Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (40 page)

His one request: “Write that I was a happy man on my tombstone. That I was loved. The most terrible torment is not being loved.” [
Silence.
] Our lives are so short…just a flash! I remember how in her old age, my mother would look out at the garden in the evenings…Her eyes…

[
We spend a long time sitting in silence.
]

I can’t…I don’t know how to live without him…Men have started pursuing me again. Bringing me flowers.

[
The next day, she calls me unexpectedly.
]

I cried all night long…wailed from the pain…All this time, I’d been escaping, fleeing, running from it. I’d barely made it out alive…and then, yesterday, I had to go back there again. You brought me back to that place…I’d been walking around all bandaged up and when I started removing the bandages, it turned out that nothing had healed. I thought I would have new skin under there, but there’s nothing. No scar tissue. The pain hasn’t gone anywhere…Everything is right where I left it…I’m afraid of handing it off to someone. No one can possibly handle it. It’s too much for ordinary hands…

THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD

Maria Voiteshonok, writer, 57 years old

I’m an
osadnik
. I was born to an exiled Polish
osadnik
officer (“osadnik” is Polish for “settler.” They received land in the Eastern Borderlands
^*5
after the Polish-Soviet war of 1921). Then, in 1939, in accordance with a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Western Belarus became part of the USSR, and thousands of
osadnik
colonists and their families were resettled to Siberia for being “dangerous political elements” (as specified in a note from Beria to Stalin). But this is Big History. I have my own little history…

I don’t know when my birthday is…or even what year I was born…With me, everything is approximate. I never found any documents. I exist, but I don’t. I don’t remember anything, but I remember everything. I think my mother was pregnant with me when they were leaving. Why do I think that? Because train whistles always upset me…and the smell of railway sleepers…the way people cry at train stations. I can take a good brand-name train, but whenever a freight train goes by, I’m in tears. I can’t handle seeing cattle cars, hearing the cries of the animals…that was the kind of train that took us away; I know although I wasn’t born yet. Still, I was there. I don’t see faces in my dreams or narratives…My dreams are all sounds and smells…

The Altai Krai. The town of Zmeinogorsk, on the banks of the Zmeyevka River…The exiles were unloaded outside of town. Next to the lake. We moved into the dirt. Into mud huts. I was born underground, and it’s where I grew up. The soil has always smelled like home to me. Water’s dripping from the ceiling—a clump of dirt falls down and bounces toward me. That’s a frog. But I was little, I didn’t know that you were supposed to be afraid of these things. I slept with two little goats on a warm spread of goat droppings…My first word was “b-a-a-a”…The first sound I made, instead of “ma”…or “mama.” My older sister Vladya recalled how surprised I was when I learned that goats don’t talk like we do. I was confused, I thought they were our equals. We shared a world, it seemed indivisible. I still don’t feel the difference between us, the distinction between man and animal. I always talk to them…they understand me…and the beetles and spiders do, too. They were all around me…Such colorful beetles, it was as though they’d been painted. My toys. In spring, we’d go out into the sunshine together, crawling through the grass in search of food. Warming ourselves. In winter, we’d go dormant like the trees, hibernating from hunger. I had my own school, humans weren’t my only teachers. I can hear the trees and the grass, too. For me, there’s nothing more interesting than animals, they’re truly fascinating. How can I cut myself off from that world, from those smells…? I simply can’t. Finally, the sun would come out! Summer! I’d go above ground…The beauty all around me was blinding, and no one had to cook anyone anything. On top of that, everything was singing, all the colors were out. I tasted every single little blade of grass, every leaf, each flower…every little root. One time, I ate so much henbane I nearly died. I remember entire tableaux…Bluebeard Mountain and the blue light spilling down it…That light…it was coming from the left, down the slope. Lighting the mountain from top to bottom…Those sights! I’m afraid that I don’t have the talent to convey it all. Resurrect it. Words are only a supplement to our emotional states. Our feelings. Bright red poppies, turk’s cap lilies, peonies…All of them spread out before me. Right under my feet. Or another image…I’m sitting next to a house. A sunspot is creeping down the wall…it’s so many different colors…Constantly changing. I sat there for a long, long time. If it weren’t for those colors, I would have probably died. I simply wouldn’t have survived. I don’t remember what we ate…If we had any kind of real food at all…

In the evenings, I would see the blackened people marching. Black clothes, black faces. They were exiles coming home from the mines…All of them looked exactly like my father. I don’t know whether or not my father loved me. Did anyone love me?

I have very few memories…There aren’t enough of them. I root around in the darkness trying to unearth anything I can. It doesn’t happen very often…It’s very rare that I will suddenly remember something that I didn’t remember before. My memories are bitter, but they always make me happy. I’m terribly happy whenever a new one floats up.

I can’t remember anything about the winter…In winter, I would never leave our mud hut. Day was the same as night. Nothing but twilight. Not a single spot of color…Did we own anything other than bowls and spoons? No clothes…For clothes, we would wrap ourselves in rags. Not a single spot of color. Shoes…What did we have by way of shoes? Galoshes, I remember galoshes…I had galoshes, too, they were big and old, like Mama’s. They had probably been hers…I got my first coat in the orphanage, as well as my first pair of mittens. A little hat. I remember Vladya’s face barely growing whiter in the darkness…She would lie there and cough for days on end, she’d gotten sick in the mines, tuberculosis. I already knew that word. Mama wouldn’t cry…I don’t remember Mama ever crying. She didn’t talk very much, either, and eventually, she stopped talking altogether. When the coughing subsided, Vladya would call me over: “Repeat after me…This is Pushkin.” I would recite: “The frost and sun, a gorgeous day! You’re dreaming still, beautiful friend!” I tried to picture winter. How it had been for Pushkin.

I’m a slave of the word…I have an absolute belief in words. I always expect to hear the words I’ve been waiting for, even from strangers, even more so from strangers. With strangers, you can harbor hopes. I feel like I want to say something…and then I decide to…I’m ready. When I start telling someone, afterwards, I can’t find anything in the place I’ve been describing. It’s drained, the memories have fled. It instantly transforms into a hole. Afterwards, I have to wait a long time for the memories to come back to me. That’s why I usually keep silent. I am refining everything within myself. The paths, the labyrinths, the burrows…

The scraps…Where had those bits of fabric come from? They were many different colors, a lot of them magenta. Someone had brought them to me and I sewed little people out of them. I would cut off pieces of my hair to make them hairdos. They were my friends…I’d never seen a doll, I didn’t know a thing about them. By then, we lived in the town, but not in a house—we lived in a basement. With one little blacked-out window. We even had an address: 17 Stalin Street. Just like other people…like everyone else…We had an address now, too. I would play with a girl there…The girl lived in a real house, not a basement. She wore dresses and shoes while I was still in my mother’s galoshes…I brought my scraps over to show her, they looked even prettier on the street than they had in the basement. The girl asked me for them, she wanted to trade me something, but I wouldn’t do it for anything in the world! Her father came home. “Don’t play with that pauper girl,” he scolded her. I saw that they had cast me out. I had to make a quiet retreat, get out of there as soon as I could. Of course, these are the words of an adult, not children’s thoughts. But the feeling…I remember the feeling…It’s so painful, you don’t even feel hurt or sorry for yourself, it’s like you suddenly have a lot of freedom. But there’s no self-pity…When there’s still some self-pity left, it means that you haven’t gone so far that you’ve left humanity behind. But once you have, you don’t need people anymore, you’re self-sufficient. I went too far…It’s difficult to hurt my feelings. I hardly ever cry. I laugh at all the regular kinds of pain, women’s problems…For me, it’s all play-acting…in the play that is life. But whenever I hear a child crying…I can never walk past a poor person…I will never just walk past them. I remember that smell, the odor of tragedy…I pick up the wavelength, I’m still tuned in to those frequencies. That’s the smell of my childhood. My diapers.

I remember walking with Vladya. We were carrying a down shawl…a beautiful object intended for some other world. She’d made it for a customer. Vladya knew how to knit, and that was the money we lived on. The woman paid us, and then she said, “Let me cut you a bouquet.” A bouquet—for us? We’re standing there, two beggar girls in some kind of respectable setting…Cold and hungry…And here she is giving us flowers! The only thing we ever thought about was bread, but this person saw that we were capable of thinking about other things as well. You’re locked up, walled in by your circumstances, and suddenly, someone cracks the window…Lets in some fresh air. It turns out that besides bread, besides food, people were capable of giving us flowers! It meant that we really were no different than anyone else. We…were like everyone else…This broke the rules: “Let me cut you a bouquet.” She wasn’t going to pick them or gather them, she was going to cut them for us from her garden. From that moment on…maybe that was the key for me, it opened the door…My world turned upside down. I remember that bouquet…It was a big bouquet of cosmos…I always plant them at my dacha now. [
We’re actually at her dacha. There’s nothing but trees and flowers all around.
] I recently went to Siberia, to Zmeinogorsk. I went back…I looked for our street…our house, our basement…but the house was gone, it had been demolished. I asked everyone: “Do you remember us?” One old man remembered that yes, there was a beautiful girl who had lived in a basement there, she was sick. People remember beauty more than they remember suffering. The reason that woman had given us the bouquet was also because Vladya was beautiful.

I went to the cemetery…Near the gates, there was a guardhouse with boarded-up windows. I knocked for a long time. The guard came out, he was blind…What kind of omen was this? “Would you mind pointing out where they buried the exiles?” “Oh…over there…” and he waved his hand up and down. Some people led me out to the furthest corner…There was nothing but grass there…Nothing else left. That night I couldn’t sleep, I felt like I was suffocating. I was having a spasm…It felt like someone was choking me…I ran away from the hotel and went to the station. I walked through the empty town. The station house was closed. I sat down on the tracks and waited for morning. A guy and a girl were sitting on the banks of the railway. Kissing. It finally got light out. The train came. An empty tram car…We got in: me and four men in leather jackets with shaved heads. They looked like convicts. They started offering me bread and pickles. “Wanna play some cards?” I wasn’t afraid of them.

Not long ago, I was on the trolleybus and suddenly remembered…Vladya used to sing this song: “I went searching for my darling’s grave / But her grave is hard to find…” Turns out that it also used to be Stalin’s favorite song…he’d cry whenever he heard it. I immediately stopped liking it. Friends would come to see Vladya, they’d invite her out to dances. I remember all of that…I was already six or seven. I saw how instead of a waistband, they’d sew wires into their underwear. So that no one could rip them off. There were only exiles out there…convicts…There were a lot of murders. I knew about love already. There was a good-looking guy who would come to see Vladya when she was sick. She’d be lying there in rags, coughing. But the way he would look at her…

It’s all very painful, but it’s mine. I’m not running from my past…I can’t say that I’ve accepted everything, that I’m grateful for the pain. There needs to be another word for how it makes me feel. I won’t be able to find it right now. I know that when I’m in this state, I’m far away from everyone. Alone. I have to get a handle on the suffering, own it completely, find my way out of it, and also come back from it with something new. It’s such a victory, it’s the only meaningful thing to do. That way, you’re not left empty-handed…Otherwise, why descend into hell?

Someone led me up to the window: “Watch, they’re taking your father away…” A woman I didn’t recognize was pulling something along on a sled. Someone or something…wrapped in a blanket and tied up with rope. Soon afterwards, my sister and I buried our mother. We were left all alone. Vladya could barely walk by then, her legs would give out. Her skin peeled off like paper. Someone brought her a bottle…I thought it was medicine, but it was actually some kind of acid. Poison. “Don’t be scared…” She called me over and handed me the bottle. She wanted us to poison ourselves together. I took it and threw it into the stove. The glass shattered…The stove was cold, there hadn’t been anything in there for a long time. Vladya burst into tears: “You’re just like our father.” Somebody found us…maybe her friends? Vladya was unconscious…They sent her to the hospital and me to the orphanage. My father…I want to remember him, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t see his face. His face isn’t anywhere in my memory. Later on, I saw what he looked like when he was young, my aunt showed me a photograph. It’s true…I do look like him…That’s our connection. My father married a beautiful peasant girl. From a poor family. He wanted to make a fancy lady out of her, but my mother always wore a kerchief pushed down low on her forehead. She was no lady. In Siberia, my father didn’t live with us for very long…He moved in with another woman. I had already been born…I was a punishment! A curse! No one had the strength to love me. My mother didn’t have it, either. It’s built into my cells: her despair, her pain…The lack of love…I can never get enough love, even when somebody loves me, I don’t believe it, I need constant proof. Signs. I need them every day. Every minute. I’m hard to love, I know…[
She is silent for a long time.
] I love my memories…I love my memories because everyone is alive in them. I have everyone: my mother, my father, Vladya…I always need to sit at a long table. With a white tablecloth. I live alone, but I have a big table in my kitchen. Maybe they’re all here with me…Sometimes I’ll be walking along, and suddenly I’ll imitate someone else’s gesture. It’s not mine…It’s Vladya’s, or Mama’s…I’ll think that our hands are touching…