The Cult in my Grandmother's House - стр. 24

People even died like this. As a child I was always surprised that the fact of a person’s death was so quickly glossed over. There was never any public mourning or grief, never anything special or solemn – nothing that should by rights conclude the life of a worthy person, or so it seemed to me. Somehow no one was up to it.

However, when Brezhnev died, we were obliged to grieve. But the death of the Chief’s youngest daughter’s newborn baby was put down to the cold weather. Not to the fact that his mother had wrong thoughts, or that she was a perverted woman, or that she had done something wrong to the baby, but to the fact that there was frost outside: the baby had quite simply and routinely frozen in his pram during a nap. It was the frost that was guilty. The chosen ones are excused everything.

When I was first writing my recollections (at age 23), I declared completely sincerely that, yes, seriously, despite everything, we were never ill. I really believed that. But now, with the years, remembering our life then in more detail, and through talking with other former cult members, I uncovered facts which as a child I had never even known. In fact, as often happens, much was hidden from the children intentionally.

I came to see that it is important to fact-check our childhood impressions.

WHO REMEMBERS THEIR CHILDHOOD IN THE USSR

Here in Switzerland, I know a Russian lady who is surprised every time I mention the USSR with ill will. “But what was so bad about it?” she says, “Soviet people had everything. Even if it wasn’t much, everyone had a roof over their head, free education and medicine, a job, a salary. Everything stable and predictable. Is that not heaven?!”

True, it came out later that in the USSR she had lived in her parents’ apartment, and her dad was in the army, so they were in a very privileged layer of society and had more or less enough. (They were the total opposite of our family, which was headed by an enemy of the people). That aside, her recollections of the Soviet Union are tainted with childish romanticism. Children do not see the complex relationships in social phenomena. We begin to notice and understand them only with years and experience.

This is why it is so important in adulthood to mentally return to our childhood, to reevaluate what happened then. This is why I am writing this book: I want to understand what was not right and how to make sure nothing similar happens again, either with my own children or other people’s.

THEATRE, OR ART THERAPY