8
" When they were finally alone, Brajesh told Svetlana, with a calm resignation that was both disconcerting and moving, “Sveta, I know that I will die today.” He said he had had a dream of a white bullock pulling a cart. In India when you have that dream, it means death is coming.22 She did not believe him. At seven a.m. that Monday, he pointed to his heart and then to his head and said that he could feel something throbbing. And then he died. Into her mind came the memory of her father’s death, the only other death she had witnessed. She recalled her father’s outrageous struggle, his fear in the face of death, his terrifying last gesture of accusation. Singh’s death was quick and peaceful, his last gesture toward his heart. She thought, Each man got the death he deserved. With Singh’s death, Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry. "
― Rosemary Sullivan , Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
19
" She was thirty-five. It is not a comfortable age. If one is still alone, one believes one will stay alone. Her children, now sixteen and eleven, were at school. Katya had her compulsory Pioneer meetings, and Joseph had joined the Komsomol. Svetlana recalled, “I was melancholy, irritable, inclined towards hopeless pessimism; more than once I had contemplated suicide; I was afraid of dark rooms, of the dead, of thunderstorms; of uncouth men, of hooligans in the streets and drunks. My own life appeared to me very dark, dull, and without a future.”2 Beneath Svetlana’s carefully controlled exterior, there existed sorrows and suspicions, rages and frustrations, psychic wounds that she did not know how to face, let alone heal. "
― Rosemary Sullivan , Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva