Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 11

There was a moment in my early childhood when I stood in a garden, by a wooden gate and fence, and stared with amaze­ment at masses of enormous, almost-black cherries hanging from the branches of the trees. An older woman wearing a pale yellow dress handed me a few and said with pride, ‘Our cherries.’ I reached for them and can still taste their mellow sweetness, buried in firm, juicy red flesh which bled on my hands and trickled pinkly down my naked knee.

This happened in the same garden where my father unearthed the gun, on my only visit to his family home in Kuntsevo. The woman’s name was Tyotya Sonia – Auntie Sonia; she was my father’s stepmother. I never returned there and never saw her again. I don’t remember anyone or anything else from this visit, although I had come with my mother and both her parents, and my father’s father was also present. This detailed memory of the cherry garden has remained alive, effortlessly, as if I had been a much older child. It wasn’t until I began to reconstruct my life with systematic attention to dates that it struck me: I was only two and a half at the time. It was August 1957. My mother had already decided to follow her future husband to Prague, so this was my last summer as a Russian child, on a visit to her future in-laws. I was being presented to them.

English has only one word for cherry, but in Russian there are two different words for this fruit, or rather its two main varieties: chereshnya and vishnya. Chekhov’s famous play The Cherry Orchard is Vishniovyi Sad in Russian. ‘Vishnya’ is the heavier, darker kind of cherry, and it was this word Auntie Sonia used in my memory of our encounter. ‘Nasha vishnya,’ she had said; my mother would later contemptuously describe her Russian to me as having a ‘Yiddish-inflected, provincial accent’. There was a soft pride in Tyotya Sonia’s voice; perhaps she was eager to impress this new family. I always crave cher­ries. Whenever I buy them – and they have to be the dark kind, the ones I think of as vishnya – I hope to relive that first rich taste. I hog them, and devour them all in one go.

Why has this memory stayed with me in such a pure form, unchanged, forever fresh? Perhaps because this was the only long outing I had been taken on at that age. We travelled to Kuntsevo by tram; the entire experience had the sheen and excitement of novelty for me. Whatever the reason, I am grateful for this first childhood memory: my very own cherry orchard is the only real link I have to my father’s history, a sense of being there, in the place where he was born and where he grew up.

It is difficult to inherit the histories of those who raise us when they choose to hide them. Unlike my mother, my father hates being asked about what he remembers. He often says, ‘I don’t remember anything, and I don’t try.’ Maybe his past is a minefield he is afraid to step into. Only very occasionally, when not asked, will he begin to uncoil a film reel of vivid mem­ories, which, surprisingly, don’t seem to be buried under too many layers of enforced forgetting. I had always known that his mother died of a lung infection when he was five years old and that he doesn’t remember her at all, except for seeing her corpse in the house before the funeral. But one day he suddenly told me how his mother pulled him on a sleigh in deep white snow, rushing to a doctor or hospital after he cut his hand on a rusty nail from a wooden container. He remembered the box and the nail, and his bleeding hand, and his mother, decisive and quick, facing the freezing wind. The sleigh tracks in the hard snow.

Kuntsevo had no meaning for me other than the name of my father’s birthplace. The fenced garden I remember made me think of it as a rural place. But a house with a garden and cherry trees in 1950s Russia? At a time when my mother’s parents lived in shared, communal apartments like most Muscovites? I needed to know more about this home, and what it was really like.

My father is a short, agile, dark-haired (now silver-haired) man, cinematically good-looking and a powerful presence. His expressive face has always been dominated by large spectacles in strong, elegant frames. He has penetrating, heavy-lidded brown eyes and a loud voice that he is unable – and unwilling – to modulate, whether he is speaking or clearing his throat. He alternates between being overbearing, and very funny and gentle. Growing up, I thought of him as a large man (in fact, he is only a little taller than my mother, who is tiny), and did not realise he was short until, as a teenager, I stormed out of the house after one of our frequent arguments and kept walking away, having just declared that I was leaving home. A few min­utes into my dramatic march down the street I turned around and saw him in hot pursuit on the other side of the road, fol­lowing me like a badly trained operative. He looked very upset and worried, and endearingly vulnerable. My father, I now saw, was a small man who was larger than life. I felt very secure and rooted in his love, and loved him, always, with a tinge of tender sadness, as if he needed my emotional protection more than I needed his. Of course I turned around and went back home on that grey Hamburg afternoon – until our next fight.

I grew up thinking that my birth was a moment of joy for my parents. For almost fifty years of my life I knew this, and my birth certificate confirms it: I was born in Moscow in 1954. My father is listed as Czech, my mother Armenian. In the Soviet Union, so-called nationality was legally determined by the father. So, according to this document, I am Czech. My father’s Jewishness and my mother’s half-Jewishness, on her mother’s side, is completely (though unintentionally) concealed. If my father hadn’t inherited his father’s Czechoslovak citizenship his nationality would have been listed as Jew. Soviet identity papers appeared to be respectful of a person’s national allegiance; in actual fact, they represented institutionalised racism, enabling the authorities to categorise everyone’s nationality with ease, and for their own purposes. When Stalin conducted purges ofJewish doctors these were not abstract selections of people who were doctors by profession and Jewish by name or appearance or overt religion: it actually said so in their papers. There was a hier­archy of nationalities; to be listed as Russian was far preferable to being listed as Jew. Armenian was better than Jew but worse than Russian. Czech was sheer luxury, symbolising foreignness beyond the reach of the Soviet caste system but still within Russia’s orbit of so-called friendly states – if only barely. It was explained to me that at the time of my birth my father was living in Prague, and my parents were waiting for official permission to marry, as he was a foreign national. When this finally came through my mother and I were allowed to travel to Prague and join him. Thus began my Czech childhood. My brother Maxim would soon become a part of it – he was born in Prague in 1960.

When I arrived in Prague with my mother, in 1958, I had a Soviet passport. In Czechoslovakia a Soviet passport – the kind issued to Soviet citizens living abroad – was a handy one to have: it allowed almost unrestricted travel to the West. At the same time, paradoxically, travelling back to Moscow on this Soviet passport was impossible without a special visa and permit. This twisted logic of a communist state is hard to com­prehend, yet at the time it made perfect sense: a Soviet citizen living in Prague was considered almost a Westerner, and a sub­versive influence on those at home. For this reason, even – or especially – family visits were inhumanely difficult, in either direction. When my mother left my baby brother with her par­ents in Moscow while she was recuperating in Prague from a gall-bladder operation, it turned out to be almost impossible to get him back. Tearful visits to the Soviet Embassy proved use­less; visas were granted with random wilfulness, with the aim of humiliating the citizen. After nearly a year my grandfather was allowed to visit us in Prague and bring the toddler back. I still remember the day Maxim came home: everyone gathered around his cot and rejoiced about this gift, finally returned to us. I was excited to have my brother back, and found it hilarious that he had forgotten his Czech and now spoke only Russian. To this day, my brother owes his perfect Russian accent to his enforced extended stay in Moscow at the age of almost two. My grandparents were overjoyed to have him there to spoil and cherish, my parents in agony about his open-ended absence, and I somehow did not question it.

My brother is convinced that he was traumatised, and it is interesting to me that he judges this incident from a modern perspective, as if he had been ‘abandoned’. Being six years older, I have a much stronger awareness of the implications the Iron Curtain imposed not just on the East European bloc but on every single individual life of its citizens. It made everyone feel like a pawn in the hands of an invisible evil giant. When my mother decided to marry my father and move to Prague in the 1950s, she was in fact severing herself from her roots and family, embarking on a lifetime of painful separations – not only for herself, but for her children too. Borders were not mere demarcations on the map: they were the fault lines of dormant personal tragedies, ready to erupt like earthquakes at any moment and destroy people’s lives. Visits with our Moscow family, on either side of the border, were so rare and difficult to arrange that I could count the number of times I saw my grandparents since leaving Moscow on the fingers of one hand.

V’s phone call in 2002 shocked me into thinking again about those years of my first separation from my Moscow roots. While my mother seemed quite relieved that the burden of lying to me about my biological father had been lifted, and understood my need to know and even write about it, my father’s reac­tion was a different story. During a very brief period of family detente after V’s phone call, he relented and opened up about some previously untold memories of becoming my father, his voice infused with love and a sudden shadow of uncertainty. He became deeply concerned about losing me. He listened to what I had to tell him about my new family – which, at the time, wasn’t very much – and then said, ‘I am afraid that you will be completely absorbed by them. You will leave us. I will lose you.’ I felt less like a daughter than like a woman caught between two men. It was a very odd feeling. Suddenly I was loved by two fathers, with what appeared to be the same degree of tenderness. Yet despite my curiosity about the new father I knew that the only real father I could ever have was the man who had actually raised me.

I was aware that my parents’ tolerance for my digging deep into the suppressed facts of our lives would not last long. It was too painful for them, too difficult to deal with, like a broken limb they had managed to heal and didn’t want to test by exposing it to too much new strain. They didn’t seem concerned about the effect all this was having on me. With the same skill and resilience that had allowed them to execute and sustain this successful operation for over five decades, they now managed to direct their attention back to themselves. Their patience for my efforts to really understand what happened proved short-lived. My father couldn’t deal with it, and my mother gave in to his pressure, as she had always done.

One afternoon, not long after I had decided to write this memoir, I was sitting in my parents’ kitchen in Hamburg, recording a conversation with my mother about her memories of my early childhood. In her eightieth year, she still looked beautiful, and some fifteen years younger than her age. I hear her vibrant young voice on the tape, along with munching noises as she enjoyed her afternoon snack of cornflakes and yoghurt after her long dog walk. She is talking about my memory of the cherry trees at my father’s home when he enters the kitchen and realises what we are discussing. He explodes. It feels like getting caught in the planning of a doomed coup.

‘But you don’t even know what my book is really about,’ I hear myself say on the tape, surprisingly calmly. ‘It’s about the languages in my life, and how I discover that English was actu­ally there from the very beginning.’

‘What English? What are you talking about?’ He sounds genuinely surprised, and confused.

‘My other grandparents spoke English at home, in Moscow. They—’

‘What kind of nonsense is that? Why would they speak English? They were just regular Moscow Jews—’

‘No they weren’t,’ I interrupt. ‘They were Americans living in Moscow. You didn’t know?’

It is obvious that he had no idea. I say to my mother (my turn to sound surprised), ‘You didn’t tell him?’

‘No,’ she admits. To my father, with some pain – or anger – in her voice: ‘You never wanted to know!’

At this point he exits the kitchen, overwhelmed by this new information he doesn’t know what to do with. The film he wants to watch on TV has just started. It has to be more inter­esting, or easier to digest, than my life story.

My mother and I are alone again. After a brief silence, she says, slowly, ‘I didn’t tell him because he never asked. But why didn’t he ask? I wonder . . . ’ Her voice trails off, but quickly returns with new energy: ‘I know why. He didn’t want to know much about you because knowing more would make it harder for him to accept you as his own. He saw you as my daughter, and therefore his. It was easier for him to imagine you were just you, without any baggage.’

She said she understood my excitement about the peculiar narrative twist in my life – my hidden native connection with the English language, through this newly revealed American family: ‘You didn’t know you had it, but it drew you back to itself, like a charm.’

Obviously, my parents wouldn’t have been able to maintain this odd illusion that my birth resulted from a semi-immaculate conception, 1950s Soviet-style, had they lived in Moscow after they married. I would have grown up with my father as a stepfather and my biological father as someone I would see occasionally. But the move to Prague and my de facto adoption was the equivalent of moving to another world; hence it was possible for my mother to cut us both off from my real origins, apparently irrevocably. ‘We were a complete family,’ she once told me. She used the Russian word polnotsennaya, which means ‘whole’. Whole and wholesome.

My father’s resistance to my need to know the truth about who I was, and indirectly about who my parents were, and to write about it, was a serious obstacle for me initially. I had been conditioned, or had conditioned myself, to think of my parents as the people to whom I was not allowed to cause any pain. Their happiness was my responsibility. My happiness was more than my own feeling about my life: it was a way of making theirs easier.

My parents’ oldest friend, Slava, in his nineties and still living in Prague, unexpectedly informed me that as a child I may have been fully aware of what I thought I never knew. He revealed to me that when I was a little girl, I confided in him that I had a secret. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes. You told me, “Don’t tell anyone, but I have another father.”’ This was said during a phone conversation, with my parents, whom he was visiting, laughing in the background. My mother quickly came to the phone and whispered in conspiratorial tones that Slava was drunk and I shouldn’t listen to him: ‘There is no way you could have remembered. He is making this up.’ My father was out of earshot.

I was completely intrigued, and phoned Slava at his home on another day, when his being drunk could not be blamed for anything he said. We had a long conversation, during which I realised that he was the only witness to my early years in Prague who was not a family member. More than that: being of mixed Russian and Czech origin himself (not Jewish), he had also known my father’s family and visited their home in Kuntsevo on several occasions. He could actually tell me what it looked like.

Slava had no trouble at all remembering what he had said on the phone. I questioned him carefully, aware that there is no such thing as a completely reliable witness, especially after almost five decades. Slava seemed incredibly lucid and happy to talk (perhaps his being married to a much younger wife was keeping his head clear). I made him retell the circumstances of that conversation we once had, to test how the revelation about my ‘secret’ would fit into the context. It did, perfectly. It happened on a visit of his to our apartment. Maxim was about three or four years old, so I would have been nine or ten. We were being noisy and naughty, as we always were, and probably being told to behave by our parents. Slava said, ‘I told you to listen to your father. Then you turned to me and whispered: “I have a secret. He is not my real father. I have another father.” I explained to you that your real father was the one who looked after you and raised you, and you had to listen to him, and you said yes.’

Then he said, ‘You do know about your real father, right?’ I told him I hadn’t known, no, not until a few years ago. Slava was convinced I had to be aware of it as a child, ‘because when you came from Moscow with your mother, you were not a baby’.

The time gap between the age when I shared this secret with him and the age of my arrival in Prague was not that large: only seven years at most. It makes perfect sense that I was aware of suddenly having a new father in a new country, and had not forgotten the old one. Not yet. Then I must have suppressed, blocked out or truly forgotten all about him.

Slava knew my father before he married my mother, and had been told by him that he was going to bring a Jewish wife from Moscow to live with him in Prague. This bride had a daughter – me. My father needed to have my past erased, to start with a clean slate, as a family with my mother. For a very young man in his twenties, this was a huge commitment, an act of love, a sign of a great ability to love, but also a daring feat of single-mindedly controlling the lives of not one but two human beings, directly, and of many others indirectly.

I asked Slava about the house in Kuntsevo. The town itself, it turned out, was more than an insignificant speck on the map of the Soviet Union: it was a suburb of Moscow with two dis­tinct halves. In one, people had dachas and summer homes, and nice houses with gardens. In the other were the recreational dachas of Soviet functionaries, most famously Stalin’s own guarded retreat, where he died in 1953 – a year before I was born. So my father’s childhood was a tableau in the shadow of Stalin – literally.

The family home, said Slava, was an extremely nice house, ‘very well appointed, with elegant furniture’. He remembers several beautifully hosted meals there. He described my father’s father as a ‘very impressive, smart man; we called him knyaz kuntsevskyi (the Lord of Kuntsevo), because he presided over such elegance’. I suddenly understood the significance of the large set of silver cutlery my parents still have, a wedding gift by my father’s father. Yet I also understood much more. My father’s innate ability to dress immaculately, to create a sense of aesthetic luxury in any home we have ever lived in, to fill his surroundings with beautiful objects and a richly equipped kitchen (he loves buying dishes, cutlery, glasses) – all this is the childhood home he still carries in him, yet claims not to remember.

And what do I have in me, what do I carry? I begin piecing my memories together, placing them where they belong, recog­nising where they didn’t, against my father’s resistance, against both my parents’ lack of real interest, against their fears, against mine. My memories, like a bowl of cherries. Just for me.