#secondhand time

"'How did you make it out of there alive?'

“But where are these happy people? On the radio, they’d said that after the war was over, we would all be happy, and Khrushchev, I remember, promised … He said that communism would soon be upon us. Gorbachev swore it, too, and he spoke so beautifully … it had sounded so good. Now Yeltsin’s making the same promises. He even threatened to lie down on the train tracks … I waited and waited for the good life to come. When I was little, I waited for it … and then when I got a little older … Now I’m old. To make a long story short, everyone lied and things only ever got worse. Wait and see, wait and suffer. Wait and see … My husband died. He went out, collapsed, and that was that — his heart stopped. You couldn’t measure it or weigh it, all the trouble we’ve seen. But here I am, still alive. Living. My children all scattered: My son is in Novosibirsk, and my daughter stayed in Riga with her family, which, nowadays, means that she lives abroad. In a foreign country. They don’t even speak Russian there anymore.

History is the life of ideas. People don’t write, time writes. Human history is but a nail. For anyone to hang their hat on.

"I remember how once we were over at our friend’s house, she’s a poet. I was listening to their endless grumbling: Gorbachev is all talk…Yeltsin’s an alcoholic…The people are just cattle…

“I’m searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There’s the one they use with children, another one for love. There’s the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling—everywhere you go, you’ll hear something different, and it’s not just the words, there’s something else, too. There’s even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night...”