Mother Tongue

by Tania Romanov

  As the coffee event got underway, Vava and Zhenya somehow got wind of it and showed up, coming from their apartment in the compound. We’d left enough coffee in the jezva for two more tiny Turkish coffee cups. Once the coffee was poured, they deliberately stirred in the sugar, then let it sit until the grounds settled to the bottom. They knew you didn't drink it all, just the right amount to avoid getting the grounds in your mouth with the last sip.

  Vava, like the gypsy everyone believed she was, wanted to read everyone’s future in the remaining coffee grounds. We turned the used cups upside down, and when they set up Vava started her tales.

  “There is some violence in your future,” she said to my grandmother in a mysterious tone. “See how these currents are competing with each other? Here and here.”

  My brother just laughed to himself, but I looked at the cup. Sure enough, the jagged edges seemed violent. Instead of rolling around like the normal single Rorschach blot, her wet grounds had spattered, and then dripped over each other in a confusing melee. Babusya just laughed, and then realized it was time to go watch TV: Saturday afternoon wrestling, her favorite show, was about to air! We chuckled at the reference to violence and at this un-grandmotherly activity of Babusya’s.

  One day I had finally pestered Mama enough and she brought home a store-bought white cake with red roses for my birthday. Everyone took a small bite and left the rest on their plate, finding it completely inedible. I took a large piece, savoring every sweet bite. I even got to eat all the rest of the roses after the family left. Of course, I got terribly sick to my stomach from the American cake.

  I really had to surrender. Having a life that resembled anything going on in my friends' homes just wasn't going to happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Speak Serbian, Tania

  One evening when I was a teenager I sat in my family dining room while my parents entertained a group of visitors. The conversation swirled around me. Rather than our usual friends who all spoke Russian, these people were speaking po našemu. I understood every word they said. But when I opened my mouth to respond, nothing came out. Nothing. I stared at them, open-mouthed, and said not one word. They assumed I didn't speak their language. Perhaps I had forgotten it even if I spoke it at one time?

  What was going on? I wondered. Was this a dream? Or, more accurately, a nightmare?

  I always spoke different languages with my father and with my mother. That’s just how it worked. He was Papa, and he and I spoke his language—Russian—and she was Mama, and we spoke in her language—Serbo-Croatian, as it was then called. It was true in the refugee camp, and it continued in America. I don’t remember what language I used with my brother when I first learned to talk. Once we learned English, Sasha became Alex, and we spoke English exclusively to each other.

  Russian and Serbo-Croatian are both Slavic languages, so they have some similarity, but they are different enough that a speaker of one would not understand the other.

  In San Francisco, we lived in a virtual Russian community, although not that many Russians lived in our physical neighborhood. The only place we spoke English was in American School.

  All our parents' friends, and ours, were Russian. We attended Russian School after American public school and on Saturdays. We prayed in a Russian Orthodox Church, joined the Russian Scouts, sang Russian songs and learned Russian poems. We were punished for speaking English in any of those settings.

  I had learned Serbo-Croatian long after we had left Yugoslavia, so I had never lived anywhere that people used the language. And the only place I had ever spoken Serbo-Croatian was at home with Mama. Unlike Russian, no one ever forced me to say a word in my mother’s language, but I always spoke it fluently and felt comfortable in it.

  So I spoke this language with exactly one person in my life. I have never even heard of a similar circumstance, even in bilingual families—but I never thought about it much. It was just what I did.

  I never studied the language in school, but I could read and write in it for one simple reason. Serbo-Croatian is a true phonetic language. It is spelled exactly as it sounds. Since I studied Russian and English in their respective schools, I knew both the Cyrillic and the Latin alphabets. Serbian is written in Cyrillic and Croatian in Latin. I could handle both.

  It’s an almost bizarre notion for an English speaker, where phonetics is a challenging concept and spelling is an art, not a science. Simple examples abound. The letter combinations I and eye share the same sound, as do be and bee; to and too and two; wear and where and ware. The whole notion of phonetics in English is comical, but in Serbo-Croatian it really works.

  I lived in this purportedly American world of Russians with a single Yugoslav interloper—my mother—into my teens. And then in the 1960s, the political situation in Yugoslavia started loosening up, and various cultural groups started showing up in San Francisco. One time a Serbian Kolo, or dance group came to perform in the city. Through our dear friend, Anatol Joukowsky, a dance professor at San Francisco State and once head of the Belgrade Ballet, they came to our house for dinner.

  They were a noisy, jovial group, and my mother cooked up one of her delicious meals. My father served rakija or slivovitz, the national Yugoslavian drink. Sasha and I sat, mostly listening.

  As my mother stepped into the kitchen between courses, one of the young men turned to me.

  “So your father says you understand our language. Do you have many Serbian friends, did you study it at school?”

  “No, I …”

  Suddenly I was tongue-tied. No words emerged from my mouth. My brain froze. I looked at the young man. I looked at my father. They smiled, stared at me.

  Nothing would come from my mouth.

  “Maybe she doesn’t speak po našemu, in our way,” said the young woman sitting next to him, trying to get me off the hot seat.

  “Of course she does,” said my father, smiling at me in a puzzled fashion.

  And I just continued to sit, mute, growing more embarrassed by the moment. This was surely a nightmare.

  Suddenly the door from the kitchen swung open, my mother entered the room with the platter of sarme, stuffed cabbage leaves. She said, “What’s wrong?” and my mind freed instantly, and I spoke, freely and fluently, po našemu.

  Everyone just sat and stared at us.

  And then it hit me. For the first time in my life I needed to speak Serbo-Croatian with someone other than my mother, and I couldn’t do it. I had a single-person language, and I had to be physically looking at Mama to speak it. I didn’t even know anyone other than Mama who used that language, and my mind refused to divulge the secrets of that private tongue to anyone else. It was truly my “mother tongue”—but in a very unique way.

  For all those years, my mother and I had existed in a cocoon whose wrapping was a unique language—the language of a country I was born in but left long before I learned to talk. It was many years before I understood just how important her gift of language would turn out to be for our relationship.

  Tania and the Greg, Christmas 1969.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Greg

  When I was young, my yearning to be more like the American girls was strong. I envied them their roots in this country, the fact that their grandmothers could speak English. But it was a remote issue, as they existed in a world separate from ours.

  By junior high we lived in a nice neighborhood and I started visiting American friends at their homes. But I was embarrassed to bring them home, lest they find out how “different” I was. As for boys, until high school, I’d only had crushes on or dated Russian boys. I hardly knew anyone else.

  But when I was in the eleventh grade, I briefly played on the George Washington High School tennis team, and I met a tennis player out at the Golden Gate Park tennis courts. He was tall, handsome, charming, and, of course, American.

  Here’s the rub. Because I was only five when we came to this country, even though it was my third language, I spoke English l
ike any other American girl. I had no accent.

  I was 5’4”, weighed about 115 pounds, had brownish blond hair, dark brown eyes, a light complexion that tanned easily, and I looked and sounded like any other California girl.

  So there was no reason, when the tall handsome tennis player asked me out, that he would have any idea of what my saying a simple “yes” entailed. It wasn’t that I kept the fact that my parents were foreign a secret. I just didn’t think or talk about it a lot—until he came over to pick me up, that is.

  Mama learned English much faster than my father did. She was more outgoing and less self-conscious. But she always had trouble with a few of the less logical parts of English grammar. Take the definite article; the word THE. The door. The car. Turn on the light. In her language, as in all Slavic languages, this word does not exist.

  “I am in the house” sounds better than “I am in house” because our ear is used to it, but both are perfectly clear. We say “I am going to the hospital,” but the British say “I am going to hospital” and no one is confused. And, of course, proper names don’t require the definite article. In fact, they sound bizarre with one unless they are part of a modifier. For example, we say “I read King Lear,” but “I read the King James Bible.”

  Now, none of this is confusing to me or any other native English speaker—it’s intuitive. But you could understand that it might be challenging for a nonnative speaker.

  Having gone through mortifying missteps that included Mama requesting sheets as 'shits' at JC Penney, and sending beer to school with my brother in the third grade when root beer was called for, I wanted to be sure Mama was prepped for the big event—my first American date.

  “Mama, his name is Greg.”

  “Greg?” she asked, as if I had said some particularly challenging word, a name that had landed off the moon.

  “Greg,” I repeated.

  “Greg.” She rolled it around in her mouth, practiced it a few times. It had that middle European heavy rolled ‘r’; the short ‘e’ was crisp and came from the top of her mouth rather than the full-cheeked version he would be used to, but it would do. She wrote it down to practice later. For her, it was much harder to remember than, say, Miloslav, or Vladimir, or Slobodan.

  So I wanted to rehearse his arrival.

  “When he comes, I’ll be upstairs. Just call up and tell me he’s here, Okay?”

  “Tania, enough. I wasn’t born in a barn, you know. Go get dressed.”

  She wanted me to look pretty. She wished I would wear a dress she had made for me, comb my hair, put on some lipstick. I wanted to look like a flower child of San Francisco in 1965—in old tattered clothes, or even jeans. It killed her every time I left the house looking like someone whose mother couldn’t afford nice clothes.

  We were both suffering the disease of nonacceptance, but somehow we toiled on.

  I pushed her out of my bedroom. She went downstairs. I considered going and opening the door myself, but something kept me back. Besides, it was too late. The doorbell rang.

  I was in the upstairs hallway, where Sasha and I used to sit, legs through the rungs, listening to our parents' parties downstairs, with the bawdy singing getting louder as the vodka flowed more freely.

  I heard the faucet in the kitchen turn off. I felt her wiping her hands, taking her apron off, heading for the front door.

  She opened the door and said, “Hello, won’t you come in?”

  Then he said something, and she replied, “I’m the mother.”

  I cringed, heard no response; what could he say? He stepped in; she closed the door, turned toward the stairs, and called to me, in a proud voice, “Tania, the Greg is here!”

  The family in San Francisco in 1977, when Alex was completing his PhD in neuro-physiological psychology at UCSF medical school and Tania was at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford.

  Tania as the CEO of a computer software company in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1985.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Life in America

  Mama and I survived each other, although it was never easy. Over the succeeding years I lived out a rags to riches immigrant story, adapted for an insanely determined female. Someday, I thought, I’ll write a book about it.

  I attended the decaying San Francisco public school system, working a part-time job in the best delicatessen in the city.

  Of course there’s a Zora backstory to this. Mama shopped at Petrini Plaza for years. It had the best meat department after the Crystal Palace on Market closed, and she was very careful to buy only the best. The store was in a neighborhood, near the old Lowell High School, that had seen better days. Wealthy society ladies drove in from Pacific Heights, but the neighborhood women were either poor blacks or immigrants, and the mix created an amazing synchronicity. The more steaks and roasts one group bought, the more offal—brains, kidneys, hearts, tripe, tongues, pancreas (sweetbreads), and other innards—there were to be gotten rid of. These items, which I mostly detested, were the beloved ingredients of Mama’s favorite dishes. And the butchers would basically give them away. She was such a regular that both Sasha and I were eventually given jobs in the delicatessen—Maison Gourmet. Sasha decided stringing raw chickens in a cooler was not for him, but I worked the front counter until I graduated from college. I was hired before I was fifteen, paid illegally as “supplies” until my sixteenth birthday, and on that day joined Butcher’s Union Local 101. Since Sundays led to double pay at union rates, I made more on an hourly basis there than I did in my first professional job after graduating from one of the best universities in the country. I can still probably find that union card somewhere.

  I received a scholarship to college through the Ford Fund because my father was employed at Philco, an engineering company that Ford bought. I studied math at Berkeley in the late 1960s, to the accompaniment of the Free Speech Movement, People’s Park, and Vietnam War protests. My parents, like most people fleeing communism, voted staunchly conservative and Berkeley in the 1960s was the antithesis of everything they believed in. But for me, it embodied a key step in my ongoing fight for self-determination, and it propelled me far away from my roots in the San Francisco Russian community. My fierce independence continued unabated, and I always worked two or three jobs and lived on my own, so I had no financial obligations to my family and no one could criticize what I did or how I thought. At least I could choose not to listen when they insisted on doing so.

  I graduated from Berkeley while on strike in 1970, outraged that the United States had bombed Cambodia. The entire math department protested, and our graduation ceremony was actually cancelled. Interestingly, by the time the ceremony was reenacted for us, in 1990, I was a business executive serving on an advisory board of the college. Somehow protest had morphed into success.

  “The Greg” and I broke up just weeks before our planned wedding, shortly after my college graduation. Instead, I moved on to a successful career in the computer business, which was just getting rolling in those days. I lived in France for a few years, them moved to Minnesota for an irresistible promotion. While spending the next decade in the Midwest, I took enough time out in California to earn a graduate degree from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. I also met my future husband, Harold, who had also attended the Stanford GSB, and had moved to Minnesota after he finished. With our marriage, I gained two stepchildren who fortunately got along better with me than I had with my own mother at their age.

  By the time Harold and I married, my family was wondering whether I would ever marry, and had given up all hope of a Russian. A Yugoslav man had never been a possibility since I had never known any. And although I had spent my youth dreaming of acquiring a simple, American last name with my marriage, by its arrival date that dream had gone stale, and I loved my exotic labeling. Harold didn’t see any reason to give up Hahn, but I did in the end change my name, becoming Tania rather than Tatiana on our marriage certificate.

  Harold treated my parents gently and confidently.
He loved their stories of exile and reconnection, their crazy parties and their singing, the three kisses everyone exchanged at Easter, the fabulous food. And he adored my mother, and eventually somehow helped the two of us learn to get along.

  When my father stopped working, instead of traveling around the world as my mother always dreamed, he continued his lifelong passion of fishing. He reclaimed an old boat and with his inbred ability to repair anything that had a motor, got it in shape. He sailed from San Francisco Bay, with his brother Shura as a fishing buddy, when the salmon were running, and retained access to the Russian River for his old time favorites—the carp that I detested. Upon his retirement from his final job—having again risen to the position of engineer as he had been in Yugoslavia all those years before—his colleagues awarded him a cartoon image of himself, cigarette leaning as precariously as the small boat, hauling in a big one. Shortly after, I heard there was a picture in the San Francisco Chronicle of him at Fisherman’s Wharf with the catch of the day—a six-foot-tall sturgeon. Since I only spoke to my father in Russian, I mistakenly translated osetrina to a six-foot flounder, to Harold’s astonishment at the thought of this marvel.

  And then, one morning at dawn, as Tolya was quietly putting on his shoes to sneak out to go fishing, Zora heard a gasp. A few hours later, at age seventy and a week after a physical examination that found him healthy, he died of a heart attack.

  It was 1987, and Harold and I were trekking in the remote Himalayas of Northern India, in Kashmir and Ladakh, and didn’t hear of Papa’s passing until we arrived in Delhi, long after his funeral. We returned to San Francisco to find my strong Mama had become a frail old woman whose hair had started turning grey overnight. This was not the outgoing woman I had grown up with. I couldn’t come to grips with this horrible transformation, with the grief that wouldn’t heal.