Little Zinnobers

Chapter 5

NEW WORLD

Her mother was a dvornik, a road-sweeper-c*m-caretaker, and never learnt to speak Russian properly. Both in good old St. Petersburg tradition, considering her nationality. Hence the Russian language spoken by all those around the daughter, both inside the communal flat and outside, was not so much a mother tongue, as an ‘other tongue.’ It was her mother’s mother tongue which resounded above her cradle. Russian, not native from birth, became so later. The mother spoke to the daughter in her own mother tongue but the daughter, having reached the age of self-consciousness – i.e. about six – responded to her solely in Russian. The mother took this for stubbornness, mulishness, and maybe she was right. But, even so, it was a particular stubbornness which had nothing in common with the ordinary stubbornness of daughters. Language was dictated by environment. A phenomenon known to emigrants and their children, who are familiar with this stubbornness.

Her mother was born in a distant, non-Russian village and dodged the label ‘immigrant’ only because St. Petersburg and her native land were part of the same empire then, and when her mother entered this world, no-one alive was responsible for this. Be that as it may, to some extent her mother was still an immigrant since she never mastered the imperial tongue well enough, and so stood little chance of ever getting an easier or cleaner job. The daughter was not an immigrant, neither historically nor in fact, but the mother’s life, so like an immigrant’s, inevitably left its mark on her own. They lived – and here it is not a St. Petersburg tradition but a Leningrad one which comes into play – in a small room in a large, semi-basement communal flat. The mother’s life, so like an immigrant’s, kept the daughter forever on her toes. She was the mother’s ears in the world around her. The mother could not pick up the whispers, rapid mutterings or words spoken ‘into thin air’ in the communal kitchen. The mother did not ask, of course, and the daughter did not pass the conversations of others on to her, but whereas in normal – i.e. monolingual – families a child does not listen in on the conversations of adults, silently relying on its parents for that, here, the daughter could not rely on her mother, linguistically. In a world which spoke a language not quite accessible to her, the mother could not fulfil the role of mediator between daughter and world. The daughter met the world head on. Being the younger of the two parties, she was obliged to converse with the world in its own language.

At the same time, the world was unfolding through the vastness of the Russian language, which she met head on, without maternal mediation, and the Russian language itself became the world. Actually, it was merely a fragment of a much larger world, but she had no inkling of that back then. Like Columbus. Due to the limited knowledge of the Europeans, who had not yet reached the necessary historical age, Columbus’s world did not include either of the Americas. Columbus set sail for known shores but discovered unknown ones. Be that as it may, the cry: “Land!” held a sharp joy, independent of the land to which it referred. It was joy at land itself, in a pure sense. And, growing up in such a family, it was this kind of joy she knew. At the age of six, she came across The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer in a Russian translation. It was 1940, the pre-war winter. Reading it induced this joy, and she understood: everyone should know Chaucer. Small in terms of age as well as constitution, she had to climb onto a kitchen stool – where else but the kitchen could she read this aloud to everyone, so they could listen and laugh? She read it to them just as Columbus had told his compatriots of mysterious lands he had seen, of the New World he had discovered. I imagine they listened half-heartedly, not slackening their kitchen bustle for even a second: lighting the wood stove, splitting wooden tapers, boiling the washing in cauldrons and rubbing it in basins, shuffling potatoes in frying pans and clattering as they washed up in the sink. None of them, I suspect, turned from their bucket or basin to look at her, to sit and listen. Yet she took no offence; yes, she was opening a new world for them, but they, with their basins, jars, and frying pans, were her world, too, a world once large but from which she would sail away aboard the St. Mary, then sail back. Had she not sailed away and then returned, she would never have suspected that, before becoming Mary, one must long and patiently bear being Martha. That is how she began: under the rumble of basins, the crackle of frying potatoes and the roar of logs burning in the stove. The winter of 1940 was rowdy.

It was the next year that a silence worthy of Chaucer fell. Тhe voices and basins quietened as the months passed, the roar of the stove faded into hungry memory, and the thrumming of drops in the metal sink changed to the measured drip of a metronome. That winter, she read Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. To herself. Shining eyes met her there, eyes that bewitched her. She could not read about these eyes aloud to them: the blokadniki2 had their own idea about shining eyes. Just as Columbus’s compatriots had had their own ideas about ‘shining,’ too: the glitter of gold. She went hungry, drank hot water and became deceptively plump. This deception tricked a terrifying man with shining eyes; she ran from him through the city’s wasteland. The blokadniki’s idea of shining was correct.

Having finished school – I know next to nothing about her school years – and having learnt that others’ concepts, however correct, remain alien nevertheless, she decided go to university. This decision was a gargantuan leap out of the mother’s past. Had her past listeners, barely able to read, heard about this earlier, they would have considered her either crazy or a heroine. It was not the kind of act which provokes jealousy; you can only be envious of something within the realm of possibility, and for them, in their semi-basement flat, this was well beyond that realm. Her deed – for the decision was followed by the act – inspired impartial amazement, brief gossip, and alienation: she was becoming ‘an apple from a different orchard.’ She succeeded first time, and this successful attempt, while not exactly reconciling certain aspects of life around her, became something akin to an antidote, as if, once and for all, it gave her certainty: that which is important is possible. Ever after, though never tolerant of vileness, when faced with it, she would, as it were, swallow a secret potion known only to herself: “Even so…”

There were no longer any St. Petersburg lecturers left in Leningrad University in the days when she matriculated, for a variety of reasons. Still, among the random people who had replaced pre-revolutionary professors on the principle of natural selection in a proletarian state, from time to time, one did come across their students, who had managed to receive knowledge first hand. Besides these, there were also lecturers who succeeded in siphoning and furthering knowledge by themselves, thanks to their own efforts, intelligence and talent. Unlike students for whom the university bench was a forgone conclusion, or whose parents had booked a place for them mentally, so to speak, as sons of the landed gentry were once registered in the regiment, she never could get used to it. The propensity which affects all students to a greater or lesser degree – namely, that one cannot permanently rejoice in what comes to pass partly thanks to your own efforts, yes, but nevertheless ‘according to plan’– had no hold over her whatsoever since the trajectory of that astonishing gargantuan leap from the mother’s past continued far beyond the university gates. The run-up required had been herculean, congenial, so where other students were already walking, she was still flying, unable to touch down.

In the eyes of the above-mentioned rare lecturers, this flight was a quite natural state; they were themselves flying, flitting in the scholarly empyreans, and what shone in her eyes did not need to be put to the test. She studied as though she were still running through the city’s wasteland, fleeing from the blockade cannibal, the only difference being that in her childhood she had been running away, whereas now she was running towards what she saw beyond the wasteland, and it was coming more sharply into focus with each university year. They were teaching her as though they were standing under the saving shadow of the building she was headed for and could see that man behind her. This trajectory was more than enough to burst open the doors of the First English School, flying in from the street straight after graduation, which, again, was unheard of: prospective teachers for this school were selected from higher echelons, almost at the level of the raikom party committee.