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

I always felt bad for him. The other men would make fun of him: “What kind of man are you? You’re a girl!” My mother would cry over the fact that he…well, that he wasn’t like other people. He would pick up a head of cabbage and stare at it…Or a tomato…When he first came back, he was totally silent, he wouldn’t tell us anything. It wasn’t until about ten years later that he finally started talking. Never before…Yes…At a certain point, while he was in the camp, his job had been transporting dead bodies. There would be ten to fifteen fresh corpses a day. The living returned to the barracks on foot, the dead were pulled back on sleds. They were ordered to remove their clothing, so the dead men lay naked on the sleds, “like jerboas.” My father’s words…It’s coming out all muddled…because of my feelings…It’s all so upsetting…For the first two years in the camp, none of them thought that they would survive. Those who’d been sentenced to five or six years would talk about home, but those who got ten to fifteen never mentioned it. They never brought up anyone, not their wives or their kids. Their parents. “If you started thinking about your loved ones, you wouldn’t survive,” my father explained. We waited for him…“Papa will come back, and he won’t even recognize me…” “Daddy…” I would look for any excuse to say the word “Papa.” Then, one day, he returned. Grandma saw a man in a soldier’s cloak standing by our gate: “Who are you looking for, soldier?” “You don’t recognize me, Mama?” Grandma fainted on the spot. That was Papa’s homecoming…He came back frozen to the bone, he could never get his hands or his feet warm. My mother? Mama would say that my father came back from the camps gentle, although she had been worried, she’d heard scary stories about people coming back mean. Papa wanted to enjoy life. His motto was, “Man up—the worst is yet to come.”

    I forgot…I forgot where this happened…Where was it? The transit camp? They were crawling around a large yard on their hands and knees eating grass. Men with dystrophy and pellagra. You couldn’t complain about anything with my father around. He knew that in order to survive, you only needed three things: bread, onions, and soap. Just those three things…that’s all…They’re no longer with us, our parents, their generation…But if any of them are still around, they should be put in museums, kept under glass so that no one can touch them. They went through so much! After my father was rehabilitated, *2 they paid him two months’ wages for all of his suffering. For a long time, a large portrait of Stalin continued to hang in our home. A very long time…I remember it well…My father didn’t hold a grudge, he considered it all to be a product of his era. Those were cruel times. A powerful nation was being built. And they really did build it, plus they defeated Hitler! That’s what my father would say…
    I grew up a serious girl, a real Young Pioneer. Today, everyone thinks that they used to force people into the Pioneers. I’m telling you: No one was forced to do anything. All of the kids dreamed of becoming Young Pioneers. Of marching together. To drums and horns. Singing Young Pioneer songs: “My Motherland, I’ll love forever / Where else will I find one like her?” “The eagle nation has millions of chicks, and we are our nation’s pride…” There was a stain on our family name because my father had been in the camps. My mother was scared that I wouldn’t be accepted into the Pioneers right away or even at all. I really wanted to be with everyone else. I had to be…“Who are you for, the sun or the moon?” the little boys would interrogate me in class. You had to be on your toes! “For the moon!”—“Correct! For the Soviet Union.” Because if you said, “For the sun,” you would get, “For that damn Japan!” They’d laugh and tease you. The way we swore was