Six Days in Leningrad by Paullina Simons

Author:Paullina Simons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

When my mother went to Russia in 1987, she visited the Fifth Soviet apartment. She spent a long time telling me all about it. Yet now, after being inside, it was as if she hadn’t told me a thing.

My mother didn’t tell me about the floor or the walls, about the size of the rooms or the heart-wrenching decay of it all. She didn’t tell me about the stench from the toilet.

She told me she sat down and had tea with the Morzhakovs, who lived in the room adjacent to ours and who had since died. Morzhakov had turned informant for the KGB, my father later told me. (“Don’t you remember how the year before I was arrested he took to his bed with a cold that lasted a year? He lay with his ear against the wall and listened in on all my meetings.”) Because of Morzhakov, the KGB collected enough evidence to send Papa away to Shpalerka for a year, Mordovia for two years and then exile for another two.

That’s what my mother told me about in glorious detail — having tea with the man who had spied on my father.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.