Words Will Break Cement

by Masha Gessen

Buttonholes get stitched very fast. That zigzagging thread you will see if you look at a buttonhole—that is put on by a machine in the space of about 10 seconds, and then a knife lands in the middle. Then you shift the cloth over and the process repeats: shift, stitch, knife. Shift. Stitch, knife. Next item. I put buttonholes onto housecoats.

  There are machines that use 3 or 5 spools of thread simultaneously. They overstitch the edges. First you slip the cloth underneath the tab, then you press the pedal, and a tiny knife starts trimming the cloth very very quickly while a needle (or two needles) cover the edge with a pattern using a mechanism I don’t understand. If you needed to undo regular stitching, it would take you a while, but you can undo the edge stitch in a second simply by pulling on the right thread.

  I like the sound of the overstitching machines; they are like little animals willing to eat all the cloth you can feed them. I like the smell of oil that you feel when you clean a machine; you flip it and lay it on the back part of the table and you can see the oil trickle into the tray from the different internal mechanisms. I like cutting buttonholes; they look like mouths. I like the view from the workshop window: a small grove with factory stacks visible beyond it, and there is always smoke coming out of them. If you spend a long time sewing fast, the same thing over and over again, and then you stand up and look out the window, you feel like you spent much longer than a minute staring. It is a wondrous thing, to look out the window. Just to look out the window and nothing else. It is like all the noise in the world recedes and there is so much silence that it fills up my entire head.

  TWELVE

  Nadya

  NADYA LOOKED LIKE she was going to cry. “Gera is acting like I’m a stranger! Gera is being shy around me! But just you wait, I’ll get out.”

  “That’s odd,” said Petya. “Gera is usually perfectly relaxed around strangers.” This did not help.

  Gera had not seen her mother since the last family visit, two months ago. In the interim she had gone to the Montenegrin seaside and become very tan and a little grown-up and shy.

  “You are not tan,” Petya said to Nadya. “Do you not get to be outside?”

  “Oh, I get to be outside all right,” said Nadya. “Take yesterday, for example. We were lugging rocks. The rocks were in bags. Gera, I work on the factory floor. You know what a barn looks like?” There was no reason for her daughter to know what a barn looked like any more than she knew what a factory floor looked like. “It’s like a barn with very very many sewing machines in it. And very very many women. And on the factory floor, they are changing the floor. It used to be wooden and they are going to put down tile. And we are carrying rocks so they can put them down first and then cover them with tile. All right, I am going to read to you.”

  Gera was still standing stiffly next to her mother. This four-hour visit was taking place in a tiny rectangular room that was cut up with tall desks. Nadya sat at the desk farthest from the door, with her back to the window. Petya and I sat about two yards from her, behind another desk, with our backs to the door. A penal colony officer sat in the space between us. After some consideration she had allowed Gera to cross over to Nadya’s side of the room.

  “Have you learned to read yet? So I guess I’m going to have to come out of prison and teach you to read. Do you at least play the hedgehog game?” Nadya leaned into Gera’s neck and made sniffling sounds. Gera giggled uncomfortably. “You don’t play the hedgehog game? What do you do all day? Who is Andrei Usachev?” This was the name on the book of children’s poems Gera had with her. “Why aren’t you reading the classics? Do you read Kharms?”

  Daniil Kharms was an absurdist poet who was killed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Petya had diligently memorized a Kharms poem with Gera, and he had even sent it to Nadya in a separate e-mail so they would all know the same poem, but this was months ago and Gera had forgotten most of it while she was in Montenegro. They all tried to recall it together now, but they started by putting the words in the first line in the wrong, too-obvious order, and this got them into trouble; it got them to where the bulldog’s bone had a wrinkly forehead. Gera finally laughed like a kid.

  “Can you wrinkle your forehead? Since I’ve been in prison, I have gotten wrinkles on my forehead.” Nadya was now trying to draw a bulldog. She was too far away for us to see what she was doing, and the desks had odd little barriers that obscured whatever was there, but apparently she did not think the drawing was very good. “I know a woman here who can draw anything at all because she is a professional artist.”

  Time was, Nadya had thought of herself as a professional artist. Petya called her on it now, and she laughed bitterly. At most, she said, she could convince people here that she was “creative,” which was just a fancy word for weird.

  Petya tried to change the subject to something positive: “Did you make that smoothie yet?” Nadya had been dreaming of making one and had asked for bananas and cinnamon, which she planned to mix with milk, available from the colony concession.

  “I haven’t had the time. There is no time here.”

  “What about your two hours before lights-out?”

  “It doesn’t exist. They keep giving us extra maintenance work.”

  The colony was laying pipes underground: at the moment the gas, water, and sewage pipes were elevated. Endless ditches were now being dug and the dirt had to be removed. The inmates lugged it off using those all-purpose giant square bags.

  “Don’t you have wheelbarrows?” I asked.

  Nadya laughed an angry laugh.

  “And we don’t have planes and trains either.”

  ———

  “SOMEONE TOLD ME recently that I walk like the Terminator,” she said.

  “You do have an unusual gait,” said Petya.

  “What’s unusual about it? Verbalize. Oh my God, I can use that word!”

  Petya thought for a long minute.

  “If a person’s gait can express emotions, yours expresses anticipation. You hop.”

  “That’s what they told me. That I hop and that I walk very confidently and that I hold my arms like so.” Nadya placed her hands on her hips and spread out her elbows. “And that I walk around as though I owned the world. So I’ve been trying to walk a bit more modestly, but I don’t seem to be very good at that yet.”

  At the age of twenty-four, Nadya was confronting the idea that it is not always good to be noticed. She had been that very unusual kind of girl and young woman who always thought that standing out, being more beautiful, smarter, and louder than everyone else was a good thing. Even in prison it had seemed a good thing at first—or it just took her a long time to realize that it was not. Nadya’s relationships with other inmates seemed smooth at the beginning; she was too unusual to form the kinds of intense bonds that got Maria into instant trouble, and this same otherworldliness seemed to make her attitude of anthropological curiosity acceptable to others. She did not rack up violations like Maria—in fact, she was ambushed by her first violation for walking to the infirmary unescorted on March 2, the last day of her first year of incarceration, which happened to be the last day she could be slapped with a violation that would serve as an excuse to deny her parole. Soon waves of hostility started rolling through the penal colony: one day Nadya would approach an inmate in the factory with a work-related question and the inmate would hiss back, “Don’t talk to me.” Nadya would be ostracized for about a week and then things would normalize, only to flare up again a week or two or three later, for no apparent reason.

  For the first time in her life, Nadya found herself in a setting where she did not know and could not intuit the rules. She would be reprimanded for not taking part in social activities such as the Miss Charm beauty contest or the singing contest, and she would sign up to sing and go to the clubhouse to rehearse only to be told that she was in violation for being in the clubhouse without an official permission slip. Though this requirement did not seem to apply to other inmates, Nadya needed an escort to walk from her ba
rracks to the clubhouse. But while she waited for the escort, her permission slip expired. She never made it to the clubhouse and never took part in the contest.

  Petya had a pile of legal paperwork with him. He had developed as great a passion for jailhouse lawyering as Maria had. Attorney Irina Khrunova, who was now representing both of the Pussy Riot inmates, called him the best lawyer’s assistant she had ever met. Now seemed like a good time to give Nadya some papers to sign; these were some legal motions Maria was testing, and Nadya could follow. She waved him off.

  “I am not interested at all. I don’t believe in the courts.” Petya tried to convince her that Maria had succeeded in changing her own and other inmates’ lives for the better through legal means. Nadya did not have an argument to counter this and grew even more irritated. “Petya, we have a conjugal visit in two weeks, right? Can’t you bring it up then? You have nothing to talk to me about right now? What are you, going to burst?”

  Petya showed no sign of being hurt. It was now an hour and forty minutes into the visit and Gera was finally comfortable in her mother’s lap.

  “Gera, what is your favorite food now?”

  Gera could not think of an answer.

  “I am giving Petya an assignment, to find out what your favorite food is and send it to me here so I can taste it too.”

  “You know, Maria doesn’t understand how it’s possible not to be fascinated with the intricacies of the law; she has immersed herself completely.”

  “She is lucky. My excuse is that everyone has her own language. I am growing increasingly convinced that I am not interested in politics as such.”

  “But this is the system’s bloodline. It allows you to see how the state really works.”

  “You don’t think I have a good sense of how this state works? I have intimate knowledge now, and I really understand how bureaucrats work. And the more I learn, the less hope I have. It’s all based on a set of blind beliefs that are impossible to shake even using an individual approach. Their very concept of state power—they see it as a static structure that is unchangeable by its very nature. The same goes for the way the penal colony is constituted. And art. No one wants to listen; they tell me to go get lost. They are afraid of new information: ‘Tolokonnikova, stop it right now.’ Even though all I’m doing is trying to talk to them about art. Which I try to do all the time, because I’m an expert in that area. As opposed to sewing, for example.”

  There was another reason she did not want to file any more complaints: she wanted time in the colony to go faster. “That’s all anyone here wants. And court hearings or anything else that breaks up the monotony doesn’t help because it slows time down.”

  Petya was surprised. He would have thought that time in the colony dragged on, and interruptions would help speed it up. He clearly did not know the first thing about monotony.

  On Sundays the inmates watched movies. “Last week they screened an hour-long American film about dental hygiene. It was dubbed. But the funniest one they showed us was about the need for leisure time. I was sitting next to women who work until one in the morning every day. And here they were telling us that when a person does not get any rest, he becomes a destructive member of society because of the elevated risk of accidents. The women were laughing so hard they fell off their chairs.”

  ———

  WHAT NADYA REALLY wanted to see was Laurence Anyways, a film by Xavier Dolan. I had not heard of the film or the filmmaker. “He is a Canadian director,” she explained, “who’s made a movie about a man and a woman and the man decided to become a woman. The other thing that I’m interested in is that the director is twenty-four years old and he’s already made four movies and each one of them has been shown at Cannes. He was born the same year I was. It always touches me when someone my age does something. And it really hurts that I have to spend this time behind bars.”

  Being behind bars was not only a waste of time; it was also an experience that had changed Nadya in ways from which she already feared she would not recover. “I know that when I get out of here I will be able to find people capable of understanding me and acting with me. But I realize that we will only ever be understood by a small circle of people. This is a crisis of sorts. I am not interested in classical art forms, but it is they that can be used to explain things to people. So I am facing the task of using the mechanics of pop to create something that’s mine. This is a complex technical challenge, so I am feeling a little stymied.”

  “But that is a replay of the Soviet attitude, when you were only considered an accomplished poet if your books had press runs of three million,” said Petya, somewhat unfairly to Soviet-era poets.

  “Say, War and Peace leaves me completely cold,” said Nadya, trying a different tack either to make herself understood or to understand what she was trying to formulate herself. “Whereas Tolstoy’s ridiculous attempts to educate and organize the masses inspire me.”

  “Interesting that it was when Tolstoy tried to address the masses that he was noticed as problematic by the Church.” Petya was trying hard to hold up his end of the conversation, even if he had a difficult time grasping what Nadya meant.

  “‘Being noticed’—I used to think that was a good thing,” said Nadya. She was not hearing Petya either.

  I thought I might as well bring up something Nadya and I had been corresponding about: language. Pussy Riot had subverted Soviet-speak, which had perverted language. But how does one pull off that trick in a more traditional art form?

  “I really feel the problems with the language in here,” said Nadya. “Yes, words being used to mean their opposites, and this is handed from the top down. And at every step, as they pass the word down, people feel that they are doing it but they still do it in order to keep the status they acquired through this use of upside-down language.”

  “And this use of upside-down language is what you were referring to when you talked about sincerity in your closing statement in court?”

  “I had a fit of absolutism then,” Nadya said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “I got overheated. I started talking about ‘the truth.’ Because this endless flow of lies—” Of course, talking about “the truth” in earnest would embarrass a twenty-four-year-old student of Theory.

  “I always thought this was strange,” Petya chimed in. Apparently, they had not discussed Nadya’s closing statement, which had been translated into most of the world’s languages. “The truth is not a political concept at all.”

  “So what that it’s not a political concept? I just wanted to be understood. I could have used constructions from contemporary philosophy that are better suited to describing this precisely, but I wanted to be understood.”

  Petya persisted in his criticism, and he and I fell into an argument about whether Nadya had fallen into a modernist trap. Nadya and Gera tried singing a song about polar bears, but they could not remember the words.

  “You look beautiful,” said Petya.

  “It’s just the green color of the uniform,” Nadya responded. “When I danced in a green dress, that suited me too. Especially when a yellow mask used to cover my face.”

  EPILOGUE

  Activist Ambition sat on the second floor of a café near Chistye Prudy metro. She had no way of knowing it was the same table at which Violetta Volkova and Nikolai Polozov had met almost exactly a year earlier. She chose the table because it had a good view out the window. She was drinking wine. Activist Ambition—she did not remember exactly, but the nickname must have been coined by Petya when he recruited her for Voina near the end of that group’s active life—was in her late teens, which in Russia meant she was of drinking age. This did not change the fact that she was small and not a very experienced drinker: she felt the effects of the alcohol by the time she got to the bottom of her first glass, and on her second, she grew maudlin and sentimental. She started thinking of Pussy Riot.

  No one had made her leave: she had decided herself, for all the right reasons. It was the time Pussy Riot wa
s detained in the Metro for singing on the platform. Activist Ambition had been very clear with Kat and Nadya from the outset: she told them she only had three hours before her lecture, and unlike them she arrived not in Pussy Riot dress but in her school clothes—Kat had had to shield her while she changed. A few minutes later she was up at the top of the platform looking down. The song was over and police had surrounded the platform. She started throwing confetti at the police, and this did not make a difference. A train came: all she had to do now was climb down and jump on board the train before the police could grab her. She did—but the train did not move. Women in gray tried to force her back out through the open doors. Several men in black ran in and quickly grabbed her—and Kat and Nadya and Morzh, who she discovered were next to her—and twisted their arms behind their backs.

  At the police station, while Nadya haggled with the cops and Tasya kept filming and Kat fretted that they had called her father, Activist Ambition realized something important: not only did none of them care that she had missed her lecture, but they would not have cared even if one of them had missed a lecture. They lived for the actions. She had been trying to be like them for several months. After the Feed the Road action, which had been her first, her father had stopped giving her pocket money, and she had been reduced to finding ways to ride public transit for free and to shoplifting, which she learned from Nadya and Petya and Kat. Now, at the police station, she realized that she had landed there not by accident but by design: the life they led had to include incarceration. And she was the only one in the group who cared.

  They kept inviting her to actions after that, and she did help in filming one, but by the time the Cathedral of Christ the Savior happened, she learned about it from the media. While Maria, Nadya, and Kat were in hiding, they gathered several women in a safe space—it was some sort of cellar, which seemed fitting—and Activist Ambition went, of course. They talked about future actions. The feeling of being part of the group was elusive, it kept teasing her and dissipating, leaving a painful longing in its place.