Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 15

My grandfather was abroad during the year of my birth, work­ing in Romania for a Soviet–Romanian oil company with the imaginative name SOVROMPETROL. He returned when I was several months old. His presence was immediately felt. Before he came near me he spent a long time washing his hands, like a surgeon before an operation. Then he said, ‘So let’s see,’ and I was finally shown to him. Like everyone else in the small household and the extended family he was immedi­ately besotted with the tiny person, the first grandchild. Later that evening, when he realised that my sleeping pattern was not very satisfactory, he declared that ‘the baby needs discipline’, and insisted that they let me cry instead of immediately pick­ing me up. Family rumour has it the treatment was successful: I quickly got the idea and henceforth slept – well, like a baby.

He became very involved in planning my routine and my earliest education, just as he had done when my mother was little. There was a seriousness of purpose in his handling of children and babies. He did not see them as doll-like miniatures but as fully formed human beings who deserved utter respect from the earliest age.

In 1956, when I was almost two years old, he made a list in pencil, on a thin sheet of company stationery he had brought back from his Romanian job, of all the words I knew at the time. Russian words. Under the heading ‘Lenotchka is 1 year 10 months old, October 1956’ he wrote down the words as I pronounced them, in his handsome, very clear handwriting. Next to my version, after a dash, he added the real meaning of each word. Thanks to my grandfather’s loving attention to my early language acquisition, I know with complete cer­tainty that I was able to say twenty words or phrases at that age:

Say

Bublik

Walk

Pencil

Candy

Stop

I don’t want

Money

Scissors

Shoes

Take

Get up

Give

Play

Glasses

Box

Chocolate

Apples

Mushroom

Blood

Some of the words were phonetically very close to their intended pronunciation, others a little fanciful. I can imagine my whole toddler life from these words, with a large group of adults at my beck and call: my parents, my grandparents, other relatives, a live-in nanny. The latter was not a luxury; many Moscow families had them, very young girls from the provinces who held the fabric of a home together by taking care of babies, cooking, cleaning while the parents worked. Our nanny (or nannies: there was a succession of them) slept on a mattress in the kitchen. I was at the centre of everyone’s attention, spoiled by my grandparents, my mother’s sole focus and project. This never happened again in my childhood – six years later, when my brother was born she went straight back to work and there was no grandparental indulging going on, except when they visited us, which was rare. But my early years were a warm cocoon of sheer pleasure, not yet disturbed or even foreshadowed by the imminent move to Prague. My childhood in Moscow had a sweet taste for me, and those tastes I do remember: beige-coloured chocolate butter and milky vanilla ice cream.

The words I knew at the age of almost two tell a story. My verbs were just about all the simple actions I would ever need to master in order to communicate with and manage my world, then and now: say, walk, stop, take, get up, give, play. There was the crucial ‘I don’t want’. But what I did want, I remember, was to brush my grandmother’s frizzy hair, or play a game, any game, with my grandfather, or – my absolute favourite – sit at my little desk and pretend to be really busy talking on my toy telephone and scribbling, preferably inside my books. I still have some of them, including the doodles; it’s a very odd feeling to witness, from a distance of more than fifty years, evidence of my infant self’s playing at being a busy adult, in exactly the same style as I do now. I still love nothing more than to sit at my desk, talk on the phone, read, write and doodle. My grand­father’s list attests to the fact that I knew the word for pencil as early as I could pronounce it, or something like it.

The food I could name at that age is a clear giveaway of how my grandparents indulged my sweet tooth, and perhaps their own: sweets, chocolate and, for only slightly more solid nutri­tion, bublik (a Russian kind of bagel). It seems obvious that I liked apples too, and I can suddenly remember – in fact see – my grandfather’s large hands as he peels an apple, very smoothly and skilfully, in one curved line. Then he would slice it neatly and feed those small pieces to me like to a baby bird.

Shoes were a challenge – I couldn’t put them on myself, but really wanted to. Especially my winter boots, the valenki – they made me roll forward through snow rather than walk. I was wrapped in so many layers, the top one real fur, that in my winter outdoor clothes I must have been much heavier than my actual weight. In photos I look like a smiling winter doll, pulled on a wooden sleigh by my young mother, also dressed in fur.

A box was a different kind of attraction. I was mesmerised by the little boxes my grandfather kept on and inside his desk, in a special drawer. Many of them contained tiny toys and games – for his own pleasure. My greatest, and rare, delight was when he relented and agreed to sit down with me and slowly begin opening the boxes, demonstrating, with pride, the toys he had collected. My grandfather took the fun contained in inanimate objects as seriously as I did.

The two words on the vocabulary list I can least account for are ‘mushroom’ and ‘blood’. For many years, and almost to this day, a mushroom was the only thing I could actually draw. Russian children’s books frequently feature mushrooms in a magical woodland setting. And blood: that’s a great word for a not-yet-two-year-old to own. A scraped knee, small injuries, maybe a nosebleed? Was my over-protective parental and grandparental cocoon excessively attentive to my minor childhood injuries?

Like many other documents that could easily have been lost as I moved from house to house, city to city, country to coun­try, continent to continent, this precious small piece of paper, just two years younger than I am myself, has always been with me, perfectly preserved. I said those words and my grandfather heard them; like a scientist collecting a body of data, he sys­tematically and lovingly wrote them down on one particular day. My grandfather gave me the gift of preserving my first language, Russian, when it was just beginning to grow into my mother tongue.

And yet, it didn’t.