Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 10

‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired,’ Anton Chekhov famously wrote in 1889. The literary device known as Chekhov’s gun posits that writers must be as disciplined about introducing cru­cial elements into their narratives as criminals planning a perfect murder. Nothing can be left to chance. Every detail exists for a reason, which must be revealed at just the right moment.

I grew up with the kind of gun Chekhov may have had in mind: a nineteenth-century Smith & Wesson revolver, hang­ing on the wall in the study of the man I knew as my father in Prague. Hooked on a nail above a sofa, it attracted everyone’s attention as an unusual decoration. I loved to climb up and touch its heavy black metal grip, rusty brown barrel and casing. To me it always smelled as if it had just been fired, an aroma of dust and smoke – the latter imaginary, yet potent.

My father’s home office was a place of enchantment for me, furnished in the latest 1960s style (blond rounded shapes, pastel colours) but dotted with objects that exuded history: a large antique armchair, softly upholstered and extravagantly set in black wood; an enormous oil painting in a heavy gilded frame, a portrait of an old man that could have been from the Rembrandt school – dark yet mysteriously illuminated. But this was borrowed history, the kind you can buy when you purchase an antique: other people’s lives had been lived in their presence, in their own time. Only the gun on the wall was part of my father’s own history, a real witness.

The family story, told and endlessly repeated to anyone who was interested (and even if they weren’t), was that it was dug up, by accident, in the garden of my father’s parents’ home in Kuntsevo, a suburb of Moscow. No one knew how it had got there, or to whom it had originally belonged. The gun didn’t fire any more, of course (would Chekhov make literary pro­vision for a damaged weapon?), but it looked impressive. It had a kind of solid beauty, designed and crafted with a sense of unembellished aesthetics. My father was very attached to it, and so was I.

And I still am. The gun moved with us from Prague to Hamburg (having made its earlier journey to Prague from Russia), when we emigrated there in 1970. Its home is still my father’s study, but for many years now it has no longer been a wall decoration. Instead, my father keeps it on a marble shelf above a radiator, in front of a framed photograph of his mother. She died when he was only five years old, in her early forties, and so looks forever young in this only portrait I have ever seen of her: strong dark eyes, centre-parted dark hair tied back in a no-nonsense manner. She has good, clear features, an open, unsmiling face, full lips; she looks stern and forbidding, perhaps a little hard, and even sad. She was the mother of six sons (two were from her first marriage), and had to be tough, practical, focused. Would she have mellowed, in the manner of all Jewish grandmothers? If she had lived and accompanied her sons into their adulthood would my father – her youngest – have become a different man?

I emailed him a photo of a similar gun I had found on the internet and asked if he thought they were the same make and period. He shot back in Czech, without missing a beat: ‘I wish I had your problems!’ My father has no interest in teasing out the poetic relevance of this or any other object. It wouldn’t occur to him to wonder why he keeps the gun next to his mother’s portrait, and surrounds it with antique menorahs. Confronted with the Chekhovian claim that the continued presence of this revolver in his life is, or ought to be, no accident, my father would reply, ‘Of course it is. It’s just an old gun. That’s all.’

It was him, in fact, who found it. It had been buried in the garden for many years, but not too deep for a child digging for treasures. With the family mutt Tobik for company, he spent hours on his own when his much older brothers were too busy or too uninterested to pay attention to him. One day in the late 1930s his play yielded a real result. He couldn’t believe his luck: this pistol was so old it could have witnessed the big revolution, several wars, and maybe even a romantic duel or two . . . My father was allowed to keep it. When he left Russia while still a teenager (against his father’s wishes) to join his brothers, who were already living in Prague, he didn’t take much with him; but he took this gun. It must remind him of the things he never talks about: the home he grew up in, his early childhood.

My father’s parents were both Jews, from different back­grounds. His father was from the Czech part of Carpathian Ruthenia, and ended up in Russia as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. There, after being kept as a prisoner of war, he met his future wife, who was from the Ukraine. Their first years were spent in Kiev, where my father’s older brothers were born. Later the family moved to Kuntsevo and I would not have any idea what their family life was like if I hadn’t had several long telephone conversations with one of my father’s brothers a few years before he died. This uncle told me things I could never have imagined: the family kept all Jewish holidays, with special dishes used during Passover. But, most significantly, their home served as a house of prayer for local Jews during High Holidays, presumably in secret. My father is a deeply secular Jew, and never studied Hebrew nor had a bar mitzvah. But his Jewishness is an intrin­sic part of his personality, and whenever he hears Jewish songs and prayers (in which he cannot participate) he always wells up and often cries. They touch and connect him with what he no longer consciously remembers: his home. When I told him what I learned from his brother he was actually surprised: he himself was not aware of all the traditions kept in his parents’ house.

He was a child during the Second World War, and, like many people from areas near the front lines, spent those years in evacuation in Asiatic Russia. But his brothers joined the Czechoslovak corps of the Red Army, under General Svoboda. The war reconnected them with their father’s Czech roots, and when it was over they all moved to Prague (still a Western democracy, until the communist putsch of 1948). My father learned Czech, but always retained Russian as his ‘best’ lan­guage. The high school he attended was a Russian gymnasium, originally created for the children of White Russian ex-pats, but after the war it was increasingly filled with young people who loved communism. As a teenager, my father was an ardent young communist. A relative who owned a tiny grocery shop in Prague, and later immigrated to Israel, remembered his passionate outrage in the 1940s: ‘Your business will be expro­priated when the revolution comes.’ My father’s love affair with communism turned out to be short-lived and ended badly (or perhaps rather well, depending on one’s point of view) when he was denounced by a friend. The gun has always been an essential item among the few familiar objects he surrounds himself with when he works at his desk or spends time in his study. Even now, in his eighties, when work as a translator and interpreter is rare, this room is still his personal domain, aesthetically very distinct from the spaces occupied by my mother. Hers are over-cluttered with items of dubious provenance and quality (she collects everything and is unable to throw anything away), whereas his minimalist office is sparsely arranged. On his oversized oak desk, which we found in one of the first apartments we moved into in Hamburg, is a sepia photograph of his father in a glass frame set in a heavy marble base. On its reverse side – he turns the frame around from time to time – is a cheerful colour snap­shot of me, very suntanned and summery, aged about twenty, cuddling a fluffy teddy bear. On the walls, next to his floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with dictionaries, are large portraits of my very beautiful mother when she was in her forties.

In her room, at the other end of their long-corridored Hamburg apartment, my mother displays photos of her own, much more numerous family: Armenian on her father’s side, Russian Jewish on her mother’s. There are many group photos of handsome, dark-haired relatives with deep gazes and smil­ing faces, women holding babies, mementoes of lives lived in a very different climate. My mother was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, where her parents met and shared some happy years. Their move from Baku to Moscow in 1938 was sudden, an escape from Stalin’s purges among my grandfather’s col­leagues. Eventually Moscow became my mother’s permanent base – until she met my father, and married and followed him to Prague.

My father is a translator by profession, from Czech into Russian. In later years, when we emigrated from Prague to Hamburg (after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), he also added German, which could not have been easy. The clatter of his typewriter was always a permanent acoustic backdrop, loud and pervasive. It was the sound of my father’s authority in the house, not to be disturbed. I always did. I hated the invisible barrier between his work and our family life. I resented his absolute dedication. Today, I admire it, and envy it. My father was the quintessential freelancer, working from home – not an easy feat with two noisy kids constantly running around, often with many of their friends visiting and playing loud games. My mother was usually absent – she had a full-time job as a geographer–economist, a two-hour commute each way. She would leave the house early in the morning and return in the evening, every single day. She would braid my long hair while I was still asleep, saying softly, ‘The other side!’ when she needed me to turn over. When I got up, two hours later, my braids were perfect, ready for school with pretty silky bows firmly tied at each end.

My father took on any translations he could get. Having started with small technical ones, he eventually became a prominent literary translator and interpreter, earning a very good living. We had two cars, a Simca and a small Fiat, and a large, beautiful apartment. When we emigrated to Germany I watched my parents start all over again, at the age of forty, without knowing a word of their new language. I saw the same talents and absolute commitment to hard work take them from a rough beginning in a foreign country to, ultimately, another large apartment filled with paintings and some antiques. And two cars. The smoothness of this transition was what they expected of their children too.

Today, the ancient Smith & Wesson is the only object that has been physically present in all of my father’s incarnations, and in some of mine. It has lived with him since his childhood in Russia, accompanied him through his high-school years and adulthood in Prague, and made the journey to Hamburg, where it remains. In mocking admiration of my obsession with the gun and its history, my father announced that I will inherit it, and that he is prepared to put it in writing. When that hap­pens the gun will move to my home (my children love it too) and continue to be a tangible link in the chain of our family wanderings. I don’t want to think about it, but I know that one day I will place it close to a portrait of my father. He believes in leaving the ghosts of the past alone, undisturbed, forgotten. He says forgetting is his peace of mind.

Contrary to Chekhov’s maxim, this is a gun that will never be fired, no matter how many acts follow its original appear­ance. Regardless of its history prior to being unearthed in the Russian garden, its current power is in its silence and continued presence. To me, it seems to be saying, Be careful what you hide.