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 uncle; only by full name and patronymic. But I really felt like calling Ekaterina Viktorovna Aunt Katya. She was like family to me. She was calm, kind, clever and beautiful. She cared about me and talked to me like a human. She didn’t treat me like another adult (all the others did, it was considered normal), but like the child I was. This was why I did my homework with her and liked it. She helped me learn a lot of different poems by heart: poems by Alexander Pushkin, Agniya Barto, Irina Tokmakova and many others. To this day I can hear the perky couplets in my head that Aunt Katya and I would recite together:

Buy an onion, a green onion,

A potato and a carrot!

Buy them for our little girl,

Even though she’s a little minx!

Once we went camping by the mountain river Varzob. It was early spring, all around there were almond trees blooming and flocks grazing. I couldn’t help trying a sheep dropping, because it looked like someone had been scattering chocolates about. Aunt Katya taught me not to lean against the trees in spring: it’s very dangerous because scorpions live under the bark and spring is their mating season so they are extra poisonous and prone to stinging.

Aunt Katya often read aloud to me. Once, after that camping trip, in the collective, she got out a big art book, sat me down beside her and, moving her finger over the sculptures in the illustrations, started to tell me about gods and goddesses, retelling the greek myths. She traced the images of nude bodies with her finger, saying all the while, “Look, how beautiful, look at these lines, isn’t that lovely…”

The revered geneticist Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson wrote that a child’s personality forms under the influence of impressions, so that what has a big effect in a person’s childhood can largely define their life. I remember those moments spent with Aunt Katya very well. For my whole life, whenever I’ve come across something from antiquity, I’ve remembered what she smelled like and the light that came off her. And every time in my head I answer her: “Truly beautiful”.

But my happiness did not last long. Aunt Katya threw herself out the window. I didn’t see it; I don’t remember where I was. She simply disappeared somewhere, and then I was taken to visit her in hospital. The fact I was taken to visit her was a surprisingly humane act, because usually problems were hushed up and hidden, and no one would ever find out the truth if it didn’t fit the doctrine.

Aunt Katya survived, but had badly damaged her neck, and there was something wrong with her jaw: you could see the scar. Someone told me later that during her fall she had grabbed the vine on the second floor, which had saved her. I also found out later that she had been pregnant but as a result of the fall had lost the baby.

After that Aunt Katya disappeared from my life. She left the collective for ever, and for years the Chief only mentioned her in his speeches, calling her a prostitute and an enemy. I came to the conclusion they had had a row, but I never believed she was a bad person. There was another sceptical rumour going around saying she had become a simple tram driver, but I never understood that. We had always been taught that normal, simple, working class jobs were noble, so why were they so scathing about Aunt Katya going to work on a tram? What was shameful about it?

MY NAME

In this large group of people I was now totally alone. Over the six years in the cult I practically forgot my own name. Besides Aunt Katya, no one called me by name or only on those rare occasions when for some incomprehensible reason I suddenly became “good”, “healthy” or otherwise came into grace. Normally the adults either called me by my surname or came up with various strange nicknames. This sounded jovial, sometimes almost affectionate, but I always detected some kind of ironic derision. We children, copying the adults, also often addressed each other not by name but by various teasing epithets.

If by chance I ever heard my name, Ania, I always froze because it was so unusual. Every time I wondered what had happened, why was I suddenly Ania? Not filth, slut, arse, Chedia, Chedipops, pseudointelligentsia, sicko, evil bastard, filthy beast, or any of the things I usually got called, but Ania.

This is how children completely lose their identity. Such seemingly trivial instances soon build up and through them children lose their pride in themselves and in their name, roots, and family. They lose their pride and that means also their accountability.

MY FIRST AND LAST FRIEND

Our apartment on Lakhuti had become a commune, and more and more new children were brought there. They were from ages about 5 to 16 and were very diverse. I was never close to any of them, but I do remember one very well.

One day a boy came to us, about 12 years old. We became friends. Then I got my first slap in the face – a baptism of fire into adult life. I was told that I was definitely a whore, that I was perverting the boy, that I would drag him under the table and fuck him there.

Swearing was always encouraged: it was said to be the language of working folk, not “pseudointellectuals”.

I was the centre of long public speeches of a very harsh tone. Now I can say with full accountability that sexual awareness only appeared in me many years later, when I was approaching 20; back then I didn’t even understand the meaning of the obscene words. I fell into disgrace, and I was hunted like an animal by everyone, young and old.

I was totally shunned and treated like a slave. I prostrated myself and tried with all my might to “improve”.