Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (77 page)

The guard changed several times that night. I don’t remember their faces, they all look the same in uniform. Except this one guy…Even now, I would recognize him if I saw him on the street—I’d know him by his eyes. He wasn’t young or old, just a regular man, nothing special. But what was he doing? He’d open the doors of the police van and leave them open for long stretches because he liked it when we’d all start shivering. Everyone was just in their jackets, cheap boots, fake fur. He’d watch us and smile. He wasn’t acting on orders, this was his own free will. On his own personal initiative. But another cop snuck me a Snickers. “Take it. What the hell were you thinking going out on the square?” They say that in order to understand this, you have to read Solzhenitsyn. When I was in school, I took
The Gulag Archipelago
out from the library, but I couldn’t get into it. It was this fat, boring book. I read about fifty pages and stopped…It seemed as distant from my reality as the Trojan War. Stalin was a played-out topic. My friends and I weren’t all that interested in him…

The first thing that happens to you in jail…They dump your purse out on the table. What does it feel like? It’s as though they’re undressing you…Then they literally undress you. “Take off your underwear. Spread your legs shoulder width. Squat.” What were they looking for in my anus? They treated us like we were prisoners. “Face to the wall! Eyes down at the floor!” They kept ordering us to look at the floor. They really hated it when you looked them in the eye: “Face to the wall! I said face to the wall!” We went everywhere in formation, they even took us to the bathroom like that: “Form a column with the backs of your heads to each other.” In order to tolerate it, I created a barrier—this is us and that is them. Interrogation, the detective, the evidence…During interrogation: “You have to write, ‘I fully acknowledge my guilt.’ ” “But what am I guilty of?” “What don’t you understand? You participated in a mass riot…” “It was a peaceful protest.” They started threatening me: They’d expel me from the university, fire my mother from her job. How could she keep being a teacher when she had a daughter like me? Mama! The whole time, the only thing I thought about was my mother…They noticed, so every interrogation began with the words, “Your mother is crying,” “Your mother is in the hospital.” And then, again: “Give us names…Who was with you? Who was handing out flyers? Sign this…Name names…” They promised that no one would ever know what I’d said and that they’d let me go home right away. I had to make a choice…“I’m not signing anything.” But at night, I would cry. Mama was in the hospital…[
She is silent.
] It’s easy to become a traitor out of love for your mother…I don’t know if I could have endured another month in there. They’d laugh at me: “What’s it going to be, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya?” These young, cheerful guys. [
She is silent.
] I was scared…We all went to the same stores, sat in the same cafés, rode the Metro together. We were together everywhere. In normal everyday life, there’s no clear boundary between us and them. What makes them different? [
Silence.
] I used to live in a good, kind world, but it no longer exists, and it never will ever again.

I ended up spending a month in a jail…That entire time, I never once looked in a mirror. I’d had a small one with me in my purse, but after they searched me, a lot of things went missing. My wallet and cash, too. I was always thirsty. Unbearably thirsty! They only ever gave us something to drink with our meals, the rest of the time it was: “There’s water in the toilet.” And laughter. While they drank their Fantas. I thought that I would never get enough to drink, that when I got out I would buy a whole refrigerator full of mineral water. All of us stank…There was nowhere to wash ourselves…Someone had a tiny bottle of perfume and we would pass it around, sniffing it. While somewhere far away, our friends were writing papers, sitting in the library. Taking exams. For some reason, I kept remembering these little things…A new dress I hadn’t had a chance to wear…[
She laughs.
] I learned that happiness can come from something as small as a bit of sugar or a piece of soap. In a cell intended for five people—thirty-two square meters—there were seventeen of us. You had to learn how to fit your entire life into two square meters. It was especially hard at night, there was no air to breathe, it was stifling. We wouldn’t get to sleep for a long time. We’d stay up talking. The first few days, we discussed politics, but after that, we only ever talked about love.

CONVERSATIONS IN A JAIL CELL

“You don’t want to believe that what they do is of their own free will.”

“…It’s always the same scenario…Things keep going in circles. The people are a herd. A herd of antelopes. And the government is a lioness. The lioness picks out a victim from the herd and kills it. The rest keep chewing their cud, watching the lioness out of the corner of their eyes as she’s picking out her next victim. Once she’s bagged her prey, they all sigh in relief: ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! I can keep living…’ ”

“…I loved learning about the Revolution at the museum…I have a romantic bent. I made believe that I was in that fairy tale. No one had called on me to go, I went to the square on my own. I wanted to see for myself how people actually brought about revolution. For that, I got clubbed in the head and the kidneys. It was mostly young people who came out, they call it a “children’s revolution.” That’s what they’re saying now. Our parents stayed home. They sat in their kitchens talking about how we’d gone out there. Worrying. They were scared, but we have no memories of the Soviet era. We’ve only read about the Communists in books, we didn’t have that fear. Minsk has a population of two million, and how many of us were out there? Thirty thousand, tops…But even more people were watching us: on their balconies, honking their horns, bolstering us. ‘Come on, guys, you can do it! Go on!’ There are always more people sitting in front of their TVs and drinking beer. That’s how the majority of people are…And as long as it’s only us educated romantics out in the streets, it’s not a real revolution…”

“…Do you really think the only thing holding all this together is fear? The police with their clubs? You’re wrong. The victim and the executioner have an arrangement. That’s something left over from communist times—there’s a silent pact. A contract. The great unspoken agreement. The people understand everything, but they keep quiet. In exchange, they want decent salaries, the ability to buy at least a used Audi, to go on vacation to Turkey. Try talking to them about democracy or human rights—it’s like you’re speaking ancient Greek! Those who lived through Soviet times instantly start saying things like, ‘Our children thought that bananas grew in Moscow. Take a look around…There’s one hundred different kinds of salami! What more freedom do we need?’ Even today, many people want to go back to the Soviet Union, except with tons of salami.”

“…I ended up in here by accident…I went to the square with my friends just for kicks, I was only curious about what it would be like in the middle of all those posters and balloons. To be perfectly honest…I had a crush on one of the guys I went with. In reality, I’m nothing but an indifferent spectator. I stopped thinking about politics a long time ago. I’m so damn sick of that battle between good and evil…”

“…They drove us out to some kind of barracks. We spent the night on our feet facing the wall. In the morning: ‘Get on your knees!’ We got on our knees. ‘Get up! Hands up!’ They told us to put our hands on our heads and do one hundred squats. Then it was stand on one leg…What were they doing this for? Why? Ask them—they won’t be able to tell you. Someone gave them permission…it made them feel powerful…Some girls got nauseated and fainted. The first time I got called in for an interrogation, I laughed in the detective’s face until he finally snapped, ‘Listen up, little girl, I’m going to fuck you in every hole, then throw you in a cell with real criminals.’ I’ve never read Solzhenitsyn and I don’t think the detective had, either. But we all knew the score anyway…”

“…My interrogator was an educated man, he’d graduated from the same university as me. It turned out that we even liked the same books: Akunin, Umberto Eco…‘Why,’ he said, ‘did you have to become one of my problems? I’m used to dealing with corrupt officials. It’s nice! You know exactly where you stand with them. But you guys…’ He was doing his job reluctantly, he was ashamed, but still, it didn’t stop him. There are thousands of people like him—officials, detectives, judges. Some do the beating, others spread lies in the press. Others arrest people, pass sentences. You need so little to start up the Stalinist machine.”

“…There’s an old notebook we’ve kept in my family. My grandpa recorded his life story for his children and grandchildren. He wrote about what he lived through in Stalin’s time. He was imprisoned and tortured: They would put him in a gas mask and turn off the oxygen. Or they’d strip him and put a metal rod or a doorknob into his rectum…I was in ninth grade when my mother gave me the notebook: ‘You’re old enough now. You have to know this.’ But I didn’t understand what for?”

“…If they bring back the camps, there will be plenty of people who’ll want to be guards there. Tons! I remember one of them…When you looked him in the eye, he seemed like a normal person, except that he was foaming at the mouth. They moved like sleepwalkers, as though they were in a trance. They kept swinging left, right, left, right. One man fell down and they put a shield on top of him and started dancing on it. These meatheads…two meters tall…eighty or one hundred kilos each, you know—they feed them well. Those riot police and special ops boys, they really are special…They’re like Ivan the Terrible’s
oprichniks
^*2
…You don’t want to believe that what they’re doing is of their own free will, you resist the thought with all your might. You fight it with the last of your strength. They need to eat. It’s just some guy…all he’s seen of life was school and then the army. Now he makes more money than a professor. Afterward, it’s always the same old story…like clockwork…He’ll say he was acting on orders, they didn’t know anything, it has nothing to do with them. Even today, they find a thousand excuses: ‘Who’s going to feed my family?’ ‘I took an oath.’ ‘I couldn’t break ranks even if I’d wanted to.’ You can do this with anyone. Or at least with a lot of people…”

“…I’m only twenty years old. How am I supposed to live now? I’m worried that when I get out and go into the city, I’ll be too scared to raise my eyes off the ground…”

“You’re having a revolution—over here, we’re living under the Soviet regime.”

They released us at night. Journalists, friends—everyone had been waiting for us outside the prison, but they put us in police vans and dropped us off all over the city outskirts. They let me out somewhere in Shabany. Next to a huge pile of rocks by some construction site. It was actually scary. I stood there, unsure of what to do, then started walking toward the lights. I had no money, my phone had been dead for a long time. The only thing in my wallet was a bill, all of us were handed bills for what we owed them for our bed and board in jail. It’s my entire monthly stipend…I don’t even know how…My mother and I are barely scraping by. My father died when I was in sixth grade, I was twelve. My stepfather drinks and parties away his salary every month without fail. He’s an alky. I hate him, he’s ruined me and my mother’s life. I am always trying to make some extra money: I stuff flyers in mailboxes—in the summer, I’ll work at a fruit or an ice cream stand. I walked along with these thoughts…Some stray dogs were running around…No people anywhere…I was so happy when a taxi stopped for me. I gave the driver the address of my dormitory and told him: “I don’t have any money.” The driver somehow knew right away: “Ah, you’re one of those Decembrists [we’d been arrested in December]. Get in. I’ve already picked up another one of you and taken her home. What are they doing letting you out in the middle of the night?” The whole ride home, he lectured me on common sense: “It’s all bullshit! Nothing but idiocy! In 1991, I was a student in Moscow, I also ran around to demonstrations. There were more of us than there are of you. And we won. We dreamed that every one of us would start a business and get rich. And what do you think happened? When the Communists were in power, I was an engineer—now I’m a cabbie. We chased out one group of bastards, and another group of bastards took their place. Black, gray, or orange, they’re all the same. In our country, power will corrupt anyone. I’m a realist. The only things I believe in are myself and my family. While the newest round of idiots tries to usher in the latest revolution, I just keep my nose to the grindstone. This month, I need to make enough money to buy my daughters new coats, and next month, my wife needs boots. You’re a pretty girl. You’d be better off finding yourself a good man and getting married.” We drove into the city. Music. Laughter. Couples kissing. The city had gone on with its life as though we didn’t even exist.

I couldn’t wait to see my boyfriend and talk to him. I really wanted to see him. We’d been together for three years, we were making plans for our future. [
She falls silent.
] He’d promised me that he would come to the demonstration, but he never showed up. I was waiting to hear why. Speak of the devil, he showed up, ran over as soon as I got home. The girls left us alone in our room. What kind of explanation was I expecting?! It was absurd. It turned out that I’m nothing but “a fool,” a “prime example of a naïve revolutionary.” He’d warned me—had I forgotten? He lectured me on how it was irrational to get worked up over things you can’t control. There are people who believe we must live for others, but that’s foreign to him, he had no desire to die on the barricades. It’s not his calling. His primary objective was building a career. He wanted to make a lot of money. Get a house with a pool. You have to keep living and smiling. There are so many opportunities these days, a dazzling array…You can travel the world, go on unbelievable cruises (though those are expensive), buy a palace if you like (though it will cost you), order turtle soup and elephant meat at a restaurant…Anything, as long as you pay for it. Cash money! The big bucks! As my physics teacher always said, “My dear students! Just remember that money solves all problems, even differential equations.” It’s the cold hard truth. [
She is silent.
] But what about ideals? They don’t exist? Maybe you know something about them? After all, you write books…[
Silence.
] At a general assembly, they expelled me from the university. Everyone raised their hands to vote “Aye,” everyone except for my favorite elderly professor. Afterward, he was taken away in an ambulance. When no one was looking, my friends comforted me: “Don’t be mad, it’s just that the dean threatened us, he said that if we didn’t vote against you, they’d kick us out of the dorms…!” True heroines!