What Language Do I Dream In?. Elena Lappin
off by the unsexy red scarf around her neck. He thought she looked like a Young Pioneer, not mature enough for her age (twenty-six). But she was extremely pretty and vivacious, and he was smitten in a way that felt much deeper than his many flings in Prague. They were well-matched – both were short, dark-haired, good-looking, and both had a quick, natural way with words, though his was a great deal quicker. She preferred to listen, and he liked her attentiveness. He also liked her laugh, loud and open, and especially her blue-grey eyes. Together they looked like shining Hollywood stars playing dressed-down parts in a drab post-war movie.
Life writes scripts novelists often try to imitate. The couple accidentally bumped into another young man – Joseph, my biological father, who at the time was still an occasional if rare presence in my life. He was dressed in outlandish – for 1950s Moscow – trousers with a zip (everyone else wore them buttoned), a hand-me-down he had received from relatives in America. Over his arm he carried an oversized camel coat from the same source. Both young men were introduced to one another by my mother; she told each the other’s name, and who they were. They were not of a dissimilar type: both were dark, very Jewish-looking, attractive, bespectacled. But Joseph was much taller, had bright blue eyes, and a shy voice with a slight stutter. This encounter on a sunny spring afternoon was brief, casual and quickly forgotten by all; yet my entire life was already in the hands of this young trio.
There is a scene in my mother’s memoir that always makes me cry. She writes about our first night in Prague, in the one room we were all now sharing. I was finally asleep in my new cot, my long braids flung in opposite directions across the pillow. Though we had just arrived from Moscow, my new father had a deadline the following morning and had to finish editing a translation. My mother describes, in warm, vivid strokes, how she looked over his shoulder, saw his work for the first time and offered to help. They sat there together, reading and editing the Russian text he had translated from Czech, until late into the night, in a room filled with green light. The light was created by a cloth they had put around the bright ceiling bulb so it wouldn’t disturb my sleep. My mother remembers their shared concentration, how close their lips were, almost touching . . . When the editing was finished her new husband had tears in his eyes. ‘I can’t believe I am finally not alone. We are now together. Will you always be here with me and for me?’
He was probably overwhelmed by the enormity of what they had accomplished, against so many odds. And he didn’t even fully understand how lucky he was – not yet. My mother’s love for him was of the unconditional kind, absolute. Still, she wasn’t his first big love. Eva, a beautiful Jewish girl from his home town, was my father’s first serious passion, also adored by his family. She left him and broke his heart. When her marriage failed and she wanted to return to him, he refused to take her back. Instead, he found my mother – who has always felt somewhat inferior to Eva. My father was suddenly keenly aware of the emotional security he had gained by marrying my mother. He had been fiercely independent as a teenager, living with his older brothers but without parental authority. He relied on himself for everything. His sense of responsibility for their new family unit must have suddenly kicked in that night after our arrival from Moscow. But there was more: the understanding that he now had his own slice of Russia, and of real, authentic Russian, by his side. His Russian would always remain excellent, but having a Russian-speaking wife, especially one who was also able to help him edit his work, was a priceless source of support in his profession. She would continue to help him edit his translations, especially the literary ones, and he in turn would be her first reader, typist and editor when she began publishing her own writing. My first night as a brand-new, not-yet-four-year-old émigré was spent in the sign of things to come: translation, one language into another, old commingling with new, under a roof of love my parents had created without any concern whatsoever for its chances of survival. They were very instinctive decision-makers: what felt right could be done; had to be done.
On neither side of my family, no matter how far down one goes, is there a trace of real, bona fide Russianness. And now here they both were, inside a cocoon of very pure Russian, in Prague. It was the Russian language that defined my parents’ cultural identity, and still does – even when they now watch endless hours of very bad Russian TV (via satellite) in Hamburg or Prague.
So much has survived in our family archives, despite all these moves: photographs, books, notebooks, letters, personal knick-knacks . . . But the first two love letters my parents had written to one another simultaneously, which crossed en route – those did not survive. Worried that they may contain compromising information, my mother destroyed them in the early 1960s, during a time when the family was under heightened surveillance due to an uncle’s failed attempt to emigrate, and his subsequent arrest.
My mother took these letters to a friend’s apartment not far from ours, and burned them in his coal oven. Their Russian words of passion are lost, but their bond has endured. It continues to feed on their tempestuous love, and on the impassioned arguments they have on a daily basis, in a timeless Russian kept in pristine condition. They were both émigrés, each in their own way, and their inner island of very literate and literary Russian was an oasis they inhabited together, and with their children. We were all émigrés, in staggered stages. Russian was the first casualty of all our wanderings.
Blurred Vision
‘Don’t rely on your emotional memory,’ my mother once told me. I liked the poetic mystery of her phrasing, so I never probed behind those words, for fear they might dissolve into something mundane along the lines of ‘check your facts’. But I have no memories whatsoever of my first year in Prague, between the ages of three and a half and almost five. I have to ask myself: did my emotional memory erase itself, did it block a period of transition during which I appeared to be a cheerfully happy little girl to my parents but was, in fact, finding my way in a new family, new language, new environment – perhaps not without some pain?
Years later, when I was about ten, my mother inadvertently closed the car door on my finger. I remember having two simultaneous reactions: agonising, mind-shattering pain and, seeing the horror on her face, an instant decision not to show it, to spare her feelings of guilt for my injury. Before she could even ask, I said, ‘It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt.’ She looked at me with both shock and relief. She couldn’t believe me, and yet she wanted to. This was our modus vivendi from the start: everything was kind of true between us, except when it wasn’t allowed to be. It was a grey area between truth and almost-truth, as dictated by circumstances.
If I can’t rely on my own memory of my first year in Prague (emotional or otherwise), I have my mother’s reported view of things – and many of her photographs. She was an avid, artistic photographer.
Her story begins with our train ride from Moscow. My mother, not yet thirty, leaving her old life behind, advancing towards her new one at the speed of a train’s rickety progress on Soviet rail tracks, then, much faster and softer on Czechoslovak ones, to marry a man she hardly knew, but knew she loved. It is essential to add the 1950s Iron Curtain dimension to this picture: in 1958 a move from Moscow to Prague was equivalent to a personal liberation. Czechoslovakia may have seemed like a grim Central European outpost of the Soviet empire to both Western visitors and its own citizens, but to a Soviet arrival Prague was a dream of civilised beauty, full of seductive promise and unheard-of freedoms. It wouldn’t take my young mother long to morph into a Czech patriot – with a Russian accent. She fell in love with Prague as quickly as she had fallen for her new husband.
There was only one moment she must have dreaded, a little (or possibly a lot, depending on the kind of truth she was telling herself). My new father was to join us at the small Slovak border town of Čierna nad Tisou. How would I react to him? Everything depended on that first encounter.
I know I must have been well prepared for the meeting. My mother would have told me fun things to make me excited with anticipation. It worked. When this father joined us in our train compartment, bringing me sweets and a doll, apparently I greeted him with a cheerful ‘Papa!’ and a hug. And that, as far as my parents were concerned, was that. We were a family.
In one instant Sjoma changed from being a single young man living in close quarters with his older brother Misha to a family man with a wife and daughter (but still sharing the