Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 16

There were many farewells over the years, beginning with the first one, in 1958, when my mother took me to live in Prague. The separation was hard on my grandparents, and the change drastic. Their apartment was suddenly emptied of what had filled their days with so much life: their beloved only daughter, and their three-year-old granddaughter. But they never asked my mother not to leave. On the contrary: they knew that living in Czechoslovakia instead of the Soviet Union could only make her life easier, and so they were happy for her. And they loved the man she would marry.

They would visit us in Prague (never together, as far as I remember), but not all that often – such travel was difficult to arrange, with special visas required, which had to be applied for, involving long waiting periods and uncertain outcomes. The same was true of my mother’s trips back to Moscow from Prague. There was a finality in our departure, which I sensed and somehow understood. At the end of my first few years in Moscow there was a very long train journey to another coun­try. And waiting at the end of that train journey was the man I would immediately accept as my father.

But Russia remained present in my life as my first literary home. I still have many of my early children’s books, read to me by my grandparents in Moscow. In one of them there was a popular poem called ‘Moydodyr’ (‘Wash ‘em clean’ or, literally, ‘Clean ‘til Holes’) by Korney Chukovsky, written in 1924. It is about a dirty boy who is confronted by an anthropomorphised sink, a kind of general of cleanliness with an army of cleans­ing means at his command – soaps, brushes, toothbrushes, toothpaste . . . The boy is so filthy that everything he comes in contact with flees in terror – his bedding, his clothes, shoes, the samovar he wants to use to get a cup of tea. As the boy tries to escape the scary sink in absolute terror, running down the streets of Petrograd (or Leningrad, depending on the decade of the poem’s publication), he runs into Crocodile, another famous character from the same author’s imagination, who defends him against the aggressive brushes but insists that the boy wash himself thoroughly, after which all is well again.

This petrifying ode to cleanliness is written in wonderful verse, animating every object, from lowly toothbrush to mythic sink, in a completely captivating manner. I was obsessed with it and had to have it read to me several times a day by every willing adult in the family. I knew it by heart, but the reading was an essential ritual which not only gave the right voice to the idio­syncratic cadences of Chukovsky’s writing, but also helped me be less afraid of some of the more gruesome details of the story.

Another narrative children’s poem by the same author was also a favourite of mine. In ‘Mucha Tsokotucha’ (‘The Buzzing Fly’), the story was even more worrying. The heroine of the tale, a fly with a golden stomach, invites a multitude of insects to celebrate her birthday. They arrive, bringing gifts and cakes and sweets, and are pleasant in an obsequious manner. But when a vicious spider attacks the fly, threatening to kill her, not one of her guests is willing to help her. They are all afraid and hiding. At the last minute a tiny but courageous mosquito saves the fly by cutting off the spider’s head in one quick move. At which point the guests crawl out of their hiding places and proceed to celebrate the fly’s birthday. As a bonus, the heroic mosquito and the fly get married. I wonder if Chukovsky wrote these stories as clever allegories of life in the totalitarian Soviet Union, where cowardice and hypocrisy were a means of saving one’s own skin.

Listening to my grandfather’s melodic, expressive voice filled me with a feeling of deep comfort and security. Children crave, and deserve, a loving adult’s undivided, absolute attention, and a sense that the outside world can be made to disappear into their own imaginary version of it.

As I only lived with my grandparents until the age of three, and they visited us in Prague no more than a handful of times, my grandfather could not have read to me very often. Yet when I immerse myself in Russian books my grandfather’s voice is always with me. My grandmother rarely read to me, nor did she read to my mother when she was a child; my grandfather was the one who loved ‘to work’ with children – he called it zanimatsa, which means to engage in serious work and learn­ing. Even our games were educational, teaching us skills he thought were important: clear thought, concentration, a deeper understanding of the world. He also taught me (and later my brother) how to play chess and draughts and backgammon, and how to enjoy caviar for breakfast, spread thickly on fresh, white buttered bread.

My most vivid memory of my grandfather dates back to the winter of 1963–4, when I visited Moscow for the last time. My grandmother, aged only sixty-three, was seriously ill; she was, in fact, dying from complications following a gall-bladder operation. But this was somehow kept in the background by my mother, who believed that children should be spared traumatic encounters with reality. I was never taken to my grandmother’s funeral, and never really understood, or took in, the fact that she was no longer there. I never saw my mother cry over her mother’s death. She must have done it when I wasn’t watch­ing, and she made sure I wasn’t watching. She wanted me to remember my grandmother as she was when she was alive, and not to dwell on her death. I was nine when my grandmother passed away; by not being allowed to grieve with the adults, with my family, I was protected from understanding their sadness and from sharing mine. Perhaps it was due to this emo­tional mollycoddling that I simply don’t know how to think of death and what it means. A few years ago, when I visited a close friend who was dying, she asked me, ‘How can you console me?’ All I could say was ‘We’ll all meet again.’ I meant: death is not final, because I don’t understand what that would mean. This friend’s funeral was the first one I ever attended.

During the time of my grandmother’s final illness I was kept amused and entertained, rather than included in what everyone was going through. My mother’s intention worked out perfectly: my happy childhood was not affected. As a result of that trip I still remember Moscow as a real winter wonderland, made espe­cially for children. The Russian version of Santa, Dyedushka Moroz (Grandfather Frost), is a more secular and less mysterious figure, and that winter he somehow merged in my mind and memory with my tall, elegant, always kind, affectionate, cheer­ful and playful grandfather. A well-placed relative had arranged tickets for the biggest yolka, a Christmas tree celebration for chil­dren at the Kremlin. This was a huge variety show with songs and performances and presents and sweets for each child. The audience seemed enormous to me – several hundred children with their parents. I was probably the only non-Soviet child in the crowd. When the presenter asked if anyone would like to perform a song my hand shot up without a moment’s hesitation. My grandfather looked on in amazement as I fearlessly walked up to the stage and announced that I would be singing a song in Czech, of my own composition (I should add here that I am a terrible, if enthusiastic singer, but at the time I was not aware of it). I had written it not long before, and still remember the simple, upbeat tune and lyrics: ‘We will board the rocket ship and fly to the moon’. I began to sing, accompanied by a smiling accordion player. He hadn’t counted on my song having about twenty verses, each picking up where the previous one left off, narrating the rhymed adventures and activities on the moon once our rocket ship had got us there. (I was under the profound influence of the Soviet side of the space race; clearly I favoured cosmonauts at the time.) The accordion player tried to end my song many times, with an appropriately bombastic finale, but I ignored him and just went on, and on, and on, until I was all done and there were no more verses left to sing. I received some applause from the audience but this was mainly an attempt to encourage me to finish my performance, as people had already started to leave. When I finally came off stage and rejoined my grandfather he said, with an astonished smile, ‘I wouldn’t have believed you’d have the courage to do this.’ He was both proud and surprised. And to his own very musical ear, perhaps I was a disappointment. It was important for me to sing to this Russian audience in Czech, in my own language, to set myself apart from them. Growing up in Prague in the 1950s and 1960s, Russian was the language of the enemy. I was ashamed and embarrassed to claim it as my own, and outside my home I always tried to hide that I spoke it. This dichotomy became more pronounced as I grew older, and began to feel anti-Russian. My grandfather would not have understood.

This was the reason why, sadly, I never said goodbye to him. In 1969, not long before we emigrated to Hamburg, my mother travelled to Moscow to visit her father and tell him about the secret plans. Obviously this was not explained to us; it was simply a trip to Moscow, and she offered to take both my brother and me. I absolutely refused to go: so soon after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, I saw it as a betrayal of my moral principles and my loyalty to my homeland to visit the occupier. Not going to Moscow was my personal protest. But Maxim (who was nine at the time) did go, and how I envy him today. I wish I had seen Moscow one more time while my grandfather was still alive, and with my own, more grown-up eyes. He made several attempts to visit us in Hamburg in the early 1970s, and waited a very long time for his visa. Finally, it seemed as if he was about to receive it. Overjoyed, he immediately began out­lining his journey and wrote us a detailed letter about how he was going to travel, having consulted all the necessary timetables for trains between Moscow and Hamburg. With his characteris­tic meticulousness, he thought of every detail, every eventuality. He was bringing us gifts, thoughtfully selected for each of us. This letter is unbearably difficult to read today, because shortly after he posted it his visa request was denied. My grandfather died not long after. We were told by family members that the rejection completely broke him. Always an optimistic man, his last months were heartbreakingly sad.

I adored my grandmother Zelda. Even though I don’t have as many and as detailed memories of her as I do of my grand­father, my sense of her as a kind of older version of myself was always very clear. She was a strong personality, but also very giggly, and loved setting up practical jokes. My favourite letter of hers is one she wrote from a river cruise she undertook on her own, down the Volga. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she was completely relaxed. Everything seemed to be in its place, she was retired and now had some time to herself – a real luxury. She describes with such joy the towns she visited during the cruise, and the wooden jewellery she bought for herself as souvenirs. I treasure these pieces as much as the simple gold bracelet that had belonged to my Jewish great-grandmother Rachel.

When my grandmother and my mother were evacuated to Bashkiria during the war, my grandmother worked in a factory seven kilometres away from where they lived. In winter, as she walked home every evening along an empty road in complete darkness, she saw wolves’ eyes following her from very close by. The wolves were hungry. My grandmother was petrified. But she had no choice, and just kept walking. This is how her generation faced everything in life: by doing what they had to do, despite the ever-present fear.

In 1944 my grandmother was sent to work in a factory near Stalingrad. She and my mother, who was almost thirteen years old at the time, arrived in the city very early on a summer morning, when it was still dark. The sun was barely beginning to rise. A bent old man offered to guide them to the train that would take them to their destination. They followed him on foot as he carried their suitcase on his back. (Their main cargo, a beautiful shiny black upright piano and boxes of books, had been sent and stored separately; the piano – originally made in 1903 – survived the war and the following years, and ultimately made it to Prague, where I would have lessons on it until we left for Germany in 1970).

What my mother saw as a child walking through war-ravaged Stalingrad has remained etched in her mind with the veracity of a high-definition camera lens. She writes in her memoir, The Watermelon Rind, in the third person:

There were no more sidewalks. They walked in the middle of the streets, but these were no longer streets: they walked down a road on each side of which there were mountains of ruins, covering the remaining bits of sidewalk. The ruins were of various heights – depending on the size of building they used to be, big or small. And in this peaceful silence it was somehow hard to believe that under the city’s debris there lay a multitude of corpses. Who were they? Were they the people who used to live in those houses and didn’t manage to get away in time? Or were they soldiers – ours or the enemy’s? No one could tell them who was under those fallen bricks, and how many there were. Their guide had no idea. And yet it looked as if these buildings had collapsed only yesterday, the ruins looked untouched. Only from time to time something rustled and moved in them. The old man said calmly that the city was overrun with rats. And fell silent again.

There was complete stillness. A very unusual kind of still­ness for this morning hour. Birds were silent and dogs did not bark. And there were no inhabitants. What kind of a city was it, without inhabitants? It seemed as if the only survivor was this night guide. One couldn’t even say that the city was asleep – the city simply did not exist.

In the dim light of the rising sun, against the pinkish-red sky, they could now see the dark silhouettes of multi-storey buildings, which seemed to have remained intact. By the time they came closer to them, it was completely light, and the sun’s first rays fell on these houses. And only then did they realise that these were merely walls which remained standing, some with incomprehensibly connected floors, from which there were suspended, as if falling from one level to the next, metal beds, tables, wardrobes. Blankets, pillows and mattresses appeared to be strangely attached to the beds. On some of these walls there were pictures, mirrors; the window frames were ripped out but torn curtains were still hanging on them. And you could see exactly where there used to be a bedroom, a kitchen, a child’s room. One chair lay on a fragment of a floor, another was suspended in the air; the slightest wind would blow it to the lower floor, or all the way down to the ground. And in one corner, some­thing white: an overturned toilet, ripped out of the floor. Occasionally, when they walked near such a ruined house, you could even see mops and buckets; a doll in a red dress was miraculously hanging from a child’s cot. It was as if people had just walked out of these rooms and would be back shortly to tidy them up again. But there were no more stair­cases for them to climb up to their homes. This part of the building was completely gone. The ruins were both alive and dead. The girl saw for the first time what war really meant and what it caused – not from radio or newspapers, nor from what people were saying when they talked about war and about the front. And although these walls had already stood there almost half a year, it seemed as if the war had happened here only yesterday, and that these buildings were destroyed only a moment ago. They looked untouched.

In this way, they crossed the entire city, which had ceased to exist.

My mother never told me about this frozen memory of the destruction of Stalingrad. There was so much she never talked about. Not because she wouldn’t or didn’t want to, but because there was so much to tell, and so little of it seemed even remotely translatable into my own experience. She didn’t think I wanted to hear those stories, and she didn’t feel she knew how to explain them. She could only write them. Mostly to her­self – her book was almost an afterthought. And in her writing, spontaneous yet carefully burnished, she managed to keep alive and share what she had witnessed. Great movie scenes are made from a fraction of her visual precision.

As I lovingly translated my mother’s memories from Russian into English I thought about how, in our family, we seem to be destined to live at great physical distances from one another, but our love is stronger than our separations.

The evening before my grandmother Zelda became ill, in late December 1963, my grandparents were out celebrating her brother’s birthday. The following morning, still in high spirits, they were eating breakfast and listening to the radio when a quick Charleston tune came on. The music made her jump up and dance; she felt young again, joyful memories came flood­ing back. In mid-motion she suddenly clasped her stomach and cried out in pain. She went from intense happiness to fatal illness in a matter of seconds, almost dancing her way to the end.