Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (59 page)

When I was young, I liked to toy with my fate, to tempt it. Not anymore: I’ve had enough. My daughter is growing up, I need to think of her future. And that means money! I want to make it myself. I don’t want to ask anyone else for it, or take it from anyone. I have no desire for that! I quit the newspaper and went to work for an advertising agency, the pay is better. It’s good money. People are interested in the beautiful life, that’s the most important thing happening today. It’s what’s on everyone’s mind. Just turn on the TV: the political demonstrations…Even if tens of thousands of people are going to them, what the millions are doing is buying elegant Italian plumbing fixtures. No matter who you ask, everyone is renovating and fixing up their homes and apartments. Traveling. Russia has never been like this before. We’re not just advertising goods, we’re selling needs. We create new needs—we are the ones who teach people to live beautifully! We run this era…Advertising is the mirror of the Russian revolution…My life is stuffed to the gills. I’m not planning on getting married…I have friends and all of them are rich. One got fat on oil, another on mineral fertilizers…We meet up and talk. Always at an expensive restaurant: a marble hall, antique furniture, expensive paintings on the walls…Doormen that deport themselves like nineteenth-century Russian nobles. I love being surrounded by sumptuous decorations. One of my closest friends is also single, and he doesn’t want to get married, either. He likes being alone in his three-story house. He always says, “Sleep next to someone, but live alone.” By day, his head swells from the fluctuations in base metal prices on the London market. Copper, lead, nickel…He has three cellphones, they ring every thirty seconds. Works thirteen to fifteen hours a day. No weekends, no vacation. Happiness? What happiness? It’s a different world…Today, single people are the ones who are happy and successful, they’re not the weak ones or losers. They have everything: money, careers. Being alone is a choice. I want to keep moving forward. I’m a huntress, not docile prey. I am the one making this choice. Loneliness is a kind of happiness…That sounds kind of like a revelation, doesn’t it? [
She is silent.
] Really, it’s not you I wanted to tell all this to, it’s myself…

*1
A Voluntary People’s
Druzhina
is a civil police organization that has the right to perform citizen’s arrests for petty offenses such as hooliganism and drunkenness.

*2
A line from Nikolai Nekrasov’s 1863 poem “Red-Nosed Frost,” which has become a proverbial description of the Russian woman.

*3
The Insulted and Humiliated
is a novel by Dostoevsky. Bashmachkin is the main character of Nikolay Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.” Opiskin is a protagonist in another novel by Dostoevsky,
The Village of Stepanchikovo
.

*4
Chichikov is the protagonist of
Dead Souls.
Sergey Mavrodi (1955–) is a businessman and former deputy of the State Duma famous for his massive, unapologetic pyramid schemes, successfully perpetrated in Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

Only her mother showed up to our first meeting. She confessed, “Ksyusha didn’t want to come. She tried talking me out of it: ‘Mama, who needs us? They only want our words and feelings, they don’t care about us—they haven’t been through what we’ve been through.’ ” She was very agitated, she would get up to leave, “I try not to think about these things. It’s painful to put myself through everything all over again,” but when she’d start talking, there was no stopping her. Mostly, she was silent. What could I do to comfort her? “Don’t get upset. Please calm down.” At the same time, I was eager to hear her recollections of that terrifying day, February 6, 2004, when there was a terrorist attack on the Zamoskvoretskaya line of the Moscow Metro, between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stops. Thirty-nine people were killed and 122 hospitalized.

I pace and pace the circles of pain, I can’t break out of them. Pain has everything: darkness, triumph. Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss.

I have several paragraphs in my notebook from that first two-hour session:

“…Being a victim is so humiliating…It’s simply shameful. I don’t want to talk about it to anyone, I just want to be like everyone else, but then I’m alone and that’s it. I’m capable of bursting into tears anytime, anywhere. Sometimes, I’ll roam the city crying. One day, a man on the street came up to me and said, ‘Why are you crying? You’re so beautiful and here you are weeping.’ First of all, my beauty has never gotten me anywhere, and second of all, beauty betrays me, it doesn’t correspond with what’s going on inside me…”

“…We have two daughters, Ksyusha and Dasha. We’ve always lived modestly, but whenever we could, we went to museums, the theater, we read tons of books. When the girls were still little, their father would always make up fairy tales to tell them. We did whatever we could to shelter them from life’s harsh realities. We believed that art saved people. And then it turned out that it didn’t…”

“…There’s an old woman who lives alone in our building, she’s religious. One day she stopped me, I thought she was going to try to comfort me, but instead, in this mean voice, she demanded, ‘Do you ever think about why that happened to you? To your children?’ Why…What did I do to deserve those words? I’m sure she repented…I think that afterward, she must have repented for what she said…I’ve never deceived or betrayed anyone. I had two abortions: Those are my only two sins…I know in my heart…Whenever I can, I give money to people on the street, even a tiny bit, whatever I have. I feed the birds in the winter…”

—

The next time, the two of them, mother and daughter, came to see me together.

THE MOTHER

Maybe some people consider them heroes? They have this idea, they’re happy to die for it, they think that they’re going to heaven. It makes them unafraid of death. I don’t know anything about them: “We’ve created a composite sketch of the alleged terrorist…” and that’s it. For them, we’re targets—no one explained to them that my little girl is no target, that she has a Mama who can’t live without her, that there’s a boy who’s in love with her. How can you kill someone who is loved? I think that’s a crime twice over. Go to war, go up to the mountains and shoot each other, what are you shooting at me for? Why are you shooting at my daughter? They kill us in the midst of our civilian lives…[
Silence.
] Now I’m afraid of myself, frightened of my own thoughts. Sometimes you want to kill them all and then it horrifies you that you wanted that.

I used to love the Moscow Metro. The most beautiful Metro system in the world! It’s like a museum! [
She is silent.
] After the attacks…I’d see people going into the Metro holding hands. Fear kept its grip on us for a long time afterward…It was scary to go out into the city, my blood pressure would skyrocket immediately. I was always scoping out suspicious passengers on the Metro. At work, it was the only thing we talked about. What’s happening to us, dear Lord? One day, I was standing on the platform, and there was this young woman near me with a baby stroller. She had black hair, black eyes, I could tell that she wasn’t Russian. I don’t know what her ethnicity was—Chechen, Ossetian? Who was she? I couldn’t help myself and peeked into the stroller: Was there a child in there? Or was it something else? Thinking about riding in the same car as her ruined my mood. “No,” I thought. “She can go ahead, I’ll wait for the next train.” A man came up to me, “Why did you look into her stroller?” I told him the truth. “So you too, then.”

…I see an unhappy girl curled up in a ball. It’s my Ksyusha. Why is she all alone? Without us? No, it’s impossible, it can’t be true. Blood on the pillow…I cry, “Ksyusha! Ksyushenka!” But she can’t hear me. She pulled a hat over her face so that I wouldn’t see her, so that I wouldn’t get scared. My little girl! She’d dreamed of being a pediatrician, but now, she’s lost her hearing. She was the most beautiful girl in her class…and now her face…For what? I’m drowning in a viscous fluid, my consciousness is splintering into shards. My legs don’t work, they feel like they’re made of cotton, and I have to be led out of the ward. The doctor screams at me. “Get ahold of yourself, or else we won’t let you see her again!” I get ahold of myself…and go back into the room…She didn’t look at me, she looked past me, off somewhere, as though she didn’t recognize me. The look in her eyes was like a suffering animal’s, it was unbearable. It was barely possible to go on living after seeing it. Now she’s hidden that look away somewhere, she’s put on an armored shell, but she’s holding all that inside of her. It’s all been imprinted on her. She’s always in that place where none of us were with her…

There was an entire hospital ward full of girls like her…They’d all ridden in the same Metro car, and there they all lay…lots of students, school kids. I thought that all of us mothers were going to march out into the street to demonstrate. All of the mothers with their children. There would be thousands of us. Now I realize that my girl is only important to me, only at home, just to us. People listen and sympathize…but without feeling the pain! There’s no pain for anyone else!

I’d come home from the hospital and lay there feeling nothing. Dashenka would sit with me, she took time off of work. She’d stroke my head like I was a little child. Their father didn’t scream, he didn’t panic, then suddenly he had a heart attack. We found ourselves in hell…Again? What have we done to deserve this? My whole life, I’ve made my daughters read good books, tried to convince them that good is more powerful than evil, that good always wins in the end. But life is nothing like books. Will a mother’s prayer be heard from the bottom of the sea? It’s all lies! I’m a traitor, I couldn’t protect them like I could when they were little, and they were depending on me. If my love alone was enough to protect them, they would be invulnerable to all harm and disappointment.

One operation…another…Three total! Ksyusha regained her hearing in one ear…then her fingers started working again…We lived on the border between life and death; between faith in miracles and utter injustice. It made me realize that even though I am a nurse, I know next to nothing about death. I’ve seen it many times, but only in passing. You put an IV in, listen for a pulse…Everyone thinks that medics know more about death than other people, but no. I worked with a pathologist, he was about to retire. “What is death?” he asked me. [
Silence.
] My previous life turned into a big white nothing. All I remember is Ksyusha…Every little detail—how she was brave and funny as a little kid. She wasn’t afraid of big dogs and wanted for it to always be summer. The way her eyes sparkled the day she came home and told us that she had gotten into medical school! Without bribes or private tutors. We couldn’t afford the tuition, it was beyond our means. How a day or two before the terrorist attack, she happened to come across an article in an old newspaper about what you should do in the event of an extreme situation on the Metro…That…I don’t remember what exactly, but it was a set of instructions. Then, when it happened, before she lost consciousness, Ksyusha remembered that article. And on that morning, she had just picked up her boots from the cobbler’s. When she had already put on her coat and was pulling them on, she couldn’t get them on…“Mama, can I borrow your boots?” “Sure. Go ahead.” We’re the same size. My maternal intuition didn’t tell me anything…I could have stopped her…Some time before, in my dreams, I’d seen big stars, a constellation. But there was no sense of alarm…It’s all my fault and I feel crushed by the guilt…

If they’d allowed it, I would have slept at the hospital and been a mother to everyone. Some people wept in the stairwell…some needed hugs and for someone to sit with them. A girl from Perm cried because her mother was far away. Another girl’s leg had been crushed…There’s nothing more precious than a leg! There’s nothing more precious than your child’s leg! Who can blame me for wanting to be there?

In the first few days after the attack, it was all over the papers and on the news. When Ksyusha saw a photo of herself in print, she threw away the newspaper…

THE DAUGHTER

…There’s a lot I don’t remember…I choose not to keep it in my memory! I just don’t want to! [
Her mother puts her arms around her. Comforts her.
]

…Everything is scarier underground. Now, I always carry a flashlight with me in my purse…

…I couldn’t hear any screaming or wailing. It was completely silent. Everyone was lying in a big pile…It wasn’t scary, no…Then, slowly, people started moving. At a certain point, it dawned on me that I had to get out of there, everything was covered in chemicals, and it was all on fire. I was looking around for my backpack, it had my papers in it for school, my wallet…Shock…I was in shock…I didn’t feel any pain…