What is left for her here? Even if it were possible to withdraw her emigration papers without penalty, even if she were permitted to remain in her job as a book illustrator, she will never be promoted beyond her current position. There’ll be nights and weekends spent in the flat — that’s if she were permitted to stay here alone — painting pictures that will never be seen by anyone other than herself. She supposes there’ll be a husband and a child or two whose own future would be as strained and stained as her own. As a Jew, she’ll never know the freedoms of other Soviet citizens, much less those experienced in the West. Gorbachev’s reforms, like all those that have preceded them, will not last. If she stays, this — what she has now — is the best she can hope for, this life stretching ahead to her own death.
Nadya must have realised that Galina’s thoughts were elsewhere because finally she stops talking. She pours more tea for them both, lights another cigarette, and when she speaks again, her voice is gentle, it is kind.
‘So, Galya, what do you plan to do?’
‘I’m still going to emigrate.’ The words come of their own accord.
Nadya stares at her. Sadness and pity are etched in the crumpled face, and suddenly she is apologising. It was wrong of her to have raised the subject of the future. It’s far too early to make decisions. Lidiya has only just gone, Galya is in a state of shock.
Now Galina reaches for Nadya’s hands. She holds them gently between her own. Her voice, however, is firm.
‘I’m going to emigrate … to Australia.’
The word fits uneasily in her mouth. She has decided to move to a country whose name has never before passed her lips.
Australia.
2
IN TRANSIT
In February 1986, within two days of each other, Galina Kogan and the Australian mosaicist, Andrew Morrow, left Leningrad.
Andrew was returning home. He had a myriad of ideas for his own work, and was impatient to begin, but at the same time a queer foreboding he might never return to Russia made him reluctant to leave. Only a small portion of the interior mosaics of the Church on the Spilled Blood had been restored so far, and he could not bear to miss seeing the finished glory. Nothing on the face of the earth would compare.
Then there was the girl he had knocked down in the street, the girl who had never called, the girl who, if he were to be realistic, was never going to call. But in the three months since their meeting, he had spent so much time thinking about her, she had become part of his Leningrad life. Her striking presence back when they met had inflated to giddy proportions now. Not just her height — so appealing, given his own six feet — but the dark eyes and olive skin, the lush figure, and the caramel-coloured hair that reminded him of palomino horses. He had crafted their second meeting and all the ones after that. He had scripted conversations with her; he had imagined holding her and kissing her, he had even imagined making love to her. In short, he had managed to make her an intimate, and typical of a shy bloke, to fall for an imagined woman — although gratifyingly easy to transport her home.
He arrived at Pulkovo airport very early on the day of departure, having learned that despite all the rules and regulations circumscribing Soviet life, rarely did things proceed as planned. It was minus ten outside, with an Arctic wind blasting across the flats. The Intourist driver had dropped him off a good fifty metres from the terminal entrance (that in itself was against regulations), rightly guessing she’d not receive much of a tip from a foreigner with a backpack. Russians, he had learned, had a great sense of entitlement when it came to Westerners; they were also shrewd punishers. By the time he entered the terminal, the cold had carved into his bones, his lungs had stiffened, and his face, foolishly uncovered, was flayed by that unique blend of sting and burn that is the province of extreme cold.
He found a space away from the doors against a small patch of wall. His breath still refused to come, and his hands and feet were blocks of pain. This will subside, he told himself, in just a few minutes, his hands and feet will return to normal, and his lungs will resume their usual work. He forced his attention outwards, beyond his beleaguered body.
It struck him as typically Soviet that a relatively new international airport should have such a small waiting area. Much the same size as a basketball court, there were very few seats and, as far as he could see, only one food-and-drink kiosk. There was a single tourist outlet, with two shop assistants talking animatedly to each other, while travellers browsed shelves of matryoshka dolls and embroidered peasant shawls. On his left, so incongruous at this international airport, was a babushka seated on the floor surrounded by bundles; and huddled together on a single seat, was a young couple who looked so dazed they might have been on Mars. Apart from a large family who had spread themselves across an entire row of seats, the rest of the people in the waiting area appeared to be foreign businesspeople, predominately male and mostly European. He was the only traveller with a backpack.
Ten minutes later he had recovered sufficiently to move. He collected his luggage and approached the check-in counter. His pack was heavy, certainly heavier than when he arrived. Would he be liable for excess baggage? And what would they do to him if he couldn’t pay the fee? He put his backpack and shoulder bag on the scales, lowering each as gently as possible — as if that might lighten the load. He watched the needle swing vigorously across the dial and stop at twenty-four kilograms.
The woman at the counter looked at him, she held his gaze. He was four kilograms over the luggage allowance, but something in her expression, together with a just-perceptible shrug, suggested there might be room for negotiation. In his pocket was a small purse shaped as a map of Australia which contained the last of his American dollars — enough to buy a meal in the transit lounge in Vienna, but would, he decided, be put to better use here. He reached for the purse and offered it as a gift to the woman. He pointed to the word ‘Australia’ on his passport, and told her in Russian he was Australian. She took the purse, had a quick look inside, and indicated he was to remove his shoulder bag from the scales. The dial now indicated nineteen kilograms. She wrote nineteen on his form, pocketed the purse, and waved him through. Two hours later Andrew was in the air, two hours after that he was in transit in Vienna, and another twenty-four hours saw him arrive at Melbourne airport.
No gift would help him here. He was passed to two customs officers who combed through his pack. They checked the toes of his shoes and turned out all his pockets; they leafed through notebooks and dismantled his ballpoint pens; they unscrewed the lid of his talcum powder and stirred the contents with a metal prong; his deodorant stick wasn’t worth keeping after they were finished with it. And they unwrapped every single mosaic piece he had packed so carefully. He was among the last to exit customs. Beyond the doors were his parents, Sylvie and Leonard, whose anxious faces burst into smiles when he appeared.
Andrew Morrow was home.
In contrast with Andrew, Galina Kogan was leaving home, heading towards a country that if the paucity of reference books in the library was a reliable guide, barely existed. Yet she had not wavered over her choice of destination. She had settled on Australia the day her mother died; it was an omen, and she was convinced that to change her mind would bring bad luck.
She carried a single suitcase, a small valise and, safe in her pocket, two train tickets. The first ticket would take her via Kiev to Lvov in western Ukraine; the other covered travel from Lvov through Czechoslovakia across the border into the West, terminating in Vienna. So many times had she and her mother imagined the moment of crossing from east to west — like moving from a dingy flat into a palace, or from black and white to full technicolour — but the excitement they’d anticipated together had now disappeared. Every aspect of this trip made her anxious.
She’d heard of other émigrés loading tables, chairs, divans, cupboards, beds, carpets, crockery, pianos and paintings into huge containers, packing up long-
established Russian lives and shipping them to far-off destinations. She had dithered for weeks over the contents of the flat — full-time dithering, given that when permission to emigrate came through, she was, as forewarned, dismissed from her job. (Grief, she decided, must give irrationality a free ride, for she truly had believed that because of her loss, the authorities would show sympathy and waive the usual termination of employment.)
Like all sensible Russians, she and her mother were hoarders — with shortages a fact of life, you never knew when something might become useful — so their flat was choked with stuff, and not simply stuff for now or stuff for an uncertain future, but also stuff from a dangerous past. There was the collection of maths books belonging to her grandfather, a man arrested and shot more than forty-five years earlier, and the four volumes of Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary belonging to her grandmother, who died of neglect in a Siberian labour camp a year after her husband; there was a pre-revolutionary embroidered challah cloth with matching table napkins made by Lidiya’s grandmother, her own great-grandmother, and a lacquered cigar box, courtesy of her cigar-making great-grandfather.
In the long days and weeks of decision-making, Galina weighed up each object, and she bartered: this of my grandfather’s, but not that of my grandmother’s; this of my grandmother’s, not that of my grandfather’s. It was hard, it was stressful: these things that survived when their owners had not had acquired an odd sort of power — like relics. And with her mother now gone, the choices became even weightier. What to do with Lidiya’s clothes, her mementos, her trinkets? And what about the books she had translated and the books she had loved? All these things emerged from her mother’s life, were evidence of that life. How could any of them be left behind?
As the days and weeks passed, Galina was making herself sick with choice. In the end, practicality and limited funds forced her to be tough. She decided to restrict herself only to what could be fitted in the trunk that she and her mother had used to store their winter clothes and bedding. She packed the Dahl dictionary, together with the Italian and English books Lidiya had translated; she included two settings of the crockery Lidiya had herself kept of her own parents’ possessions, two sets of cutlery, and Lidiya’s stained and tatty copy of The Book of Tasty and Nutritious Food; she added four photograph albums, including one belonging to the maternal grandparents she had never known; and she packed her mother’s best gloves, her ring and pendant, her favourite shawl, and her embroidered tapochki — the prospect of wearing her mother’s indoor slippers in far-off Australia appealed to her. She wavered over Lidiya’s typewriter and in the end settled for her fountain pen, but it was the bulky Cyrillic typewriter she really wanted. To prevent herself from changing her mind, she gave it to Ivan, an engineer by day and a poet by night. She packed eight English novels, including The Time Machine and War of the Worlds, both long-time favourites of her own; among the French books, she chose The Count of Monte Cristo, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Zola’s The Masterpiece — another enduring favourite, and she also included Lidiya’s precious Dante. The Russian books presented her with the hardest task: she wanted to keep them all. When she could delay no longer, she took all those with her mother’s signature inscribed on the inside cover, a good selection of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Yevtushenko and, of course, Pushkin. She slept only fitfully in those weeks of choosing; plagued by future regrets, she must have changed her mind a hundred times.
It was an easier job with her own possessions. She packed her new winter coat and her hard-wearing winter boots. She chose two Chagall posters, a set of Kandinsky postcards, a selection of her own illustrations, a collection of Krylov’s tales, and all her illustrated children’s books, many of which had belonged to her mother as a child. These were the books that had ignited her own artistic ambitions; doubly precious, she couldn’t leave them behind. With a small amount of space left to fill, she packed a teaspoon with an enamelled handle and a clock in a handpainted wooden frame that had belonged to Lidiya’s Baba Marya, along with the embroidered challah cloth and matching napkins that had come down through the Kogan family. With little interest in cooking, she selected a small samovar, some tea glasses, a set of serving platters also from Lidiya’s family, and a single pot and pan.
She sent the trunk to a Jewish organisation in Rome, and worried, increasingly as the weeks passed, that despite the huge price she had paid, she would never see it again. And while she told herself these were only things, that memories were far more durable, it was to no avail. These objects she had so carefully selected to take to her new life, these things that would connect the unknown future to the familiar past, these things were like solid memories, and she could not bear to lose a single one.
On a February morning in 1986, Galina left Leningrad. In the wintry dark, there were no farewells to this city she would never see again, no last glimpses of favourite landmarks to cement into memory, nothing to distract her from the fierce anxiety that was now a constant presence in her days.
The train to Kiev was not the express she had expected, and each time it drew into a station she steeled herself for the official who would enter the carriage, inspect her documents, find them wanting, and haul her off the train. She tried to reason herself into a state of calm. After all, what was the worst that could happen? She’d be sent back to Leningrad with no job, no place to live, and no possessions. Friends and family wouldn’t leave her stranded, or at least some wouldn’t; others would go out of their way to avoid a self-declared traitor to the Motherland. But even if the worst happened, she would manage. And besides, the worst in known and familiar Leningrad was not nearly as intimidating as the worst in utterly unknown Australia. So she reasoned, but reason transported her nowhere close to a state of calm.
With her limited funds she’d had no choice but to settle for the cheapest compartment, the obshchiy. She had counted on the blur of the passing countryside to tranquilise her during the journey, but discovered she’d not been allocated a window berth despite having requested it. There were no doors to the obshchiy, she had no view, she had no privacy. She wanted to insist, she wanted to demand, but had to stifle her protests, knowing she mustn’t draw attention to herself. There were three other places in the compartment, and she hoped her fellow passengers would make the journey bearable. But when a husband and wife and their daughter, an overdressed girl of about twelve, arrived, she quickly realised there would be no joy from them. After a brief nod when they took their places, they ignored her. With neither window nor distracting company, she rummaged in her bag for her mother’s copy of Chekhov, her literary equivalent of comfort food.
Soon after the journey began, the family laid out real food — so much expensive food that she wondered why they were travelling in an obshchiy. There were hard-boiled eggs, pickles, cheese, bread, sausage, smoked fish — a huge array, and far too much for the three of them. They ate slowly, tauntingly, or so it seemed to Galina. She was hungry, very hungry; with so much to think about, it had not occurred to her to prepare food for the journey. She knew she could buy food at the stations, but she didn’t want to get off the train just in case it departed without her, leaving her stuck in the middle of nowhere, with no possessions and hardly any money. And why, she wondered, was she dogged by these worst-case scenarios? As if she didn’t already have enough to be anxious about.
She put her book aside and watched the family eat. She willed them to share their food, but she might as well not have existed. When they were finished, they cleared everything away except a tin of montpansiez placed where they could all easily help themselves. The bright, fruity sweets fanned her hunger. She swallowed over and over, surprised that the body, usually so adaptable, would keep up saliva production when the enterprise was so obviously futile.
The tin of sweets gradually emptied, the train rattled through the countryside, the air grew hotter and stuffier, the man’s feet stank. Galina tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate,
just stared at the page. With each stop she hoped the family would disembark, and when finally they did, she had barely enough time to be relieved when their place was taken by another equally unfriendly family. It was as if she gave off a message: I am emigrating; I am a traitor to Mother Russia.
The train picked up speed, the new family spread their bodies, and Galina stepped into the passageway — not too far, so she could keep an eye on her belongings. And there she stood, her body rolling with the train, the time passing, she couldn’t say for how long, when she felt a touch to her shoulder. She sprang around. There was a woman about her mother’s age asking whether she would like to join her and her husband. The voice was friendly, the smile warm, and alone and miserable and at the end of her tether, Galina refused to allow her usual suspicions to dominate.
She moved her belongings into their compartment, and the three of them travelled all the way to Kiev in a space reserved for four. The couple shared their food, they shared their tea, and over the next several hours she and her new friends read, dozed, and conversed about safe topics: work (both were teachers), family (a married son, no grandchildren), the passing scenery, the books they were reading. It was only when they arrived in Kiev that they mentioned their connection to Lvov.
Being careful is a way of life in the Soviet Union, and a feature of being careful is to be sensitive to nuance. The code word here was Lvov. Who other than emigrating Jews would be travelling with large suitcases from Leningrad via Kiev to Lvov? Yet the couple’s name was Russian, not Jewish. Galina would never have guessed.
On the journey from Kiev to Lvov they opened up. The woman told her they were emigrating to America, along with their family. ‘Our son and daughter-in-law are already in Rome. We’d intended to travel together, but something unexpected happened.’ She raised her eyebrows and shrugged, as if to acknowledge that Galina would understand without her having to elaborate. ‘We thought it prudent they leave early.’
Invented Lives Page 3