Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

by Svetlana Alexievich

I’d gone to my friend’s house, he was having people over. As I was taking my coat off in the foyer, I heard someone coming toward me from the kitchen. I had to let them through, I turned around and—it was her! For a moment, I short-circuited, like they’d suddenly switched off the electricity in the apartment. And that was it. I’m not usually one to be tongue-tied, but with her there, I just sat and stared, I couldn’t even see her, like, it’s not that I didn’t look at her, but for a long, long time, it felt like I was looking through her. Like in a Tarkovsky film: Someone is pouring water from a pitcher, and it’s flowing down just past the rim of a cup, and then, very slowly, it turns along the cup’s contour. The way I’m telling it, it sounds like this went on for longer than it really did. It happened in a flash! That day, I learned something that made everything else seem insignificant. I won’t even attempt to dissect it—really, what’s the point? It happened and that’s enough.