After Love (5 page)

In autumn the year after Aunty Olga had shown me the place where Tonya, my mama, had died in an accident, Papa and I went to Saratov to visit the village where he and Aunty Olga had been born. She didn't come with us. ‘Bad timing,' she explained, ‘I'm going to do the Pushkin walks around Leningrad. But don't forget to visit Grandfather Karl, and remember to bring me a pot of blackberry jam and some honey.'

We boarded the boat in Moscow and sailed down the River Volga to Astrakhan, the Caspian port town where the river flows into the sea. It took us seven days to reach Volgagrad, where we ended the journey. We would return to Moscow by train. Papa had wanted us to go to Astrakhan ‘to taste the juicy melons' but in Volgagrad I came down with nasty flu.

Our days were spent visiting towns and villages, while the boat moved on at night. Papa had brought his Zenith camera with a whole set of different lenses, and he showed me how to take perfect photos. At first I enjoyed taking them but soon became bored. ‘Don't you like the camera?' he asked. ‘I prefer my own eyes,' I replied. When he pressed me I explained that my disenchantment was related to the photos in the family albums. At first they had seemed so real and my need so urgent that I couldn't stop looking at them. But slowly they had lost their magic, as if an Ali Baba had cast a spell and a door to them had swung shut.

I enjoyed being close to Papa and talking to him. We discussed how much he loved jazz, and he told me all about the book he had been working on for many years but which he was certain he would never finish. He asked about my school, my teachers and what I wanted to do with my life. I was most interested in history, I told him, especially the history of ancient nomads.

He told me about our Volga and how it would be hard to imagine Russia without the great river. The name Volga had been given by the Finno-Ugric people who had settled the areas upstream. The word Volga had several meanings: white, light, wet, humid, long, big and calm. The ancient Greeks who used to trade along the river called it
Ra
. For the Maris the river was
Yul
, for the Chuvash
Atal
, and for the Tatars and the Bashkirs
Idel
.

‘Do you miss Mama?' I remember asking him. Once this question had been posed we both knew that the rest of the conversation would focus on avoiding the subject.

‘Yes of course,' he said. ‘Quite a lot then,' he added after a pause, ‘but not so much now.'

‘Did you love her?'

‘What sort of question is that? Naturally. What do you think? I do even now, in a strange sort of way.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘We spent only a few years together, remember – just three or four. Then you were born and I was whisked away and—'

‘And?'

‘When I returned she was already dead.'

‘Did you write to her?'

‘I did, but most of the letters never reached her. They were confiscated, I think, and destroyed.'

‘Were you angry? Are you still angry?' I realised that I had never seen him angry.

‘Angry,' he mused. ‘Perhaps I was. But anger cripples, you know. It just makes life more difficult to endure. You know that Tonya was a Communist, an agitprop comrade. She was driven. She wanted to change the world, make it better for the poor and the downtrodden.' He gave me a little smile. ‘You know, the usual words, so commonly used and so meaningless.'

‘It's nice to see you angry, even just a little,' I said. ‘Was it very hard in the camp?' When he didn't reply, I quickly added: ‘Of course it must have been.'

‘It wasn't exactly a camp. In a way I was free, though not free enough to travel across the Urals. I was ordered to keep quiet and do whatever I was told, so that's what I did.'

Papa and I spent two days in Saratov. On the first we caught a bus and travelled to Komarovka, a
kolkhoz
village less than forty kilometres north. It didn't take long to find the grave of Grandfather Karl who, like his son, had worked as a foreman in a ceramics factory manufacturing tiles and pottery.

The untidy state of the cemetery didn't upset Papa. He had expected it. The cottage in which he and Aunty Olga were born had been destroyed in the War, like most others in the street. In their place stood a large farmyard and a workshop with trucks, tractors and bulldozers parked outside.

Papa knew the place where the cottage must have stood and guided me to it. It had stood near the present fence, looking down over a stream and fields of grassy tussocks. A power line now ran past the farmyard, across the stream and through the fields, four sagging wires stretched between wooden poles. Ravens sat on the wires, swinging slowly and steadily in the wind, as if silently contemplating their next short clumsy flight.

A tractor was driven out of the yard by a young woman in a red scarf who waved to us. All the ravens flew off except one tiny leftover, who kept on swinging.

Papa drew for me a sketch of the street and the cottage as it had been: a wooden house with a sloping tiled roof, a chimney and small windows, with a well out the back.

‘There used to be two apple trees not far from the well,' he said. ‘One of them would flower every year but never bore any fruit, while the other was always heavy with apples. My grandmother looked after a row of beehives and taught Olga and me to collect honey. Our honey smelt of apples.'

‘Some of those grassy mounds,' he said, pointing across the stream, ‘are the kurgans, the ancient burial mounds. Ploughing the fields we often used to uncover ancient coins and pottery shards, which I would collect. I've still got some of them at home in Moscow.'

‘So is it true that our family are Germans—I mean, Germans from the Volga?' I abruptly asked.

I knew that we were: Eisner, our family name; our love of classical music; the old German editions of Goethe, Hölderlin and Rilke on the bookshelves; the ancient maps of German cities like Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart; the German hymnbooks; and the etchings and the engravings of castles and churches.

So why had I asked? I suppose it was because I wanted to hear it from Papa himself.

We were in the bus travelling to the village. The sun was descending, splashing the sky with colours. The jovial driver chatted loudly with an old lady in the seat next to him. Apart from her there were only two other passengers: a young woman with a red Pioneer leader's tie and an old man with a ghastly tennis-ball-sized lump on the side of his head.

‘Do I feel German?' he mused after a few minutes of silence. ‘I don't know. You should ask Aunty Olga. She's more worried about these things, although it's true that I once tried to change our name to Eisnerov. There were many who went right ahead and gave themselves new names. I didn't, but not because I didn't consider myself Russian. I think it was the War that finally forced me to think about myself more seriously. The day I went to enlist I discovered the entry in my passport. I was shocked – no, not at the entry, but at my failure to notice it earlier. The entry had been there all the time. Now I don't mind that there's a bit of German in me, but somehow it hasn't made me improve my German or go to Hamburg in search of my forebears. My parents' grandparents are buried in that cemetery we saw. My journey begins and ends here. Is there any point in going beyond that, searching for the sake of searching? I suppose some people like to and want to, and I'm sure they have their compelling reasons—' ‘And what about Tonya, my mother?'

He didn't reply straight away. I guess he didn't know how to react to the way I used to say Mama's name: ‘Tonya' followed by ‘my mother', the two separated by a punctuation mark: the first to open a gap and the second to throw a bridge across it.

‘Your mother,' he replied, ‘was more Russian than any Russian I've ever met – which is strange, because her father was a Hungarian Jew from a village near Budapest. Her mother came from a prosperous family of Ukrainian Cossacks. They lived in a village near Rostov-on-Don.' He gave me a big grin. ‘Now there's a reason for you to travel and see the world.'

He looked away. The silence that followed extinguished any hope I might have had of continuing our conversation. When a moment or two later he turned again to look at me and smile, I noticed that he was really ready to cry. He took his glasses off and tried to clean them with his handkerchief.

Then he put them on again and looked around, as if searching for Aunty Olga, his angel of a sister, to console him.
He needs a hug
, I thought and that made me both sad and angry.

A year after the trip to Saratov I moved back to Moscow to finish high school. Now it was Aunty Olga's turn to shuttle between Kiev and Moscow. Initially she was apprehensive about my decision, because she wasn't sure how easily Papa, her dear Leynya, would adjust to my presence. But when I told her more about our trip together, she relaxed.

It didn't take Papa and me long to get used to one another. We both loved music and, whenever we could, we played together, he on the piano or saxophone and I on my cello, improvising jazz tunes or classical compositions.

I didn't enjoy my final year at school. My history teacher started picking on me, mercilessly criticising my reading and writing. She didn't like my project work and never missed a chance to laugh at my serious devotion to my music.

I didn't say anything to Aunty Olga, scared that she would confront the teacher and make life even more difficult for me.

One Friday evening in the winter of 1966, I felt the urge to rummage again through Mama's suitcases. The night before, I had been woken by a strange dream. During the lunch break at school next day, I found a desk in a secluded corner and sat down to record the dream in my diary. However, as I began to write I realised that the dream had lost the vivid details which had besieged my imagination.

Fortunately my friend Vera saw me in the library and asked if I wanted to go to her place. Her parents lived in a large well-furnished and comfortable apartment, because her father, an Armenian from Yerevan, held an important position in the Party branch of the Hammer and Sickle Factory. Vera loved chess and her coach, a celebrated Grandmaster, was convinced that he could make a world champion out of her. Vera, however, had other ideas. She was beautiful, with soft tanned skin, beautiful deep-set brown eyes and thick dark hair. She wanted to be a model.

We sat for a while in her room turning the pages of East German and Finnish fashion magazines, and then Vera opened her mother's wardrobe, pulled out some fabulous dresses, turned on some music and staged an impromptu show.

There was a mauve summer dress of Chinese silk, light and soft, that made my heart jump. Vera noticed my reaction. ‘You like it, don't you?' she said and handed me the dress to try on. I refused. Vera insisted but I again said no. ‘Take it with you, silly, and try it on at home.' She flicked the dress over to me. ‘And don't worry about Mama. She won't notice. She's into diamonds these days.'

I took the dress home. Aunty Olga had gone to spend the night with an old friend who was ill. I read her note on the kitchen table, heated up the dinner she had left me and sat eating and thinking about the two dresses, the one Vera had given me and my mother's. I had put both of them on my bed, side by side.

They looked so different. Was it because of the material, cotton against opulent Chinese silk, or the dots? The silk dress had tiny embroidered flowers all over it. I first put on my mother's dress and then slipped into Vera's. It felt so smooth and sensuous. I loved the way it caressed my body but I also wanted to get rid of it, as if its touch were contagious, as if by being in the dress I was about to betray Tonya.

But I was sure that Mama would have liked it, and that she would have looked wonderful in it. I took it off and put on her spotted dress again. Aunty Olga had been right; the dress now fitted me well, as if it had been waiting for me to grow up a bit, and as if the sole purpose of my growing up was to be able to fit into it.

I wore it for a while, and hung the silk dress in the wardrobe, where I avoided looking at it.

The suitcase from which I had taken Mama's dress remained open. The two leather straps which held the top together had broken, causing it to fall open and reveal a small pocket with a half-open zip. I noticed that something was stopping it closing. I stuck my hand in to remove the object and found a piece of glossy paper. I pulled it out. It was a passport-sized black-and-white photo, the upper left corner ripped from being stuck in the zip.

I took the photo to the table, switched on the lamp and studied it. I turned it over and read the words neatly written on the back: ‘To dearest Tonya', and underneath, ‘Paolo Prezzolini, March 1949'.

Quickly I returned to the bundles of old photos in the suitcase. Suddenly the face in the passport photo, the face of Paolo Prezzolini, was everywhere. In one photo he was impersonating Il Duce, standing beside a pathetic-looking Fuhrer. The ‘partisan' woman, tucked between the two and holding a gun, was Tonya. This must be one of Tonya's agitprop shows, I thought. Paolo must have been an actor.