What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
in one go.
Why has this memory stayed with me in such a pure form, unchanged, forever fresh? Perhaps because this was the only long outing I had been taken on at that age. We travelled to Kuntsevo by tram; the entire experience had the sheen and excitement of novelty for me. Whatever the reason, I am grateful for this first childhood memory: my very own cherry orchard is the only real link I have to my father’s history, a sense of being there, in the place where he was born and where he grew up.
It is difficult to inherit the histories of those who raise us when they choose to hide them. Unlike my mother, my father hates being asked about what he remembers. He often says, ‘I don’t remember anything, and I don’t try.’ Maybe his past is a minefield he is afraid to step into. Only very occasionally, when not asked, will he begin to uncoil a film reel of vivid memories, which, surprisingly, don’t seem to be buried under too many layers of enforced forgetting. I had always known that his mother died of a lung infection when he was five years old and that he doesn’t remember her at all, except for seeing her corpse in the house before the funeral. But one day he suddenly told me how his mother pulled him on a sleigh in deep white snow, rushing to a doctor or hospital after he cut his hand on a rusty nail from a wooden container. He remembered the box and the nail, and his bleeding hand, and his mother, decisive and quick, facing the freezing wind. The sleigh tracks in the hard snow.
Kuntsevo had no meaning for me other than the name of my father’s birthplace. The fenced garden I remember made me think of it as a rural place. But a house with a garden and cherry trees in 1950s Russia? At a time when my mother’s parents lived in shared, communal apartments like most Muscovites? I needed to know more about this home, and what it was really like.
My father is a short, agile, dark-haired (now silver-haired) man, cinematically good-looking and a powerful presence. His expressive face has always been dominated by large spectacles in strong, elegant frames. He has penetrating, heavy-lidded brown eyes and a loud voice that he is unable – and unwilling – to modulate, whether he is speaking or clearing his throat. He alternates between being overbearing, and very funny and gentle. Growing up, I thought of him as a large man (in fact, he is only a little taller than my mother, who is tiny), and did not realise he was short until, as a teenager, I stormed out of the house after one of our frequent arguments and kept walking away, having just declared that I was leaving home. A few minutes into my dramatic march down the street I turned around and saw him in hot pursuit on the other side of the road, following me like a badly trained operative. He looked very upset and worried, and endearingly vulnerable. My father, I now saw, was a small man who was larger than life. I felt very secure and rooted in his love, and loved him, always, with a tinge of tender sadness, as if he needed my emotional protection more than I needed his. Of course I turned around and went back home on that grey Hamburg afternoon – until our next fight.
I grew up thinking that my birth was a moment of joy for my parents. For almost fifty years of my life I knew this, and my birth certificate confirms it: I was born in Moscow in 1954. My father is listed as Czech, my mother Armenian. In the Soviet Union, so-called nationality was legally determined by the father. So, according to this document, I am Czech. My father’s Jewishness and my mother’s half-Jewishness, on her mother’s side, is completely (though unintentionally) concealed. If my father hadn’t inherited his father’s Czechoslovak citizenship his nationality would have been listed as Jew. Soviet identity papers appeared to be respectful of a person’s national allegiance; in actual fact, they represented institutionalised racism, enabling the authorities to categorise everyone’s nationality with ease, and for their own purposes. When Stalin conducted purges ofJewish doctors these were not abstract selections of people who were doctors by profession and Jewish by name or appearance or overt religion: it actually said so in their papers. There was a hierarchy of nationalities; to be listed as Russian was far preferable to being listed as Jew. Armenian was better than Jew but worse than Russian. Czech was sheer luxury, symbolising foreignness beyond the reach of the Soviet caste system but still within Russia’s orbit of so-called friendly states – if only barely. It was explained to me that at the time of my birth my father was living in Prague, and my parents were waiting for official permission to marry, as he was a foreign national. When this finally came through my mother and I were allowed to travel to Prague and join him. Thus began my Czech childhood. My brother Maxim would soon become a part of it – he was born in Prague in 1960.
When I arrived in Prague with my mother, in 1958, I had a Soviet passport. In Czechoslovakia a Soviet passport – the kind issued to Soviet citizens living abroad – was a handy one to have: it allowed almost unrestricted travel to the West. At the same time, paradoxically, travelling back to Moscow on this Soviet passport was impossible without a special visa and permit. This twisted logic of a communist state is hard to comprehend, yet at the time it made perfect sense: a Soviet citizen living in Prague was considered almost a Westerner, and a subversive influence on those at home. For this reason, even – or especially – family visits were inhumanely difficult, in either direction. When my mother left my baby brother with her parents in Moscow while she was recuperating in Prague from a gall-bladder operation, it turned out to be almost impossible to get him back. Tearful visits to the Soviet Embassy proved useless; visas were granted with random wilfulness, with the aim of humiliating the citizen. After nearly a year my grandfather was allowed to visit us in Prague and bring the toddler back. I still remember the day Maxim came home: everyone gathered around his cot and rejoiced about this gift, finally returned to us. I was excited to have my brother back, and found it hilarious that he had forgotten his Czech and now spoke only Russian. To this day, my brother owes his perfect Russian accent to his enforced extended stay in Moscow at the age of almost two. My grandparents were overjoyed to have him there to spoil and cherish, my parents in agony about his open-ended absence, and I somehow did not question it.
My brother is convinced that he was traumatised, and it is interesting to me that he judges this incident from a modern perspective, as if he had been ‘abandoned’. Being six years older, I have a much stronger awareness of the implications the Iron Curtain imposed not just on the East European bloc but on every single individual life of its citizens. It made everyone feel like a pawn in the hands of an invisible evil giant. When my mother decided to marry my father and move to Prague in the 1950s, she was in fact severing herself from her roots and family, embarking on a lifetime of painful separations – not only for herself, but for her children too. Borders were not mere demarcations on the map: they were the fault lines of dormant personal tragedies, ready to erupt like earthquakes at any moment and destroy people’s lives. Visits with our Moscow family, on either side of the border, were so rare and difficult to arrange that I could count the number of times I saw my grandparents since leaving Moscow on the fingers of one hand.
V’s phone call in 2002 shocked me into thinking again about those years of my first separation from my Moscow roots. While my mother seemed quite relieved that the burden of lying to me about my biological father had been lifted, and understood my need to know and even write about it, my father’s reaction was a different story. During a very brief period of family detente after V’s phone call, he relented and opened up about some previously untold memories of becoming my father, his voice infused with love and a sudden shadow of uncertainty. He became deeply concerned about losing me. He listened to what I had to tell him about my new family – which, at the time, wasn’t very much – and then said, ‘I am afraid that you will be completely absorbed by them. You will leave us. I will lose you.’ I felt less like a daughter than like a woman caught between two men. It was a very odd feeling. Suddenly I was loved by two fathers, with what appeared to be the same degree of tenderness. Yet despite my curiosity about the new father I knew that the only real father I could ever have was the man who had actually raised me.
I was aware that my parents’ tolerance for my digging deep into the suppressed facts of our lives would not last long. It was too painful for them, too difficult to deal with, like a broken limb they had managed to heal and didn’t want to test by exposing it to too much new strain. They didn’t seem concerned about the effect all this was having on me. With the same skill and resilience that had allowed them to execute and sustain this successful operation for over five decades, they now managed to direct their attention back to themselves. Their patience for my efforts to really understand what happened proved short-lived. My