What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
became very visible, she was called in to the office of the director of student affairs (in other words, the person responsible for spotting and punishing any political misbehaviour among the student body). My mother was not only not married – though this, in itself, was not frowned upon in the Soviet Union – but also involved with a man whose own political status was precarious. She was nervous about the interview; it could have spelled the end of her studies and any subsequent professional career. In fact, it could have blackened her political report card for ever. The woman functionary did not ask, ‘Are you planning to get married?’ but rather, ‘Who is the father?’ My mother, in a flash of both inspiration and fear, replied, ‘I am a single mother.’ This was not strictly true, but neither was it completely false. The apparatchik was satisfied with the answer, and there were no repercussions. My mother was able to complete her degree.
While she was still living at home with her parents, my mother may have had complete freedom to do as she liked (which she had obviously exercised), but she was also very much her parents’ devoted daughter, not especially keen on distancing herself from the emotional safety of their cocoon. Her pregnancy was something everyone accepted: it just happened, the timing was neither good nor bad – it just was. This attitude of taking things as they came, getting on with whatever fate might serve up, planned or unplanned, wanted or not, was a kind of wisdom it took me many years to truly appreciate.
When the contractions began her mother took her to the maternity hospital by taxi, but once there she had to leave her. No one other than the patients and medical staff was allowed inside the hospital, not even visitors. The reason given for this strict procedure was ‘hygiene’, but the result was that, along with germs, the medical establishment isolated patients completely from their family and other support systems. This was especially tough on new mothers.
After she had been admitted and briefly examined, my mother was placed in the corner of a room behind a curtain, all alone. No one explained to her what was happening or what was about to happen, no one even talked to her. She coped with her progressing labour pains as best she could, but was slowly reaching a state of panic. No nurse came to see her all night, and no doctor either. In the early hours of the morning someone finally entered her room: a cleaner, who had come to mop the floor. My mother was elated to see her, and asked her: ‘Nyanyechka, how long is this going to last?’ The cleaner stopped mopping for a moment and looked at my mother. ‘Is it your first?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then it’s going to take a loooooong time.’
Only in the very last stages did a gruff nurse attend to my mother, and a doctor appeared to check on her. There were no complications, but no joy either: no one could reach my mother to congratulate her for the entire week of her stay in hospital. After my healthy first cry I was shown to her, tightly wrapped in a blanket, Soviet-style. No part of my little body could really move. I had a lot of dark hair, and plump shoulders, for a newborn.
That week in the maternity hospital was a social eye-opener for my twenty-four-year-old mother. She shared a room with about a dozen working-class women, all of whom had given birth many times before, and never stopped cursing their men for getting them pregnant and causing them such pain and hardship. It was like a scene from a female hell. My mother lay there quietly, and I wonder, did she secretly agree with them?
In the Soviet Union, the most common form of contraception was abortion. Multiple abortions, in most cases. I have relatives who, even in later years – into the 1970s – had one abortion after another, with all the resulting complications: gynaecological problems, inability to have children in later years, other health issues. I have never asked my mother whether, in her circumstances, she ever considered this option. I’d rather not know.
When they brought me home I slept in a little zinc bathtub for the first week or two. According to Jewish superstition, one is not allowed to buy anything at all for a baby before the birth. My grandmother and mother gradually collected all the necessities, until nothing was missing. I still have the tiniest baby shirts my grandmother sewed for me, and my first little jacket. It is red and white, with thick cotton padding to keep me warm. The stitching has lasted to this day and shows no sign of disintegrating.
In my earliest baby photos my young mother often wears a white gauze mask over her face. She was fanatical about not exposing me to any germs, and rarely took me to visit people. According to her, I didn’t have a single cold or even a runny nose until kindergarten age. I was not too keen on her breast milk, so her plentiful surplus went to our next-door neighbour’s baby daughter Lara (my ‘milk sister’). I still remember Lara as my first and only Russian childhood friend; later, when I visited from Prague, she came over to play and I felt self-conscious about my Russian. It didn’t sound quite the same as hers, and I think she even corrected a mistake I made, which upset me.
I thought of my mother when, at about the same age, I was giving birth in Ottawa, Canada, to my first baby. My husband was with me. I could not imagine going through labour by myself; it seemed completely natural to share every moment of the experience. But in the same room, behind a curtain, was a woman who was alone, quietly suffering through her contractions without a partner’s help. The midwives were always present, but the difference between her experience of childbirth and mine was obvious. I felt very lucky. I also thought of my mother, in a different way, during the birth of my second son, in Haifa, Israel. There I had a very dogmatic Russian midwife, obviously Soviet-trained, whose understanding of labour seemed to be stuck in the 1950s. She told me to lie on my back and wait. I argued that that was the worst thing I could do, and insisted on walking around or rocking on all fours to accelerate the process and reduce the pain, as I had learned to do in Canada. The midwife was outraged at my disobedience, and our relationship continued to deteriorate throughout the birth. As she gave me yet another anachronistic instruction when I was least able to take it, I lost my temper and slapped her. I am sorry I did, but it felt good – like slapping the horror that was the Soviet way of bringing new life into this world.
A Russian List of First Words
My grandfather was abroad during the year of my birth, working in Romania for a Soviet–Romanian oil company with the imaginative name SOVROMPETROL. He returned when I was several months old. His presence was immediately felt. Before he came near me he spent a long time washing his hands, like a surgeon before an operation. Then he said, ‘So let’s see,’ and I was finally shown to him. Like everyone else in the small household and the extended family he was immediately besotted with the tiny person, the first grandchild. Later that evening, when he realised that my sleeping pattern was not very satisfactory, he declared that ‘the baby needs discipline’, and insisted that they let me cry instead of immediately picking me up. Family rumour has it the treatment was successful: I quickly got the idea and henceforth slept – well, like a baby.
He became very involved in planning my routine and my earliest education, just as he had done when my mother was little. There was a seriousness of purpose in his handling of children and babies. He did not see them as doll-like miniatures but as fully formed human beings who deserved utter respect from the earliest age.
In 1956, when I was almost two years old, he made a list in pencil, on a thin sheet of company stationery he had brought back from his Romanian job, of all the words I knew at the time. Russian words. Under the heading ‘Lenotchka is 1 year 10 months old, October 1956’ he wrote down the words as I pronounced them, in his handsome, very clear handwriting. Next to my version, after a dash, he added the real meaning of each word. Thanks to my grandfather’s loving attention to my early language acquisition, I know with complete certainty that I was able to say twenty words or phrases at that age:
Say
Bublik
Walk
Pencil
Candy
Stop
I don’t want
Money
Scissors