to die?” “Yes.” “Well, first of all, I never promised you I wouldn’t. Second of all, it won’t be that soon.” “Are you sure?” As usual, I believed him. I immediately wiped away my tears and convinced myself that once again, it was time to help him. After that, I didn’t cry…Up until the very end, I didn’t cry…I would come to the ward in the morning and that’s when our regular life would begin. We used to live at home and now we lived in the hospital. We got to spend another six months together in the oncology ward…

He didn’t read much. More often, he’d tell me stories…

He knew who had informed on him. This boy…He’d been in a study group with him at the House of Young Pioneers. Either he did it of his own accord, or they forced him to, but he had written a letter criticizing Comrade Stalin and defending his father, an enemy of the people. At the interrogation, the investigator showed him that letter. His whole life, Gleb was afraid…afraid that the informant would find out that he knew…When someone told him that the guy’s kid was disabled, he got scared—what if that was retribution? For a while, we even lived in the same neighborhood and would run into each other all the time—on the street, at the store. We’d say hello. After Gleb died, I told one of our mutual friends…She couldn’t believe it. “N.? How could he? He always speaks so highly of Gleb and talks about how they were friends when they were kids.” I realized I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s as simple as that: knowing these things is dangerous. But he was aware…Other former camp inmates came by very infrequently, he didn’t seek them out. Whenever they came over, it made me feel like I didn’t belong, like they’d all come from some place where I didn’t exist. They knew more about him than I did. I saw that he had another life…which also made me realize that a woman can talk about her humiliating experiences, but a man can’t. It’s easier for a woman to discuss them because somewhere deep inside of herself, she’s prepared to endure violence—take the sex act itself…Every month, a woman begins her life anew. These cycles…nature helps her along. Many of the women who have done time in the camps are single. I have not met many couples where both the man and the woman did time. The secret of the camps doesn’t bring people together, it cuts them off from one another. His friends from there called me “child”…

“Is it interesting listening to us?” Gleb would ask me after the guests left. “What kind of question is that?” I’d get offended. “Do you know what I’m afraid of? Back when this was interesting, we had gags in our mouths, but now that we can tell our whole story, it’s like it’s too late. Nobody wants to hear about it anymore. They don’t want to read about it. People bring manuscripts about the camps to publishers and they’re returned to them unread. ‘Again with the Stalin and Beria? It’s not a commercially viable project. The readers have had their fill.’ ”

…Dying wasn’t new to him…He wasn’t afraid of this little death…Criminal brigade leaders used to take away prisoners’ bread and lose it at cards, and the prisoners would be forced to eat asphalt. Tarmac. A lot of people died that way—their stomachs would get glued shut. But he’d just stop eating and only drank.

…One boy tried to escape…He made a run for it on purpose so that they would shoot him. In the snow…in the sun…excellent visibility. They shot him in the head, dragged him back to camp with a rope, then put him up in front of the barracks—take a good look at him! They had him up there for a long time…until the spring.

…It was election day…There was a concert at the polling station. The camp choir performed. Political prisoners, Vlasovites, prostitutes, pickpockets, all of them singing about Stalin: “Stalin is our banner! Stalin is our joy!”

…At a transfer station, he met a girl. She told him what an investigator had once said to her while trying to talk her into signing a confession, “You’ll end up in hell…But you’re beautiful, some higher-up is sure to like you. That can be your salvation.”

…Spring was especially terrifying. Nature is full of changes, everything coming to life…It’s better never to ask anyone how much time they have left in their sentence. In spring, any sentence is an eternity. The birds are flying overhead, but no one lifts their eyes to admire them. In spring, prisoners don’t look at the sky…

I looked back at him from the doorway, and he waved at me. When I returned a few hours later, he’d lost consciousness. He was begging someone, “Hold on. Hold on.” But eventually, he stopped and just lay there. Three more days. I got used to that, too. There he is, lying there, and here I am, living. They brought in a bed for me and put it next to his. So, on the third day…It had gotten difficult to give him intravenous injections. He was getting blood clots…I had to give the doctors permission to stop treatment, it wouldn’t hurt him, he wouldn’t feel anything. And then he and I were left alone. No more machines, no more doctors, no one came in to check on us anymore. I lay down next to him. It was cold. I got under the blanket with him and fell asleep. When I woke up, for a moment I thought we were asleep at our house and that the balcony door had opened for some reason…like he just hadn’t woken up yet…I was afraid of opening my eyes. When I did, I remembered exactly where we were. I started fussing over him…I got up, put my hand on his face: “Ahhh…” He heard me. The agony began…and I sat there. Holding his hand, I listened to his final heartbeat. Afterward, I sat with him like that for a long time…I called the nurse, and she helped me get his shirt on. It was light blue, his favorite color. I asked her, “Can I stay here?” “Sure, go ahead. You’re not afraid?” What was there to be afraid of? I knew him like a mother knows her child. By morning, he was beautiful…The fear had evaporated from his face, the tension dissipated, all the frenzy of life had dispersed. And I noticed his subtle and elegant features. The face of an Oriental prince. So that’s what he was like! That’s what he was really like! I never knew that about him.