What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
backgrounds. His father was from the Czech part of Carpathian Ruthenia, and ended up in Russia as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War. There, after being kept as a prisoner of war, he met his future wife, who was from the Ukraine. Their first years were spent in Kiev, where my father’s older brothers were born. Later the family moved to Kuntsevo and I would not have any idea what their family life was like if I hadn’t had several long telephone conversations with one of my father’s brothers a few years before he died. This uncle told me things I could never have imagined: the family kept all Jewish holidays, with special dishes used during Passover. But, most significantly, their home served as a house of prayer for local Jews during High Holidays, presumably in secret. My father is a deeply secular Jew, and never studied Hebrew nor had a bar mitzvah. But his Jewishness is an intrinsic part of his personality, and whenever he hears Jewish songs and prayers (in which he cannot participate) he always wells up and often cries. They touch and connect him with what he no longer consciously remembers: his home. When I told him what I learned from his brother he was actually surprised: he himself was not aware of all the traditions kept in his parents’ house.
He was a child during the Second World War, and, like many people from areas near the front lines, spent those years in evacuation in Asiatic Russia. But his brothers joined the Czechoslovak corps of the Red Army, under General Svoboda. The war reconnected them with their father’s Czech roots, and when it was over they all moved to Prague (still a Western democracy, until the communist putsch of 1948). My father learned Czech, but always retained Russian as his ‘best’ language. The high school he attended was a Russian gymnasium, originally created for the children of White Russian ex-pats, but after the war it was increasingly filled with young people who loved communism. As a teenager, my father was an ardent young communist. A relative who owned a tiny grocery shop in Prague, and later immigrated to Israel, remembered his passionate outrage in the 1940s: ‘Your business will be expropriated when the revolution comes.’ My father’s love affair with communism turned out to be short-lived and ended badly (or perhaps rather well, depending on one’s point of view) when he was denounced by a friend. The gun has always been an essential item among the few familiar objects he surrounds himself with when he works at his desk or spends time in his study. Even now, in his eighties, when work as a translator and interpreter is rare, this room is still his personal domain, aesthetically very distinct from the spaces occupied by my mother. Hers are over-cluttered with items of dubious provenance and quality (she collects everything and is unable to throw anything away), whereas his minimalist office is sparsely arranged. On his oversized oak desk, which we found in one of the first apartments we moved into in Hamburg, is a sepia photograph of his father in a glass frame set in a heavy marble base. On its reverse side – he turns the frame around from time to time – is a cheerful colour snapshot of me, very suntanned and summery, aged about twenty, cuddling a fluffy teddy bear. On the walls, next to his floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled with dictionaries, are large portraits of my very beautiful mother when she was in her forties.
In her room, at the other end of their long-corridored Hamburg apartment, my mother displays photos of her own, much more numerous family: Armenian on her father’s side, Russian Jewish on her mother’s. There are many group photos of handsome, dark-haired relatives with deep gazes and smiling faces, women holding babies, mementoes of lives lived in a very different climate. My mother was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, where her parents met and shared some happy years. Their move from Baku to Moscow in 1938 was sudden, an escape from Stalin’s purges among my grandfather’s colleagues. Eventually Moscow became my mother’s permanent base – until she met my father, and married and followed him to Prague.
My father is a translator by profession, from Czech into Russian. In later years, when we emigrated from Prague to Hamburg (after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968), he also added German, which could not have been easy. The clatter of his typewriter was always a permanent acoustic backdrop, loud and pervasive. It was the sound of my father’s authority in the house, not to be disturbed. I always did. I hated the invisible barrier between his work and our family life. I resented his absolute dedication. Today, I admire it, and envy it. My father was the quintessential freelancer, working from home – not an easy feat with two noisy kids constantly running around, often with many of their friends visiting and playing loud games. My mother was usually absent – she had a full-time job as a geographer–economist, a two-hour commute each way. She would leave the house early in the morning and return in the evening, every single day. She would braid my long hair while I was still asleep, saying softly, ‘The other side!’ when she needed me to turn over. When I got up, two hours later, my braids were perfect, ready for school with pretty silky bows firmly tied at each end.
My father took on any translations he could get. Having started with small technical ones, he eventually became a prominent literary translator and interpreter, earning a very good living. We had two cars, a Simca and a small Fiat, and a large, beautiful apartment. When we emigrated to Germany I watched my parents start all over again, at the age of forty, without knowing a word of their new language. I saw the same talents and absolute commitment to hard work take them from a rough beginning in a foreign country to, ultimately, another large apartment filled with paintings and some antiques. And two cars. The smoothness of this transition was what they expected of their children too.
Today, the ancient Smith & Wesson is the only object that has been physically present in all of my father’s incarnations, and in some of mine. It has lived with him since his childhood in Russia, accompanied him through his high-school years and adulthood in Prague, and made the journey to Hamburg, where it remains. In mocking admiration of my obsession with the gun and its history, my father announced that I will inherit it, and that he is prepared to put it in writing. When that happens the gun will move to my home (my children love it too) and continue to be a tangible link in the chain of our family wanderings. I don’t want to think about it, but I know that one day I will place it close to a portrait of my father. He believes in leaving the ghosts of the past alone, undisturbed, forgotten. He says forgetting is his peace of mind.
Contrary to Chekhov’s maxim, this is a gun that will never be fired, no matter how many acts follow its original appearance. Regardless of its history prior to being unearthed in the Russian garden, its current power is in its silence and continued presence. To me, it seems to be saying, Be careful what you hide.
Cherries
There was a moment in my early childhood when I stood in a garden, by a wooden gate and fence, and stared with amazement at masses of enormous, almost-black cherries hanging from the branches of the trees. An older woman wearing a pale yellow dress handed me a few and said with pride, ‘Our cherries.’ I reached for them and can still taste their mellow sweetness, buried in firm, juicy red flesh which bled on my hands and trickled pinkly down my naked knee.
This happened in the same garden where my father unearthed the gun, on my only visit to his family home in Kuntsevo. The woman’s name was Tyotya Sonia – Auntie Sonia; she was my father’s stepmother. I never returned there and never saw her again. I don’t remember anyone or anything else from this visit, although I had come with my mother and both her parents, and my father’s father was also present. This detailed memory of the cherry garden has remained alive, effortlessly, as if I had been a much older child. It wasn’t until I began to reconstruct my life with systematic attention to dates that it struck me: I was only two and a half at the time. It was August 1957. My mother had already decided to follow her future husband to Prague, so this was my last summer as a Russian child, on a visit to her future in-laws. I was being presented to them.
English has only one word for cherry, but in Russian there are two different words for this fruit, or rather its two main varieties: chereshnya and vishnya. Chekhov’s famous play The Cherry Orchard is Vishniovyi Sad in Russian. ‘Vishnya’ is the heavier, darker kind of cherry, and it was this word Auntie Sonia used in my memory of our encounter. ‘Nasha vishnya,’ she had said; my mother would later contemptuously describe her Russian to me as having a ‘Yiddish-inflected, provincial accent’. There was a soft pride in Tyotya Sonia’s voice; perhaps she was eager to impress this new family. I always crave cherries. Whenever I buy them – and they have to be the dark kind, the ones I think of