Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (54 page)

I waited, and waited…and waited…Abulfaz didn’t join us in a month…or six months. It took him seven years. Seven years…seven…If it hadn’t been for my daughter, I wouldn’t have made it. My daughter saved me. For her sake, I held on with all my strength. In order to survive, you need to find at least the thinnest thread…In order to survive waiting that long…It was morning, just another morning…He stepped into our apartment and embraced us. Then he just stood there. One minute he was standing there in the entrance, and the next, I was watching him collapse in slow motion. Moments later, he was lying on the floor, still in his coat and hat. We dragged him to the sofa and rested him on top of it. We got so scared: We had to call a doctor, but how? We weren’t registered to live in Moscow, we didn’t have insurance. We were refugees! As we were trying to figure out what to do, my mother burst into tears. My daughter was in the corner, staring with wild eyes…We’d waited for Papa for so long, and now, here he was, dying. Finally, he opened his eyes: “I don’t need a doctor, don’t worry. It’s over! I’m home.” I’m going to cry now…Now I’m going to cry…[
For the first time in our entire conversation, she breaks down in tears.
] How could I not cry? For a month, he followed me around the apartment on his knees, kissing my hands. “What are you trying to say?” “I love you.” “Where have you been all this time?”

…They stole his passport…and after he got a new one, they did it again…It was all his relatives’ fault…

…His cousins came to Baku…They’d been forced out of Yerevan where they’d lived for several generations. Every night, they’d tell stories…always making sure that he could hear…A boy had been skinned alive and hanged from a tree. They’d branded a neighbor’s forehead with a hot horseshoe…And then, and then…“And where do you think you’re going?” “To be with my wife.” “You’re leaving us for our enemy. You’re no brother of ours. You’re not our son.”

…I’d call him…They’d say, “He’s not home,” and tell him that I’d called and said I was getting remarried. I kept calling and calling. His sister would answer the phone: “Forget this phone number. He’s with another woman now. A Muslim.”

…My father…He wanted me to be happy…He took away my passport and gave it to some guys to put a stamp in it certifying that I was divorced. To falsify my documents. They wrote something in it, washed it off, tried to fix it, and in the end, they made a hole in my passport. “Papa! Why did you do that? You know I love him!” “You love our enemy.” My passport is ruined, it’s not valid anymore…

…I read Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet…
two enemy families, the Capulets and the Montagues. It’s about my life…I understood everything, every word…

I didn’t recognize my daughter. She started smiling from the moment she saw him, “Papa! Papochka!” She was little…Before he came home, she’d take his photos out of the suitcase and kiss them. But only when she thought I wasn’t looking…so I wouldn’t cry…

But this is not the end…You think that’s it? The end? Oh no, not yet…

…We live here as though we’re at war…Everywhere we go, we’re foreigners. Spending time by the sea would cure me. My sea! But there’s no sea anywhere near here…

…I was a cleaning woman in the Metro, I scrubbed toilets. I dragged bricks and sacks of concrete at a construction site. Right now, I clean at a restaurant. Abulfaz renovates apartments for rich people. Nice people pay him, bad people cheat him. “Get the hell out of here,
churka!
^*2
Or we’ll call the police.” We’re not legally registered to live here…we have no rights…There are as many of us here as there are grains of sand in the desert. Hundreds of thousands of people fled their homes: Tajiks, Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Chechens…They escaped to Moscow, the capital of the USSR, only now it’s the capital of another country. You won’t find our nation anywhere on the map…

…My daughter finished school a year ago…“Mama, Papa…I want to continue my education!” But she doesn’t have a passport…We live like transients. We rent from an old lady, she moved in with her son and rents us her one-bedroom apartment. The police knock on the door wanting to check our documents…and we freeze like mice. Once again, we’re living like mice. They’ll send us back—but to where? Where can we go? They can kick us out in twenty-four hours! We don’t have the money to buy them off…and we’re not going to find another apartment as good as ours. Everywhere you go, you see ads that say, “Will rent an apartment to a Slavic family,” “Will rent to a Russian Orthodox family. Others need not apply.”

…We never leave the house at night! If my daughter or husband are late, I take valerian. I beg my daughter not to wear too much makeup or flashy dresses. They killed an Armenian boy, they stabbed a Tajik girl to death…they stabbed an Azerbaijani. We used to all be Soviet, but now we have a new nationality: “person of Caucasian descent.” In the morning, I run to work. I never look young men in the eye because I have dark eyes and black hair. On Sundays, if we leave the house, we’ll stroll through our own neighborhood, not straying far from our house. “Mama, I want to go to the Arbat. I want to walk around on Red Square.” “We can’t go there, daughter. That’s where the skinheads hang out. With swastikas. Their Russia is for Russians. Not for us.” [
She falls silent.
] No one knows how many times I’ve wanted to die.

…My little girl…Since childhood, she’s heard the words
“churka,”
“darkie”…When she was very little, she didn’t understand. When she’d come home from school, I’d kiss her and kiss her so she would forget those awful words.

All the Armenians left Baku for America. They were taken in by a foreign country…My mother, my father, and many of our relatives moved there. I went to the American embassy myself. “Tell us your story,” they said. I told them about my love…They were silent; for a long time, they didn’t say anything. Young Americans, they were very young. Then they started discussing it among themselves: Her passport is all messed up, and it’s weird, where was her husband for seven years? Is he really her husband? The story is too terrifying and beautiful to believe. That’s what they said. I know a little English…I realized that they didn’t believe me. But I have no proof other than my love for him…Do you believe me?

“I believe you…” I tell her. “I grew up in the same country as you. I believe you!” [
And both of us cry.
]

*1
Traditional Central Asian teahouses.

*2
Russian racial slur for a person from the Caucasus region or Central Asia.

AS TOLD BY HER DAUGHTER

On a time when everyone lived the same way

Do you know Moscow well? It was in the Kuntsevo district…We had a three-room apartment in a five-story building, we got it when we took my grandma in. After my grandpa died, she lived alone for a long time, but then she began to decline, and we decided that we should all live together. I was excited, I loved my grandma. We’d go cross-country skiing, play chess. She was an amazing grandma! As for my father…I had one, but he didn’t live with us for long. He started screwing up, getting drunk with his buddies all the time, so Mama asked him to leave…He worked at a restricted-access military manufacturing plant…I remember how when I was little, my father would come over on weekends and bring me presents, candy and fruit. He always tried to make it the very biggest pear, the biggest apple. He wanted to amaze me. “Close your eyes, Yulia—
voilà!
” He had this beautiful laugh…but later on, my father disappeared…The woman he lived with after us—she was a friend of my mother’s—kicked him out, too. She got sick of his benders. I don’t know whether or not he’s alive, but if he were alive, he would be looking for me…

Until I was fourteen, we led a cloudless existence. Until perestroika…We did just fine until capitalism arrived, and they started talking about “the market” on TV. No one understood what it was exactly, and no one was explaining anything, either. It all started with being allowed to badmouth Lenin and Stalin. Mostly, it was young people who did the badmouthing, older people kept silent, they would get off the trolleybus if they heard someone deriding the Communists. Like at school—our young math teacher was against the Communists while our older history teacher supported them. Or at home, my grandma would say, “Instead of communists, we’re going to have speculators.” My mother disagreed: “No, we’re going to have a beautiful, fair life.” She went to rallies, breathlessly recounted Yeltsin’s speeches. But Grandma was unshakable: “They’ve swapped socialism for bananas. Chewing gum…” Their debates began in the morning, then Mama would go to work, and they would resume in the evening. Whenever Yeltsin appeared on TV, Mama would hurry over to watch: “What a great man!” Grandma would cross herself: “He’s a criminal, may the Lord forgive me.” She was a dyed-in-the-wool communist. She voted for Zyuganov.
^*
Everyone had started going to church, and my grandma did, too. She’d cross herself and keep the fasts, but the only thing she ever really believed in was communism…[
Silence.
] She liked telling me stories about the war…When she was seventeen, she’d volunteered to go to the front, and that’s where my grandfather had fallen in love with her. She’d dreamed of being a telephone operator, but the division she was assigned to needed a cook, so she became a cook. Grandpa was a cook, too. They fed the wounded in the field hospital. Delirious, the wounded would scream, “Come on! Forward! Advance!” It’s too bad, she told me so many stories, but I only remember bits and pieces…Nurses would always have buckets of chalk so that whenever they ran out of pills and powders, they’d make chalk placebos to keep the wounded men from yelling and beating them with their crutches…There was no TV back then, no one had ever seen Stalin, but everyone wanted to see him. And my grandma did, too—she worshiped him until her dying day: “If it weren’t for Stalin, we’d be licking the German’s asses.” She could swear like a sailor when she wanted. My mother didn’t like Stalin, she called him a fiend and a butcher…I would be lying if I said that I gave any of this very much thought at the time…I was just living my life, enjoying myself. My first love…

My mother was a dispatcher at a geophysics research institute. We got along well. I’d tell her all my secrets, even the kinds of things that you don’t usually share with your mother. You could do that with her, she wasn’t like a grown-up at all, she was more like my older sister. She loved books, music—that was her life. Grandma was the one at the helm…Mama said that even when I was very little, I was a golden child. I was never difficult, she never had to coerce me into doing anything. I really did adore her…I’m glad I look like her—the older I get, the stronger the resemblance. We have practically the same face. It makes me really happy…[
She is silent.
] We weren’t well off, but we got by. Everyone we knew lived the same way we did. It was even fun. Mama’s friends would come over all the time and they’d talk and sing songs. I’ve known Okhudzhava since childhood:

There once was a soldier

Handsome and bold

But he was a toy:

Paper soldier…

My grandma would put a bowl of
bliny
on the table, she also baked really good pies. A lot of men pursued my mother, they’d bring her flowers and buy me ice cream. One time, she even asked me, “May I get married?” I wasn’t against it because my mother was beautiful, and I didn’t want her to be lonely. I wanted a happy Mama. People always noticed her on the street, one man would turn around, then another. “What are they doing?” I would ask when I was little. “Come on! Let’s go!” my mother laughed, a kind of special laugh. Not like her regular laugh. We really were happy. Later, after I was left all alone, I would come back to our street and look up at our old windows. One time, I couldn’t help myself and rang our doorbell—a Georgian family was living in our apartment now. They probably thought I was a beggar, they tried to give me money and some food. I burst into tears and ran away…

Soon, my grandma got sick. Because of her illness, she was always hungry, every five minutes she’d jump out into the stairwell and shout that we were starving her to death. She broke dishes…Mama could have put her in a special clinic, but she decided that she would take care of her herself. She also loved my grandmother a lot. Often, she’d take her war photographs out of the china cabinet, look at them and weep. The woman in the photos was young, she didn’t look like Grandma, but it was her. It seemed like it was a different person…Yes, well, so it goes…Up until her death, Grandma kept reading newspapers and remained interested in politics…but after she got sick, there was only one book on her bedside table: the Bible. She’d call me over and read it to me: “For then the dust shall return to the Earth and the spirit will return to God…” Death was always on her mind: “It’s so hard for me now, Granddaughter. So wearisome.”