«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: