Sepharad

scheherazade

I WAS SO NERVOUS as we walked through those gilded salons that my knees were knocking, and I wished I still held the hand of my mother, who was just in front of me, very serious, quiet, like everyone in the group. She was dressed in black for my father and brother, and all the others wore dark suits, very stiff, very formal, some with uniforms and medals, all just as nervous and upset as I although they hid it. The only thing you could hear were footsteps on the marble floor, as if we were walking down the nave of a cathedral, and I beside my mother, as almost always in my life, moved and afraid, with a lump in my throat, looking at her profile because she never turned toward me, so straight, taller and stronger than I was, and proud of being the widow and mother of heroes. My mother would have given me a severe and mocking look if I tried to take her hand as I did when I was little and she took me to a protest march and I held her hand so hard that my fingers hurt because I feared the crowd would get wild and my mother and my father would be separated from me, feared that the guardias would charge, or that the people running away — and the horses we heard whinnying and pawing the ground, ready for their riders to spur them to attack — would crush me. Some soldiers, maybe they were ushers, guided us through the corridors, kept going ahead of us to open the doors, some of which were very tall and gilded, and others as plain as office doors, and every time we went by one my heart squeezed and I thought, now we’re going to see him, and when I’m so close that I can shake his hand I hope I don’t faint or burst into tears like a silly girl. My mother says I have the reactions of a child, although I wasn’t one, far from it, I would be twenty-five in January, and this was December 21, 1949, Stalin’s birthday, and we were going to have the chance to offer him congratulations in the name of our Party and all Spanish workers, with more solemnity than usual because it was his seventieth birthday and there would be a huge party for all Communists and workers around the world. The salon where they took us was large and filled with people, although no voices were raised, only a little for the speeches, and not much even then. I believe we were all equally moved, overwhelmed, I don’t know whether that’s the word, since often I’m going to say something and then after I’ve begun to speak realize I’m saying it in Russian and can’t find the words in Spanish. Chandeliers were switched on, but they didn’t give much light, or maybe there was smoke, or the sky was dark outside even though it was daytime, I remember, and everything was a little foggy. I couldn’t get close to Stalin and didn’t shake his hand, either because my mother motioned to me not to get on line or because someone pushed me back and I ended up in a different group. After all, I was nobody, I’d been allowed to come with our delegation because I begged my mother to take me along; when I had children and grandchildren I wanted to be able to tell them that once in my life I saw Stalin with my own eyes, and really close.

I was so nervous that I didn’t notice much of what was going on, or didn’t understand it, with that dim light and the low voices. But I could see Stalin well; he was seated at the middle of a long table, chatting with someone, very informal, smoking and laughing, and I almost had to pinch myself to believe that I was actually seeing him, the flesh-and-blood man, unmistakable, like a member of my family — he reminded me of the time I was a little girl and saw my father standing among a group of men — but also very different, I don’t know how to explain it; he looked as he did in the pictures we’d seen everywhere forever, and yet he wasn’t much like them, he was older and smaller, and I saw his short legs beneath the table and his crossed boots, and when he laughed, his face filled with wrinkles and his small teeth were chipped, or black from tobacco, and his uniform was a little big on him, but precisely for those reasons I was more moved than I’d expected, and in a different way, because I thought I would be seeing a giant at the peak of his strength but it turned out that Stalin was a tired old man, the way my father was at the end of his life. Fragile even though he’d had the enormous strength it took to rebel against the czar, oversee the birth of socialism, and win the war against the Nazis; you could see that all those years of effort and sacrifice had worn him down, like the years in the mines and in prison wore my father down, and I thought he looked as if he hadn’t slept well, and every so often he’d seem to be somewhere else while someone was talking to him or as he listened to a speech, until I felt sorry for him, for the sickish color of his skin and all those years with no rest, clear back to when he was a boy in the times of the czars and they deported him to Siberia. Later my mother said to me, “You should have seen your face when you were looking at him, your mouth was hanging open, and you’d have thought you were seeing a movie star.” But then something happened as I stared at Stalin, not taking my eyes off him as if no one else were there. I wanted to remember all the details of his face and felt sorry for him, he looked so exhausted, and the uniform jacket on him was so big, then I felt a stab, like an electric shock. Someone was looking at me, coldly, with rage, for my bad manners in staring so openly at Stalin, a small, bald man seated near him, wearing those old-fashioned glasses they call pince-nez, and a bow tie and high celluloid collar that were just as old-fashioned. I turned to ice and still get shivers down my spine when I think it was Beria, but I wasn’t afraid of him because he was the chief of the KGB, it was those eyes, which cut through the space separating us. He was studying me as you would an insect, as if saying, “Who do you think you are to be staring at Stalin like that? How did you get in here?” But there was something beyond that, and I was so stupid in those days that I didn’t realize what it was, although instinctively I felt repelled, the way I did by those men who stared at me when I lived in the girls’ residence and didn’t understand why they breathed so hard and never took their eyes off me and brushed against me in the trolley.

As I’m sitting here, memories come back, and it seems unreal that so many things happened to me, that I was in such faraway places, at the Black Sea and in Siberia and the Arctic Circle, but I’m far from things here too, Madrid is a long way from Moscow. I don’t know Madrid as well, I’m afraid to go outside with all those cars and people, afraid of getting lost and not finding my way back, especially since the time I was mugged just outside the front door, thrown to the ground, my purse snatched, and I lay there on the sidewalk screaming, “Thief, thief,” but no one came to help, though now that I think about it, I probably shouted in Russian because of the problem I have with the two languages, speaking in one and thinking in the other. I always dream in Russian, and about things that happened there, or happened many years ago when I was little, before they sent us to the Soviet Union for a few months, they said, and then until the war was over, but the war ended and they didn’t send us home, and soon another war broke out and then it was impossible, it seemed the world was coming to an end. They evacuated us and sent us a long way away, I don’t know how many days we traveled by train, days and weeks, always in the snow, and I thought, I’m getting farther and farther away from Spain, from my mother and father, although I almost didn’t remember them, I even began to feel a little hostile toward them, I’m ashamed to say, because they shouldn’t have let me get on that boat, leaving me alone again, as they did when they went to their union or Party meetings. My brother and I were left alone all night, he crying because he was afraid or hungry and I rocking him in my arms, although I wasn’t much older, such a scared little boy he was and weakly because of our bad diet, but how strong and brave he became later, when at twelve he went out with me to sell the Mundo obrero, the Worker’s World, that was when we still lived in Madrid. He told me, “Don’t be afraid of those fancy young guys, because if they come after us I’ll protect you,” and later, when he was just twenty and a pilot in the Red Army, he came to see me and lifted me off my feet and whirled me around as he hugged me, so handsome in his air-force uniform and the red star on his cap. Then he came to say good-bye because his squadron had been ordered to the Leningrad front, and he never stopped laughing and singing Spanish songs with me, and he inspired all the girls in the school to be nurses for the troops. That night I went with him to the station, and when the train was pulling out he hopped down and hugged and kissed me again, then jumped back on the train and grabbed the handrail as if he were swinging onto a horse, and he waved goodbye with his cap in his hand, and I never saw him again. That’s the strangest thing about life, something I can’t get used to, that you have someone you’re close to and who’s always been there, and a minute later he disappears and it’s as if he never existed. But I know my brother died a hero, that he kept attacking the Germans when his plane had one engine on fire, crashing it into the enemy artillery, a hero of the Soviet Union, and his photo was published in Pravda looking as handsome as a movie star. I sit here thinking about him, the memory comes without my doing anything, as if I opened the door and my brother calmly walked in, with that smile and poise of his, I see him before me in his pilot’s jacket and imagine we’re talking and remembering things. I tell him everything that’s happened to me since his death more than fifty years ago, how the world has changed, how everything we fought for has been lost, everything that he and so many like him gave their lives for, but he never loses his good humor, he scratches his head beneath the cap, pats my knee, and says, “Here, now, woman, don’t go on so.” Sometimes I’m awake and see him standing before me as clearly as in my dreams, but strangest of all is not that he’s come back or that he’s still a boy of twenty, but that he speaks to me in Russian, so fast and perfect and without an accent, because Russian was really hard for him, worse than for me at the beginning, when people spoke to me and I didn’t understand, and not understanding was worse than being cold or hungry. Now it’s the other way around, sometimes I don’t understand Spanish, and I can’t get used to how people speak, so loud and curt, as if they were always in a hurry or angry, like the man the day I was mugged, who helped me get up and stand because I was in pain, thinking, “What if my hip is broken? What if they have to put my leg in a cast and then I can’t go out? Who will come help me?” The man said, “Damn it to hell, señora, I’ll go with you to the station to file a complaint, because we need to crack down on those bastards, it had to be one of those goddamned moros who hang around here.” I thanked him but kept my dignity and said, “No, señor, it wasn’t a moro who attacked me, he was white as snow, and besides, you shouldn’t call them moros, they’re not Moors, they’re Moroccans, and as for the complaint, that will have to wait, because the important thing to me right now is to get to the protest: this is May Day.” The man looked at me as if I were crazy, “Well that’s up to you, señora, whatever you say,” and I thanked him and went on to the protest, limping, but I went, and when it was over, some comrades took me to the police station in their car and I filed the complaint, but I’m not one to miss a May Day, even though it’s not the same anymore, each time fewer people come and it’s all so watered down, there’s just a few red flags and raised fists, and not even those marching in the front, right behind the banner, know the Internationale.

IT ISN’T THE WAY NOW it was before the war, when we used to go with my mother and father, and my brother and I would look at them, raising our fists just the way they did, there on Calle Alcalá, which turned into a sea of people and red flags, or in the Soviet Union in Red Square on May 1 the year the war ended, where there wasn’t room for any more people or shouting or flags or songs or fervor, with millions cheering for Stalin. Squashed in the crowd, I cheered too, excited to think that the tiny figure I could see on the platform atop Lenin’s mausoleum in the distance was him, and I cried with joy and gratitude because he had led us in the victory over Germany, which cost so many Soviet lives, my poor brother among them, although now you would think that the Americans won that war, that they were the only ones who fought, and people know about the landing in Normandy but don’t know that the German army met its first defeat at Stalingrad, in the bloodiest and most heroic battle of the war. No one even knows there was a city called Stalingrad, they didn’t lose any time changing that name, like they did with Leningrad, what a disgrace that now it’s called what it was in the time of the czars, Saint Petersburg, and they even want to canonize Nicholas II, who ordered machine guns to fire on the people in front of the Winter Palace. Oh, I see your expression, though you’re trying to hide it, don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking, all those stories about Stalin’s concentration camps and Stalin’s crimes, as if he had done nothing but kill people, or as if everyone who was sentenced to the camps were innocent. Of course there were mistakes, the Party itself recognized that at its Twentieth Congress, and denounced the cult of personality, and did everything possible to remedy injustices and rehabilitate those who weren’t guilty, but how could there not be a personality cult when Stalin had done so much for us, for the Soviet people and for workers around the world? He was responsible for the great leap from backwardness to industrialization, the Five Year Plans that were the envy and admiration of all the world, when in only twenty years the Soviet Union moved from being a rural country to a world power. And all that under the worst circumstances, following a war provoked by the imperialists, in the midst of a siege and an international blockade, in a country with shortages of everything and where the great majority of the population was illiterate, a slave to the czar and the popes. Look what they were, or what we were, because I’ve been a Soviet citizen, and look how the country is now, how in a few years they’ve destroyed what it cost several generations to build, the largest country in the world broken up into pieces and Russia in the hands of the Mafia and governed by a drunk, so don’t tell me things are better now than in Stalin’s time, or Brezhnev’s, when they say the people suffered such oppression. What they don’t say is that there were saboteurs and spies everywhere, that imperialism employed the dirtiest tactics to destroy the Revolution, and that Jews had taken over many of the key posts in the government and were conspiring to benefit the United States and Israel.

JEWS, OH YES, SEÑOR, don’t give me that look, as if you’d never heard a word about that; don’t you know that some Jewish physicians plotted to murder Stalin? There was always someone to take advantage, to abuse the trust that Stalin and the Party put in him in order to line his own pockets or to gain power, but in the end those people paid for their sins, because Stalin was so upright that he wouldn’t allow it. Yezhov paid, that man who committed so many abuses, who jailed so many innocents, and then Yagoda paid, although they said that the worst of all of them was Beria, who managed to deceive Stalin to the end but who also got his, and they say that when they came to kill him he fell to his knees and begged and shrieked, so tell me whether or not justice was served in the Soviet Union. But now they want to hide everything, erase it all, even the names, they want to make everyone believe that the Soviet people were oppressed, or paralyzed with fear, or that the death of Stalin was a liberation, but I was there and know what happened, what the people felt. I was in Moscow the morning they announced on the radio that Stalin died, I was in the kitchen fixing myself a cup of coffee — I’d woken up not feeling well because I was pregnant with my first child — and then music began to play on the radio, then stopped, and there was a silence, and an announcer spoke, he said something but his voice broke, he was sobbing, and I almost didn’t understand him when he said that Comrade Stalin had died. I couldn’t believe it, it was like when they told me my brother had died at Leningrad, or when my father died, but my brother was in the war and I had accepted that he might die, and my father was very old and he didn’t have a lot longer to live, but it never occurred to me that Stalin could die, I don’t think it had to anyone, for us he was more than a father or a leader, he was what God should be to believers. I ran outside, not knowing where I was going, without a coat though it was snowing, and in the street I met a lot of people just like me, wandering about like sleepwalkers, they would stop at a corner and weep, old women bawling like babies, soldiers crying like little boys, workers, everyone, a crowd that carried me along, like a river of bodies beneath the snow, toward Red Square as if by instinct, but the streets were already flooded with people and we couldn’t go any farther, and someone said that Red Square was roped off and we should head for the Union Palace. I’m sitting here now and it doesn’t seem possible that I was in Moscow that morning, that I lived all that, that flood of tears and helplessness, women on their knees in the snow and shouting and calling out to Stalin, funeral music on the loudspeakers that had played such spirited anthems on May Day. I was crying too, and hugging someone, a woman I’d never seen, feeling the kicking in my womb, my son who would be born two months later and who, it seemed to me, would be born an orphan even though he had a father, because none of us could imagine life without Stalin, and we wept from pain but also from fear, finding ourselves defenseless after all those years when he had always watched over us.

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.

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.

IN MOSCOW I REMEMBERED Madrid, and now in Madrid I remember Moscow, what can I do? If I carry Spain in my heart, the Soviet Union is my country too, why wouldn’t it be when you consider that I lived there more than fifty years, and it hurts me when people say bad things about it, when I turn on the television and see what is happening there, and read what my son tells me in his letters, which are much cheaper than phone calls. Every day I get up early, even though I have nothing to do, and I spend hours cleaning and setting my house in order. It’s small and if you’re not careful everything gets cluttered and covered with dust, then I think how lucky I am to be here, with my central heat and hot water, my refrigerator and television, my rug in the bedroom so my feet don’t get cold when I get up in the wintertime. My brother and parents never had a chance to enjoy any of these comforts, and it turns out that the silly one among us — why should I deny it, I’m the one who had the least to offer — is the one who gets everything. I sit here in the afternoons and sometimes don’t turn on the TV, don’t even turn on the light when it gets dark, and there are hours and hours of silence, of not doing anything, unlike my mother, who always had some work in her lap. I sit with my hands folded, listening to the cars on the expressway, and I remember, it isn’t as if I do it on purpose, the memories come and link together like a chain, like the beads of the rosary in my fingers when I was little and I went to catechism without telling my parents. I see people’s faces, hear their voices as it grows dark, and they walk in that door and sit down here beside me, and I hear music too, the Internationale that a band made up of the Party faithful played in our mining town, Chopin’s funeral march on the day of Stalin’s funeral, and another march I liked a lot, one they always played in Moscow on May Day. It seems I’m walking down the street and hearing it, the triumphal march from Aida, and my eyes fill with tears, it must be that I’ve turned as sentimental as the Russians. But the music I like best of all is Scheherazade, that’s what played when I opened the little mother-of-pearl box my father brought me when he came home from his first trip to Russia, when I didn’t dare look up at him because I hadn’t seen him for five or six months and he was like a stranger to me, he even had a black mustache. I kept the box beneath my pillow and would open it very slowly, and the music would begin, and I would close it fast, because I was afraid it would wear out if I let it play too long, like those perfumes that evaporate if you leave the bottle open. Somehow I lost my music box, who knows in what move. But things last longer than people, and someone must still have the box, like those antiques that sit in the flea market for a long time and then are sold, and when that person opens it, she will hear Scheherazade and wonder whom it belonged to.