Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (78 page)

I bought a ticket home. When I’m in the city, I miss my village. Although I’m not quite sure which village I miss; it’s probably the village of my childhood. The village where Papa would take me along to watch him take out the frames from the beehives, heavy with honey. First, he would fill them with smoke so that the bees would fly away and wouldn’t sting us. When I was little, I was funny…I thought that bees were little birds…[
She is silent.
] Do I still like the village? People here live the same way year in and year out. They dig for potatoes in their vegetable patches, crawl around on their knees. Make moonshine. You won’t find a single sober man after dark, they all drink every single day. They vote for Lukashenko and mourn the Soviet Union. The undefeatable Soviet army. On the bus, one of our neighbors sat down next to me. He was drunk. He talked about politics: “I would beat every moron democrat’s face in myself if I could. They let you off easy. I swear to God! All of them ought to be shot. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. America is behind all this, they’re paying for it…Hillary Clinton…But we’re a strong people. We lived through perestroika, and we’ll make it through another revolution. One wise man told me that the kikes are the ones behind it.” The whole bus supported him. “Things wouldn’t be any worse than they are now. All you see on TV are bombings and shootings everywhere.”

Finally, I got home. I opened the door. My mother was sitting in the kitchen scrubbing dahlia bulbs. They’d frozen and gone a bit rotten because they’re so finicky. Afraid of the cold. I sat down to help her just like I used to do when I was little. “So what’s going on out there in the capital?” was the first thing out of Mama’s mouth. “On TV, they showed a whole sea of people shouting things against the government. Lordy! It was terrifying! We got so scared out here, we thought that war was about to break out. Some people’s sons are in the riot police, other people’s kids were the students shouting in the square. In the papers, they call them terrorists and gangsters. People around here believe what they read in the papers. You’re having a revolution—over here, we’re living under the Soviet regime.” The house smelled like valerian.

I learned all the village gossip…Two men in plainclothes showed up in a car and took Yurka Shved, a farmer, away in the middle of the night, just like they’d come for my grandpa in 1937. Ransacked his house. Confiscated his computer. A nurse, Anya N., had been fired because she’d gone to Minsk for the demonstration and signed up with an opposition party. She has a little kid. Her husband got drunk and beat her: “You little oppositionist!” The mothers of the boys who served in the Minsk police were going around bragging about the big bonuses their sons received. About how they’d brought home gifts. [
She is silent
.] The people have been split in two…I went to a dance at the club and no one would ask me to dance all night because I’m a terrorist…People were scared of me…

—

We ran into each other again a year later on the Moscow-Minsk train. Everyone else had been asleep for a while. We stayed up talking.

“It can turn red, too”

I’m a student in Moscow now. My friends and I go to protests together. It’s so cool! I like the faces of the people I see there. They remind me of the faces I saw when we went out on the square in Minsk. That day, I didn’t recognize my city or my people. They were different. Different people. I miss home, I miss it terribly.

I can never sleep on the train back to Belarus. I’m always half asleep, half awake…Sometimes I find myself in jail, sometimes in the dorms…Everything comes back to me…Men and women’s voices…

“…They stretched me, pulled my legs over my head…”

“…They put a piece of paper on top of my kidneys so that they wouldn’t leave marks and started beating me with a plastic water bottle…”

“…He would put a plastic bag or a gas mask over my head. You know the rest…Naturally, I would lose consciousness after a couple of minutes…And him…He had a wife and kids back home. He was a good husband. A good father…”

“…They kept beating and beating and beating and beating me…With their boots, their shoes, their sneakers…”

“…You think the only things they teach them how to do are parachute and fast-rope out of helicopters? They use the same textbooks as they did in Stalin’s time…”

“…In school, they told us, ‘Read Bunin and Tolstoy, those books save people.’ Why isn’t this the knowledge that’s passed down, instead of the doorknob in the rectum and the plastic bag over the head? Who can you ask this question?”

“…If they double or triple their salaries, I’m scared that they’re going to start straight out shooting people…”

“…When I was in the army, I realized I liked guns. I’m a professor’s son, I grew up surrounded by books, but I want to have a gun. It’s a beautiful object! Over hundreds of years, they’ve refined them, adapted them to the human hand. They’re so nice to hold. I would enjoy taking it out and cleaning it. Oiling it up. I love the smell.”

“…Do you think there’s going to be a revolution?”

“…Orange is the color of dog piss in the snow. But it can turn red, too…”

“…We’re coming…”

*1
Allusion to a famous revolutionary poem by Mayakovsky whose first stanza ends with the line, “It is your turn to speak, Comrade Mauser.”

*2
Oprichniks
were sixteenth-century Russian secret police officers, serving Ivan the Terrible’s secret police organization, the
Oprichina.

What’s there to remember? I live the same way as everyone else. Perestroika…Gorbachev…The postmistress opened the gate: “Did you hear? The Communists are out.” “What do you mean?” “They shut down the Party.” No shots fired, nothing. These days they say we used to have a mighty fortress and then we lost it all. But what have I really lost? I’ve always lived in the same little house without any amenities—no running water, no plumbing, no gas—and I still do today. My whole life, I’ve done honest work. I toiled and toiled, got used to backbreaking labor. And only ever earned kopecks. All I had to eat was macaroni and potatoes, and that’s all I eat today. I’m still going around in my old Soviet fur—and you should see the snows out here!

The best thing I can remember is getting married. We were in love. I remember walking home from the marriage registration bureau, the lilacs in bloom. The lilacs! If you can believe it, there were nightingales singing on their branches…That’s how I remember it…We lived happily for a few years, we had a daughter…Then Vadik started drinking, and the vodka ended up killing him. He died young, he was only forty-two. Ever since, I’ve lived alone. My daughter is all grown up, she got married and moved away.

In the winter, we always get snowed in, the whole village is blanketed in snow—the houses and the cars. Sometimes, the buses won’t run for weeks on end. What’s going on out there in the capital? It’s a thousand kilometers from here to Moscow. We watch Moscow life unfold on TV like it’s a movie. I’ve heard of Putin and Alla Pugacheva…The rest, I know nothing about. Rallies, demonstrations…Out here, we live the same way we’ve always lived. Whether it’s socialism or capitalism. Who’s Red, who’s White—it makes no difference. The important thing is to make it to spring. Plant potatoes…[
A long silence.
] I’m sixty years old…I don’t go to church, but I do need someone to talk to. To talk to about other things…about how I don’t feel like getting old, I have no desire to get old at all. It’ll be too bad when it comes time to die. Have you seen my lilacs? I go out at night to look at them—they glow. I’ll just stand there admiring them. Here, let me cut you a bouquet…

I wouldn’t have made it up this tall and craggy hill without the love and expertise of Ainsley Morse; my parents, Vadim Shayevich and Anya Raskin; my grandmothers, Ida Khait and Elena Raskin, my aunt Marina, my grandpa Moisey. For having walked the steep path from the 1930s to the present, through war, persecution, revolution, and immigration, for my invaluable inheritance—their memories—I dedicate this translation to my grandparents.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S
VETLANA
A
LEXIEVICH
was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include
The Unwomanly Face of War
(1985),
Zinky Boys
(1990),
Chernobyl Prayer
(1997), and
Secondhand Time
(2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

B
ELA
S
HAYEVICH
is a Soviet American artist and translator.

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Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Chronology: Russia After Stalin

Remarks from an Accomplice

Part One: The Consolation of Apocalypse

Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations (1991–2001)

Ten Stories in a Red Interior

On the Beauty of Dictatorship and the Mystery of Butterflies Crushed Against the Pavement

On Brothers and Sisters, Victims and Executioners…and the Electorate

On Cries and Whispers…and Exhilaration

On the Lonely Red Marshal and Three Days of Forgotten Revolution

On the Mercy of Memories and the Lust for Meaning

On a Different Bible and a Different Kind of Believer

On the Cruelty of the Flames and Salvation from Above

On the Sweetness of Suffering and the Trick of the Russian Soul

On a Time When Anyone Who Kills Believes That They Are Serving God

On the Little Red Flag and the Smile of the Axe

Part Two: The Charms of Emptiness

Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations (2002–2012)

Ten Stories in the Absence of an Interior

On Romeo and Juliet…Except Their Names Were Margarita and Abulfaz

On People Who Instantly Transformed After the Fall of Communism