Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  Innocence—Vera’s take on it in the memoir. ‘Modern psychologists say that children usually think of death as a temporary and reversible thing, that a child’s consciousness is not equipped to deal with the permanence of death. Not the children of the Lvov ghetto. We know that you can be alive in the morning and dead in the afternoon.’

  Every Tom or Jill in a drycleaned suit can quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. ‘Test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.’ Impossible to debate. But what of the adults made as children to witness and endure things monstrous, intolerable? What are they owed? They are on every full train, in every medium-size workplace, child survivors in grown-up bodies. If they care to self-identify, oh, we’ve got a job for you—you be Guardian of Memory, you be Witness, you be indefatigable Truth Teller, you be Moral Lightning Rod. Won’t you, dear survivor? Don’t let the rest of us forget or dream it never happened. Walk in circles in this public square over there, won’t you?

  ‘Is that what you are going to do to us?’—Imre Kertész (nine when WWII started) who wrote Kaddish for an Unborn Child—‘How could we survive something like this, and understand it, too?’

  I speak to a woman, J, abused in every way you could abuse a child and who testified at the Royal Commission. How strong she is and how hurt. It’s not just the life she lived, it’s what she is. J tells me she regrets testifying. Nothing happened after her testimony, or not yet anyway, and the wound is wide open, it’s tougher the second time around to live with it bleeding over everything. She tried so hard to get herself together. Particularly for her kids who didn’t know anything till recently. Now J is wondering if she’ll get sick all over again and make others around her sick. And reliving the injustice of it, who’d want that, and for nothing. There is a moment in our conversation—am I torturing her with my questions? should I stop? better to continue?—when something happens, shifts. I don’t know what. She writes a day or two later, ‘Hey, Maria, just wanting to tell you at the end of our chat you said “do you think if someone had said you have carried the burden for such a long time…”—not exact words I know but while you were still talking my mind went into a mad crazy time … hard to explain … anyway wow the word burden really hit me.’

  ‘Burden’ hit me too, reading J’s email. Burden brings other words with it: weight, carrying, lifting, putting down, exhaustion. Words to add to the familiar ones: testimony, witness, listening, telling, lest we forget, story, transmission.

  Putting burden at the centre. The body—all of it—moves to the centre too. I think, shit, it’s what we actually do, isn’t it? We—writers. We lift a bit off. We carry some corner of it some of the way. We ask without asking, ‘Would anything make it lighter?’ We ask, ‘What would make you rest for a bit?’ Kookaburras we are not, more like limping horses and donkeys.

  Vera likes to repeat she is an ‘unresolved walking trauma’ and I can tell she particularly savours the word ‘unresolved’.

  Vera goes back to Lvov (Lwów, Lviv). Her grandson Pani, who lives in London, joins her. We Skype a few months later. ‘The trip was so long ago I’ve forgotten about it,’ Vera says.

  First Warsaw, then to Lvov. ‘Lvov,’ she says, ‘is a wonderful town. You told me you’ve been there, haven’t you? No? Anyway we were in Lvov and we found the address in the ghetto of where we stayed. So we went there. Everyone took lots of photographs apart from me because I don’t take photographs. They still haven’t sent me any. And I located the block of flats where we lived before the war. The building is still standing. So this was Lvov. The weather was wonderful.’

  Skype is hissing. We disconnect and reconnect, turn the video off.

  ‘When we were on our way to the Jewish archives it was the first time since the Holocaust, would you believe, that I had tears in my eyes. I couldn’t cry all my life. But this was all right, like a cleansing thing. I gave them my parents’ names and my grandparents’ and so on and I thought it’d take them weeks but on Friday—we were leaving on Saturday—they called us. “Come within half an hour,” the woman said, “and I’ll guide you how to get there.” This was the hiding place. And the fucking taxi driver held a big conference. Whole area, he said, had been done up. And the house where we were hiding was bricked up but it was still there. I saw it. So there we are. And then we went to Berlin. Berlin was another story altogether. I got tickets to Daniel Barenboim conducting even though the show was sold out. The guy who got us tickets offered for me to meet Barenboim. And I said, “What the fuck for? To go backstage and shake hands?” There wasn’t much point.’

  Was it hard being in Lvov? First time back as an adult. ‘I thought I might be traumatised,’ Vera says, ‘but I wasn’t. Nothing was difficult. Wonderful restaurants. Excellent coffee. The difference between the Jewish population prewar and now is the only thing. And that’s all I can tell you, darling. Traditionally Lvov was an intellectual person’s town. Big university. There was a writers festival on when we visited. I met a fellow who was there for the festival and who fell in love with me. Born in Lvov, lives in the USA. He gave me his book with the most wonderful inscription. That was it. It was speedy. It was quick. So there you are.’

  There I am. 2011-12-13-14-15-16-17-etc.18.

  YOU CAN’T ENTER THE SAME RIVER TWICE

  2.

  WE WERE READING the Soviet encyclopedia in a park. The one from when Stalin was alive. Your mother’s copy. The Father of All Nations was apparently a great scientist too on top of his other skills. Just couldn’t help being gifted in every striving and endeavour. We were laughing. Our crazy country with its crazy history. The craziest ever. Broad daylight, people everywhere. They surrounded us. One of them must have had a ring. I’d see a male hand with a ring on a tram or a trolleybus for weeks after and I’d flinch. My parents said to each other, maybe they wanted me to hear, ‘This is why we are doing this.’

  OK, memory has been kind with me on this one: two Jewish girls went walking through a park, having brought along a fat philosophical dictionary from the 1960s. There was much that was absurd in that dictionary and they were planning to laugh their time away in the tree shade. In the middle of their merriment they were approached by two or three young, not entirely sober, scumbags. Maybe the scumbags didn’t take to the girls’ laughter, maybe the girls’ non-Slavic features weren’t to scumbags’ liking. Could have easily been a two-in-one. There may have been some ‘ideological’ bickering between us and them—that bit I don’t remember. What I remember, remember it acutely, is a feeling of powerlessness, a feeling of being nothing, when they hit you over the head in front of me, and the sentence you said on the way home: ‘This happened so I could be cured of any nostalgia for the motherland.’ I remember—curious—the precise place on Sumskaya where you said these words. Right on the intersection with Petrovsky Street.

  3.

  Sometimes after school we simply couldn’t say goodbye and so we stood under the tree on Chernyshevskaya Street in our stupid servile uniforms. The brown of the winter uniform was like [complete the sentence]. It was like decomposing earthworms eating chocolate spongecake deep in the mud. I want to say we stood under that tree for hours but I am conscious perceptions of time are age-specific blah blah, context-specific blah triple blahdee blah. Anyway it felt like hours. Or we’d say goodbye, fly home—yours, stuffed with other families, was closer to the tree; I had to walk past the bookshop, Akademkniga, where your mum worked to get to mine—and call each other on the phone straight away. Now I make faces when I talk on the phone to make it tolerable. I am one of those people who prefer either face-to-face or email: total co-presence or total separation in time and space.

  4.

  Your sixteenth. My flowers, as tall as you, maybe taller. Hugging, giggling. The flowers, we said, look like ‘drunk Olympic swimmers’. Cruel optimism—have you heard this expression?

  5.

  Nina Sergeevna, useless as a teacher, but oh those dark curls and eyes. Dressed well too. Don’t laugh. Such a bit
ch, though. Determined to not let me sit next to you. Every class she would send me to the last row where no one ever sat. It became a ritual. And you, you were annoyed with me, not her, weren’t you? You wanted less fuss, less drama, you thought my defiance was becoming ridiculous. What exactly was I fighting for? I don’t know what possessed me, but I wasn’t going to give up. I was going to go on like this forever. Like a self-appointed Sisyphus. Twice a week, planting my feet next to your desk waiting for her bored voice to call me out.

  Who is Nina Sergeevna? Not our English teacher by chance? Can’t remember much about her. For some reason all English teachers at that time were these arrogant damsels, dressed to the nines and dazzling of manicure. At least she knew the language.

  I thought I’d keep going till someone dies or school ends or she gives in or I black out.

  6.

  Sometimes after school we simply couldn’t say goodbye. Or we’d say goodbye, fly home—one flight of stairs for you, one flight for me, one older sister to ‘neutralise’ for you, one older sister to ‘neutralise’ for me, parents at work and won’t be home for hours, best if sisters are busy with love entanglements—and call each other on the phone straight away. Now I am one of those people who think ‘Who is dead?’ if a phone rings in the evening.

  What year was it when you called after searching for me up and down the internet? 2003? 2005? I don’t remember which out of a dozen nomadic rented flats I was in when your phone call found me. I did not have a mobile then. My entire adult life, I’ve only had four phones. First computer—got that in 2008. Ugly, huge, with a round-eye monitor. Junk really. Made me so happy. Do you remember how I would write to you at home, save it on a flash disk, run to an internet cafe to send it off.

  7.

  Just the other day my father sent me an academic article in which a literary scholar discusses our (yours and my) friendship (among other things). The scholar commends me for ‘unashamed embrace’ of ‘big emotions’. Between the lines (but not disapprovingly): how very non-Anglo Saxon. She cites examples of my ‘emotional intensity’, symptomatic, she writes, of the time and the place of my childhood and adolescence. Terrible, soggy tra-ti-ta-ta passages from Book 3. Am I a chest beater? Looks like it. Also, I wonder if painters’ eyes burn like this too when they land, in passing, on an old canvas.

  8.

  I am looking through them now and can see all your letters from those first years—1990, 91, 92—and after that: nothing. Did you stop writing to me? Did everything stop? Was THAT when you decided it was all over? I remember: the past is all we have and it’s not enough.

  ‘I dug up somewhere Tsvetaeva’s diaries. Just listen to this:

  “To love—is to see a person the way God intended him and his parents failed to make him.

  To not love—is to see a person as his parents made him.

  To fall out of love: is to see, instead of him, a table, a chair.”’

  9.

  (We were best friends.) I wrote about us. I wrote about us sitting on a park bench with an old Soviet encyclopedia on our laps. I wrote about us remembering this together, in situ, nineteen years later:

  ‘No,’ says Sasha, ‘there were only three guys who hassled us but one of them hit you over the head.’

  ‘How is it that I have tripled the numbers and managed to forget a blow to my head?’

  ‘Go figure,’says Sasha.

  I wrote about that day, D-Day, sweet sixteenth, your coming of age:

  If I could have given her a hundred of these flowers, if I could have surrounded her with a forest of them, I would have.

  I don’t know that this is what I meant to do but I put us on the public record.

  10.

  CNN Live, Stuart Loory to Larry King:

  Larry, you can’t imagine the scene in that room. Mikhail Gorbachev walked in, looked very relaxed, sat down at the table, in front of him was a simple green folder with a few sheets of paper. They were his speech and they were the documents with which he was going to sign away the power… I have in my hand [lifts and shows to camera] the pen that he used to abdicate the presidency of the USSR. After his speech he had to sign the document and his pen didn’t work. Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, was standing at the table. He gave this pen to Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev signed. Tom asked him for the pen back and he’s allowed me to bring it over here to show to your viewers, Larry.

  ‘Hello, my disappearing one… With every day you’re becoming further away and I am drowning in all the trivial bullshit around me. I am frightened that I am losing you, losing the only REAL thing I had. I am frightened, you hear me? Of course you hear me. You always hear me when I am calling you. If you didn’t, it’d be a colossal cruelty on His part. Is it not enough for Him that I haven’t seen you in fourteen months? And you know what’s most frightening? I am getting used to living without you. The first months I just wept. I thought I was not going to make it. “Time heals” sounds like a bitterly cutting joke. I don’t want it to heal me… OK, no more of this, but … just one last thing—let it hurt.’

  (Letter prices have gone up; on the envelope—three additional, identical stamps, a harp and quill in green and grey.)

  11.

  Larisa Petrovna, our Year 4 classroom teacher, used to smoke behind a tree. She lived alone. Her hiding and smoking, smoking while hiding, was the only thing about her I found interesting—stains on her fingers, her teeth pickled in the subterranean smoke, what’s so interesting about that? Had she smoked in the classroom, that’d be interesting. She was short, with the short hair, skinny. She taught algebra and geometry: I was good at the first, no good at the second (rotating a 3D shape in my head? Ciò non è possibile! Sorry!). I was the first in Larisa Petrovna’s class to swim to the other shore.

  Your sister came to the graduation, she was visiting if you remember, and hung a pearl necklace round my neck and gave me an Otto catalogue (fashion catalogues from Germany were beyond cool then) as a gift. I wore a skirt made out of my sister’s wedding dress, a modest white jacket, a black top. Plus pearls, your sister’s. Mum said I looked touchingly pure, an innocent amid all the overdressed, overdone girls of our class. The graduation itself—grey, grey, grey. Larisa Petrovna (dear and beloved) got smashed (to smithereens) and at 4 a.m. dragged us all to meet the sunset in Dzerzhinsky Square. She talked utter nonsense there and then everyone, pissed off and sleepy, went their separate ways.

  12.

  (We were best friends. I wrote about us, mea culpa-style too…): I had not seen my childhood friends in Ukraine for almost two decades; to them, and especially to my best friend who turned sixteen on the day etc etc… nothing short of a etc etc etc.. It took nineteen years for me etc and I was coming back so I could write a etc etc…

  In some talk I gave I said I used my daughter, twelve at the time, as a ‘human shield’ to be able to go back. I didn’t say ‘go back to you’.

  13.

  Years after her immigration Dina Rubina popped into a Moscow bookshop: ‘It was a terrible shock. I realised that all books had already been written. They had all been released. There were so many of them already that there was absolutely no need to write any more. If you decided to write something, you had to be prepared to wage a war for your reader. You had to be prepared not to hold back.’ We watch Rubina’s interview on the same day—me (t)here, you (t)here.

  14.

  We were best friends. I wrote about us and about how we thought it was the end of the line. Except, a month earlier the Berlin Wall came down, a year and a bit later our country ‘collapsed’ (the word used by authorised purveyors of that tale) and it no longer seemed so absolute that Those Who Left would never sit around the same table with Those Who Stayed Behind. We saw each other again nineteen years after that, in 2008, beforehand you said, ‘Let’s not. There is no need, no point.’ I said, ‘Give me an hour.’

  I told you to meet me outside my alma mater—Kharkiv State Academy of Culture on Bursatskiy Descent. I got there half an hou
r early, went first to the dean’s office. Tears, my hands were trembling. I managed to gather myself and come out almost composed (at least, so I thought). Then: circling the city, joined by the cheerful Italian Marina, our foray into the Palace of Pioneers, photos there, ice-cream in a cafe, you and her exchanging your autographed books, trip to the other side of the city in a dirty minibus, tea and cake, as if in a dream… My ridiculous boots with 10cm heels clearly not intended for long walks around the city… I would have worn them three/four times my whole life, no more than that! They are still hanging in a storeroom from a carefully sewn-on thread (so that the shaft with the handmade ornament wouldn’t get crumpled, for Christ’s sake). My next night, sleepless, was in someone else’s kitchen (you remember where I lived and who with), an almost empty pack of cigarettes (whole week’s ration! shit!).

  15.

  I would meet people in my new life and they would know about you (ask questions etc.) and I would be startled, wrongfooted—how on earth.?