Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich Page A

had a fear of large trees with full crowns because they were the kinds of trees that the Finnish snipers would hide in—they called them “cuckoos.” [ She is silent. ] I want to add…this is my opinion…After the Victory, our little town was flooded with flowers, people went flower crazy. The most important flowers were dahlias, you had to keep the bulbs alive through the winter and not let them freeze. God forbid! People would swaddle them, tucking them in like they were little babies. Flowers grew in front of people’s houses, behind their houses, around the wells, along the fences. People were hungry for life. After living in fear for so long, they needed to celebrate. But eventually, the flowers disappeared; there’s nothing left of that now. But I remember…I just remembered them…[ Silence. ] My father…My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy’s artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn’t accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: “They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, ‘You made it, Ivan!’ ” My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn’t understand why they were so cheerful…

    The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. “Brothers! Friends!” they threw themselves on their comrades. “Halt! Another step and we’ll shoot!” The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…“How were you taken prisoner?” the interrogator asked my father. “The Finns pulled me out of a lake.” “You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.” My father also considered himself guilty. That’s how they’d been trained…There was no trial. They marched everyone out on the quad and read the entire division their sentence: six years in the camps for betraying the Motherland. Then they shipped them off to Vorkuta to build a railway over the permafrost. My God! It was 1941…The Germans were moving in on Moscow…No one even told them that war had broken out—after all, they were enemies, it would only make them happy. Belarus was occupied by the Nazis. They took Smolensk. When they finally heard about it, all of them wanted to go to the front, they all wrote letters to the head of the camp…to Stalin…And in response, they were told, “Work for the victory on the home front, you bastards. We don’t need traitors like you at the front.” They all…Papa…he told me…All of them wept…[ Silence. ] Really, that’s who you should be talking to…Alas, my father is gone. The camp cut his life short, and so did perestroika . He suffered so much. He couldn’t understand what had happened. To the country, to the Party. Our father…After six years in the penal colony, he forgot what an apple was or a head of cabbage…Sheets and pillows…Three times a day, they would give them thin gruel and a single loaf of bread split among twenty-five men. They slept with a log under their heads and a wooden plank on the ground for a mattress. Papa…He was a strange man, not like the others…Incapable of striking a horse or a cow or kicking a dog.