NINE

by Svetlana Alexiyevich

  «NINE»

  Of Russia's Foremost women writers

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  SVETLANA ALEXIYEVICH

  LANDSCAPE OF LONELINESS: THREE VOICES

  Translated by Joanne Turnbull.

  VOICE ONE

  When he said: «I love you,» but didn't yet love me, didn't realize how deeply he'd fall in love, I said: «What does that mean? That word?» He hesitated and looked at me with such interest. I guess it was time and he decided he had to say it. Typical story. Classic. But for me love's a strange word… A short word… Too small to contain everything that was going on in me, everything that I felt. Then he left. We'd meet again, of course, the next day, but even before the door closed I began to die, I began to die a physical death, my whole body ached. Love's not a glorious feeling, not at all glorious, or not only glorious… You find yourself in a different dimension… life is shrouded, veiled, you can't see anyone, can't throw yourself into anything, you're in a cocoon, a cocoon of insane suffering which grinds up everything that happened yesterday, the day before yesterday, that may happen tomorrow, everything that happened to him before you, without you. You stop caring about the world; all you do is this work, this work of love. I dreamed about how happy I'd be when it ended. How happy I'd be! At the same time, I was afraid it would end. You can't live at that temperature. Delirious. In a dream. I'd suffered before him, ranted and raved, been jealous, I'd had a lot of men, I'm no prude, but what he gave me, no one had… He was the only one… We were soul mates, each other's whole world. No one gave me that experience of self-sacrifice, I suppose… He didn't even give me a child… Even… A child? No, he didn't… And I'm a good mother… (Searches for words). Love throws you into the very depths of yourself, you dig and you dig, sometimes you like what you find, other times you're frightened. Love blinds you and makes a fool of you, but it also gives you greater knowledge. This woman said hello to him, and right away I knew she was his first love, they chatted about this and that, very social and what you'd expect. But I knew it… Knew she was the one… She didn't look at me, didn't even glance in my direction, there was no curious stare: who are you with, how are things? There wasn't anything except some sweet gestures. But I sensed something. They huddled together, together in the middle of a big crowd, a human torrent, as if there were a bridge between them. Like an animal I sensed something… Maybe because, before, when we happened to drive along that street, past those particular buildings, he always had this look on his face, this way of looking at those shabby, perfectly ordinary entrances… Something like that, that science can neither prove nor refute, that we can't understand, can't understand. (Again searches for words). I don't know… I don't know…

  We were on the metro, we worked together, we taught at the same college and went home the same way. We were colleagues. We didn't know yet, I didn't know, but it had already begun… It had already begun… We were on the metro… And suddenly he said gaily:

  «Are you seeing anyone?»

  «Yes.»

  «Like him?»

  «Not really.»

  «How about you?»

  «Yes.»

  «Like her?»

  «No, not really.»

  And that was all. We went into a store together, he pulled an antediluvian string bag — by then they seemed funny — out of his pocket and bought some macaroni, cheap sausage, sugar, and I don't know what else, a classic selection of Soviet products. Lump sugar… Cabbage pies in a greasy paper bag… (Laughs). I was married at the time, my husband was a big boss, we didn't live that way, I lived a completely different life. Once a week my husband brought home a special food package (they were doled out at work) of hard-to-come-by delicacies: smoked sturgeon, salmon, caviar… We had a car… «Help yourself, the pies are still hot,» he ate them on the run. (Laughs again). I was a long time coming to him, it was a difficult journey… A difficult journey… His sheepskin coat had been clumsily patched up in back with the thread showing. «His wife must have died and now he's bringing up their child alone,» I felt sorry for him. He was gloomy. Not good-looking. Always sucking heart pills. I felt sorry for him. «Oh, how Russia ruins you,» a Russian woman I met on a train once confided. She lived in the West, had for a long time. «In Russia, women don't fall in love with beauty, it's not beauty they're looking for and not the body they love, it's the spirit. Suffering. That's ours.» She sounded wistful…

  We bumped into each other again on the metro. He was reading the paper. I didn't say anything.

  «Do you have a secret?»

  «Yes,» the question so surprised me that I answered it seriously.

  «Have you told anyone?»

  I felt numb: My God, here we go… My God! That's how these things begin… It turned out he was married. Two children. And I was married…

  «Tell me about yourself.»

  «No, you tell me about yourself. You seem to know everything about me already.»

  «No, I can't do that.»

  «Why?»

  «Because first I'd have to fall out of love with you.»

  We were going somewhere in the car, I was driving and after that remark I swerved into the opposite lane. My mind was paralyzed by the thought: he loves me. People kept flashing their lights, I was coming right at them, head-on. Who knows where love comes from? Who sends it?

  I was the one who suggested it:

  «Let's play?»

  «Play what?»

  «That I'm driving along, see you hitchhiking, and stop.»

  So we started playing. We played and played, played all the way to my apartment, played in the elevator. In the hall. He even made fun of me: «Not much of a library. Schoolteacher level.» But I was playing myself, a pretty woman, the wife of a big boss. A lioness. A flirt. I was playing… And at some point he said:

  «Stop!»

  «What's wrong?»

  «Now I know what you're like with other people.»

  He couldn't leave his wife for six months. She wouldn't let him go. She swore at him. Pleaded with him. For six months. But I'd decided I had to leave my husband even if I wound up alone. I sat in the kitchen and sobbed. In the process of leaving I'd discovered that I lived with a very good person. He behaved wonderfully. Just wonderfully. I felt ashamed. For a long time he pretended not to notice anything, he acted as if nothing had happened, but at some point he couldn't stand it anymore and posed the question. I had to tell him. He was sorry he'd asked… He blurted it out but his eyes were pleading: «Don't answer! Don't answer!» I could see in them his horror at what he was about to hear. He began fussing with the kettle: «Let's have some tea.» We sat down and we had a good talk. But I answered all his questions, I confessed. He said: «Even so don't go.» I told him again… «Don't go.» That night I packed my things… (Through tears and laughter). But there too… Now we were together… There too I sobbed every night in the kitchen for two weeks, until one morning I found a note: «If it's so hard, maybe you should go back.» I dried my tears…

  «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 m
asculine tenderness…

  I'm surprised… I'm astonished… More than anything I'm astonished by how short life is. People say: «When I was young», but I was young only recently, I was still young yesterday. For some reason it took me a long time to get pregnant the second time. The first time it was a snap. But the second time, I just couldn't. For three years. One day I went into a church. I stood by the Virgin and it was as if she spoke to me:

  «What do you want?»

  «A son.»

  Maybe that's it… (Musing). No matter how far we are from the stars… No matter… They're there, watching us, looking after us, I went to bed again that night and thought, I can't remember what I thought. I'll be honest: I've always wanted to write letters to people, or rather to a certain person, I've always dreamed of meeting a person like that, even if we couldn't live together, I could write to him. Sometimes he would answer. Fantasies… Fantasies are everything… I'm sorry, I suppose, sorry that we're all lonely. (Pauses). Although no, I realize now… Women are never lonely, men are lonely. I feel sorry for them. Always. Even though they've let me down and haven't lived up to my hopes, I still feel sorry for them. I don't love them so much as I feel sorry for them. That's the main thing, the biggest confession I have to make. About my life. And actually, if I think about it, I've never known where my life is, unless it's with the children. Which is why I just cover my face with my hands and forge ahead…

  My father was in the military. A veterinary doctor. We moved all over the Urals with him. Our gypsy life drove my mother to tears, as soon as we'd gotten used to one place, we'd be sent to another. When Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago first came out here, everyone was talking about it. I bought a copy and gave it to my brother. A few days later he asked me:

  «Have you read it?»

  «Not yet.»

  «Read it. It's about everything you and I saw as children.»