Soviet Milk

‘This can’t be true! Quick, quick – come here!’

Scared, we ran to him. On the television thousands of people were shown climbing onto the Berlin Wall and tearing it down bit by bit. There, on the screen, reigned an uncontrolled joy, euphoria, the sound of yelling and streaming tears.

‘This can’t be! It can’t be!’ As if transfixed by the

screen, my step-grandfather repeated it over and over. And yet it happened right in front of our eyes. Our four pairs of eyes – mine, my grandmother’s, my stepgrandfather’s and Jesse’s. Only my mother’s were missing.

Jesse clutched her head and said, ‘We really will be free. Why couldn’t she listen to my words?’

‘My mother, Serafima, called your mother my father.’ She smiled. ‘Without your mother, I would not have been born. That was in Leningrad. Now we live here. Serafima died, but she always said that I should find your mother. Sadly, I have only managed now.’

‘Your mother was my father’ – it rang in my ears.

In the evening Jesse telephoned. She couldn’t talk. Tears stifled every word. My mother had died. I had to hurry back immediately.

seemed to me that since I was born I’d been trying to get my mother to connect to life. As a helpless infant, as a child of limited understanding, as a fearful teenager, as a young woman. And she always seemed to be striving to turn out her life’s light. So we struggled – always ending in stalemate. Although one day the light would be extinguished for ever.

was already the end of April when the country was shaken by the explosion of the Chernobyl power station. The school director tripled our military instruction classes. On the instructor’s orders we put on and took off gas masks until we were sick and tired of it.

‘You fainted by a painting?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I was tired and I had my period. Besides, that painting was incredibly beautiful, just the darkness and a green moon. I looked at it for a long time. Then suddenly it was as if the darkness drew all of us into it – me, you, Grandmother and Step-Grandfather, and the little clay baby. It grew dark in front of my eyes and I fainted.’

‘What did you answer?’

‘I said that the bell reminded me of you. Everyone was silent and I didn’t have anything more to say. It was quite a dreadful silence, but I couldn’t explain briefly why that bell reminded me of you. That’s why I kept silent.’

‘And why did the bell remind you of me?’

‘Because it often seems to me that someone has stolen your joy in life. They’ve torn it out of you like that bell’s clapper. And you can’t ring any more – just like the bell. Are you offended?’

I gazed at her. My flesh and blood. Her longing for life was stronger than the evil that gnawed on me.

‘You’re not offended?’

‘No, of course not. You’re my joy.’

‘For God’s sake, pull yourself together,’ Jesse said.

Jesse then started telling me about the orphanage, where boys had tied her to a post, a rough post thick with splinters. They had tied her almost naked, in her skimpy undershirt. They made her say, ‘Better that I hadn’t been born!’ Jesse had stayed silent;

‘It’s a vale of tears,’ Jesse said as she walked beside me. ‘She now goes to the ambulatory centre only a couple of times a week. The rest of the time she is slowly self-destructing. I try as hard as I can, but nothing works. I clean the house, but she doesn’t let me into her room. It’s good that you’ve come.’

Now tears also filled my eyes, because my mother had said the same thing. All of this had seemed to me no more than her own dark nightmares, but now it turned out to be the truth.