«I want to be a good wife. What would you like?»
«You know, no one has ever made me breakfast. I'd like you to call me to the breakfast table, that's all, I don't need anything else.»
He got up every morning at six to prepare for his lectures. I felt downcast because I was a night person, I went to bed late and got up late. This was going to be hard, it was a hard clause. The next morning, I staggered into the kitchen, threw some curd cakes together, put them on the table, sat there for five minutes, and shuffled back to bed. I did that three times.
«Don't get up anymore.»
«You don't like my breakfasts?»
«I see what a huge effort they are, don't get up anymore.»
We had a child… I was forty-one, it was very difficult even physically, I realize now, though at the time I thought: Ah, it's nothing. But it wasn't nothing. Sleepless nights. Diapers. The baby got a staff infection. Which meant twice as many diapers and washing them a special way. I felt dizzy… There weren't any pampers yet… Just diapers and more diapers… I washed them, rinsed them, dried them… Then one day I went completely to pieces: the diapers in the stove had burned up, the washing machine had overflowed and the bathroom was ankle-deep in water. I'd flooded it. The baby was screaming and I was mopping up the water with a rag. It was winter. I sat down on the edge of the bath and burst into tears. I sat there and cried. Then he walked in… He looked at me in this cold way, like a stranger… I thought he'd come rushing in to help, I thought he'd feel sorry for me. I was going out of my mind. But he just said: «How quickly you 'cracked'.» And turned around and walked out. It was like a slap in the face. I didn't even say anything back, I was so undone. Very hard… I was a long time coming to him, it was a difficult journey…
Later I understood… I understood him… He lived with his mother, who had spent ten years in the camps and never once cried and always sent jolly, humorous letters home. The letters still exist. In one she wrote: «Yesterday a very amusing thing happened. I had gone to see a flock of sheep during a blizzard. [A livestock specialist by profession, she was allowed out unescorted to treat sheep.] When I got back the guard dogs didn't recognize me — they could barely see me — so they attacked and we had a very funny tussle.» She went on to describe how they'd rolled over the steppe gnawing each other. And ended: «But now I'm fine, I'm in the hospital, they have clean sheets here.» They'd torn her flesh… Those guard dogs… He grew up among women like that… And here I was wailing because of a broken washing machine… His mother's friends had all come back from there. One woman had been so badly tortured she had a broken vertebra, but she always looked elegant and erect in her corset. Another woman… They'd taken her naked to be interrogated. Her interrogator had sensed her weak spot, he knew that by doing that he might break her. Her hair was gold, she was little, fragile. «They took you there naked?» «Yes, but that wasn't the funny part.» She had been sentenced not for political crimes, but as a socially dangerous element (SDE). As a prostitute. In a dark alley, as that heavenly creature was proceeding between two armed escorts, one of them, a backwoods boy, whispered: «You really an SDE?» «That's what they say.» «Can't be.» And he looked at her with rapture. It was a famous camp — the Aktiubinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland — a camp of beautiful women… They had lost everything in this life: husbands, relatives, their children were dying of hunger in orphanages. That word — «cracked» — came from there. They arrested his mother and he was left with his grandmother. His grandmother «cracked». She beat him till he was black-and-blue, screamed at him. Her son had been arrested, her daughter and her daughter's husband. She had lost face. In his diary, he wrote: «Mama, a-a-a!»
His mother… She'd come to see us at the dacha, this was many years after the camps… She had her own room at the dacha. It was a big house. And I decided to clean it. I went in — there weren't any things lying about anywhere — and began to sweep. Under the couch I found a small bundle. Just then she appeared:
«My little knickknacks,» that's what she always said: not my dresses or my shoes or my things, but my little knickknacks.
«Under the 'bed boards'?»
«I just can't get used to it.»
And what do you think she did with her miserable little bundle? Did she unpack it? Hang it up somewhere? You'll never guess… She stuffed it under the mattress…
You could listen to her forever… I was such a long time coming to him…
Prison. Night. A suffocating cell. The door opens and in walks a woman wearing a fur coat and wafting French perfume. I can't remember her name now, but she was a famous actress, she'd been arrested right after a concert. They all surrounded her and began stroking her fur coat. Smelling it. It smelled of freedom and their former female life. They were all beautiful women… Commissars always married beautiful women, with long legs and good educations, preferably from the formerly privileged classes, the ones who were left, who'd escaped notice. In Persian thread stockings. It was Nabokov who noted that the scratches life leaves on women heal, whereas men are like glass.
How much I remember, how much it turns out I remember… I was such a long time coming to him…
Nighttime… In the barracks… A young girl with long wavy hair… From an old noble family… She would sit by the hour brushing her hair and remembering her mother. One morning they woke up and she was bald. She'd pulled out all her hair, no one had a knife, of course, or scissors, she'd used her hands. They thought she'd gone crazy. What have you done to yourself? They were trying to recruit her, she said, they'd promised to let her go free on condition she become an informer. The barracks wept, but she was smiling: «I was afraid I'd falter and they'd let me go, but now there's nothing they can do, I'm bald. That's it, I'm here to stay.»
He grew up among women like that… And I was supposed to become like them… Like his mother… And I did…
VOICE TWO
Who can explain fate? No one. People are mostly unhappy no matter how much they want to be happy. It's a difficult question… I can't learn anything from other people; I can only dig around in myself. Life isn't very beautiful; it's we who make it that way in our minds. Maybe that's it, um-hum… I want to find a book about love that describes someone like me, a woman like me, not the usual heroes and princesses. I'm surrounded by ordinary life. Dislike is everywhere, all over the place: dislike for one's husband or wife, dislike for one's work, dislike for one's family. It's good I like to fantasize… My fantasies are everything to me… Tell me about a woman like me: an eight-hour workday, small apartment, small salary and vacation once a year. And I used to be very beautiful… Very beautiful when I was young…
What's my life like? I get up at six and make breakfast. Then I take the kids to kindergarten. Drop them off and go to work. It takes me an hour (with two changes). By nine I'm at work. In my office. Forms, forms, forms… Money for goods, goods for money… I'm an economist at a large factory. After work I shop for food. First one store, then another… Loaded down I run for the bus. It's the end of the workday. Rush hour. People are angry, tense. I pick the kids up from kindergarten. Get home and figure dinner out. I'm an appliance, a machine, not a woman. After dinner my husband reads the paper, the kids watch T.V., I wash the dishes, do the laundry, iron. Until midnight. Then I go to bed and set the alarm for six again… First I took the kids to kindergarten, then they walked to school, now they're in college. I had a first husband, now I have a second, but I still get up at six, still rush back and forth to work and from one chore to the next: cooking, vacuuming, shopping, washing, mending. Maybe that's it… The hardest thing to understand is our life. The hardest thing… The constant whirl… Round and round… Where's the joy? (Smiles for the first time). Here's an example… My younger son was five, wait, let me think, no, that's right, he was five. I was doing something in the kitchen, I heard him snuffling behind me. I didn't turn round, I let him sneak up on me. He pulled a stool over, climbed up onto it and hugged me from behind, around the shoulders. He hugged me hard. And I felt such a masculine tenderness…