What I liked was going to school, and that my teacher liked me a lot, and I wouldn’t have minded also going to confession and Communion — so young and already with ideological conflicts. I dreamed of getting a job in a dressmaker’s shop when I finished school, of embroidering my own trousseau and becoming close friends with the girls who worked with me. I grew so fond of Madrid that I imagined I would live there forever, and quickly picked up the way the other girls talked, and I liked boarding the trolleys and learning to get around on the metro, and when my brother and I could get a few centimos together we would go and sit in the gallery of some theater to watch Clark Gable movies or Laurel and Hardy. I said “there” when I was talking about Madrid, as if I weren’t in Madrid this very minute, but I often forget and wake up thinking I’m in Moscow. But if I say “there” it’s as if I were saying “then,” because that Madrid was a different city from the one I find when I go outside today, or when I go out on the balcony, which I seldom do because of the noise of the cars on the expressway day and night, something I can’t get used to. My friends tell me to get double-pane windows, but how can I spend that kind of money on my income? But with all we’ve gone through, I’m not going to complain about traffic noise, it’s not half as bad as the sound of bombing, or spending the winter in a garrison at forty degrees below, and it’s a lot worse to be dead. This is the best house I ever lived in, and best of all I won’t have to move until the day they carry me to the cemetery, and I have my spot assured there too, in the civil cemetery, beside my mother, the two of us together in the tomb the way we always were in life, except for those horrible first years in Russia when I was alone and didn’t know if I would see her again or if she and my father were dead, or had forgotten about me, being so busy with their war and their Revolution.
I sit here and things return, as if I were in a waiting room and the dead come walking in, and the living too, who are so far away, like my son who can’t visit and can’t talk more than five minutes when he calls me on the telephone, he’s so worried about the bill, and my little grandson, who doesn’t know me, and I hug and kiss him and sing him lullabies, the ones my mother sang to me and my brother and the ones I learned in Russia and sang to my son. I’m afraid to go outside; I order almost everything I need from the supermarket or have a very nice friend who lives near here bring it to me, and that saves me from being mugged again, or getting lost, which is something else that’s happened to me often, especially when there are a lot of people. When the Nazi invasion began and we had to evacuate Moscow, I went through the station holding my mother’s hand, but in the confusion she let go my hand, and I found myself among thousands of people, stupefied by the loudspeakers I couldn’t understand and the trains whistling their departure, so I began to run like a crazy person, not seeing where I was going because my eyes were filled with tears. I ran into people’s legs and had to jerk away from a guard who tried to catch me, who already had me by one arm. I ran alongside a train that had already started, and there were clusters of people hanging from the steps and from the windows, clinging to anything they could, then I saw my mother calling me from the door of a car, and I ran faster toward her, but the train picked up speed and I was left behind. It seemed to me I was lost forever in that station, the biggest I had ever seen, with so many trains and people frantic to leave, spilling over onto the tracks. I saw another train starting off beside me, and without thinking I jumped onto it, but at just that moment someone pulled me back. It was my mother. She grabbed me to her, believing she had lost me forever, and she would have if she’d looked one second later at the train leaving, en route to Vladivostok, she told me later, which is on the Pacific. How would she have found me if I’d got on the train going through Siberia? I deserved the whipping my mother gave me that day, she spanked me and kissed me at the same time. “What were you thinking,” she asked, “to let go of my hand, you little scatter-brain?”—that’s what she always called me.
I GET LOST IN MADRID more than I did in Moscow, and I don’t like to ask people because they look at me in an odd way, probably because of my accent, or because I look like a foreigner, like a Russian. So to avoid problems I don’t go out, I spend the day here, puttering, it’s such a pleasure having a whole apartment to myself, and my central heating never breaks down. The place is so small I don’t know where to put all my things, but I can’t make up my mind to throw anything away, I’m so fond of every item and the memories they bring. After all a person goes through life losing so many things, you want to keep what’s left. Look at those little doilies my mother used to crochet whenever we could find white thread in Moscow, which wasn’t always, though she could make them from anything, she was good with a needle and could make something beautiful from any old scrap. I didn’t take after her that way; she used to say, “What pretty hands you have, and so useless, they look like a bourgeois girl’s hands,” and it was true, they got rough and red with the smallest task, and I also suffered from chilblains, but now I can take care of them, although painting my fingernails makes me feel ashamed, because my hands do in fact look bourgeois.
I break things and don’t know how to mend them, I drop them, for example one of the knobs came off the television when I tried to turn it on, and you can’t imagine the trouble I had finding the knob on the floor, since there’s little space and I get around so poorly after I was thrown to the ground when they mugged me. I spent days looking, because without it I couldn’t turn on the TV, and when I put it back on, it fell off again, so finally I used adhesive tape, and if I’m careful it works and doesn’t fall off. How can I throw anything away when everything has its own story? I tell stories to myself when I’m alone, as if I was a guide in a museum. That Lenin on top of the television set is bronze, pick it up and you’ll see how heavy it is, and just look what a good likeness, though friends tell me, “Woman, put that somewhere not so obvious, it will offend people,” but no one comes to see me here, and if someone does come and gets offended, well I’m sorry, so be it, as they say in Madrid, don’t they have their crucifixes and virgins and portraits of the Pope? Well I have my Vladimir Ilyich, right there on the doily my mother crocheted for me one birthday, ah, look how yellow it’s getting, and think of the kilometers it’s traveled, for I had it with me when my husband was assigned to Arkhangelsk, and it got so stiff from the cold that it might as well have been tin. Those dolls in the little Siberian dresses we brought from there, and the coat rack too, let me move the coats and show you, those are real hooves, they come from those big reindeers they have. And those little paintings? I’ve seen how you can’t take your eyes off them, they’re drawings Alberto’Sánchez did with what he had on hand, sheets of paper and school crayons. I remember watching him drawing at the kitchen table in the apartment where we lived in Moscow, the last winter of the war, if you go over you’ll see how perfect the details are, and the little squares on the paper. He talked about the days of the siege in Toledo where he lived, and as he was talking he drew what he was telling us, and it seemed as if we were in Spain and not in Moscow, and we could feel the summer heat and the tickle of wheat chaff in our throats. Look at those white shirts, how the harvesters have their sleeves rolled up, and their straw hats and scythes and the cords they wear to hold up their pants, and the sheaves of wheat. And that town in the distance, Alberto told us, you could see it as you came out of a curve, with the bell tower of the church and its nest of storks, and those blue mountains in the background, what we would have given to see them then, because we thought we would never return to Spain, and for many it was true, they never did, like poor Alberto, who is buried in Moscow. A woman friend who knows what she’s talking about said I should sell those drawings, I’d get good money for them, she’s always overwhelmed when she sees all the stuff I have. “Before long you won’t be able to move around in here,” she tells me, “get rid of it all, wipe the slate clean.” But I can’t part with any of it, not even that painting that drives my friend crazy, “Who in the world would think of framing the top of a cookie box?” she says, but it brings back so many memories, Red Square with its colorful onion domes and that blue the sky has on certain summer mornings, and it’s in relief, I can touch the towers on the Kremlin wall, the cathedral of Saint Basil, Lenin’s tomb. I had that cookie box for years, and I was so fond of it that before leaving Moscow I cut off the cover and framed it.