Words Will Break Cement Read Online Free Page A

vineyards in the south razed and vodka rationed across the land. So for many Soviet citizens it was a day soaked in industrial alcohol, cologne, or, as was the case with Andrei, medical spirits. No one had been expecting Nadya. She was given the name Nadezhda, which means “hope,” and parked, for the next few years of her life, with Andrei’s mother, Vera, which means “faith.”
    Vera lived in Krasnoyarsk. Katya lived in Norilsk. Andrei lived in various places; when Nadya was conceived and born, for example, he was living in a village outside of Arkhangelsk, in the very north of the European part of Russia. He had a gig as chief doctor at a rural hospital, unfettered access to medical spirits, and rare access to his wife. “That’s part of the reason we parted ways. I think that distance is important and a relationship works better when people take breaks from each other.” The distance in this case exceeded a thousand miles. “I guess Katya had a different opinion. She said I killed the woman in her. It’s a strange accusation, though I’m not a woman, so I wouldn’t know. And anyway, it’s not like she was wasting time herself.” All the more reason to be surprised by Nadya’s arrival.
    Shipping the baby off to Krasnoyarsk was not an unusual arrangement: young Russian couples often placed their children with grandparents, who themselves had likely been raised by their parents’ parents. Katya showed up at regular intervals, while Andrei was always anything but regular: “I am a holiday. I was always highly prized—both because girls always privilege men and because I provide a contrast to the women’s strict ways.”
    In the early 1990s, Andrei moved to Krasnoyarsk and Katya followed him. They had plans, a friend who had secured funding for a medical center, a view to making a home for their family. But the Soviet Union collapsed, and soon so did the friend’s funding scheme, and Andrei and Katya’s marriage. Andrei left for Moscow. Katya took the child and returned to Norilsk.
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    N ORILSK WAS A DARK PLACE. Forty-five days out of the year the city fumbled in the pitch-blackness of polar night; for another six months the blackness took turns with a gray haze that was neither day nor night. And when polar day arrived in May, it exposed snowbanks hardened by the winter and blackened by the fine particles with which the metals plants showered the city year-round. As the snow melted, more blackness emerged—all the way to the banks of the Norilskaya River, where some natives swam despite temperatures that rarely exceeded fifty-five degrees, even in July. The banks were coarse sand and rocks filled with the metals that made Norilsk the mining mecca it is. And one of the ten most polluted places on the planet.
    In the summers, Andrei yanked Nadya out of the darkness and transported her to hectic Moscow or the green leafy outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, where his mother still lived. Some summers, Katya finagled a ticket to a seaside summer camp in the Russian south and informed Andrei of its location so he could find a rental cot nearby and take Nadya out of camp for a few weeks. The colorful, warm, light-soaked environments in which Nadya spent time with Andrei no doubt enhanced the magical effect of father “the holiday.”
    “She would come and see ducks [in a Moscow canal] and she wouldn’t just say, ‘Ducks!’ She would ask, ‘Are these real ducks?’ She lived at the end of the earth, her only image of
duck
was virtual, like a computer-generated sign,” Andrei told me. And then he would commence his performance. How did he do it? Andrei took the question very seriously: self-effacement does not run in the Tolokonnikov family. “A hypnosis teacher of mine used to say you have to aim your arrow low: all this talk of superego or social phenomena makes no sense; what makes a difference is the biological, reptilian, sleeping life of the brain. The trick is to awaken that sleeping volcano—that is where