Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  “So which language will the children speak?” Martin continued.

  “Why both, of course. Sasha already speaks Russian as well as po našemu.”

  “He does seem like an exceptionally gifted child.”

  “He is. I am so lucky!”

  “But Zora, you are talking about three languages, not two. They will speak our language, Russian and English? And you will be the only person in their lives who speaks our language. Are you sure about this?”

  “When we’re in America,” Zora continued, a phrase she would use for far longer than she could imagine at that moment. “When we are in America, everyone will speak English. It will be easy for them to learn. And besides, they are so young. Tolya and I have talked about it a lot. We think it will work.”

  “Well, you are fortunate with Sasha, but what about the new one? The one that’s been keeping us up all night?”

  “I don’t know, Tata.” Zora smiled ruefully and shook her head. “That one is angry. She hasn’t given me a minute’s peace since she was born. I hope the Americans will take her!” She was only half joking.

  “Well, you can hardly blame her, Zora. It’s not as if she entered a world that was peaceful and calm.”

  “True. I just hope she’ll grow out of it,” Zora said, almost wistfully. “Things will be easier when we’re in America, I’m sure.”

  “Oh dear, I hope they take all of you and quickly,” Martin said. “How will you get to America? Have you been able to take any money with you?”

  “We have a little, and Tolya is hoping he can work in the camp while we are waiting. Tolya is bringing his camera and developing equipment. He was quite passionate about photography before all this started, and he bought a wonderful camera, it’s called a Leica. People will need pictures for their documentation and visa requests. There’s also an organization that helps Russian refugees.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, it’s called the Tolstoy Foundation. It was set up by Leo Tolstoy’s daughter after the author’s death, and they help pay for people’s relocation if they have been left homeless after fleeing the Soviet Union.”

  “Thank God for Tolstoy, then,” said Martin. “We would love to help you, but you know we have nothing. Things are still very tight here in Zagreb since the war; we barely have enough to survive.”

  “Oh, I know, Tata. We aren’t looking for anything from you. We have to do this on our own. We will. Don’t worry.” She kissed him and they hugged. Then I started crying again and the moment was interrupted.

  But Deda wanted to know one more thing. “How are you getting along with your mother-in-law? Are things better?”

  “We’ve more or less made our peace, Tata. She’s not like a mother to me, but she loves Sasha and is good to him. It helps a lot that she can take care of him, and he loves her. He can’t say the word for grandmother—Babushka—so she has become Babusya. I’m just grateful not to have to call her Daria Pavlovna anymore. We all call her Babusya. Another gift from my lovely son.”

  “Well, I am glad to hear that. It could be tight quarters for a while.”

  “Oh yes, we understand we will be sharing very tight spaces in Trieste at the camps,” explained Zora. “And she makes no secret of how much Tania’s crying annoys her.”

  And so, with me crying, in two days we left the country of Yugoslavia, and all my parents knew and loved, for perhaps the final time.

  Sasha and Tania shortly after they moved to San Sabba

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Campo San Sabba

  “Ti si uvek plakala. You were always crying,” the story started, as did so many others that Mama told about me as a baby. They weren't about the hardships, or the fear, or even about Sasha, her golden child. They were always about my crying.

  The train to Trieste crossed the border at night. The border was lax, because the Yugoslavs were happy to be rid of the Russians, and Trieste was accepting refugees. At the time, Trieste was a so-called Free Territory under the United Nations and governed by international law, administered by British and American forces. The refugee camps there had been set up in the aftermath of World War II, to deal with people displaced and unable to move back to their homes, primarily East Europeans and Russians.

  Zora remembered that when the train arrived in Trieste, people without passports were crowded into one part of the station. From there we were taken in the back of a truck to the processing center for Displaced People. It was about half an hour out-oftown, up a hill, in a place called Opicina.

  The truck pulled in past a raised metal bar into a field full of old dark green tents surrounded by woods. One wooden barracks at the front had a sign that said Ufficio. Inside, at a desk, were people who spoke Italian and a little Russian and Serbian. It took forever to fill out all the paperwork, but they were very happy that Zora and Tolya had hidden copies of our old documents, even if Yugoslavia had declared us all non-citizens.

  Finally, the new documents were finished. Our family was now officially registered as stateless. We possessed new refugee travel documents, issued by the United Nations Committee on Refugees based on something called a Nansen Passport. It would be used to identify us until we were accepted on a permanent basis by some country. Everyone assumed it would be a matter of a few months. Tolya, in fleeing Russia as an infant, had already been issued one of the original Nansen Passports, but he no longer had it.

  Everyone was then taken to the tents where we would stay until we could be processed into the longer term DP, or Displaced Person camp down in Trieste. That camp was at an old rice granary called San Sabba, near the shipyards. The Opicina camp was normally to be used by families with young children in the summer, when it got swelteringly hot in San Sabba. But there were so many unexpected refugees still flowing in that we had to be put up there first, with several thousand others.

  We were given blankets and pointed to an area in a large tent that we would share with other families arriving at the same time. There were no beds, as there had been no warning of another arrival. Newcomers simply laid out their blankets on the ground. We did that and fell asleep as well as we could.

  Too young to remember that arrival in early 1950 in Campo San Sabba, I heard Mama talk about it so often during my childhood that I could visualize it just by closing my eyes.

  I was never a hero in Mama’s stories. She believed that if you complimented your children, they would get swelled heads, so she never did. But I loved her tales of the old country anyway, even if I came off less than the stellar child that was her firstborn.

  “There were so many things about those first days I can never forget,” Mama continued, “but I specifically remember trying to settle the five of us into that small space and mostly I remember you crying.”

  I was less than a year old. We had been on the move for a good part of my life, and now we were to be crowded in a drafty barracks until some country took us in. “We are going to America,” Mama's story went on. “I kept saying it to anyone who asked. I believed that if I said it often enough it would be true.”

  That first night was to be one of many in the Campo—way, way, too many. A truck took us from the tents at Opicina to Campo San Sabba, where my Russian aunts and uncles were living. But they were in the large brick building across the street from where our family was headed. They lived in the old San Sabba rice factory, long decommissioned and now packed with refugees. We couldn't live there because no children were allowed. So we were on our own, heading for the barracks in the camp annex. My parents knew there would be other Russians from Belgrade in our camp, but they had no idea who they were.

  Mama knew for certain, however, that she was the only non-Russian person among the “displaced.”

  The part of the camp where we were headed was a large flat field filled with long narrow wooden army barracks abandoned by the American military after the end of World War II. A tall chain-link fence surrounded it, the wires extending into the distance as far as could be seen. As we pulled
up, the gate was opened by a gentle-looking man in his fifties. He had no uniform, but wore a military looking cap. We climbed out of the back of the truck. Papa carried the few suitcases—everything we owned. Mama carried me. Sasha walked next to us. Babusya carried her own suitcase and followed.

  “I remember there was a sign in Italian that said Campo, and Profughi, and other Italian words I didn’t understand or have time to read. But I knew this was where we would now be living.” Mama’s stories always brought me right back to the Campo, and sometimes I believed I remembered it all, from the very first day, even though I was six months old at the time.

  On arriving in front of the Campo, Mama just stood before the gate and stared. It was late evening, and two big lights glowered over the scene. The ground between the barracks was barren dirt. These temporary shelters were spaced about ten or twenty steps apart from each other, in long straight rows going off behind the barracks that served as the Campo headquarters office. A few larger buildings lined the field across from the headquarters. Someone told us they included the medical center, the school, and the kitchens where meals could be picked up. Everything looked a bit shabby in the stark light.

  A small group of people stood around, watching as our group of new arrivals listened to the introductory comments in Russian and Italian. And then the driver of the truck read names. As each name was read, one of the people watching responded with a smile. About forty people lived in each barracks, and they were there to welcome us newcomers and introduce us to the rest of the people who lived in our barracks. Mama didn't know, at the time, that this was something the refugees had come up with, a way to make newcomers feel wanted. It was a godsend. After months of insecurity and not knowing what the next moment might bring, suddenly someone was welcoming us, someone who was living through a similar situation.

  A young couple smiled as Zora and Tolya’s names were called. “We are the Karsanidis and this is our son Sasha,” the man said, pushing a small boy forward.

  “I'm Sasha too!” said my brother. The boys looked at each other shyly, then Sasha Karsanidi walked over to his new friend—my brother Sasha—and gave him a marble. It was clear glass with green and blue swirls. Mama said she worried briefly about how small it was, and whether Sasha, at two and a half, might swallow it. And then she saw him beaming proudly as he held it out to show it, and she felt something that had been held tight loosen in her. At that moment she started the slow process of understanding that this group of people was now her family.

  Zora had left her father, her sisters, and her friends in Yugoslavia along with all her possessions. There was no going back. Our only documents now were the Nansen Passports that declared us stateless. But here we weren't the only ones officially homeless. Everyone in camp had faced this same situation, most of them, like us, more than once.

  The Karsanidis led us to our barracks, not far from where we stood. A few people were gathered before the door. They introduced themselves, welcomed us in. We walked through the door at the center of the barracks to a small open area, which held the bathrooms. A narrow corridor led off in either direction, and we turned left. Plywood walls that reached neither the ceiling nor the floor—broken up by doors every few feet—lined it. We passed a few doors and reached the last one on the left. Like the one across from it, it swung freely when pushed. In the doorway on our right, across the hall from our home-to-be, stood a large woman in a dress that was too tight, too short and too bright.

  “I'm Vava,” she said, in a voice that was rough, as if from smoke and shouting in noisy places. She smelled of cigarettes, and it was one of the few times Zora was ever to see Vava without one in her hand.

  “I’m Zora,” Mama said. “And this is Tania.” She pointed to me, the baby in her arms. I had quieted during our walk and was now asleep, and she whisked me into our new home. Babusya followed, holding Sasha's hand. Papa brought up the rear with our bags.

  Zora thought the apartments in Yugoslavia had been small, but at Campo San Sabba she walked into a space no bigger than eight feet long and six or seven feet wide. Behind it was a second space the same size, with two sets of bunk beds lining the walls. The first room had a small stove, a table, and a banquette. At night Babusya would sleep on the banquette. In the daytime it would be our family room. The remaining four of us would sleep two to a cot under old khaki military blankets on the small lower bunks in the rear. The upper bunks would serve as our storage area, holding our clothes and anything else we possessed, which fortunately wasn’t much.

  It was late and everyone was tired. Mama got us into bed as quickly as possible, unpacking only enough to get us through the night. Sasha and I settled in on our side of the room. “You started crying, Tania,” remembered Mama, “and you cried, and you cried, and you cried.”

  Mama brought me into their bed, but I didn't stop. She walked me up and down the narrow space between the bunks, but I didn't stop.

  The partial walls were so thin she could hear the neighbors tossing and turning. She was mortified at what they must be thinking. Tolya and Sasha slept through it all. They always did. Mama was up most of the night, with no private space to retreat to. I would quiet down when she gave me her breast, but I’d start up again as soon as I was done. This went on endlessly. Zora couldn't find a way to stop whatever it was that bothered me. She never could.

  Near dawn Mama finally closed her eyes as I crawled out to the other half of our small space. I found Babusya's bag to play with and was quiet. Zora could hear people getting up. The neighbors, not too quietly, were talking about the crying baby, angry that it had kept them up all night. Zora drifted into slumber at last.

  When she woke up, she realized that it was still morning and there was still no crying. Sasha and Tolya were asleep. She put on her robe and stepped out to check on me. Babusya was there, but I was not in the room.

  “Where is she?” Mama asked.

  “Isn't she with you?” Babusya replied.

  Mama ran to the door and shoved hard. It slammed into the wall behind it, startling everyone in the entire barracks, for sure. She was oblivious. Suddenly she heard a familiar—but too rarely heard—little giggle. It came from under the door across the hall. Zora knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” The door swung open. It was the man who had let us in at the front gate the night before, the one with no uniform but a military cap. There was nothing loud or threatening about him. He had greying blond hair and gentle blue eyes.

  He was the kind of person you could imagine telling fairy tales and singing lullabies. He stepped back and to the side so Zora could see the whole room. Behind him, on the floor, sat Mama’s giggling baby daughter—me—playing with the old gent’s cap. Two elderly women sat on bunk beds in nightdresses and hairnets, enchantment on their faces, staring at the scene. The termagant in the tight dress stood at the other end of the room, putting on bold red lipstick.

  “She is such a sweetheart,” one of the old women, whose name we later learned was Tama, said. “What were you doing to her to make her cry all night? She's such a happy baby!”

  This happy baby apparently cried her way through the first year of her life. I cried when we were at home. I cried when we weren't at home, and when we no longer had a home. I cried when we were on trains. I cried when we weren't on trains. I cried.

  Until, that is, I met Dyadya Zhenya, Uncle Zhenya, the man with the cap. Apparently, I thought the sun rose and set with him, and the feeling was mutual and immediate. We were inseparable from that moment on.

  Clearly, all believed that my crying was Mama’s fault, and they now had indisputable proof that this was true. The minute she tried to take me across to our end of the barracks, I started bawling again. It would not be the last time my mother was to be blamed for my behavior.

  Sasha and Tania with her beloved Dyadya Zhenya when he was on duty at the guard station at the entrance to the camp.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Campo family

  “Prestani, Ta
nia. I wish you would stop crying,” Mama nearly shouted, exasperated. It was many months after that first night in the Campo. “You're old enough to tell me what you want. If you need something, just ask.”

  I was barely two, and she knew she was being ridiculous. She also knew they were all laughing at her behind her back. Damn it, she just wanted her daughter to start talking.

  “Of course she's not talking, Zora,” said Vava, picking me up and hugging me close until I quieted. She was always one of my champions. “She can't figure out what language she should use.”

  “Oh, how absurd!”

  “It's not absurd. What do you think, Zhenya?” Vava asked her uncle and barracks-mate. “Her father and everyone else around her speaks Russian, and you, but only you, her mother, speak to her in Serbian. I would be confused, and I would be angry. Why can't you just talk to her in Russian like everyone else does? Then maybe she'd be talking instead of crying.”

  God damned Vava, thought Zora, she always thinks she knows everything. She had never held on to a husband, never had a child, but here she was, telling Zora how to raise her kids. And poor Zhenya. She had him wrapped around her finger like a kite on a string.

  “You know, I don't have time for this conversation right now,” Zora said. “I need to go wash clothes and get some food ready. Sasha is coming home from school soon; he'll be hungry.”

  “Sasha, Sasha. Your little genius. He's got you wrapped around his little finger,” sneered Vava. “Go ahead, you can leave Tania with us. We'll take care of her. Won't we, Zhenya?”

  Zora couldn't believe she threw out that phrase. She was a gypsy, that one, Mama knew she was. She read the future in coffee grounds, but she seemed to read the present just by looking in Mama’s eyes. And Mama never was good at dissembling.