IN OUR HOME, WHEN I was little, my parents talked to me about Russia and Stalin, and when the boat bringing us from Spain reached the port of Leningrad the first thing we saw was a huge portrait of him, which seemed to welcome and smile at us, just as we had seen him once in a newsreel, smiling at a child he had swept up in his arms. But it was snowing harder now, and there were more and more people in the street, and we couldn’t move in the crowd, and above the music on the loudspeakers we heard the sirens blowing in the factories, all the sirens in Moscow blowing at the same time, as they had for air raids during the war. That was when I began to feel trapped, reminded of running downstairs to a shelter afraid I would trip and people would fall over me. I couldn’t breathe, with people pressing from all sides, men and women in overcoats and caps, their breath on my face and neck, the smell of bodies that needed to be washed and of damp clothing. My mouth wide open to breathe, I broke into a sweat but also shivered with cold, trying to cover my belly with both hands because the baby was squirming inside me harder than ever, as if he too felt caged and crushed. I pushed, begged, wept, and pointed to my swollen belly, because I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and make it to a street that wasn’t crowded, where I could hurry back home, gasping for breath, clutching my belly because the baby was twisting so much I thought I was going to have him right there, in the middle of that crowd that wouldn’t budge one centimeter, all wrapped in their overcoats and caps, their breath frosty amid the snowflakes, and I like an idiot without a kerchief or boots. Finally I was free, suddenly alone, my hair soaking wet, lost in Moscow with no one to ask for directions. I tell all this to my son, and he says, “Mother, you’ve told me this a thousand times.” He says it in Russian, of course, because he hardly speaks Spanish although he has Spanish looks, which I’m proud of. His father, may he rest in peace, was from Ukraine. I saw my boy dressed as a soldier when he did his military service and I thought I was seeing his uncle, my brother, just as tall and dark, just as happy, with the visor of his cap tilted to one side, a cigarette in his mouth, and his eyes squinted like the movie stars I’d liked so much as a girl. It’s two years now since I’ve seen my son, I don’t even know my youngest grandson, because with what I earn I don’t have money for a ticket to Moscow, and he’s a chemical engineer and his salary barely stretches to take care of his family. Sometimes I send him a few dollars so he can make it to the end of the month or buy a little car for my grandson, although I get only the minimum pension in Spain, a charity case, he has no idea the years and troubles it cost me to earn it, but my Russian pension isn’t worth anything, a few rubles after having worked my entire life.
Lenin said it, freedom for what? Why did we mining people want freedom for the Republic if they sent us off to the Legion and the Guardia Civil and chased down the strikers and shot them as if they were animals? They locked up my mother, who hadn’t done anything, just for being the wife of a unionist, and tortured my father and sent him to a penal colony in Africa, to Fernando Poo. When the Popular Front issued the amnesty, he came home sick with malaria, so aged and jaundiced I didn’t recognize him and burst out crying when he hugged me. I didn’t want him ever to go away, from the time I was little I couldn’t sleep until my father came home from the mine, and I did everything possible to stay awake till he came, or I woke up if he had the night shift and came in before dawn. How happy I was to hear him push the door open and hear his voice and cough and smell his cigarette smoke, I can smell it this minute, even though it’s been more than sixty years. I sit here and the memories come, and with them the smell of things and the sounds from those days that don’t exist any longer. I remember my father’s eyes shining in a face black with coal dust, the way he had of knocking at the door, and I would think, he’s come, nothing’s happened to him, there hasn’t been an explosion in the mine and he hasn’t been carted off by the Guardia Civil. I’ve lived through so many things, been so many places, in Siberia, on a ship trapped in ice in the Baltic Sea, in those garrisons in the Urals where they sent my husband, when we couldn’t go out at night because of the wolves howling in the forests. I would have given anything to have a family like other girls, even those poorer than us in the mining town where we lived, those girls might have gone to school barefoot and with lice but at least their fathers weren’t arrested from time to time and didn’t have to hide for months, and they didn’t leave their children alone all night to go to their meetings of committees and unions. The only thing I ever wanted but never had was to live in peace, to have my house, to get along with my modest lot and not have unexpected things happen. My first memories are of hurried moves and nights on benches in train stations, of being afraid that something terrible would happen, that the guardias had killed my father or that he’d died in an explosion or cave-in at the mine. My heart still pounds when I think of it, I look at him in that photograph on the piano and it seems he’s still alive, at my side with a gift in his hand he brought me from a trip, that little mother-of-pearl box, for example, when he came back from Russia and had been gone so long I didn’t know him and started crying when I saw him. I never told this to anyone, but the dreams I had as a little girl were petit bourgeois dreams. I always wanted my parents and my brother nearby, and to go to school and occasionally to mass, and to take Communion like the girls I saw coming out of church dressed in white with their rosaries and mother-of-pearl prayer books in their hands, and patent-leather shoes, not like me, who wore old espadrilles even in the winter, my feet like ice and mud clinging to the hemp soles. I was always hearing my parents talk about the Revolution, but what I wanted was for my father not to miss his pay and for us to have a warm meal every day, and good blankets and coats and boots in the winter. I was frightened when he talked about emigrating to America or when he told us that we had to go to Russia because that was the homeland of the workers of the world. Our house near the mine was little more than a hut, although my mother kept it swept and orderly, but I cried when we left it to move to Madrid, it felt like they were ripping out my heart. We got onto the train and my brother, being so little, was wildly happy, but I was dying because we had to leave our clean little house and the school I liked so much and my friends. But after a few months in Madrid I got used to it and wanted all the neighbor women and ladies in the shops to know me, I made friends with the girls in the school and with the teacher who scolded them the first day when they made fun of the way I spoke, which must have been with a strong Asturias accent. We lived in a building in the Tetuán barrio, two rooms in a crowded corridor, but my mother fixed them up right away with the few things we owned, and it seemed that finally we’d moved into a real house, and for the first time the toilet — the servicio they called it then — was indoors at the end of the corridor, not in a courtyard or out in the field, like a place for animals. My father didn’t have to go to the mine anymore, he had a job I didn’t know anything about, at a newspaper or with the union, and at first I thought we were going to live a normal life, that I wouldn’t have to be afraid every time he was late or they went out on strike and had meetings in our house, which I hated because the men smoked so much you couldn’t breathe and they left behind a smell that took days to disappear and my mother and I had to sweep up the butts and ashes.