What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
took me so many years to find you, Lena. So many years.’
He was my uncle by marriage, the ex-husband of Joseph’s sister. The reason why he had undertaken this search was that he had an only daughter who was a little younger than me, and who was living in the States. He wanted his daughter to know her family. He felt that this was very important.
‘Your real father is living in New York. The entire family emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1973, as Jews. You have a half-brother by your father’s second wife . . . Also in New
York.’
I felt the first pang of disappointment, and pain. Why wasn’t this father looking for me? And why had my parents never told me?
The man on the phone (who finally introduced himself as V) said I should speak to my parents to verify his story. And did he have my permission to give Joseph my number? I agreed to both, and we hung up.
I didn’t go straight back to the kitchen. I phoned my mother in Hamburg and told her about the phone call. She was silent. Silence – in conversation – is practically non-existent in our family. My parents are always talking, in expressive cadences, about everything under the sun. Except their secrets, apparently.
So I knew she was confirming the truth when she didn’t say anything at all, and then: ‘Let me speak to your father. I’ll call you right back.’
The phone rang again.
‘Lena? Eto tvoy otec govorit.’
A man with a much stronger voice than V’s, speaking in Russian with a slight stutter. ‘Lena? This is your father speaking.’
We had a surprisingly normal conversation, about where we both lived, what we do . . . As if I didn’t already have a father. In middle age, I was suddenly transported back into my infancy. What did I know? What did I not know?
A year earlier I had published my first novel, called The Nose. It was the story of a young American woman living in London, whose parents, especially her mother, had created an impenetrable wall of silence between themselves and their children. Only as an adult does my heroine almost accidentally stumble into uncovering and understanding the truth about her family. I thought I had invented and imagined it all. But perhaps I was writing about what I did not yet understand, but had lived with all my life.
Before we said goodbye I told Joseph that I was flying to New York in a week’s time, on a journalism assignment. We arranged to meet. He sounded very excited.
Then I called my brother Maxim in Berlin. My father was visiting him, and while Maxim and I spoke I could hear his voice in the background, talking to my mother on his mobile. I quickly told Maxim what had just happened.
‘Why are you so lucky?’ he said, laughing. But then he was serious: ‘Are you OK?’
‘I am,’ I said. ‘Or maybe not. I don’t know.’
My parents then both called, in quick succession. Each confirmed the truth of V’s story.
‘To be honest,’ said my mother, ‘I am relieved it’s out.’
‘I’m worried that I am going to lose you,’ said my father.
No one except my brother seemed to be concerned about how this bombshell was affecting me. My parents were the core, I was the periphery. Whose story was this, really? And what was the story?
I rejoined my own family in the kitchen, and gave no sign of what had just occurred, how my life – and in some way theirs – had just been turned on its head. I knew this: my father would always be my father, whoever Joseph might become to me.
Chekhov’s Gun on my Father’s Wall
‘If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired,’ Anton Chekhov famously wrote in 1889. The literary device known as Chekhov’s gun posits that writers must be as disciplined about introducing crucial elements into their narratives as criminals planning a perfect murder. Nothing can be left to chance. Every detail exists for a reason, which must be revealed at just the right moment.
I grew up with the kind of gun Chekhov may have had in mind: a nineteenth-century Smith & Wesson revolver, hanging on the wall in the study of the man I knew as my father in Prague. Hooked on a nail above a sofa, it attracted everyone’s attention as an unusual decoration. I loved to climb up and touch its heavy black metal grip, rusty brown barrel and casing. To me it always smelled as if it had just been fired, an aroma of dust and smoke – the latter imaginary, yet potent.
My father’s home office was a place of enchantment for me, furnished in the latest 1960s style (blond rounded shapes, pastel colours) but dotted with objects that exuded history: a large antique armchair, softly upholstered and extravagantly set in black wood; an enormous oil painting in a heavy gilded frame, a portrait of an old man that could have been from the Rembrandt school – dark yet mysteriously illuminated. But this was borrowed history, the kind you can buy when you purchase an antique: other people’s lives had been lived in their presence, in their own time. Only the gun on the wall was part of my father’s own history, a real witness.
The family story, told and endlessly repeated to anyone who was interested (and even if they weren’t), was that it was dug up, by accident, in the garden of my father’s parents’ home in Kuntsevo, a suburb of Moscow. No one knew how it had got there, or to whom it had originally belonged. The gun didn’t fire any more, of course (would Chekhov make literary provision for a damaged weapon?), but it looked impressive. It had a kind of solid beauty, designed and crafted with a sense of unembellished aesthetics. My father was very attached to it, and so was I.
And I still am. The gun moved with us from Prague to Hamburg (having made its earlier journey to Prague from Russia), when we emigrated there in 1970. Its home is still my father’s study, but for many years now it has no longer been a wall decoration. Instead, my father keeps it on a marble shelf above a radiator, in front of a framed photograph of his mother. She died when he was only five years old, in her early forties, and so looks forever young in this only portrait I have ever seen of her: strong dark eyes, centre-parted dark hair tied back in a no-nonsense manner. She has good, clear features, an open, unsmiling face, full lips; she looks stern and forbidding, perhaps a little hard, and even sad. She was the mother of six sons (two were from her first marriage), and had to be tough, practical, focused. Would she have mellowed, in the manner of all Jewish grandmothers? If she had lived and accompanied her sons into their adulthood would my father – her youngest – have become a different man?
I emailed him a photo of a similar gun I had found on the internet and asked if he thought they were the same make and period. He shot back in Czech, without missing a beat: ‘I wish I had your problems!’ My father has no interest in teasing out the poetic relevance of this or any other object. It wouldn’t occur to him to wonder why he keeps the gun next to his mother’s portrait, and surrounds it with antique menorahs. Confronted with the Chekhovian claim that the continued presence of this revolver in his life is, or ought to be, no accident, my father would reply, ‘Of course it is. It’s just an old gun. That’s all.’
It was him, in fact, who found it. It had been buried in the garden for many years, but not too deep for a child digging for treasures. With the family mutt Tobik for company, he spent hours on his own when his much older brothers were too busy or too uninterested to pay attention to him. One day in the late 1930s his play yielded a real result. He couldn’t believe his luck: this pistol was so old it could have witnessed the big revolution, several wars, and maybe even a romantic duel or two . . . My father was allowed to keep it. When he left Russia while still a teenager (against his father’s wishes) to join his brothers, who were already living in Prague, he didn’t take much with him; but he took this gun. It must remind him of the things he never talks about: the home he grew up in, his early