What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
together was a tango danced by an amateur couple learning the moves as they went along. ‘I didn’t really think I would stay with him for ever,’ my mother declared one day, at the age of eighty-two. She said she never thought about her life that far ahead.
It was my mother’s love – adventurous and fearless – that brought me from Moscow to Prague. I was about to be transformed from a Russian child into a Czech child. This process of linguistic and cultural layering is a familiar one to all immigrant children. One language is spoken at home, another in the world outside, with children mastering the new language while their parents, with their accents and imperfect grammar, remain forever foreign. Even a small child begins to feel superior to his or her parents, sensing their language inferiority in the domain outside their home.
After a brief stint at a Russian nursery close to where we first lived, I began attending a regular Czech kindergarten when we moved to another apartment. I wish I could make my memory light up and illuminate those moments, but in this first virginal encounter with being foreign I can now only recall the pleasure of suddenly knowing Czech.
My mother says that for the first two months after joining my Czech kindergarten I didn’t speak at all – not a word. I was absolutely silent there, like a mute child. After two months I started speaking in complete, perfect Czech sentences, as if I always had. This sounds accurate, even scientifically so: a four-year-old child needs about two months to internalise the vocabulary and syntax of a new language, mastering it in its entirety rather than in tentative stages, the way adults do.
But my first perfect Czech sentence was spoken at home – not to my parents, obviously, with whom I continued to speak Russian, but to our Czech neighbour. I was sitting on my potty in the hallway of the apartment we now shared with a very nice Czech family, a policeman and his wife and young son. As the policeman walked in through the front door I greeted him from my little throne: ‘Ahoj, vojáčku!’ (‘Hello, little soldier!’) I do have a vague memory of his uniform and my vantage point, possibly reinforced by the multiple retellings of this apocryphal story of my initiation into Czech.
I love it, mainly because it encapsulates, in two words, the extent to which I had already absorbed the grammatical and even satirical intricacies of my new language. I used the correct declension for the noun vojáček, inflecting it in the vocative case. I also immediately found a diminutive for soldier – vojáček rather than voják – and in just two words managed to convey a tender yet ironic greeting. Blurring the difference between a soldier’s and a policeman’s uniform was not a mistake but rather a cheeky provocation: my first joke in Czech! Or, to be precise, my first Czech words were a joke I made myself. It was, as I quickly understood, a great language to joke in, to be funny in, to tease in. Provoking a uniformed man into laughter while sitting on a potty was a very Czech moment.
I am laughing – not just smiling, really laughing – in most of the photos my mother took of me in my early days and years in Prague: playing in various parks and beautiful, very old gardens; lending my shoulder to my father, who is fast asleep on a park bench; amusing a crowd of participators in one of the obligatory parades celebrating the victory of the proletariat; dipping my feet in a country brook on a hot summer day. The adults around me are laughing too. My parents’ Prague of the late 1950s seems to have been a cheerful place. I know that this enjoyment came with a heavy price, and wasn’t what it seemed. But privately, at least, away from the unbearable political demands the regime imposed on every single citizen, life was good for our young family.
My fully developed memories of Prague begin with my first day of school. But from my kindergarten days I retain two key moments.
I arrived in Prague with very long hair, two thick braids tied with silky, rustling ribbons. My mother said she couldn’t take me anywhere without hearing from strangers ‘To je hezká holčička!’ (‘That’s a pretty little girl!’), mainly on account of those very Russian braids. One day she decided she wanted to use my hair for a hair extension, which was the greatest fashion accessory of the day. I remember very clearly sitting in a hairdresser’s chair about to have my long hair cut off, without my approval or interest. My mother rationalised the deed by telling me that it would be good for me to have a haircut, and that my hair would grow back even thicker. But in the meantime I had to present myself to my kindergarten teacher and friends with a very short, rough haircut. As I entered my kindergarten I immediately announced I was a new girl, with a made-up name. No one really believed me, but they did at least pretend they did, for a while. Reinventing my identity was becoming quite easy.
The other very clear memory from my pre-school days in Prague also involves my mother, albeit indirectly. I was playing in the kindergarten playground when she came to pick me up. Seeing her from a distance, I was so happy I began running towards her as fast as I could, not noticing I was heading straight for a barbed-wire fence. I hit the wire at eye level, eyes wide open. There was a sharp sting. My vision went blurry for a while, but I was lucky: I had missed the most sensitive part of the eye, and there were no serious consequences. The sensation of freely running towards my mother in an open space, then suddenly not seeing her, exhilaration followed by momentary blindness, followed by the relief of a lucky escape has stayed with me. My early childhood was full of such contrasts: fun and games on the periphery of danger.
My original point of entry into Czechoslovakia, the sleepy Čierna nad Tisou, would ten years later become a place of ominous significance. In the summer of 1968 the Czechoslovak leader Alexander Dubček, hero of the Prague Spring, was forced into a meeting there with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, to justify the Czechoslovak experiment of ‘socialism with a human face’ and to prevent the inevitable: a military invasion of his country by the Soviet Union and four other armies of the Warsaw Pact. He failed, and on 21 August 1968 my new country was brutally invaded by my old one. This would cause our emigration to yet another new country, and whatever trajectory I and my family had been on until then would undergo a complete change. But not yet.
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