Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (73 page)

It took me a long time to find a “guide” into this story, a narrator or interlocutor—I don’t even know what to call the people who lead me on my travels through people’s worlds. Through lives. At first, everyone refused: “This is a case for a psychiatrist.” “Because of her sick fantasies, a mother abandons her three children—this is something for a court to examine, not a writer.” “What about Medea?” I countered. “What about Medea, who killed her own children for love?” “That’s a myth. These are real people.” But artists don’t live in a ghetto cut off from the real world. They’re free, like everyone else.

Eventually, I learned that there was already a film about my protagonist—
Suffering
(Fishka Films). So I met the director, Irina Vasilyeva. As we watched the movie, listening to the characters tell their sides of the story, we would pause and Irina would tell me the rest.

AS TOLD BY FILMMAKER IRINA VASILYEVA

When I first heard the story, I didn’t like it, it scared me. They tried to convince me that it would be a breathtaking film about love, that I had to go and start filming immediately. It’s such a Russian story! A woman who’s married with three kids falls in love with a prisoner—and a “lifer,” at that—sentenced to life in prison for a particularly brutal murder. And for him, she abandons everything: her husband, her kids, her home. But something was stopping me…

Russia has loved its prisoners since the dawn of the ages—they’re sinners, but they’re martyrs, too. They need comfort and consolation. There’s a whole culture of pity, and its traditions are carefully preserved, especially in the small towns and villages. The simple women who live there don’t have the Internet, they use the mail. An ancient method. While the men drink and brawl, the women spend evenings writing each other letters. Their letters are filled with their artless tales alongside all sorts of ephemera—sewing patterns, recipes—and at the end, there’ll always be prisoners’ addresses. Someone’s brother is doing time, he’s spread word of his comrades on the inside. For others, it’s their neighbor or former classmate. The addresses travel through the grapevine…Men will steal, raise hell, go to jail, get out, and then end up behind bars again. Always the same old story! In the villages, you’ll learn that half the men have either already done time or are still serving out their sentences. But we’re Christians, it’s our duty to help the unfortunate. There are women who marry these habitual offenders, even murderers. I’m not judging, but if you were to ask me to explain this phenomenon…it’s complicated…I can tell you that some men seem to have a nose for this kind of woman. Most often, it’s women who come from bad situations, who haven’t been able to realize their dreams. They’re lonely. Suddenly, somebody needs them, they have someone to take care of. It’s one way to change your life. A kind of medicine…

Finally, we decided to go out there and shoot a film. I wanted to show people that even in our pragmatic era, there are still people who live by a different logic. And that they’re very vulnerable. We often speak about our people. Some idealize them, others consider them beasts.
Sovoks
. In reality, we don’t even know them. There’s a great gulf between us…I always film stories, and every story has everything in it. The two most important ingredients are love and death.

All this takes place in a remote village in the Kaluga Oblast…We drove there…Out the window, everything seemed endless: the fields, the forest, the sky. Churches shone on the hilltops. Power and peace. Ancient presences. We kept going and going…Finally, we turned off the main highway onto a country road…Oh! Russian roads are a special breed—some of them, not even a tank can pass. Two or three pits every three meters already counts as a good road. And villages on either side—gnarled, slanting huts with broken fences, dogs and chickens wandering the streets. Every morning, before it even opens, there’s already a line of alcoholics outside the shop. Sights so familiar they give you a lump in your throat…In the center of the village, the plaster statue of Lenin still stands where it’s always stood…[
She is silent
.] There was a time…It’s hard to believe that it existed, but we all used to be that way…When Gorbachev came to power, we ran around mad with glee. We lived in our dreams, our illusions. Baring our souls to one another in our kitchens. We wanted a new Russia…Twenty years down the line, it finally dawned on us: Where was this new Russia supposed to have come from? It never existed, and it still doesn’t today. Someone put it very accurately: In five years, everything can change in Russia, but in two hundred—nothing. Boundless open spaces and yet, a slave mentality…You won’t refashion Russia in a Moscow kitchen. They brought back the Tsarist seal but left the Stalinist anthem. Moscow is Russian…a capitalist city…but Russia itself was and remains Soviet. They’ve never even set eyes on a democrat out there, and if they had, they would have ripped him to shreds. The majority of the people want equal shares and a leader. The cheap counterfeit vodka flows in rivers…[
She laughs.
] I get the sense that you and I both come from the kitchen generation, we started off talking about love, and five minutes later, we’re discussing how to rebuild Russia. Russia doesn’t care about what we have to say, it has its own life to lead…

A drunken little man pointed out our heroine’s house. She stepped out of the hut…I knew that I liked her right away. Deep blue eyes, statuesque. You could say she’s a beauty. A true Russian beauty! A woman like her will sparkle whether she’s in a modest peasant hut or a luxurious Moscow apartment. And can you imagine—she’s married to some murderer. We haven’t met him yet, he has a life sentence and a case of tuberculosis. When we told her why we’d come, she laughed: “It’s my little soap opera.” I had been pacing around wondering how I would tell her that we were going to film her. What if she was afraid of cameras? But she said to me, “I’m such a little fool, I tell anybody and everybody my story. Some people cry, others curse me. If you like, I’ll tell you, too…” And she told us…

YELENA RAZDUYEVA

On Love

I hadn’t planned on getting married, but of course, I’d fantasized about it. I was eighteen years old. My man…What’s he going to be like? One night, I had this dream: I was walking through the meadow, toward the river—there’s a river behind our village—and suddenly a handsome and tall young man appeared in front of me. He took me by the hand and said, “You will be my bride. My bride before God.” I woke up and thought: I better remember him…his face…So it stayed in my memory like it had been programmed into me. A year went by, two…I never came across him. Meanwhile, Lyosha had been courting me for a long time, he was a cobbler. He wanted me to marry him. I was honest with him, I explained that I didn’t love him, that I loved and was waiting for the man I had seen in my dream. I was going to meet him one day, there was no other way, it just had to happen—it was simply impossible that I wouldn’t. Lyosha just laughed at me. And my mother and father laughed, too…They convinced me that I ought to get married and love would come later.

Why are you smiling? Everyone laughs at me, I know…If you live the way your heart tells you to, people will think you’re crazy. You tell them the truth and people don’t believe you, but when you lie, they eat up every word. One day, I was digging in my garden, and a guy I knew came walking by. I said, “Wow, guess what, Petya? You were in my dream the other night.” “Oh no! Anything but that!” He ran from me like I was a leper. I’m not like everyone else, people are wary of me…I don’t try to please anyone, I don’t pay any attention to what I wear, I don’t wear makeup. I don’t know how to flirt. I only know how to talk to someone. For a while, I had wanted to go join a monastery, but then I read that you can lead a monastic life outside of one, at home. It can be how you live.

I got married. Dear Lord, what a good man Lyosha was! So strong, he could pick up a fire iron and bend it in half. How I loved him! We had a son. But after I gave birth, something happened to me, maybe it was the shock of giving birth…I became repelled by men. I already had a child, what else did I need my husband for? I could talk to him, wash his clothes, cook his food, make his bed, but I couldn’t be with him…like you’re supposed to be with a man…I’d scream! Go into hysterics! We suffered like that for two more years then, finally, I left him. I picked up my son and walked out the door. Only I had nowhere to go. By then, my mother and father had died. My sister is somewhere in Kamchatka…I had a friend named Yuri, he’d been in love with me since school but had never confessed it to me. I’m big and tall, and he’s little, much shorter than me. He herded cows and read books. Knew all kinds of stories and was very fast at solving crosswords. I went to find him. “Yuri, you and I are friends. Can I stay with you? I’ll live in your house, but please don’t try to get close to me. Just please don’t touch me.” And he said, “Okay.”

So that’s how we lived…Except I kept thinking, “He loves me, he behaves himself so beautifully with me, doesn’t demand anything, why should I keep tormenting him?” So he and I went down to the marriage registration bureau. He also wanted us to get married in a church, and that’s when I confessed to him that I couldn’t in a church…I told him about my dream, that I was waiting for my true love to come…Yuri laughed at me, too. “You’re like a little child. You believe in miracles. No one is ever going to love you as much as I do.” I had two sons by him. He and I lived together for fifteen years, and for all fifteen years, we walked around holding hands. Everyone marveled at us…So many people live without love or they only see love on TV. What is a person without love? Like a flower without water…

We have this custom…Girls and young women write letters to prisoners. All of my friends and I, we’ve done it since we were schoolgirls. I’ve written hundreds of letters to prisoners and received hundreds of replies. That time, it was the same as ever…The postman cried, “Lenka, there’s a letter for you!” I ran over, grabbed the envelope. It had the prison stamp, a classified return address. And suddenly, my heart started pounding. All I’d seen was his handwriting, but I could already tell how dear he was to me. I became so agitated, I couldn’t even read what it said. I’m a dreamer, but I have a grip on reality, too. It’s not the first letter I’ve ever received from prison…The contents were simple: “Thank you for your kind words, sister…Of course, you are not my sister, but you are like a sister to me…” I replied that same evening: “Send me a photo, I want to see your face.”

So he sent me his photo in his next letter. I looked at it—and he really was the one, the man from my dream—my true love! I’d waited for him for almost twenty years. I can’t explain any of this to anyone, it’s like a fairy tale. I told my husband immediately, “My love has arrived.” He cried. He begged. Tried to talk me out of it. “We have three children. We need to raise them.” And I wept, too: “Yuri, you’re such a good man, I know the kids are in good hands with you.” Our neighbors, my friends, my sister…everyone judged me. Now I’m alone.

At the station, when I was buying my ticket…there was a woman in line with me, and we struck up a conversation. She asked me, “Where are you going?” “To see my husband” (he wasn’t my husband yet, but I knew that one day, he would be). “Where is he?” “In prison.” “What did he do?” “Killed a man.” “Oh, I see. Will he be in for a long time?” “Life.” “Oh, dear…Poor woman…” “No need to pity me. I love him.”

Everyone has to be loved by someone. Even if it’s just one person. Love is…I can tell you what it is…He has tuberculosis, everyone in prison does. From the bad food, from melancholy. Somebody told me that what he needs is dog fat. I roamed the village, asking people. Managed to find some. But later, I learned that badger fat is actually better. So I bought some at the pharmacy—it cost me an arm and a leg! He needs cigarettes, canned meat…I got a job at the bread factory, they pay better than they did at the farm. The work is hard. Those old ovens get so hot, we have to take off our clothes and work in our bras and underwear. I haul fifty-kilo sacks of flour, pallets of bread weighing up to a hundred kilograms. I write to him every day.

AS TOLD BY IRINA VASILYEVA

So that’s the kind of person she is. She’s impulsive, determined…Something is percolating inside of her, she wants everything all at once. It’s always extreme with her, overflowing, over the top. Her neighbors told me that one day, Tajik refugees were walking through the village. They had a lot of children, they were hungry, in tatters, so she gave them everything she had in her house: blankets, pillows, spoons…“We live too well while other people have nothing.” Even when all they had in their hut was a table and chairs…You could say that they lived in poverty. They ate whatever they grew in their garden, potatoes, zucchini. They drank milk. “It’s all right,” she consoled her husband and children. “When the tourists go away in the autumn, they’ll be sure to leave us something.” Lots of Muscovites spend their summers out there, it’s completely gorgeous—tons of artists, actors—all the deserted houses have been bought up. The villagers pick up every last scrap of whatever tourists leave behind, down to the plastic bags. The village is poor, full of old people, drunks…There was another story, too…Her friend had a baby, and they didn’t have a refrigerator. So Lena gave them hers: “My children are grown up, and you have an infant.” So that was that! Take it! She has nothing, and yet she still manages to have a lot to give. It’s that Russian type…the kind of Russian person that Dostoevsky wrote about, who is as bountiful as the Russian land itself. Socialism didn’t change him, and capitalism won’t, either. Neither riches nor poverty…Three men sit in front of the store, they’ve managed to get their hands on a bottle to split. What are they drinking to? “Sevastopol is a Russian city! Sevastopol will be ours!” They’re proud that a Russian can drink a liter of vodka without going cock-eyed. The only thing they remember about Stalin is that back when he was in charge, they were victors…