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Issue 10 - A Journal of Letters and Life
Foreign Desk
From a Country Called the Past:
Under Communism

by Christopher Orlet

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There was one bathroom for the four families, downstairs, on the ground floor. The door was warped and rotted. Our flat was one room of an old Prussian house, one under the slanted roof. There were eight of us squeezed in that one room. Under the slanted floor in the back where the cots were laid was where she hanged herself.
     
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Even as children we knew how to confuse the authorities. They were unable to recognize irony. Metaphor was our greatest weapon. Fables gave them fits.

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Visitors would often comment on the remarkable beauty of our women. It was an understandable source of national pride. Not the old women who often looked like used Russian tanks, but the young fashionable women in the short black skirts and the high leather boots and tight sweaters. They seemed to bloom under Communism.

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Snow was a big problem for the Communists. In December we would build snowmen in the paunchy figures of Marx and the skeletal figures of Lenin and the local authorities would scratch their bottoms and argue whether the snowmen were appropriate or whether they should be crushed or left to melt. The local authorities always smelled heavily of vodka and could never agree amongst themselves. In the meantime one of the older boys from our block would knock over the snowmen, shouting Long Live the Revolution!

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My grandfather built blocks in small towns along the Odra River. The blocks weren't much to look at, but you could cram six families into a small one. A local official gave my grandfather a medal for the efficient way he built blocks. He lives in one of those ruins now, cold and crumbling and coughing from cancer.

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There was a pond near my grandfather's block and I would spend summers there swimming and smoking and feeling up the local girls. We'd skinny-dip at night and drink our grandparents' vodka cut with pond water. The girls thought we were cool. We listened to forbidden tapes of exiled folk singers on sorry East German cassette players and reeled home puking at dawn.

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I got good grades in school in everything except Russian. Nobody wanted to get good grades in Russian. Everyone played dumb, except Karl whose father was a top local official. We decided to teach Karl a lesson by getting the prettiest girl in school to say she wanted him--but first he had to prove his loyalty to her by subverting the Party. Eventually Karl agreed. Our idea was for Karl to climb to the top of City Hall and replace the Soviet flag with a Solidarity flag. Karl was a remarkable climber. All of the secret police said so.

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One night the secret police came to our flat. It was just after ten o'clock ona school night and I should have been in bed. They'd come for my father. It was a very chaotic scene, with me and my mother screaming and my dog barking. One of the policemen kicked my dog in the side and the dog yelped and sulked away. Afterwards my mother and I attempted to drive to my grandfather's flat, but we were turned back at a roadblock outside of town. We stayed up all night and slept the next afternoon. Two days later my father walked through the front door. I'm fine, I'm fine, he said. Let's not talk about it anymore.

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It was Wednesday afternoon, already dark, and there was a line out front of the shop. My mother asked some women what they were waiting in line for, but nobody seemed to know. My mother handed me the loaf of bread she was carrying and the two bottles of beer and said, Go tell your father to come take my place in line. When I got home I told my father and he put on his heavy coat and hat and boots and went to relieve my mother. A half-hour later my mother came home and began making supper. Four hours later my father came home with a pair of boots. That's what they had. Boots. Try them on, he said. They were small.

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The lady across the hall was suspected of being a snitch for the local authorities. She would watch us closely looking for anything she could report and if she couldn't find anything she'd make something up. Naturally everyone hated her. Her husband was a former well-known athlete and an alcoholic who would get drunk in the afternoon and talk too much. When they got divorced they continued to live together like flies in the same flat because there were no other flats available, not even for Communist informers and especially not for drunks.
     
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When my father joined the Party we were given a flat on the first floor of a block and a garage and a Fiat to put in the garage. Later we got a telephone, although we had no one to call because nobody we knew had a telephone. My father said we were joining the Party so we could have better things, and maybe, later on, some other things. But there were no other things later on, as far as I could tell.

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