The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

From the front, he immediately landed in a camp, was given a sentence, sat it out for five years, and came out when he was amnestied. They accused him of transporting some kind of [contraband?] goods around Germany in his truck. I don’t know, it’s easy to pin things on people. To make a long story short, he came back to our town. His father died before the war yet, and his mother had gone to her daughter in Vladivostok to help look after the grandchildren. Lenka

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went to work as a driver on a poultry farm. And he brought poultry to us at the maternity home, and sometimes he came for the refuse, to collect any remains. They fed us well. There was one time when he was unloading, and I was just going off duty. So he says to me, “Come on, Anna Timofeevna, I’ll give you a lift home; why tramp through the mud?” He dropped me off. I wanted to pay him. He wouldn’t take it. He dropped me off once, he dropped me off twice. The third time, I say to him, “Come in, Lenia, I’ll make you some tea, since you don’t want to take any money for driving me.”

The next day he came already dressed in civilian clothes made out of a foreign fabric. He lit his cigarette with a lighter, like in the movies, and told me everything about having been abroad. My husband had vanished at the very beginning of the war, when everything was still a muddle; I didn’t even get a death telegram about him. Lenka moved in with me. Everything would have been fine if it weren’t for my neighbor. Like a cancer of the womb, she gnawed at me. It was one thing and another, and the fellow is twenty years younger than you. Only she lied, it wasn’t twenty, it was fifteen. He’s only after your money, she says, and all of your belongings. He’ll take everything, and then, like in American movies, he’ll strangle you. Now I’m telling you, like a cancerous growth she ate away at me. It was all from envy. I put up with it; I didn’t say anything. I just tried to do the best I could by Lenka. After all, a man can always leave. True enough, he didn’t bring home his pay, but when he managed to get some extra he’d give me a hundred rubles or fifty. Shortly after Christmas, I went and bought a calendar, a pretty, tear-off one. I was always trying to buy pretty things for the house. I bought a picture with swans, gave two hundred rubles for it—a hundred of mine and a hundred of Lenka’s. I boasted about it and showed it to Praskov’ia. So all at once she says, “Well, at least you’ll have a picture with a proper couple in it.” I brought home this calendar, and on it there was such a lovely portrait of comrade Stalin wearing officers’ epaulets, all covered in medals. Lenka came home from work. I showed it to him: a calendar, I say, I bought it. All right, he says. But there were quarrels between us even before that, especially when Praskov’ia wasn’t home, since I didn’t want her to hear us and be gleeful. Then in the evening I wanted to go to the movies.

Lenia ate heartily and then sat down to shave. I said to him, “Let’s go to the movies today.” But he answered, “I can’t, I met one of my army buddies today and promised to go out with him this evening for a beer.” I answered him, “So what are you doing shaving your mug for an army buddy? What, he’s never seen you unshaven?” One word led to another, and we wound up having a major talk. Suddenly, Lenka jumped up and said that there were two people ruining his young life—Stalin and me. “How I’d like to slash you with a razor right now,” he says, “but, I never again want to go to prison.” He took

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the razor (he never shaved with a safety razor) and one, two, three, he went and sliced up the entire face of comrade Stalin in the portrait, and then even gouged out the eyes.—He put on his coat and hat, slammed the door, and left. I sat and cried, and felt sorry for the calendar, and felt sorry for myself. To be sure, if he could have he’d cut my throat, too. He served that sentence for something—they don’t put you in prison for nothing. And here comes Praskov’ia, and without malice, but out of kindness to me, says, so what are you doing, she says, you’re crying. So I went and told her everything. She immediately began to tremble and said to me that we had to destroy the calendar right away. You know what might happen, she said, on account of that. She took the portrait part, nailed the pages back up to the wall, and left. Well, my Lenka returned, and we made up.