Читать книгу What Language Do I Dream In? - Elena Lappin - Страница 18

Although my father had moved to Prague as a teenager after the war, he returned to Russia to study history at Moscow University. This did not go according to plan; a former class­mate from his high school in Prague denounced him for saying, privately, that Stalin’s regime was anti-Semitic, and for telling an anti-Stalin joke. The friend’s motive for doing so has always remained a mystery, but it had serious repercussions. My father was thrown out of the university and the Communist Party (which he had joined with youthful zeal – ‘for five minutes’, he always told me). He had to go back to Prague with a dan­gerously sullied political profile, was very lucky not to have been arrested, and was now allowed to hold down only factory jobs. Not for the last time in his life, my father had to start from scratch and reinvent himself professionally. He began translating from Czech into Russian, initially using various friends’ names as his alias. In the early days he translated any­thing he was offered – technical texts, dry descriptions of items, newspaper articles . . . Many years later he would translate film subtitles and works of literature. His best-known translation was a special edition of the Czech classic The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, under the pseudonym Maxim Rellib – my brother’s first name and his own last name in reverse.

After the incident that ended his university studies, my father was officially no longer permitted to travel to the Soviet Union. Yet he found a way of doing so, visiting his parents on several occasions by joining organised tours with Czech youth groups. He met my mother a number of times, several years apart. They were first introduced at a party in 1949, by his brother Misha, who was a close friend of my mother’s cousin. Later that same year, when my mother was at a geography field camp in deep countryside about 100 kilometres from Moscow, the two brothers suddenly arrived by motorcycle, on a surprise visit. My mother was barely twenty; they all had fun, as friends, talking and laughing late into the night, so late that the boys had to stay over, sleeping in the nurse’s tent. The first spark of mutual attraction was there, but nothing more happened. (If it had, I once said to my mother, if they had fallen in love at first sight, she would never have become involved with Joseph – and I would never have been born. I expected her to express some­thing like potential regret at this eventuality, but she only said, ‘Oh well. Then it would have been someone else.’)

In 1956, during one of his visits to Moscow, around the time when he was just starting out as a freelance translator, my father really caught my mother’s attention at a party. He seemed much more worldly than any other young man she had ever met. And she attracted him by, without being drunk, dancing on a table and singing loudly (completely off-key), and laugh­ing even louder. Walking back to the tram along with some others, they became separated from the group and he simply asked her, ‘Would you consider moving to Prague?’ And she answered, without hesitation, ‘Of course!’ They had one or two dates after that and, having done no more than kiss, they changed the course of each other’s lives. Practically overnight, my mother found herself committed to a man who was asking her to live in Prague with him. The fact that she already had a child did not stop either of them. Immediately after they parted and he returned to Prague, each wrote a long love letter to the other, confirming their mutual love in almost identical words. My mother was relieved to receive hers – it meant that she had not been wrong about this unusual young man with a real sparkle in his dark eyes when he told hilarious jokes and stories. Semjon (or Sjoma, as everyone called him) was as seductive and warm on paper as he had seemed in real life. Their correspond­ence continued for almost a year, their plans to marry growing stronger from letter to letter.

One mild spring day my mother and Sjoma were strolling down a central Moscow avenue after their first real date. It had been a lunch at a fancy hotel restaurant. He was dressed with understated but impeccable Western European elegance, a look he knew how to produce without spending much money. My mother was not wearing a bra. The only bras she owned were home-sewn by my grandmother Zelda, made of coarse, sheet-like material; a real one would be a luxury. Her knickers, of the same provenance, were equally embarrassing – large chafing bloomers held up with elastic bands. Almost the entire population of a world superpower was dressed in extremely uncomfortable undergarments during the Cold War era.

On this occasion (as on many others, given that she didn’t have much to choose from in her wardrobe: one dress, one skirt, one blouse), my mother was wearing a close-fitting blue and white chequered skirt and a tight white blouse. The young man, always an aesthete, was put off by the unsexy red scarf around her neck. He thought she looked like a Young Pioneer, not mature enough for her age (twenty-six). But she was extremely pretty and vivacious, and he was smitten in a way that felt much deeper than his many flings in Prague. They were well-matched – both were short, dark-haired, good-looking, and both had a quick, natural way with words, though his was a great deal quicker. She preferred to listen, and he liked her attentiveness. He also liked her laugh, loud and open, and especially her blue-grey eyes. Together they looked like shining Hollywood stars playing dressed-down parts in a drab post-war movie.

Life writes scripts novelists often try to imitate. The couple accidentally bumped into another young man – Joseph, my biological father, who at the time was still an occasional if rare presence in my life. He was dressed in outlandish – for 1950s Moscow – trousers with a zip (everyone else wore them buttoned), a hand-me-down he had received from relatives in America. Over his arm he carried an oversized camel coat from the same source. Both young men were introduced to one another by my mother; she told each the other’s name, and who they were. They were not of a dissimilar type: both were dark, very Jewish-looking, attractive, bespectacled. But Joseph was much taller, had bright blue eyes, and a shy voice with a slight stutter. This encounter on a sunny spring afternoon was brief, casual and quickly forgotten by all; yet my entire life was already in the hands of this young trio.

There is a scene in my mother’s memoir that always makes me cry. She writes about our first night in Prague, in the one room we were all now sharing. I was finally asleep in my new cot, my long braids flung in opposite directions across the pillow. Though we had just arrived from Moscow, my new father had a deadline the following morning and had to finish editing a translation. My mother describes, in warm, vivid strokes, how she looked over his shoulder, saw his work for the first time and offered to help. They sat there together, reading and editing the Russian text he had translated from Czech, until late into the night, in a room filled with green light. The light was created by a cloth they had put around the bright ceiling bulb so it wouldn’t disturb my sleep. My mother remembers their shared concentration, how close their lips were, almost touching . . . When the editing was finished her new husband had tears in his eyes. ‘I can’t believe I am finally not alone. We are now together. Will you always be here with me and for me?’

He was probably overwhelmed by the enormity of what they had accomplished, against so many odds. And he didn’t even fully understand how lucky he was – not yet. My mother’s love for him was of the unconditional kind, absolute. Still, she wasn’t his first big love. Eva, a beautiful Jewish girl from his home town, was my father’s first serious passion, also adored by his family. She left him and broke his heart. When her marriage failed and she wanted to return to him, he refused to take her back. Instead, he found my mother – who has always felt some­what inferior to Eva. My father was suddenly keenly aware of the emotional security he had gained by marrying my mother. He had been fiercely independent as a teenager, living with his older brothers but without parental authority. He relied on himself for everything. His sense of responsibility for their new family unit must have suddenly kicked in that night after our arrival from Moscow. But there was more: the understanding that he now had his own slice of Russia, and of real, authentic Russian, by his side. His Russian would always remain excel­lent, but having a Russian-speaking wife, especially one who was also able to help him edit his work, was a priceless source of support in his profession. She would continue to help him edit his translations, especially the literary ones, and he in turn would be her first reader, typist and editor when she began publishing her own writing. My first night as a brand-new, not-yet-four-year-old émigré was spent in the sign of things to come: translation, one language into another, old commingling with new, under a roof of love my parents had created without any concern whatsoever for its chances of survival. They were very instinctive decision-makers: what felt right could be done; had to be done.

On neither side of my family, no matter how far down one goes, is there a trace of real, bona fide Russianness. And now here they both were, inside a cocoon of very pure Russian, in Prague. It was the Russian language that defined my parents’ cultural identity, and still does – even when they now watch endless hours of very bad Russian TV (via satellite) in Hamburg or Prague.

So much has survived in our family archives, despite all these moves: photographs, books, notebooks, letters, personal knick-knacks . . . But the first two love letters my parents had written to one another simultaneously, which crossed en route – those did not survive. Worried that they may contain compromising information, my mother destroyed them in the early 1960s, during a time when the family was under heightened sur­veillance due to an uncle’s failed attempt to emigrate, and his subsequent arrest.

My mother took these letters to a friend’s apartment not far from ours, and burned them in his coal oven. Their Russian words of passion are lost, but their bond has endured. It contin­ues to feed on their tempestuous love, and on the impassioned arguments they have on a daily basis, in a timeless Russian kept in pristine condition. They were both émigrés, each in their own way, and their inner island of very literate and literary Russian was an oasis they inhabited together, and with their children. We were all émigrés, in staggered stages. Russian was the first casualty of all our wanderings.