Tomorrow at seven I have to give blood and other specimens. I visualized the line in the stuffy hallway, the tales of the old women about diseases, and then another line for an hour
and a half to see the doctor. I burst into tears and told my mother that I was giving up on the pool and would tear up my pass.
Mama didn’t argue. She disappeared for an hour and returned with a note from her own doctor; as a war veteran she is able to go to a privileged hospital. We erased her name and wrote in mine. As wise people say, you have to think.
MARCH 7. We’re trying to make up for lost time like mad. There’s an explosion of intellectual and political life in Moscow, a steady stream of evenings with celebrities, literary evenings, exhibitions. Samizdat books, so recently banned, are read from the stage in large halls. New prose has come out from the underground. It ruthlessly strikes your psyche. Some people can’t take it and start attaching labels as in the good old days: pornography, slander, exaggeration. One insulted listener got up at a literary evening and said she thought this was a public mockery of Soviet people.
And our life isn’t a mockery? Wake up and open your eyes! Don’t have the nerve?
It’s not easy reading this prose. This isn’t your socialist realism, where everything is beautiful, joyful, and understandable, where the world is black and white, the good guy always wins, the workers go on building developed socialism, the peasants grow a bountiful harvest, and the intellectuals, a mere substratum of society, help as best they can. Here you are inundated with drunkards, drug addicts, sexual maniacs, cynical,
corrupt functionaries. Here you have vomit, bad smells, corpses, morbid fantasies, and degenerate children.
Sometimes this prose is presented in a complex, irrational form, but how else can you talk about our irrational, absurd reality?
Its most unexpected effect is healing. It’s like an inoculation. You have a light form of the disease, and then the disease is no longer a threat.
This prose helped me in my difficult moments when my mind rejected what was happening. What could be more horrible than the death of someone you love? It turns out that even that can be made twice as bad. We took my father back to his hometown to be buried, and there wasn’t a single morgue prepared to hold his coffin for one night. As a result, we left him in a small wooden building without refrigeration or air conditioning in ninety-degree heat. It was the morgue of the forensics lab. When the men came out of the building, having left the coffin in there, they stank with the horrible corpse smell. My cousin was as white as death. He said that there were three rotting corpses of a greenish blue color on the tables, and the floor was covered with a malodorous slime. The next day the coffin was permeated with that smell. I couldn’t get rid of it for several months. I’d be walking down the street, and it would come upon me out of nowhere—the bushes, a doorway.
Tell me, why did my father have to spend his last night on earth in that hell?
Of course, he had seen that for himself a few years earlier. His brother died unexpectedly during a vacation in a famous resort city. According to Russian Orthodox tradition, the body
must be buried, not cremated. It was important for Papa to have the whole family buried in one place. It took three weeks to transport the body five hundred miles. There was no coffin for transportation, and all the forms of transport refused to take the body. And there were worms and maggots all over the morgue; the only morgue in the city had no cooling system.
My father came home aged by several years.
So when I stood near the house with the bodies and listened to my cousin, I recalled those horror stories so that I could distance myself from the unbearable . . . and go on living.
In the first hours after my father’s death I also had to deal with pathological cruelty. His was an almost instantaneous death, at home, over breakfast. We didn’t want an autopsy. The cause of death was clear: He had a bad heart. We had to get a certificate from the hospital where he was treated. The doctor said with blatant nastiness, “If you’re so Orthodox, then keep your relative at home until the funeral. They do autopsies on everyone at the morgue.” It was hot, and the funeral was several days away. The doctors kept me in the hallways almost a half hour, walking past me, looking important. It was a form of sadistic pleasure for them. I couldn’t take it. I called Mama and screamed so the whole hospital could hear, “These bitches won’t give me the certificate.” Everything was ready in ten minutes. They brought me a sedative and tried to calm me down. They had got what they wanted: They had humiliated me, and then they could take pity on me.
MARCH 10. I can’t control myself, I’m still shaking. I have to buy a gun on the black market. I was coming back from friends’ tonight, and I was rather well dressed, in a German fur jacket. A suspicious-looking young man sat in the bus across from me. His head was lowered, and half his face was covered by his collar. When I got off, he followed at a distance. Then he took another path and met me near the entrance. The street was empty. In the small entry you have to punch in a code to open the inner door. He was waiting for me to enter the code. I jumped out into the street. Luckily a young man of eighteen or so was walking by. I said, “Help me, some strange guy is following me.” The guy was pushing all the buttons, trying to hit on the code. It was after midnight. Nobody goes visiting at that hour. I opened the door, and the guy followed us to the elevators. We stopped and waited to see what would happen. He got into an elevator, the door shut, and the lights went up to the seventh floor and then back down. Our elevators don’t return automatically. That meant he was still in it. We got on the other elevator and went up to my floor. I asked the young man if he was afraid to go back down. He laughed and said of course not.
Am I crazy? Obviously he had been following me. I don’t even want to think what he wanted: the jacket, my jewelry, or me? There is a dark stairway by the elevator which no one uses. He could have dragged me in there and done whatever he wanted.
A terrible crime wave has hit the country. Just a few years ago I often came home at one or two in the morning. I would walk from the bus stop down paths through thick brush and never worry. Now we try not to go out after six in the evening. The crimes are of all kinds, from mugging to vicious rapes and
murders. There have been incidents in our building, some with comic overtones. A famous speculator in Western electronic equipment lives across the way. It is said that people shot into his windows from the house across the street. And the former chairman of our building cooperative, a physics teacher, recently robbed his next-door neighbor. The dog followed the scent to his apartment, which was full of the neighbors’ things. They didn’t take him to court. They settled amicably.
Now you can be robbed in the metro. Gangs surround you and, knives in hand, politely ask you to take off your jewelry and clothes. Some even take your shoes and give you a pair of house slippers. These gangs are called Slippers.
It’s a good thing that I had military training at college. I know the strategy and tactics of battle, and I know how to do reconnaissance. When I leave the apartment, I reconnoiter the area. Anyone in the hallway or behind the garbage dump? If there’s a man in the elevator, I wait for the next one. Once I practically pushed a man out who was getting on. And I’m alert all the time—on the street, the trolley, the metro. Battle-ready. All I need is a gun.
MARCH 15. Was this really the last time? I came home, washed, warmed up, had some hot tea, and felt like a human being. The worst part of it all is its meaninglessness and humiliation. It’s been going on for almost twenty years, since my school days. It’s called helping your hometown. Everyone, from school- children to Ph.D.’s, works at the vegetable warehouse every two or three months, supposedly to help save the harvest that the