What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
to write this memoir, I was sitting in my parents’ kitchen in Hamburg, recording a conversation with my mother about her memories of my early childhood. In her eightieth year, she still looked beautiful, and some fifteen years younger than her age. I hear her vibrant young voice on the tape, along with munching noises as she enjoyed her afternoon snack of cornflakes and yoghurt after her long dog walk. She is talking about my memory of the cherry trees at my father’s home when he enters the kitchen and realises what we are discussing. He explodes. It feels like getting caught in the planning of a doomed coup.
‘But you don’t even know what my book is really about,’ I hear myself say on the tape, surprisingly calmly. ‘It’s about the languages in my life, and how I discover that English was actually there from the very beginning.’
‘What English? What are you talking about?’ He sounds genuinely surprised, and confused.
‘My other grandparents spoke English at home, in Moscow. They—’
‘What kind of nonsense is that? Why would they speak English? They were just regular Moscow Jews—’
‘No they weren’t,’ I interrupt. ‘They were Americans living in Moscow. You didn’t know?’
It is obvious that he had no idea. I say to my mother (my turn to sound surprised), ‘You didn’t tell him?’
‘No,’ she admits. To my father, with some pain – or anger – in her voice: ‘You never wanted to know!’
At this point he exits the kitchen, overwhelmed by this new information he doesn’t know what to do with. The film he wants to watch on TV has just started. It has to be more interesting, or easier to digest, than my life story.
My mother and I are alone again. After a brief silence, she says, slowly, ‘I didn’t tell him because he never asked. But why didn’t he ask? I wonder . . . ’ Her voice trails off, but quickly returns with new energy: ‘I know why. He didn’t want to know much about you because knowing more would make it harder for him to accept you as his own. He saw you as my daughter, and therefore his. It was easier for him to imagine you were just you, without any baggage.’
She said she understood my excitement about the peculiar narrative twist in my life – my hidden native connection with the English language, through this newly revealed American family: ‘You didn’t know you had it, but it drew you back to itself, like a charm.’
Obviously, my parents wouldn’t have been able to maintain this odd illusion that my birth resulted from a semi-immaculate conception, 1950s Soviet-style, had they lived in Moscow after they married. I would have grown up with my father as a stepfather and my biological father as someone I would see occasionally. But the move to Prague and my de facto adoption was the equivalent of moving to another world; hence it was possible for my mother to cut us both off from my real origins, apparently irrevocably. ‘We were a complete family,’ she once told me. She used the Russian word polnotsennaya, which means ‘whole’. Whole and wholesome.
My father’s resistance to my need to know the truth about who I was, and indirectly about who my parents were, and to write about it, was a serious obstacle for me initially. I had been conditioned, or had conditioned myself, to think of my parents as the people to whom I was not allowed to cause any pain. Their happiness was my responsibility. My happiness was more than my own feeling about my life: it was a way of making theirs easier.
My parents’ oldest friend, Slava, in his nineties and still living in Prague, unexpectedly informed me that as a child I may have been fully aware of what I thought I never knew. He revealed to me that when I was a little girl, I confided in him that I had a secret. ‘Really?’ ‘Yes. You told me, “Don’t tell anyone, but I have another father.”’ This was said during a phone conversation, with my parents, whom he was visiting, laughing in the background. My mother quickly came to the phone and whispered in conspiratorial tones that Slava was drunk and I shouldn’t listen to him: ‘There is no way you could have remembered. He is making this up.’ My father was out of earshot.
I was completely intrigued, and phoned Slava at his home on another day, when his being drunk could not be blamed for anything he said. We had a long conversation, during which I realised that he was the only witness to my early years in Prague who was not a family member. More than that: being of mixed Russian and Czech origin himself (not Jewish), he had also known my father’s family and visited their home in Kuntsevo on several occasions. He could actually tell me what it looked like.
Slava had no trouble at all remembering what he had said on the phone. I questioned him carefully, aware that there is no such thing as a completely reliable witness, especially after almost five decades. Slava seemed incredibly lucid and happy to talk (perhaps his being married to a much younger wife was keeping his head clear). I made him retell the circumstances of that conversation we once had, to test how the revelation about my ‘secret’ would fit into the context. It did, perfectly. It happened on a visit of his to our apartment. Maxim was about three or four years old, so I would have been nine or ten. We were being noisy and naughty, as we always were, and probably being told to behave by our parents. Slava said, ‘I told you to listen to your father. Then you turned to me and whispered: “I have a secret. He is not my real father. I have another father.” I explained to you that your real father was the one who looked after you and raised you, and you had to listen to him, and you said yes.’
Then he said, ‘You do know about your real father, right?’ I told him I hadn’t known, no, not until a few years ago. Slava was convinced I had to be aware of it as a child, ‘because when you came from Moscow with your mother, you were not a baby’.
The time gap between the age when I shared this secret with him and the age of my arrival in Prague was not that large: only seven years at most. It makes perfect sense that I was aware of suddenly having a new father in a new country, and had not forgotten the old one. Not yet. Then I must have suppressed, blocked out or truly forgotten all about him.
Slava knew my father before he married my mother, and had been told by him that he was going to bring a Jewish wife from Moscow to live with him in Prague. This bride had a daughter – me. My father needed to have my past erased, to start with a clean slate, as a family with my mother. For a very young man in his twenties, this was a huge commitment, an act of love, a sign of a great ability to love, but also a daring feat of single-mindedly controlling the lives of not one but two human beings, directly, and of many others indirectly.
I asked Slava about the house in Kuntsevo. The town itself, it turned out, was more than an insignificant speck on the map of the Soviet Union: it was a suburb of Moscow with two distinct halves. In one, people had dachas and summer homes, and nice houses with gardens. In the other were the recreational dachas of Soviet functionaries, most famously Stalin’s own guarded retreat, where he died in 1953 – a year before I was born. So my father’s childhood was a tableau in the shadow of Stalin – literally.
The family home, said Slava, was an extremely nice house, ‘very well appointed, with elegant furniture’. He remembers several beautifully hosted meals there. He described my father’s father as a ‘very impressive, smart man; we called him knyaz kuntsevskyi (the Lord of Kuntsevo), because he presided over such elegance’. I suddenly understood the significance of the large set of silver cutlery my parents still have, a wedding gift by my father’s father. Yet I also understood much more. My father’s innate ability to dress immaculately, to create a sense of aesthetic luxury in any home we have ever lived in, to fill his surroundings with beautiful objects and a richly equipped kitchen (he loves buying dishes, cutlery, glasses) – all this is the childhood home he still carries in him, yet claims not to remember.
And what do I have in me, what do I carry? I begin piecing my memories together, placing them where they belong, recognising where they didn’t, against my father’s resistance, against both my parents’ lack of real interest, against their fears, against mine. My memories, like a bowl of cherries. Just for me.
Silver Spoon
I was born in Moscow on a freezing December morning, without any sign or prospect of the proverbial