Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 12

I was born in Moscow on a freezing December morning, without any sign or prospect of the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth. Nevertheless, I was given a real one, by my great-grandmother. In keeping with the family passion for food it was a substantial, heavy soup spoon, rather than a dainty tea one. My name is engraved in elegant cursive Cyrillic letters on the front of its handle, and the date of my birth – ‘16.XII.54’ – on the back. But it’s not a name I have ever heard, or remember hearing, as my own: it reads To Alyonushka, a tender diminutive of Elena. Yet my mother confirms that I was indeed called Alyonushka, especially by my maternal grandmother Zelda. My beginnings seemed so purely Russian, and this baby name a perfect match for my early surroundings. But in fact there were many other ingredients in the ethnic mix that was my first home.

My mother was the only daughter of Yakov Cachmachcev and Zelda Perlstein. My grandmother never changed her last name. This was quite common for women in Soviet Russia, and not a sign of feminism – although my grandmother, born at the very beginning of the twentieth century, was in fact an emancipated woman par excellence. Despite her modest family background (her father had been a watchmaker and repairer), she had a university degree and an uninterrupted working life as an economist – uninterrupted by motherhood, war or any other obstacles she may have faced. However, I sus­pect that the real reason she remained a Perlstein was the odd acoustic complexity of her husband’s last name. Cachmachcev was the Russified version of the original Armenian name Cachmachcan, which – as I found out one day from a Turkish bank teller in London – means ‘lighter’ in Turkish (cakmak), perhaps in imitation of the sound made when lighting a fire. Family historians on my mother’s side have made much of this name and its origin (did our ancestors engage in some sort of gun or gunpowder manufacture or trade?), but all I can per­sonally attest to is the impossibility of pronouncing it in any language without sounding like one is, indeed, spewing some kind of fire or triggering a mild explosion. When I am asked for my mother’s maiden name as part of an identity or secu­rity check, there is always a pause after I pronounce it. I know that during this brief silence the employees are comparing the random sound they just heard with the letters on their com­puter screen, and that no matter how hard they try they can see no correlation. They always give up, very quickly and very politely, swallowing hard as they say, ‘That’s lovely, thank you.’

Named Raissa (Rachel) after her Jewish grandmother who had died only six months before her birth, my mother grew up sur­rounded by her lively, warm Armenian extended family. Gayane, her diminutive paternal grandmother, herself the mother of nine children, was the one who gave me the silver spoon. I touch it sometimes and imagine that moment, my lifetime ago, when she handed it with much love to her beloved granddaughter, con­gratulating her on my birth. There was a special bond between my mother and the only grandmother she had ever known. Love strengthens the fabric of memory. Her memories of Gayane are so rich that it’s not hard for me to imagine her, almost as if I had known her myself. I have a real sense of the home she created in Baku with her dashing husband for their six sons and three daughters, an open house with parties and live music they made themselves every evening. She was full of laughter, had a superb soprano voice, and despite her Armenian background had a Russian high-school education. She spoke accent-free, educated Russian, along with French and German. When I was an infant she visited my mother a few times and rocked me. Having out­lived her husband and three of her children, she reached a ripe age despite many ailments, but did not live long enough for me to remember even a trace of her presence. Yet the spoon is still with me, and always will be, as a permanent reminder of her love, generous spirit and also, it must be said, exquisite taste: it is really a thing of classic beauty and elegance (unlike my great-grandmother herself who, my mother tells me, was lovely and cuddly rather than beautiful). The engraved words and numbers have the lightness and fluidity of an elegant pen on paper.

Baku was a natural place for the paths of my mother’s parents to converge. Her mother had been born in Vladikavkaz, in Ossetia, a river town in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Her parents had arrived there from Jewish shtetls, though my grandmother’s own Jewish education and knowledge of Yiddish was close to non-existent. She studied economics at the University of Baku, in a city that was a colourful melting pot of ethnicities and religions: Muslim Azeris, Russians, Jews, Armenians. It was not too far from my grandfather’s origi­nal family home in the ancient Armenian town of Guymri, north of the capital Yerevan. The tensions and conflicts would simmer and eventually erupt into bloody wars, but during my mother’s early childhood Baku was the peaceful, lively, multi­lingual city she still loves. There is a building in Baku with her family name still carved on it, built by her uncles, at a time when they ran a successful business, a kind of department store. The affluence was short-lived; in 1918, during a period of massacres of Armenians, the family fled, leaving their homes behind and gradually selling everything they had in order to survive. My grandfather was forced to break off his university studies as the ‘son of a capitalist’; he began working in a lowly position in a Soviet oil engineering company, but eventually, due to his supreme meticulousness and skills, moved up into management positions.

Zelda and Yakov were colleagues at the same company. They were friends, but for my grandmother the friendship wasn’t changing fast enough into something more. Yakov was very attracted to women, and very attractive to women – and always would be, causing my grandmother many a jealous moment during their long life together, and fiery scenes of passionate arguments my mother doesn’t like to remember. To kick-start this lifetime of passionate loving, my grandmother arranged for Yakov to meet her in an office. When he knocked on the door she said ‘Come in,’ and when he did he found her waiting for him, naked. The rest is family history – theirs, my mother’s and, ultimately, mine.

My mother was Zelda’s and Yakov’s only child, a gorgeous, tomboyish little girl with long dark hair and very blue eyes. She was adored not only by her parents but also by every single member of her extended family – on the vast Armenian side, and the less numerous Jewish side. From her mother she inher­ited a loud, infectious laugh and a spirit of wilful independence; from her father, a passion for games and music (despite a complete lack of talent for the latter). From both, easygoing generosity and warmth of soul, and a magnetism that draws people to her, men and women, and makes her the delightful centre of attention. As in most Soviet families, my mother grew up living in very close quarters with her parents, often sharing a room in a communal apartment. Sometimes the three of them would lie in bed for hours, giggling and laughing, just because, at that very moment, it felt good to forget that their life was impossibly hard.

My mother describes her parents as extremely tolerant and understanding, never interfering in her life choices. She in turn never dreamt of being critical of them. When my brother or I argued with her, she would often say, with genuine astonish­ment, ‘I would never say something critical to my parents. It just wouldn’t be possible.’

Life in a dictatorship is a profoundly humiliating, dehuman­ising experience. There is no such thing as having your own, truly personal sphere where your individuality can flourish unconstrained. There is no aspect of your life that is not con­trolled by the arbitrary whims of the dictator and his inner power circle – whims whose only aim is to instil mortal fear in every citizen, of any age, gender or role in society, whether they support the regime or not. Laughter was not only about feeling joy; it was, more often, about feeling free – within the constraints.

As a new baby, my mother’s first child, I must have been a ray of light during a dark time. Babies always are. I was born less than a year after Stalin’s death in 1953. Growing up, the name Stalin symbolised a remote spectre of horrors, the darker precursor of the horrors I would have to live with myself. Yet the remoteness of Stalin’s power and legacy was an illusion. My life would be profoundly influenced by the regime my parents and grandparents were born into.

But even in such dark times, chances are my great-grandmother had nothing more profound on her mind when she presented me with the spoon than this simple thought: we have a new child in the family – let’s feed her and love her and help her grow up to be happy. They didn’t fail.