Life Stories by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781880100585
Publisher: Stories for Good
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Translation by Bela Shayevich

Trash Can for the Diamond Sutra

(fragment)

Marina Moskvina

And here's another interesting novella about an unexpected enlightenment, whose events began unfolding right before the Great Fatherland War. Back then, the same kind of "black Marias" would drive up of a black night, not only to the doors of such unfettered personages as my grandpa Stepan Gudkov, and others who were teaching their fellow citizens Pure Land Buddhism, but also to the doors of the most absolutely normal residents of the towns around Moscow, people who didn't stand out in any way.

Now several esteemed and respected figures will pass before your eyes, figures not related to me by blood. However, they were Stepan and Matilda Ivanovna's close neighbors at the dacha in Kratovo, therefore the threads of these people's fates are weaving into the pattern of my narrative all by themselves.

And so, to begin: a mother and child, Matilda and Stepan's neighbors, lived in Old Bolsheviks village. Their last name was Bronstein.

One fine day they come along and arrest that mother, Sara Naumovna Bronstein, and send her off to a camp for political offenders. What's going on, you might ask? Well, it appears that they had started suspecting poor Sara Naumovna of being in a very bad situation; to be exact, they suspected her of being a close relative of Lev Borisovich Trotsky, the oppositional Party member and main Trotskyite, whose real last name, it turns out, was Bronstein.

But Trotsky didn't have anything to do with this Sara Naumovna! All the more so since by this time poor Lev Davidovich, hiding from Yosif Vissarionovich somewhere, either in Mexico or in Brazil, had been killed, on the order of our Soviet government, it seems, by a man who had been worming his way into his trust for a long time. He came over, drank tea with jam, and acted as though he wanted learn the way of the world from Lev Davidovich, dip into his encyclopedic knowledge. He was so polite, so charming, and had such a totally open heart, that the awfully suspicious Trotsky, who by the way already suspected they'd try to assassinate him, relaxed his watchfulness completely, and became warmly attached to the nice young man and always gave him the very best seat and the very choicest food.

And that one chatted with him, chatted away on different philosophical topics, until one fine day the right moment came along and he whacked his respected friend and teacher in the head with a hatchet.

The arrest of our Sara Naumovna Bronstein, the innocent bearer of that low-prestige last name, was an echo of that distant Mexican event. They slapped a good solid sentence on her, too, for such a little thing!

Anyway, I won't be talking about poor Sara, or about Mr. Lev Trotsky, but about Aunt Sveta, Sara Naumovna's daughter, who back then wasn't an Aunt at all, but a young girl, who at one fell stroke had been divested of both her mother and her bright future, seeing as how she'd acquired the status of the daughter of an enemy of the people.

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