What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
As I only lived with my grandparents until the age of three, and they visited us in Prague no more than a handful of times, my grandfather could not have read to me very often. Yet when I immerse myself in Russian books my grandfather’s voice is always with me. My grandmother rarely read to me, nor did she read to my mother when she was a child; my grandfather was the one who loved ‘to work’ with children – he called it zanimatsa, which means to engage in serious work and learning. Even our games were educational, teaching us skills he thought were important: clear thought, concentration, a deeper understanding of the world. He also taught me (and later my brother) how to play chess and draughts and backgammon, and how to enjoy caviar for breakfast, spread thickly on fresh, white buttered bread.
My most vivid memory of my grandfather dates back to the winter of 1963–4, when I visited Moscow for the last time. My grandmother, aged only sixty-three, was seriously ill; she was, in fact, dying from complications following a gall-bladder operation. But this was somehow kept in the background by my mother, who believed that children should be spared traumatic encounters with reality. I was never taken to my grandmother’s funeral, and never really understood, or took in, the fact that she was no longer there. I never saw my mother cry over her mother’s death. She must have done it when I wasn’t watching, and she made sure I wasn’t watching. She wanted me to remember my grandmother as she was when she was alive, and not to dwell on her death. I was nine when my grandmother passed away; by not being allowed to grieve with the adults, with my family, I was protected from understanding their sadness and from sharing mine. Perhaps it was due to this emotional mollycoddling that I simply don’t know how to think of death and what it means. A few years ago, when I visited a close friend who was dying, she asked me, ‘How can you console me?’ All I could say was ‘We’ll all meet again.’ I meant: death is not final, because I don’t understand what that would mean. This friend’s funeral was the first one I ever attended.
During the time of my grandmother’s final illness I was kept amused and entertained, rather than included in what everyone was going through. My mother’s intention worked out perfectly: my happy childhood was not affected. As a result of that trip I still remember Moscow as a real winter wonderland, made especially for children. The Russian version of Santa, Dyedushka Moroz (Grandfather Frost), is a more secular and less mysterious figure, and that winter he somehow merged in my mind and memory with my tall, elegant, always kind, affectionate, cheerful and playful grandfather. A well-placed relative had arranged tickets for the biggest yolka, a Christmas tree celebration for children at the Kremlin. This was a huge variety show with songs and performances and presents and sweets for each child. The audience seemed enormous to me – several hundred children with their parents. I was probably the only non-Soviet child in the crowd. When the presenter asked if anyone would like to perform a song my hand shot up without a moment’s hesitation. My grandfather looked on in amazement as I fearlessly walked up to the stage and announced that I would be singing a song in Czech, of my own composition (I should add here that I am a terrible, if enthusiastic singer, but at the time I was not aware of it). I had written it not long before, and still remember the simple, upbeat tune and lyrics: ‘We will board the rocket ship and fly to the moon’. I began to sing, accompanied by a smiling accordion player. He hadn’t counted on my song having about twenty verses, each picking up where the previous one left off, narrating the rhymed adventures and activities on the moon once our rocket ship had got us there. (I was under the profound influence of the Soviet side of the space race; clearly I favoured cosmonauts at the time.) The accordion player tried to end my song many times, with an appropriately bombastic finale, but I ignored him and just went on, and on, and on, until I was all done and there were no more verses left to sing. I received some applause from the audience but this was mainly an attempt to encourage me to finish my performance, as people had already started to leave. When I finally came off stage and rejoined my grandfather he said, with an astonished smile, ‘I wouldn’t have believed you’d have the courage to do this.’ He was both proud and surprised. And to his own very musical ear, perhaps I was a disappointment. It was important for me to sing to this Russian audience in Czech, in my own language, to set myself apart from them. Growing up in Prague in the 1950s and 1960s, Russian was the language of the enemy. I was ashamed and embarrassed to claim it as my own, and outside my home I always tried to hide that I spoke it. This dichotomy became more pronounced as I grew older, and began to feel anti-Russian. My grandfather would not have understood.
This was the reason why, sadly, I never said goodbye to him. In 1969, not long before we emigrated to Hamburg, my mother travelled to Moscow to visit her father and tell him about the secret plans. Obviously this was not explained to us; it was simply a trip to Moscow, and she offered to take both my brother and me. I absolutely refused to go: so soon after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, I saw it as a betrayal of my moral principles and my loyalty to my homeland to visit the occupier. Not going to Moscow was my personal protest. But Maxim (who was nine at the time) did go, and how I envy him today. I wish I had seen Moscow one more time while my grandfather was still alive, and with my own, more grown-up eyes. He made several attempts to visit us in Hamburg in the early 1970s, and waited a very long time for his visa. Finally, it seemed as if he was about to receive it. Overjoyed, he immediately began outlining his journey and wrote us a detailed letter about how he was going to travel, having consulted all the necessary timetables for trains between Moscow and Hamburg. With his characteristic meticulousness, he thought of every detail, every eventuality. He was bringing us gifts, thoughtfully selected for each of us. This letter is unbearably difficult to read today, because shortly after he posted it his visa request was denied. My grandfather died not long after. We were told by family members that the rejection completely broke him. Always an optimistic man, his last months were heartbreakingly sad.
I adored my grandmother Zelda. Even though I don’t have as many and as detailed memories of her as I do of my grandfather, my sense of her as a kind of older version of myself was always very clear. She was a strong personality, but also very giggly, and loved setting up practical jokes. My favourite letter of hers is one she wrote from a river cruise she undertook on her own, down the Volga. Perhaps for the first time in her life, she was completely relaxed. Everything seemed to be in its place, she was retired and now had some time to herself – a real luxury. She describes with such joy the towns she visited during the cruise, and the wooden jewellery she bought for herself as souvenirs. I treasure these pieces as much as the simple gold bracelet that had belonged to my Jewish great-grandmother Rachel.
When my grandmother and my mother were evacuated to Bashkiria during the war, my grandmother worked in a factory seven kilometres away from where they lived. In winter, as she walked home every evening along an empty road in complete darkness, she saw wolves’ eyes following her from very close by. The wolves were hungry. My grandmother was petrified. But she had no choice, and just kept walking. This is how her generation faced everything in life: by doing what they had to do, despite the ever-present fear.
In 1944 my grandmother was sent to work in a factory near Stalingrad. She and my mother, who was almost thirteen years old at the time, arrived in the city very early on a summer morning, when it was still dark. The sun was barely beginning to rise. A bent old man offered to guide them to the train that would take them to their destination. They followed him on foot as he carried their suitcase on his back. (Their main cargo, a beautiful shiny black upright piano and boxes of books, had been sent and stored separately; the piano – originally made in 1903 – survived the war and the following years, and ultimately made it to Prague, where I would have lessons on it until we left for Germany in 1970).
What my mother saw as a child walking through war-ravaged Stalingrad has remained etched in her mind with the veracity of a high-definition camera lens. She writes in her memoir, The Watermelon Rind, in the third person:
There were no more sidewalks. They walked in the middle of the streets, but these were no longer streets: they walked down a road on each side of which there were mountains of ruins, covering the remaining bits of sidewalk. The ruins were of various heights – depending on the size of building they used to be, big or small. And in this peaceful silence it was somehow hard to believe that under the city’s debris there lay a multitude of corpses. Who were they? Were they the people who used to live in those houses and didn’t manage to get away