What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
under those fallen bricks, and how many there were. Their guide had no idea. And yet it looked as if these buildings had collapsed only yesterday, the ruins looked untouched. Only from time to time something rustled and moved in them. The old man said calmly that the city was overrun with rats. And fell silent again.
There was complete stillness. A very unusual kind of stillness for this morning hour. Birds were silent and dogs did not bark. And there were no inhabitants. What kind of a city was it, without inhabitants? It seemed as if the only survivor was this night guide. One couldn’t even say that the city was asleep – the city simply did not exist.
In the dim light of the rising sun, against the pinkish-red sky, they could now see the dark silhouettes of multi-storey buildings, which seemed to have remained intact. By the time they came closer to them, it was completely light, and the sun’s first rays fell on these houses. And only then did they realise that these were merely walls which remained standing, some with incomprehensibly connected floors, from which there were suspended, as if falling from one level to the next, metal beds, tables, wardrobes. Blankets, pillows and mattresses appeared to be strangely attached to the beds. On some of these walls there were pictures, mirrors; the window frames were ripped out but torn curtains were still hanging on them. And you could see exactly where there used to be a bedroom, a kitchen, a child’s room. One chair lay on a fragment of a floor, another was suspended in the air; the slightest wind would blow it to the lower floor, or all the way down to the ground. And in one corner, something white: an overturned toilet, ripped out of the floor. Occasionally, when they walked near such a ruined house, you could even see mops and buckets; a doll in a red dress was miraculously hanging from a child’s cot. It was as if people had just walked out of these rooms and would be back shortly to tidy them up again. But there were no more staircases for them to climb up to their homes. This part of the building was completely gone. The ruins were both alive and dead. The girl saw for the first time what war really meant and what it caused – not from radio or newspapers, nor from what people were saying when they talked about war and about the front. And although these walls had already stood there almost half a year, it seemed as if the war had happened here only yesterday, and that these buildings were destroyed only a moment ago. They looked untouched.
In this way, they crossed the entire city, which had ceased to exist.
My mother never told me about this frozen memory of the destruction of Stalingrad. There was so much she never talked about. Not because she wouldn’t or didn’t want to, but because there was so much to tell, and so little of it seemed even remotely translatable into my own experience. She didn’t think I wanted to hear those stories, and she didn’t feel she knew how to explain them. She could only write them. Mostly to herself – her book was almost an afterthought. And in her writing, spontaneous yet carefully burnished, she managed to keep alive and share what she had witnessed. Great movie scenes are made from a fraction of her visual precision.
As I lovingly translated my mother’s memories from Russian into English I thought about how, in our family, we seem to be destined to live at great physical distances from one another, but our love is stronger than our separations.
The evening before my grandmother Zelda became ill, in late December 1963, my grandparents were out celebrating her brother’s birthday. The following morning, still in high spirits, they were eating breakfast and listening to the radio when a quick Charleston tune came on. The music made her jump up and dance; she felt young again, joyful memories came flooding back. In mid-motion she suddenly clasped her stomach and cried out in pain. She went from intense happiness to fatal illness in a matter of seconds, almost dancing her way to the end.
Green Light
Although my father had moved to Prague as a teenager after the war, he returned to Russia to study history at Moscow University. This did not go according to plan; a former classmate from his high school in Prague denounced him for saying, privately, that Stalin’s regime was anti-Semitic, and for telling an anti-Stalin joke. The friend’s motive for doing so has always remained a mystery, but it had serious repercussions. My father was thrown out of the university and the Communist Party (which he had joined with youthful zeal – ‘for five minutes’, he always told me). He had to go back to Prague with a dangerously sullied political profile, was very lucky not to have been arrested, and was now allowed to hold down only factory jobs. Not for the last time in his life, my father had to start from scratch and reinvent himself professionally. He began translating from Czech into Russian, initially using various friends’ names as his alias. In the early days he translated anything he was offered – technical texts, dry descriptions of items, newspaper articles . . . Many years later he would translate film subtitles and works of literature. His best-known translation was a special edition of the Czech classic The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek, under the pseudonym Maxim Rellib – my brother’s first name and his own last name in reverse.
After the incident that ended his university studies, my father was officially no longer permitted to travel to the Soviet Union. Yet he found a way of doing so, visiting his parents on several occasions by joining organised tours with Czech youth groups. He met my mother a number of times, several years apart. They were first introduced at a party in 1949, by his brother Misha, who was a close friend of my mother’s cousin. Later that same year, when my mother was at a geography field camp in deep countryside about 100 kilometres from Moscow, the two brothers suddenly arrived by motorcycle, on a surprise visit. My mother was barely twenty; they all had fun, as friends, talking and laughing late into the night, so late that the boys had to stay over, sleeping in the nurse’s tent. The first spark of mutual attraction was there, but nothing more happened. (If it had, I once said to my mother, if they had fallen in love at first sight, she would never have become involved with Joseph – and I would never have been born. I expected her to express something like potential regret at this eventuality, but she only said, ‘Oh well. Then it would have been someone else.’)
In 1956, during one of his visits to Moscow, around the time when he was just starting out as a freelance translator, my father really caught my mother’s attention at a party. He seemed much more worldly than any other young man she had ever met. And she attracted him by, without being drunk, dancing on a table and singing loudly (completely off-key), and laughing even louder. Walking back to the tram along with some others, they became separated from the group and he simply asked her, ‘Would you consider moving to Prague?’ And she answered, without hesitation, ‘Of course!’ They had one or two dates after that and, having done no more than kiss, they changed the course of each other’s lives. Practically overnight, my mother found herself committed to a man who was asking her to live in Prague with him. The fact that she already had a child did not stop either of them. Immediately after they parted and he returned to Prague, each wrote a long love letter to the other, confirming their mutual love in almost identical words. My mother was relieved to receive hers – it meant that she had not been wrong about this unusual young man with a real sparkle in his dark eyes when he told hilarious jokes and stories. Semjon (or Sjoma, as everyone called him) was as seductive and warm on paper as he had seemed in real life. Their correspondence continued for almost a year, their plans to marry growing stronger from letter to letter.
One mild spring day my mother and Sjoma were strolling down a central Moscow avenue after their first real date. It had been a lunch at a fancy hotel restaurant. He was dressed with understated but impeccable Western European elegance, a look he knew how to produce without spending much money. My mother was not wearing a bra. The only bras she owned were home-sewn by my grandmother Zelda, made of coarse, sheet-like material; a real one would be a luxury. Her knickers, of the same provenance, were equally embarrassing – large chafing bloomers held up with elastic bands. Almost the entire population of a world superpower was dressed in extremely uncomfortable undergarments during the Cold War era.
On this occasion (as on many others, given that she didn’t have much to choose from in her wardrobe: one dress, one skirt, one blouse), my mother was wearing a close-fitting blue