The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb Page A

castle. The Kremlin, along the river, with its wall, twenty towers, cathedrals, and palaces, was overwhelming. My mother talked about how Moscow was filled with “Stalinist architecture,” which I did not understand as a child.
    The impressive architecture did nothing to alleviate the stark quality of life, however. The streets were crowded, fear hung heavy. We often didn’t have enough food, and it was the same food all the time. Plus, there were long lines out of each store. I waited with my parents, my sisters, for hours in line, it seemed like every day, and sometimes we’d get to the head of the line and there would be no more bread, or dumplings, or chicken, or whatever we had been waiting for.
    There were many things going on that I didn’t understand. My parents’ friends—other professors, artists, writers, musicians, doctors, scientists—were over all the time. They brought the food they had: chicken soup, potato cakes, Olivier salad, lamb dumplings, pickles, sauerkraut, braised cabbage, rye bread, sweet beets. My mother added a spice here, salt there, and somehow made it better. Everyone said so. They talked and laughed and argued around our wood table.
    And they whispered. “Hush ... quiet ... let me tell you, tell no one ... we need higher wages ... voting ... free elections ... religious freedom ... you must be careful, you must stop talking so much, Alexei ... You, too, Svetlana ... the time is not right for protesting ... still dangerous ... don’t trust the government ... you are being watched ... they are listening ... the newspapers, simply an extension of the government ... propaganda on television, always they lie to us ... it’s not safe for us ... no one knows what happened to Professor Popov ... to the priest ... to his brother ...”
    We were told, my sisters and I, not to talk about what we heard around that table. Our parents were, officially, members of the Communist Party. It was be a member or live a life of destitution with few job or educational opportunities. But we were secret Christians. In the Communist Party there was no God, no Jesus, no faith, no Christianity allowed.
    Had anyone known, my parents would have lost their jobs at the university. We would have been moved out of our apartment. My parents would have been able to find only low-paying jobs in a factory, if that. They might have lost custody of us or been sent to an insane asylum.
    Schools were state run and promoted and taught atheism. There were Russian Orthodox churches, more steeped in tradition, song, ritual, and liturgy, than God. In fact the KGB had infiltrated the Russian Orthodox church. They pretended to be priests and took confession. The Communist Party had demolished or closed thousands of mosques, temples, and churches over the years.
    We held church services in our home, with my uncles and their families. My mother’s parents, Lada and Anatoly, came, as did my father’s parents, Konstantin and Ekaterina, all loving people. My grandparents had known each other for decades.
    As kids, Valeria, Elvira, and I could smell fear around our family’s wood table, as well as our mother’s sugar-sprinkled pancakes. We could smell people’s pervading sense of distrust and hatred toward the government, alongside her baked cinnamon apples.
    It was a government steeped in corruption, cronyism, spying, paranoia, and violence. Suspicion and obsession with possible dissidents ran high. The television was used for propaganda, the press controlled. The KGB peered into everyone’s lives, and chased down and jailed without justice.
    The economy was stagnating, the government owned everything, the wages were pathetic, and a battle waged each day to buy enough food. Moscow, along with the rest of the Soviet Union, was suffocating and suffering. Life was too hard.
    But I was a child. I had loving parents who protected me from all they could. My mother and grandmothers