The Cult in my Grandmother's House - стр. 19

There were times during these interminable speeches that people fainted from tiredness or hunger. This was considered a success: it meant the person had truly comprehended the Chief’s point. It meant their level of aggression had fallen and they had readjusted and relaxed to such an extent that they had lost consciousness. A truly logical chain of thought!

During these speeches I often dreamed of feigning a faint because I was so tired of standing. It was terribly boring and I wanted to do something different.

And of course I did not understand much of what was said, apart from that we were terribly sick and if we had not got ourselves into the collective then we would have died. Everything outside the collective was dangerous and corroded. There were so many enemies on the outside who wanted to harm us and even disband us, and so we had to live as if in a wartime bunker, in the trenches, and be very suspicious of outsiders. The Chief often called our enemies “Zionists”.

Later on I realised that our main enemy was not Zionists, but offical Soviet medicine, which did not recognise our methods and treatments. The collective’s activities were actually banned. Later a criminal case was brought against the Chief for child abuse.

Being a Jew himself, the Chief exhibited admirable obstinacy over many years on the issue of the Zionists who supposedly wanted to humiliate us. To this day I still don’t understand why Zionists would want to humilate Jews. Was he just paranoid? My childish imagination drew the most outlandish and terrifying pictures of the Zionists who were supposedly chasing us. I imagined them with faces twisted with hate, gnashing teeth and long twisted hands with claws, reaching out to grab me and drag me to their fearful lair, where they would drink my warm child’s blood or do something even worse, which I couldn’t quite imagine.

The Chief devoted a large part of his interminable monologues to the theme of relations between men and women. He said they should be clean, “without smut”, but that all of us had only smutty relationships. Me personally he called a whore. So to the words slut and prostitute I added another new word: whore. I had only just turned eight.

Everyone in the collective worshipped the Chief. He became like a God to me too. My parents had gone and I had no one else to worship.

Grandma and uncle acted like we were total strangers, so I was afraid to even approach them.

AUNT KATYA

In general you weren’t allowed to call the adults auntie and