(We drink some tea, talk about other things. Then, just as suddenly as they stopped, the memories start again.)
Oh, those seaside romances… Short and sweet. A small model of life. You can begin them beautifully, and end them beautifully, the way you'd like to in real life but never manage to. That's why people like to go away. So then… I had two braids and a blue polka dot dress I'd bought at Children's World the day before I left. The sea… I swam way far out, more than anything on earth I love to swim. Every morning I did exercises under a white acacia… A man came walking along, just a man, very ordinary-looking, not young. He saw me and for some reason was glad. He stood there and stared.
«Would you like me to read you some poetry tonight?»
«Maybe, but now I'm going to swim way far out.»
«I'll be waiting for you.»
He was a bad reader of poetry; he kept adjusting his glasses. But he was touching… I understood… I understood what he was feeling… The gestures, the glasses, it was all nervousness. But I have absolutely no memory of what he read, or why it must have meant so much. Feelings are separate beings… Suffering, love, tenderness… They live unto themselves, we feel them, but don't see them. You suddenly become a part of someone else's life, without even realizing it. Everything happens both with you and without you… At the same time… «I've been waiting for you,» he said when he saw me next morning. He said it in such a way that I believed him, even though I wasn't at all ready. Just the opposite. But something was changing around me, I didn't know what or how. I felt calm because of what was about to happen to me, it wasn't yet love, but I just sensed… I had this feeling… That I'd suddenly been given a whole lot of something. One person had heard another. Had gotten through. I swam way far out… I swam back. He was waiting for me. Again he said: «We'll be fine together.» And for some reason I again believed him… So then… He met me by the sea every day… Once we were drinking champagne: «It's pink champagne, but at the regular-champagne price.» I liked that phrase. (Laughs). Another time he was frying some eggs: «It's a curious business about me and these eggs. I buy them by the dozen, fry them in pairs, and I always have one left over.» Sweet things like that…
People would look at us and ask: «Is he your grandfather? Is he your father?» I was wearing a very short skirt… I was twenty-eight… It was only later he became handsome. With me. Why me? I was in despair at first. I must serve him. There's no other way. Or better not get involved. A Russian woman is ready to suffer: what else can she do? We're used to our men, ungainly, unfortunate, my grandmother married a man like that, and so did my mother. We don't expect anything else, and that gets passed down. We're all ferocious dreamers…
«I was thinking of you.»
«What were you thinking?»
«That I'd like us to go for a walk somewhere. Way far away. Holding hands. I don't need anything except to feel you next to me. I feel such tenderness for you — I just want to look at you and walk beside you.»
We spent many happy hours together; we acted like complete children. Good people are always children. Helpless. You have to protect them.
«Maybe we could go away together to some island and lie on the sand.»
That's my… How should it be? I don't know. With one person, it's one way. With another person, another way. But how should it be? Who can gauge? Where are the scales… That… All of Russian culture, everything we see and hear around us, is built on the fact that our best school is the school of misfortune, we grew up with it. So then… But we want good fortune… I would wake up in the night and think: What am I doing? So then… I couldn't stop worrying, and because of this tension I… «The back of your head is always tense,» he noticed. But how could I get it out of my mind… What am I doing? Where am I falling? There's an abyss…
He scared me right off the bat… The breadbox… As soon as he saw it… He would begin methodically eating up all the bread. Any amount. Bread must not be left. It was your ration. He would eat and eat; however much there was, he would always finish it. It took me a while to understand why…
They tortured him with a burning light… He was only a boy, for heaven's sake… Sixteen years old… They didn't let him sleep for days on end. Decades later he still couldn't bear bright light, even the bright summer sun. What I loved was the bright morning air, when the clouds were even higher, floating way high above you. But he could end up with a temperature… From the light…
In school they beat him and wrote on his back in chalk: «Son of an enemy of the people». The school director made them do it… Our fears as children… They stick out in us… Come to the surface… They stay with you for good. Forever. I heard those fears in him…
Where am I going? Russian women love to adopt unhappy souls. My grandmother loved one and her parents married her off to another. I can't tell you how much she disliked him, how much she didn't want to marry him. My God! She decided that at the wedding, when the priest turned to her and asked if she were going of her own free will, she would say, 'No'. But the priest was drunk and, instead of asking the question as he was supposed to, he said: «You be good to him, he froze his feet off in the war.» So then she had to marry him. That's how Granny wound up with our grandfather — whom she never loved — for life. What a perfect refrain for our entire life: «You be good to him, he froze his feet off in the war.» My mother's husband was in the next war, he returned destroyed, spent. To live with a person like that, with what he brought back with him, was a lot of work, and it fell on a woman's shoulders. No one! No one has written anything, I've never read anything about how hard it was to live with the victors. With the men who returned from the war. Gleb put it exactly in one of his journals: in camp he realized that every other person in Russia had been in prison — for an arrested father, for a few ears of wheat picked up on a collective farm field, for being late to work (ten minutes), for not informing, for an anecdote… Our men are martyrs, they've all suffered some trauma — either in the war or in camp. For many, the war ended with camp, whole echelons walked straight from the front to Siberia. Right after Victory Day. Echelons of victors. That's the way it is with us: we're always fighting someone. And the woman is always ministering… She thinks of the man as part hero and part child. She is his rescuer. To this day… The Soviet empire fell… Now we have victims of the collapse… Look at how many people have wound up on the sidelines, have been thrown off history's hurtling steam engine — the army has been cut, factories have been shut down… Engineers and doctors are selling stockings at open-air markets… Bananas… I love Dostoevsky, but he is all about prison life. The subject of the war is eternal in Russia, we simply cannot let it go… So then… (Stops). Let's take a short rest… I'll put the kettle back on… And then we can continue… I have to go the whole way from beginning to end. With my little cup of experience…