Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 7

A spruce is standing lonely.

—HEINRICH HEINE

As a child I thought a family tree was something like a Christmas tree, a tree with decorations from old boxes—some baubles break, fragile as they are, some angels are ugly and sturdy and remain intact through every move. In any case, a Christmas tree was the only family tree we had, bought new every year then thrown away, a day before my birthday.

I had thought that telling the story of the few people who happened to be my relatives was all that was needed to conjure up the entire twentieth century. Some of my family members were born to pursue their callings in life in the unswerving, implicit belief that they would fix the world. Others seemed to have come out of nowhere; they did not put down roots, they ran back and forth, barely touching the ground, and hung in the air like a question, like a skydiver caught in a tree. My family had just about everything, I had arrogantly thought, a farmer, many teachers, a provocateur, a physicist, and a poet—and plenty of legends.

We had

a revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks and changed his name in the underground to one we have been using legally for close to a hundred years

several workers in a shoe factory in Odessa, about whom nothing is known

a physicist who ran an experimental turbine factory in Kharkiv and vanished during the purges; his brother-in-law was told to turn against him in court because party loyalty was gauged by a person’s willingness to sacrifice his own family members

a war hero named Gertrud, the husband of my aunt Lida, who was born when work was declared an end in itself, at first everyone worked a lot, then too much, and later still more, because exemplary achievements replaced norms and work became the meaning of life in the nation of proletarians and supermen, and so it came about that my future uncle was named Geroy Truda at birth, hero of labor, work hero, abbreviated to Gertrud

then there were Arnold, Ozjel, Zygmunt, Misha, Maria, Maybe Esther, maybe a second Esther and Madam Siskind, a deaf-mute student of Ozjel who sewed clothing for the entire city

many teachers who founded orphanages throughout Europe and taught deaf-mute children

Anna and Lyolya, who died in Babi Yar, and all the others there

a phantom named Judas Stern, my great-uncle

a peacock my grandparents bought for the deaf-mute children so they could enjoy its beauty

a Rosa and a Margarita, my floral grandmas

Margarita received a letter of recommendation for party membership in 1923, directly from Molotov, the future Soviet minister of foreign affairs, that’s how we tell the story, as if it showed that we were always at the center of the action

my grandmother Rosa, who had the loveliest name of all speech therapists and waited for her husband longer than Penelope had

my grandfather Vasily, who went off to war and did not return to my grandmother Rosa for forty-one years. She never forgave him for his long odyssey, but—in our family there is always someone who says but—but, this someone said, they kissed, at the kiosk next to the subway station, when they were both over seventy, the Hotel Tourist was under construction just then, but Grandfather, my mother said, Grandfather wasn’t able to leave the apartment anymore back then, and the Hotel Tourist wasn’t built until later

my other grandfather, the revolutionary who had not only changed his name but also given his mother a new name in every Soviet questionnaire, depending on the way the political wind was blowing, his employment, and his taste in literature, until he came up with Anna Arkadyevna, that was Anna Karenina’s name, who thus became my great-grandmother

We were happy, and everything within me resisted Leo Tolstoy’s pronouncement that happy families are alike in their happiness and only the unhappy ones are unique, a pronouncement that lured us into a trap and brought out our penchant for unhappiness, as though only unhappiness was worth words, but happiness hollow.