NINE
Page 4
He returned home on an upper bunk. The train took a week. He didn't come down during the day, he went to the toilet at night. He was afraid. Other passengers would offer him food and tell him their troubles. They would get him talking and then they'd find out that he'd been in camp.
He was a wildly lonely person… Wildly… Lonely…
Now he announced to anyone who would listen: «I have a family.» He was constantly surprised by normal family life, he was somehow very proud of it. Only fear… fear gnawed and ate at him. He would wake up at night in a cold sweat: if he didn't finish his book, he wouldn't be able to support us, and I would leave him… First fear, then shame because of that fear. «Gleb, if you want me to become a ballet dancer, I will. I could do anything for you.» In camp he'd survived, but in ordinary life… the traffic cop who stopped him could give him a heart attack. «How did you manage to stay alive?» «I was very much loved as a child.» The amount of love we receive saves us, it's what allows us to endure. I was a nurse… I was a nanny… An actress… So as to keep him from seeing himself the way he was, to keep him from seeing his own fear, otherwise he couldn't have loved himself. To keep him from finding out that I knew… Love is an essential vitamin, without it a person can't live, his blood coagulates, his heart stops. Oh, what resources I found in myself… Life is like running the hundred-yard dash… (Falls silent. Rocks ever so slightly in rhythm to her thoughts). Do you know what he asked me before he died? His only request: «Write on my gravestone that I was a happy man. I managed to do so much: I survived, I loved, I wrote a book, I have a daughter. My God, what a happy man I am.» If someone were to hear that or to read it… To look at him you would never have believed it… But Gleb was a happy man! He gave me so much… I changed… How tiny our life is… Eighty, a hundred, two hundred years would be too little for me. I see the look on my old mother's face in the garden, she doesn't want to part with all this. The way she looks at that garden! And in the evening… In the evening, how she peers into the darkness… Into nowhere… It's too bad, it's so too bad that he never knew me the way I am now… I understand him now… It's only now that I've come to understand him… So then… He was a little afraid of me, just a bit. He was afraid of my feminine essence, of a… Of a sort of vortex… He often said: «Remember that when I'm not feeling well, I want to be alone.» But… I couldn't do that… I had to follow him around… (Finishes her thought in silence). You can't purify life before death, can't make it as pure as death, when a person becomes handsome and free, the way he really is. I suppose it's senseless to try and force one's way through to this essence in one's lifetime. To try and get closer to it.
When I learned he had cancer, I couldn't stop crying the whole night, and in the morning I rushed to the hospital. He was sitting on the windowsill, yellow and very happy. He was always happy when something in his life was about to change. First there was camp, then exile, then freedom, and now there would be something else… Death was just another change of scene…
«Are you afraid I'll die?»
«Yes.»
«Well, first of all, I didn't promise you anything. And, second, it won't happen anytime soon.»
«Really?»
As always, I believed him. I dried my tears and told myself that again I had to help him. I didn't cry anymore… I came to his room every morning, and our life began. Before we had lived at home, now we lived at the hospital. We spent six months in a cancer ward.
I can't remember… We talked so much, more than ever before, for whole days on end, but I remember only crumbs… Bits and pieces…
He knew who had informed on him. A boy who was in an after-school group with him at the House of Young Pioneers. He wrote a letter. Either he wrote it himself, or they made him do it: Gleb had criticized comrade Stalin and defended his father, an enemy of the people. His interrogator showed him the letter… All his life Gleb was afraid… He was afraid that the informer would find out that he knew. He wanted to mention him in his book but then he heard that his wife had given birth to a retarded child, and he was afraid to — what if that was God's punishment. Former inmates have their own criteria… Their own attitudes… Gleb often ran into him on the street, he happened to live near us. They would say hello. Talk about politics, about the weather. After Gleb died, I told a mutual friend about his having informed on Gleb… She didn't believe me: «N.? That can't be, he always speaks so well of Gleb, about what old friends they were. He cried at the cemetery.» I realized I shouldn't have… Shouldn't have… There's a line over which it's dangerous for a person to step. Forbidden. Everything that's been written about the camps has been written by victims. Their tormentors are silent. We don't know how to distinguish them from other people. So then… But Gleb didn't want to… He knew that for a person that knowledge was dangerous… For a person… For his soul…
He'd been used to dying since he was a boy… He wasn't afraid of a little thing like that… In camp, the criminals who headed up work brigades often sold other prisoners' bread rations, or lost them at cards; the ones left without any bread ate tar. Black tar. And died: the walls of their stomachs became stuck together. But Gleb just stopped eating, he only drank. One boy ran away… on purpose, so they'd shoot him… Over the snow, in the sun… They took aim… And shot… Merrily… As if they were out hunting… As if he were a duck… They shot him in the head, dragged him back to the compound with a rope and dumped him in front of the guard shack… Gleb hadn't had any fear in camp… But here he needed me…
«What's camp like?»
«It's a completely different life. And hard work.»
I can hear… I can almost hear him saying that…
«Local elections in a nearby settlement. We were giving a concert at the polling station. I was the master of ceremonies. I stepped out on stage and said: Please give a warm welcome to our choir. Political prisoners, turncoats, prostitutes, and pickpockets all stood and sang a song about Stalin: 'And our song sails o'er the vast expanses to the peaks of the Kremlin'.»
A nurse came in to give Gleb a shot: «Your behind is all red. There's no more room.» «Of course my behind is red, don't I live in the Soviet Union?» We laughed a lot together, even at the end. Really a lot.
«Soviet Army Day. I'm on stage reading Mayakovsky's 'Poem about a Soviet Passport': 'Read this. Envy me. I am a citizen of the Soviet Union.' Instead of a passport I have piece of black cardboard. I hold it up… And the whole camp garrison envies me… 'I am a citizen of the Soviet Union.' The prostitutes, former Soviet prisoners of war, pickpockets and Socialist Revolutionaries all envy me…»
No one will ever know how it really was or what people like that come away with. He was a wildly lonely person… I loved him…
I looked round as I was going out the door and he waved. When I came back a few hours later, he was delirious. He kept saying: «Wait a minute… wait a minute…» Then he stopped and just lay there unconscious. For three days. I got used to it. To his lying there and me living there. They put in an extra bed for me next to his. So then… The third day… By then they were having trouble giving him his intravenous shots… Blood clots… I had to tell the doctors to stop everything, he wouldn't feel any pain, wouldn't hear. And we were left completely alone… No monitors, no doctors, no more checks… I got into bed with him. It was cold. I burrowed under the blanket and fell asleep. When I woke up I didn't open my eyes: it seemed to me we were in our bed at home and the balcony door had blown open… Gleb wasn't awake yet… I still had my eyes closed… Then I opened them and it all came back to me… I started tossing… I got up and put my hands over his face: «A-a-ah…» He heard me. The death throes had begun… and I… sat there holding his hand so that I heard the last beat of his heart. I sat there for a long time afterwards… Then I called the nurse, and she helped me put his shirt on, it was blue, his favorite color. «May I sit here awhile longer?» «Yes, of course, you aren't scared?» I didn't want to give him to anyone. He was my child… What was there to be frightened of? By
morning he was handsome… The fear had gone out of his face, and the tension. That was who he was! That was who he really was! I'd never known him that way. He wasn't that way with me. (Cries. For the first time during our conversation).
I always shone with his reflected light… Though I was capable of things myself, I could create… It was always, of course, work. Always work. Even in bed… For him to be able to… first him and then me. «You're strong, you're kind, you're the best. You're wonderful.» I've never known a strong man, a man who didn't make me feel like a nursemaid. A mother. An angel of mercy. I've always been lonely… I won't hide it… I admit it… I've had relationships since Gleb… Right now I have a friend, but he's also all in knots… Unhappy… Insecure… That's our life… Strange, incomprehensible… We grew up in one country with the ideas of Marx and Lenin, and now we live in a completely different country — after Gorbachev. On top of more ruins. On top of more rubble. The old values are gone, the new values still unclear. Even Gleb was braver, after Magadan… After camp… He had self-respect: Well, I survived! I endured it! I know all about it! He was proud. But this man has nothing but fear. He's fifty years old and he has to start a new life. Everything from scratch. And my role is still the same… I minister… minister… Always the same role…
Yet I was happy with Gleb. Yes, it was hard work, but I'm happy, I'm proud that I was able to do that work. Most of the time I have that sense, that happiness. All I have to do is close my eyes…
MARIA ARBATOVA
MY NAME IS WOMAN
Translated by Kathleen Cook.
As a child they used to scare me with stories about the witch Baba-Yaga. As a teenager it was the gynaecologist. All the teachers' warnings and the kids' stories ended up with the most attractive and reckless girls meeting their Armageddon in the gynaecologist's chair.
On the rubbish heap behind the polyclinic, which was closed for repairs, lay an abandoned dentist's chair that the sixth formers used to visit in single-sex groups: the boys to remove the nickel-plated nuts and bolts and the girls to rehearse their future role by sitting in the chair, legs pressed together, chin pointing upwards in agony and arms crossed over their bosom. The belief that this was a gynaecologist's chair was as strong as the conviction that you would get no better treatment here than in its dental counterpart.
There was a tricky and well-developed technique of avoiding medical check-ups in the older classes that was passed down by word of mouth. The minority did not wish to publicise the loss of their virginity, while the majority had been brainwashed by tradition and upbringing to believe that any sign of belonging to the female sex was shameful and regarded a visit to the gynaecologist as prof oundly traumatic.
To cut a long story short, by the time of my first visit to the gynaecologist I was well and truly pregnant.
Avoiding the queue, mother in her white doctor's coat got me into the clinic where she worked, and my eighteen-year-old eyes alighted on the metal structure, the need to mount the likes of which distinguished me from the opposite sex.
«Don't turn the waterworks on for me!» shouted a real battleaxe of a woman doctor, who was washing her rubber-gloved hands, at a pale young blonde with a big belly and dark rings under her eyes. «I won't be responsible for you! What sort of baby do you want to have? A monster? I tell you straight, a monster is what you'll give birth to!» Heaving herself over from the washbasin, she squatted down and poked a rubber-gloved finger into the blonde's ankle. «Swelling! Just look at it! Up to my elbow!»
«I can't go into hospital,» the blonde wept loudly. «There's no one to look after my baby! My parents live too far away and my husband drinks.»
«Her husband drinks!» The doctor turned to my mother. «Whose husband doesn't?..Is this your girl?»
«It's my daughter,» mother said proudly. «Let's hope she's not pregnant,» she added shamefully, in the same tone that doctors say: «Let's hope it's not pneumonia» or «Let's hope it's not a heart attack.»
«How quickly they grow up. I remember her trotting round the clinic in her school uniform! Take your things off!» The battleaxe waved a rubber glove in the direction of the chair.
«Doctor, please, I can't go into hospital. He beats the boy when he gets drunk,» the blonde was wailing.
I started to take off my sweater obediently.
«Your jeans, tights and pants, not your sweater,» mother hissed.
«I'm sick of the lot of you!» the battleaxe howled at the blonde. Then to me: «You look as if you're sitting in the Bolshoi Theatre. Never been in a gynaecologist's chair before?»
«No, never,» I confessed guiltily, like a schoolgirl with poor grades.
«Spread your legs!»
«How?» I said in a panic.
«The way you did for your husband!» the battleaxe shouted, charging at me.
«Who got her in this state?» she asked mother, rummaging around in my genitals.
«A student boyfriend. They're getting married.» Mother tried to make it all sound proper without any great enthusiasm. She would have liked a more up-market young man, of course.
«What is he studying to be?» enquired the battleaxe.
«A singer. An opera singer,» mother added.
«Singers like to have a good time,» the battleaxe summed up her knowledge of the type succinctly. «What about her?»
«She's studying at university,» mother said.
«To be what?»
«A philosopher,» mother confessed guiltily.
The battleaxe froze, her arms inside me up to the elbow, and asked with a mixture of disdain and curiosity:
«What sort of job is that, being a philosopher? Where do they work, philosophers? What sort of family is that, a singer and a philosopher? Never heard of anything like it!»
«That's just what I say,» mother echoed. «She should have done medicine or law.»
«I'll refer her for an abortion,» the doctor concluded.
«An abortion, of course,» mother sang. «They're much too young.»
«You can say that again.» Barely rinsing her hands, the woman immersed herself in the epistolary act.
«Graduate first, then get pregnant,» mother announced solemnly, as if someone had asked her what order to do things in, and as if she had ever taken the trouble to enlighten me on the subject of contraception.
«Their heads are too full of having a good time to know what's what,» the woman sighed.
«It's funny she didn't try to persuade me to have it,» I said when we got outside.
«She's had fifteen abortions herself,» mother informed me.
The idea that a pregnant girl of eighteen about to marry the man she loved should actually have the child had never entered my head. The heights of philosophical thought were more tempting than the kitchen sink scenario associated with motherhood as a student. Just as thoughts of continuing the family tree never occurred to my boyfriend or my mother. My boyfriend felt guilty, depressed and confused, of course; but professional ambitions combined with the infantilism nourished by our over-protective mothers united us into a couple unsuitable for reproduction.
Next day I plaited my hair and took my place in the queue, wearing a baggy hospital dressing gown. The subdued women waiting for their turn to go into the operating theatre, the shouts of the current victim inside, who was then led out, with the concomitant mise-en-scene… She staggering and the nurses trying to prop her up against the wall, shouting:
«Hurry up, you're not the only one, woman! There's a whole queue of them waiting. Get into the ward and put the pad under you properly. You're bleeding and there's no one to wipe it up! You don't fancy working here as a cleaner, do you?»
The usual production line: the waiting women, glancing at their watches to work out what household chores they would have time for today apart from an abortion; the tired, bitchy nurses; the screams from behind the closed door. The facial expressions suggested that everything was following its due course, the adults were doing their usual adult jobs, and on
ly I, an infantile idiot, viewed the whole thing in a tragic light.
«Do they give you an anaesthetic?» I asked a fat, middle-aged woman, doing my best to make my voice sound natural.
«You must be joking,» she replied with a loud yawn.
«Why not?» I asked in a panic.
«Think yourself lucky if you get a novocaine injection.» The woman stared at me, saw everything about me, and turned away in disgust. «Just out of nappies and she turns up here!»
«But why are they screaming if they've been given an injection?» I turned to a young woman in dangling earrings.
«Because novocaine doesn't work on everyone,» she smiled. «Stop analyzing and just count elephants.»
«What elephants?» I asked desperately, sensing my total ignorance and unworthiness to be sitting in the same queue as these older, experienced women.
«Well, you know when you're trying to get to sleep you count elephants: one elephant plus another elephant makes two, two elephants plus another elephant makes three, and so on. When you get up to a thousand elephants, the abortion will be over, unless there are complications, of course.»
At the twenty-seventh elephant I heard my name called out.
«How old are you, lassy?» The question came from an elderly Armenian in a short-sleeved white coat, his powerful arms crossed on a hairy chest in the operation room.
«Eighteen.»
«This your first abortion?»
«Yes.»
«Doesn't he want to get married?»
«Yes, he does, but having children doesn't go with a career,» I babbled, trying to gain time.
«Do you have a mother?»
«Yes.»
«What does she do?»
«She's a doctor.»
«……!» He cursed for a long time in Armenian. «I won't give you a scrape today. First abortions often end in infertility. You've got the night to think it over. I want you to think hard.»
I gave him a look of doglike gratitude and said:
«Alright, I'll think it over. And I'm allergic to novocaine.» This was a clever lie, which mother had taught me, instead of telling me about contraception. «I can only have a general anaesthetic.»