Читать книгу Maybe Esther - Katja Petrowskaja, Katja Petrowskaja - Страница 18

Many years have gone by since my babushka Rosa died, but I still keep finding her hairpins, the black Soviet hairpins made of some flexible metal I can’t put a name to, which have disappeared from the market with the collapse of the Soviet empire; maybe the raw material was produced in one of our republics, but the pins themselves in another one and then packaged somewhere in Asia, only to be transported back to the center, because everything was manufactured according to planned economic capriciousness. I find Rosa’s hairpins in all cities of the world, in hotels, at modern train stations, in train corridors, and in the apartments of strangers, as though Rosa had been there shortly before me, as though she knew that I had lost my way and was showing me how to get home with her hairpins—even though she had never traveled abroad.

During the last years of her life, Rosa wrote her memoirs incessantly and in great haste, in pencil on white paper. The paper quickly turned yellow, as though anticipating its natural aging process, but Rosa’s loss of sight was quicker. She didn’t number the pages; she simply piled them up. Did she sense that there was no point in putting them in order if the individual lines couldn’t be made out anyway? She often forgot to move on to a new sheet and wrote several pages’ worth on the same piece of paper. One line ran into the next, and another one lay atop earlier writing like waves of sand on the beach, obeying a force of nature, tangled up in the interlaced and interwoven pencil scribblings.

Rosa fought off her blindness with her scrawl, lacing together the lines of her world as it slipped away. The darker it grew, the more densely she squeezed her writing onto the pages. Some passages were as inextricably intertwined as matted wool; the prices of potatoes in the late 1980s were knotted together with tales from the war and fleeting encounters. Here and there a recognizable word would seep through the woolen thicket: ailing, Moscow, lifeblood. For years, I thought that the texts could be deciphered—in America there are devices that can unscramble lines like these—until I understood that Rosa’s writings were not intended for reading, but rather for holding on to, a thickly woven, unbreakable Ariadne’s thread.

She sat in our apartment building on Ulitsa Florentsii, using the windowsill as a table. She saw as little outside as inside, and she wrote.

The only things I still write by hand are telephone numbers, which I enter into a small telephone book decorated with Leonardo da Vinci’s handwriting. I bought it years ago in Florence, and whenever I look at Leonardo’s refined flourishes, the mark of an era in which people still believed that man was the measure of all things, I always think of Babushka’s illegible pencil scribblings.

Rosa’s hands, which were always animated by her use of sign language, didn’t rest even in retirement. She wanted to cook but wasn’t able to, because she couldn’t see, and her hands now adhered to different principles. She had spent her entire life with the deaf, she spoke sign language every day, her students called Rosa Mi-ni-a-tur-na-ya-mi-mi-ka, miniature mimic, as though that was her name, as though they had counted the syllables of her full name Ro-sa-li-ya-A-si-li-yev-na, translated them into sign language, and then back into spoken language, so that we could understand it as well. An elderly teacher from Rosa’s school told me that she had the most beautiful yet bashful signs and gestures of all the hearing members of that community.

When I knew Rosa, she was almost blind. She could hardly make out shapes, and when I came into the room, she took me for my father or my brother. Never for my mother, her daughter, because my mother was seldom at home. Rosa had joined an association for the blind, and now she went throughout the city bringing other blind people food rations that were distributed by the association: a scrawny blue chicken, a bag of buckwheat, some condensed milk, and a can of sprats. For a long time I failed to understand why she was helping other people who in many cases were not nearly as blind as she, and no one helped her.

Once I watched her crossing the street, unable to see the traffic lights and cars, yet she had her eye on the secret destination that the other pedestrians were oblivious to, the blind and their food packages. She rushed out onto the road as though taking the stage. Before I could cry out, she was already in the middle of an incessant stream of traffic. The cars slowed down, as though guided to a gentle stop by an invisible hand, no sound of screeching, as though we had briefly relocated to the world of the deaf. Rosa clearly had angels watching over her. How she found the stops, numbers, addresses, entryways, floors, apartments, and people remains a mystery to me to this day.

Rosa was independent and stubborn. She never let anyone help her—it did not even occur to her that she might need help. She secretly saved up money for her own burial, the way many old people do to avoid being a burden to others, even after their deaths. Then came perestroika, prices shot up like the giants in our fairy tales, and Rosa’s savings were wiped out.

Each time the hand of some gauge, unknown to us, struck a certain hour, Babushka headed down to the bakery. She bought a quarter loaf of bread and hid it under her pillow. That’s how to outwit death: get hold of a crust of bread, and death can’t catch you. The older she got, the deeper she sank back into the war. My mother was horrified every time she found one of these partial loaves, the expression of a widespread war syndrome without a known remedy.

I remember Babushka spending hours in front of the television, off to the left side, close to the screen, without glasses, because glasses no longer helped. Her profile was projected onto the flickering black-and-white image on the set. I never watched TV without her, and even years later, whenever I watch a program or go to the movies, I envision her silhouette, as though I fused it onto my optic nerve long in the past. She sang along to “The Internationale” in front of the television, No higher being will save us / No God, no kaiser, no tribune. / To wrest us from our misery / We alone must do it soon!

In Russian we were even more united in our misery, she firmly believed, and I believe her to this day.

As cumbersome as her increasing blindness made everyday life, it seemed to bestow a mark of honor that spared Rosa from deafness. Her sense of hearing grew keener and more refined, to the point that she heard voices that had faded away long ago. The less she could see, the more she sang the world of her youth back into life.

Rosa wanted to become an opera singer or to work at the operetta. She loved to dance, and as a young woman she often stole out of the house and away from the family’s altruistic deaf-mute work to go to the operetta all on her own. She became a speech therapist and teacher of the hearing-impaired, dancing and singing for her students whenever she could. At the age of seventy-five, she still entertained me with her favorites: Der Zigeunerbaron, Die Fledermaus, Die Bajadere, and, above all, Verdi.

Why am I guilty for falling in love with Alfredo, she sang, in the odd Russian translation of “L’amore d’Alfredo perfino mi manca.” Years later I found out that this was Violetta’s aria from La Traviata. I was taken aback every time; Rosa sang so passionately, and this passion of my babushka, who had lived without a man for forty years, seemed so strange to me, and so palpable. Rosa knew dozens of Italian arias in Russian; she accompanied herself, singing and playing blind on the black piano, which stood in my room.

Rosa and her older daughter, Lida, had taught deaf-mute children; my mother and I no longer did, yet we retained the gestures, the motions of our hands. We worked our hands while speaking, as though our spoken language was itself nothing to speak of and incomplete without this accompaniment. Raising one hand or the other, folding our fingers together, small discordant movements without purpose or aim, at odds with themselves, stringing up ornaments in the air, we descendants accompanied ourselves with gestures. No one—not even we ourselves—understood the chords we were creating. We no longer played the piano, and little by little we unlearned the language of our hands and fumbled in the void.

When Rosa was old and no longer taught—I never saw her communicating with anyone in sign language—she would make beautiful movements, for no particular reason, at the dinner table on Ulitsa Florentsii, as though she was actually from Italy, and she continued these movements while wielding her knife and fork, often resulting in cutlery falling on the floor and knives flying through the air. Where others inherited silver cutlery, we inherited clumsiness in handling utensils of stainless steel. When Aunt Lida, Rosa’s daughter, stopped working at the school for the deaf-mute, she took up smoking, and reined in her flailing hands with a cigarette and match. In. Out. Relax! Lida’s daughter, Marina, was always knitting, not the motions of knitting in the air, like the deaf and their teachers, but sweaters, socks, skirts. She knitted everything, even bikinis, while I sat empty-handed over the computer keyboard.

But the most important thing about Rosa was her legs, my mother said. Rosa was proud of her legs, and it must be said that of all the women in our family, she had the loveliest. My babushka’s legs were exquisite. She was fleet-footed, even in the hospital shortly before her death, and showed the nurses how to do the Charleston when they came to air out the room and Rosa had to get up despite her pain—she was only able to lie flat or dance. My mother was visiting and watched her mother dance; Rosa had been strictly forbidden to dance after her heart attack, and everyone knew that. My mother told me that Rosa gave a speech in front of all the patients, talking about the 1920s in Moscow and how she learned to dance, and while dancing she chatted about the New Economic Policy and how she had been present at Trotsky’s speech in Molokokoopsoyuz, the Milk Cooperative Association, and how he had brought a cow onto the stage, well, maybe he wasn’t the one to do it, my mother mused, but someone else, while Trotsky gave his speech, and I supposed that the Charleston reminded Rosa of Trotsky and his cow as she deftly danced her way into world history.

The legs of the women in our family grew worse with every succeeding generation. They were literally degenerating, my mother said—and she meant it seriously, although she enjoyed joking around—because the women in our family had spent centuries standing in front of their students six days a week, their legs bowed and their feet flattened into swans’ feet, my mother said, evidently believing in both Darwin’s evolution and Ovid’s metamorphoses, and alarmed at what would become of me.

My grandfather Vasily can be seen in the photograph, a handsome man with a narrow face and finely chiseled features. He is leaning on his left knee; the table is covered with a heavy fringed cloth and a basket of roses. Rosa is dancing jauntily on the table, to something from a Kálmán operetta, “The beauty, the beauty, the beauty from the cabaret.” I cannot alter anything in this picture, just edge the roses to the side. This was a marriage proposal, we were told, a basket full of roses and Rosa, the speech therapist, on the table.