The Cult in my Grandmother's House - стр. 17
Grandma was glad to feel part of something bigger than herself, a mission to save humanity. Her apartment and all her meagre possessions fell to the disposal of the collective. As someone with influence, known over the whole of Tajikistan, Grandma immediately brought new people and resources to support the collective in its work.
A new and official clinic appeared in the centre of Dushanbe to receive outpatients.
Once the initial steps were finished and the organisation was set up, Grandma contacted my parents living in Leningrad and said something like, “Hey why don’t you send little Ania here? Didn’t you say she was having trouble at school? Her maths mark wasn’t brilliant? Uhuh. And she didn’t want to learn poems by heart! See, there’s something not right with her. Let her come here and we’ll treat her, then we’ll see.”
Grandma had become the main proponent of the Chief and his method. She was the brains and the academic core of the cult. She believed in what she was doing with all her heart. She gave lectures, published papers and ran round all the authorities getting official passes and documents. Grandma could sound very convincing. She was an established paleontologist, so it was a natural next step to bring in the idea of the human brain and combine it with evolutionary theories of organisms in general to suggest new therapies and remedial treatments.
It was the perfect combination of charlatan and academic.
Of course, Grandma was a real find for the Chief. In her turn, as an energetic and educated woman with two kids on her hands, tormented by loneliness and disappointment, exiled to the ends of the earth, where woman is nothing, where to prove the contrary you had to be able to part the clouds with your glance, Grandma tumbled headlong into the collective, like into a rabbit hole.
Everybody needs to feel like somebody. Whoever they are, everybody needs to feel like they belong to something big and important. For my grandma this was the collective.
SICK KIDS
The collective would receive children with various illnesses: psoriasis, neurodermatitis, schizophrenia (including nuclear or process schizophrenia, the type with the worst prognosis and hardest to treat), as well as the children of alcoholics and drug addicts – or as we were told, from “difficult families”. I often heard the adults say we were brought up on the Makarenko system. The prominent Soviet educational theorist Anton Semyonovich Makarenko had always been a great influence on the Chief.
Many years later I found out that nowhere near all the children at the collective were ill or from difficult circumstances. Most of them were there for totally different reasons. Either it had been easy to convince the parents their children were sick, and so increase the flock that way, or the parents themselves were already part of the collective and so brought the whole family along; or sometimes they were even the children of high-ranking officials in the Soviet Union. Children of high-ranking officials and people with connections were welcomed with pleasure as they would provide both financial support and a veneer of legitimacy. Of course, for every child there the parents paid a monthly fee, and many also donated their apartments as accommodation.