What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
up
Give
Play
Glasses
Box
Chocolate
Apples
Mushroom
Blood
Some of the words were phonetically very close to their intended pronunciation, others a little fanciful. I can imagine my whole toddler life from these words, with a large group of adults at my beck and call: my parents, my grandparents, other relatives, a live-in nanny. The latter was not a luxury; many Moscow families had them, very young girls from the provinces who held the fabric of a home together by taking care of babies, cooking, cleaning while the parents worked. Our nanny (or nannies: there was a succession of them) slept on a mattress in the kitchen. I was at the centre of everyone’s attention, spoiled by my grandparents, my mother’s sole focus and project. This never happened again in my childhood – six years later, when my brother was born she went straight back to work and there was no grandparental indulging going on, except when they visited us, which was rare. But my early years were a warm cocoon of sheer pleasure, not yet disturbed or even foreshadowed by the imminent move to Prague. My childhood in Moscow had a sweet taste for me, and those tastes I do remember: beige-coloured chocolate butter and milky vanilla ice cream.
The words I knew at the age of almost two tell a story. My verbs were just about all the simple actions I would ever need to master in order to communicate with and manage my world, then and now: say, walk, stop, take, get up, give, play. There was the crucial ‘I don’t want’. But what I did want, I remember, was to brush my grandmother’s frizzy hair, or play a game, any game, with my grandfather, or – my absolute favourite – sit at my little desk and pretend to be really busy talking on my toy telephone and scribbling, preferably inside my books. I still have some of them, including the doodles; it’s a very odd feeling to witness, from a distance of more than fifty years, evidence of my infant self’s playing at being a busy adult, in exactly the same style as I do now. I still love nothing more than to sit at my desk, talk on the phone, read, write and doodle. My grandfather’s list attests to the fact that I knew the word for pencil as early as I could pronounce it, or something like it.
The food I could name at that age is a clear giveaway of how my grandparents indulged my sweet tooth, and perhaps their own: sweets, chocolate and, for only slightly more solid nutrition, bublik (a Russian kind of bagel). It seems obvious that I liked apples too, and I can suddenly remember – in fact see – my grandfather’s large hands as he peels an apple, very smoothly and skilfully, in one curved line. Then he would slice it neatly and feed those small pieces to me like to a baby bird.
Shoes were a challenge – I couldn’t put them on myself, but really wanted to. Especially my winter boots, the valenki – they made me roll forward through snow rather than walk. I was wrapped in so many layers, the top one real fur, that in my winter outdoor clothes I must have been much heavier than my actual weight. In photos I look like a smiling winter doll, pulled on a wooden sleigh by my young mother, also dressed in fur.
A box was a different kind of attraction. I was mesmerised by the little boxes my grandfather kept on and inside his desk, in a special drawer. Many of them contained tiny toys and games – for his own pleasure. My greatest, and rare, delight was when he relented and agreed to sit down with me and slowly begin opening the boxes, demonstrating, with pride, the toys he had collected. My grandfather took the fun contained in inanimate objects as seriously as I did.
The two words on the vocabulary list I can least account for are ‘mushroom’ and ‘blood’. For many years, and almost to this day, a mushroom was the only thing I could actually draw. Russian children’s books frequently feature mushrooms in a magical woodland setting. And blood: that’s a great word for a not-yet-two-year-old to own. A scraped knee, small injuries, maybe a nosebleed? Was my over-protective parental and grandparental cocoon excessively attentive to my minor childhood injuries?
Like many other documents that could easily have been lost as I moved from house to house, city to city, country to country, continent to continent, this precious small piece of paper, just two years younger than I am myself, has always been with me, perfectly preserved. I said those words and my grandfather heard them; like a scientist collecting a body of data, he systematically and lovingly wrote them down on one particular day. My grandfather gave me the gift of preserving my first language, Russian, when it was just beginning to grow into my mother tongue.
And yet, it didn’t.
No Goodbyes
There were many farewells over the years, beginning with the first one, in 1958, when my mother took me to live in Prague. The separation was hard on my grandparents, and the change drastic. Their apartment was suddenly emptied of what had filled their days with so much life: their beloved only daughter, and their three-year-old granddaughter. But they never asked my mother not to leave. On the contrary: they knew that living in Czechoslovakia instead of the Soviet Union could only make her life easier, and so they were happy for her. And they loved the man she would marry.
They would visit us in Prague (never together, as far as I remember), but not all that often – such travel was difficult to arrange, with special visas required, which had to be applied for, involving long waiting periods and uncertain outcomes. The same was true of my mother’s trips back to Moscow from Prague. There was a finality in our departure, which I sensed and somehow understood. At the end of my first few years in Moscow there was a very long train journey to another country. And waiting at the end of that train journey was the man I would immediately accept as my father.
But Russia remained present in my life as my first literary home. I still have many of my early children’s books, read to me by my grandparents in Moscow. In one of them there was a popular poem called ‘Moydodyr’ (‘Wash ‘em clean’ or, literally, ‘Clean ‘til Holes’) by Korney Chukovsky, written in 1924. It is about a dirty boy who is confronted by an anthropomorphised sink, a kind of general of cleanliness with an army of cleansing means at his command – soaps, brushes, toothbrushes, toothpaste . . . The boy is so filthy that everything he comes in contact with flees in terror – his bedding, his clothes, shoes, the samovar he wants to use to get a cup of tea. As the boy tries to escape the scary sink in absolute terror, running down the streets of Petrograd (or Leningrad, depending on the decade of the poem’s publication), he runs into Crocodile, another famous character from the same author’s imagination, who defends him against the aggressive brushes but insists that the boy wash himself thoroughly, after which all is well again.
This petrifying ode to cleanliness is written in wonderful verse, animating every object, from lowly toothbrush to mythic sink, in a completely captivating manner. I was obsessed with it and had to have it read to me several times a day by every willing adult in the family. I knew it by heart, but the reading was an essential ritual which not only gave the right voice to the idiosyncratic cadences of Chukovsky’s writing, but also helped me be less afraid of some of the more gruesome details of the story.
Another narrative children’s poem by the same author was also a favourite of mine. In ‘Mucha Tsokotucha’ (‘The Buzzing Fly’), the story was even more worrying. The heroine of the tale, a fly with a golden stomach, invites a multitude of insects to celebrate her birthday. They arrive, bringing gifts and cakes and sweets, and are pleasant in an obsequious manner. But when a vicious spider attacks the fly, threatening to kill her, not one of her guests is willing to help her. They are all afraid and hiding. At the last minute a tiny but courageous mosquito saves the fly by cutting off the spider’s head in one quick move. At which point the guests crawl out of their hiding places and proceed to celebrate the fly’s birthday. As a bonus, the heroic mosquito and the fly get married. I wonder if Chukovsky wrote these stories as clever allegories of life in the totalitarian Soviet Union, where cowardice and hypocrisy were a means of saving one’s own skin.
Listening to my grandfather’s melodic, expressive voice filled me with a feeling of deep comfort and security. Children crave, and deserve, a loving adult’s undivided, absolute attention, and a sense that the