Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 12

I spent a large part of my childhood in Kiev in a new fourteen-floor apartment house on the left bank of the Dnieper, in a neighborhood that developed after the war and seemed to have no past, only a tidy future. But “no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten,” as the poet Olga Bergholz wrote in remembrance of the one million casualties of the Siege of Leningrad. This line was borne in the heart, and replaced memory throughout the land. There was no escaping it since it assumed the role of prophecy, with its revealed truth and concealed lies; we were called on to forget no one and nothing in order that we forget who or what was forgotten. Our backyard games extended beyond jump rope and dodge ball to endless rounds of a cops-and-robbers-like game of “us” against “the fascists,” thirty-five years after the war.

My street was named Ulitsa Florentsii, in honor of our beautiful Italian sister city. We were fortunate to live there because our address conveyed the beauty of Italy and our connection to the world of beauty, meaning that we too could be beautiful, that we too were raised in the spirit of the Renaissance to experience a rebirth and be situated in the center of the universe, albeit behind the Iron Curtain. The ceremonial opening of Ulitsa Florentsii took place in 1975, and a plaque was attached to our building. The building belonged to a Soviet ministry, so we called it Sovmin House, and in comparison with the nine-story prefabricated buildings in the Soviet barracks style that surrounded our courtyard, our Sovmin house was a luxury in brick. However, no ministers actually lived here; the residents were civil servants of the state apparatus, middle managers, low-ranking supervisors, teachers with well-worn book collections, cleaning ladies, cooks, secretaries, electricians, engineers. We never found out what we had done to merit an apartment in this socialist paradise—four rooms with built-in closets, an alcove for the refrigerator, two loggias, and attic space. In the first weeks after we moved in, my father met in the elevator a KGB case officer who had interrogated him ten years earlier, and he came home with a variant of “My home is my castle.” My home is their castle, he said.

Later on, the families of the American consulate staff moved in, and once, on July 4, they ran up a big American flag on their balconies, as though they had conquered our castle. In 1977, when the flamboyant and boisterous Florence soccer team came to Kiev, our street had a second ceremonial opening, although we had been living there for a long time. The Italians were surprised to discover us in our Kievan Florence, as though we were Native Americans being discovered by Europeans. What a piece of news that people live here! The plaque was taken down from one side of our building and attached to the other.

The building was full of women who had moved from villages to the city in their youth. As they grew older, they began to forget their hastily learned and never fully rooted Russian and sank back into the embraces of their warm Ukrainian. When they retired, they pulled out their floral headscarves, with the knot facing forward, and looked so rustic that it was hard to imagine that they’d ever taken them off. They gathered downstairs on the bench in front of the fourteen-floor colossus, shelled sunflower seeds, and exchanged the latest gossip. One of the few elderly men who lived in our building—the men died decades before the women—sat on the balcony somewhere quite high up and played folk songs on the accordion that resounded mournfully across our monumental courtyard and accompanied us as we went our various ways.

I knew very few of the neighbors, and even they were just passing acquaintances. One couple, a charming woman and her husband, a military doctor, always moved with grace and dignity. We did not know quite what to make of their daughter, and we never approached her; we knew nothing back then about Down syndrome. In those days, no one kept such a child at home—maybe it was even prohibited—but the other residents, held back by timidity and admiration of the family, never indulged in idle gossip. My mother told me that the beautiful woman was an orphan from the Spanish Civil War who had been brought to the allied Soviet Union in the late 1930s.

I got to know two other neighbors, both of whom were born during the war year of 1941: Sergey, a war orphan from Ossetia, and Vadim, who was raised by partisans in Polesie. In the other wing lived Boris, a talkative man of an indeterminate age, always cheerful and forthcoming, the only one who had crawled out of the mass grave in a small Jewish town in 1941 when all other residents, from young to old, were murdered. Only much later did I find out that the uncanny monster that we girls in the courtyard between the long rows of high-rises had always feared—we called him The Madman—was the son of the fragile Boris, and maybe the final offspring of the vanished Jewish town.

Sometimes letters were addressed to us at Venice Street, Ulitsa Venetsii. Our building was situated on a canal, which not all letter writers knew. The letters arrived, because there was no Ulitsa Venetsii in Kiev, and so we were responsible for all of Italy. Because of this Venice, water came pouring into my dreams and flooded everything in them, but rescue always arrived when the water had risen as far as my seventh floor, always in the form of a golden gondola from a misty distance that came for me alone. I gave no thought to the neighbors drowning below me, forgetting them in my dreams.

Three floors below us there lived the lonely Makarovna, an elderly Ukrainian villager who had survived collectivization as a child only to lose her parents and fiancé in the war. For years she sat on the bench in front of our building in slippers and a headscarf. She was the feistiest of all, the brashest and unhappiest, always tipsy, sometimes amusing but never cheerful, and she gave us children candy so old it seemed to have dated back to the war provisions of last resort. In her bright yellow headscarf with shiny flowers in maroon and green, in her dark blue dressing gown—the retired woman’s uniform—and a look of intensity in her faintly bulging eyes, she struck me as one of the last of the strong, wild, beautiful people that had once settled here at the threshold of the Ukrainian steppe. Later she gave me all kinds of superfluous things, felt boots for infants or thickly embroidered handkerchiefs, which I have kept to this day; she gave things away because she needed money, but I didn’t understand that back then. From time to time she recounted jumbled bits and pieces about the war, family members who had died, and the collective farms known as kolkhozy, but either I hadn’t been paying enough attention or her delirium was making her mix up the Soviet catastrophes; in any case the years did not match up. In some accounts her family died in the war, but in others the family starved on the kolkhoz, and her fiancé had never come back, or had never existed, as I secretly feared. The war was to blame, that was the only part that was certain.