Posi+Tive Magazine
>A mere jumble of body parts
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| Ugo Baldassarre @ Posi+Tive Magazine |
Janet Doggett recounts a life in fragments @ Paper Darts Magazine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I.
It is autumn and the light shines in patches on the cracked sidewalk of my childhood neighborhood. I am six years old, thin, waif-like and blonde. I am a piece of paper blown about by the wind, skipping lines on the walk, squinting up at golden leaves that spark the sky. I spy something buff-colored, tiny and featherless on the edge of the grass, nestled in the dirt. It has eyes, a beak, transparent skin that barely hides fragile bones beneath. Gently, I unfurl my fingers and lay a hand just atop its breast and feel a pulsating warmth rising to meet me. I alight and back away; I turn and run to the house screaming, “I need a shoebox, a SHOEBOX!” Back outside and with care I scoop the smooth wonder up and lay it deep within the box and carry it home. My prize. Mine.
II.
Everything is drenched. The long shards of dark green grass shimmer. We return from vacation and as our garage door opens, we find that our momma cat has given birth to ten, 12, or maybe 14 kittens. But the kittens are sick and some of them are dying. Their soft spotted heads are bent; their tongues show just so. We see the mother with her long white coat take the kittens one at a time by the throat and carry them off in the yard, to the glistening grass, an early grave. I am a child but age is indeterminate for the job at hand. I’m handed a thick black trash bag that is bigger than I am and bigger than the blood I imagine seeping through the soles of my pristine white tennis shoes. I step carefully through the wet grass, looking for dead cats.
>Sitting on hard wooden chairs
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| Wanda Kujacz @ Posi+Tive Magazine |
Sheila Fitzpatrick remembers not being a spy in the Soviet Union in the 1960s @ London Review of Books.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )They gathered us in a dark-panelled windowless basement in the Foreign Office for a briefing. The year was 1966, and the group was made up of 20 or so British students selected to go to the Soviet Union for ten months under the auspices of the British Council. Plus one Australian, myself, who had managed to get on the British exchange because Australia didn’t have one. Our nameless briefer, who we assumed to be from MI6, told us that everybody we met in the Soviet Union would be a spy. It would be impossible to make friends with Russians because, in the first place, they were all spies, and, in the second, they would make the same assumption about us. As students, we would be particularly vulnerable to Soviet attempts to compromise us because, unlike other foreigners resident in Moscow and Leningrad, we would actually live side by side with Russians instead of in a foreigners’ compound. We should be particularly careful not to be lured into sexual liaisons which would result in blackmail (from the Soviet side) and swift forcible repatriation (from the British). If any untoward approach was made to us, or if we knew of such an approach being made to someone else in the group, we should immediately inform the embassy. This was not a normal country we were going to. It was a Cold War zone.
I ended up spending a total of a year and a half in Cold War Moscow, between autumn 1966 and spring 1970. I travelled under a false identity, or that’s what it felt like: the nationality on my passport was British, not Australian; the surname was Bruce, which was my husband’s name but not mine; and, to top it off, I had decided to use my middle name, Mary, on the grounds that it could be shortened to Masha and would be easier for Russians. (Nothing came of this: I could not believe in Mary as my name, and in any case it turned out that all educated Russians knew the name Sheila – which had an easy diminutive, Shaylochka – because they had read C.P. Snow.)
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