Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

He didn’t like being questioned…He had this bravado…always trying to make light of everything…this prisoner’s habit of hiding everything serious behind jokes. The bar is higher for them. For instance, he never said the word “freedom”—it was always “the outside.” “Here I am on the outside.” At rare moments, he’d tell stories…But he’d tell them so vividly, so avidly…I could just feel the happiness he’d taken out of there: like when he’d gotten his hands on some tire scraps and tied them to his felt boots. When they were transferred, he was so happy to have them! Another time, they’d gotten half a sack of potatoes…And somewhere “on the outside,” while they were working…somebody had given him a big hunk of meat. That night, in the boiler room, they made soup: “And it was just so good! So wonderful!” When they released him, they gave him a reparation payment for his father. They told him, “We owe you for the house, the furniture…” It ended up being a lot of money. He bought a new suit, a new shirt, new shoes, a camera, and went out to the best restaurant in Moscow, the National, where he ordered the most expensive things on the menu, and cognac and coffee with their signature dessert. At the end, when he’d eaten his fill, he asked someone to take a picture of him at the happiest moment of his life. “Then, when I got back to my apartment,” he recalled, “I caught myself thinking that I didn’t feel any happiness. In that suit, with that camera…Why wasn’t there any happiness? At th...