After Love

by Subhash Jaireth

Vasu told me that he knew very little about his mother. Just like me.

  There is a drawing in one of the scrapbooks I kept as a child. In the right-hand corner is my name and underneath the name of my school and the date. I called the drawing My Mama. The woman stands near a window looking out; her face is turned, strangely, away from the viewer. Outside is a small round hill covered in snow, bright in the sunlight. The drawing is in just four colours.

  I was five when I drew it. Papa was surprised by my view but for Aunty Olga the reason was obvious. ‘You were too young to know her face,’ she said. She was right. Our family album did contain a few photos of my mother but they didn’t mean much to me. Her presence in them was largely formal, as was her absence in my real life. I had been told that she died in an accident. This was thought enough for me to know.

  One night in August, a few months before my sixteenth birthday, I took three large family albums to my room and spent hours looking at them. I wasn’t sure why. Just curious, I would have told anyone who asked, but it wasn’t as straightforward as that.

  I was disappointed that the albums contained only a handful of pictures of my mother. A few days later Aunty Olga showed me an old suitcase packed with bundles of loose photos. I pulled them out but most of them were so yellow with age it was impossible to see anything clearly in them.

  I did, however, find photos that I liked. I put them aside to look at again. Papa knew a professional photographer who worked with the newspaper Izvestia. He made me some large prints. The process, Papa explained to me, wasn’t simple: the photographer had first obtained a contact negative of the photos on an emulsion plate and then used this to print the enlargements, carefully controlling the exposure time.

  One evening after dinner I asked Papa and Aunty Olga to tell me more about these four. Aunty Olga couldn’t tell me much. Papa, on the other hand, seemed to remember everything about them.

  Photo 1: Winter, 1948, Kuntsevo. My mother, Tonya, was then twenty-seven. This photo was taken a day after her birthday and I can’t see her face clearly. That day she wore a dark olive-green coat and matching hat. It had snowed for two days, Papa told me. One of his friends had a dacha and had invited them to spend a few days skiing. The photo was taken late in the afternoon when the snow had stopped falling and the sky was clear, revealing a sun weak as the light of a torch. My mother is standing shadowed, a dark figure silhouetted against the endless white of the snow.

  Photo 2: Autumn, 1949, Tsvetnoi Boulevard. My mother is sitting on a bench, smiling and wearing a pale blouse and a long striped skirt under a light autumn coat, unbuttoned. She holds an ice-cream in her right hand. Papa says that everyone then was suffering from the severe shortage of food. What they received on the ration card was meagre, although his wartime injury meant that he got a bit more than others. But even then one could go to Gorky Street and get cones and cups of delicious ice-cream. In the photo the light is bright, with leaves, mostly maple, scattered across the bench, the grass and the gravel path. My mother’s hair is gathered into a ponytail and tied with a ribbon. I still can’t see her face clearly.

  Photo 3: Summer, 1950, Soboleva. My mother was born in this village, about fifty kilometres south of Leningrad, near a stream that froze in winter. She stands near the gate of a small wooden cottage, her right arm resting on it, her left touching her stomach. She is wearing a spotted summer dress with thin straps. Her hair has grown and is straight and smooth. She seems to have put on weight, but her arms are thin, and her skin appears silky soft. She doesn’t look like a village girl. Was she? ‘No,’ Papa says, ‘she was an actor working in agitprop.’ Under her left hand I spot a bulge. So is she pregnant? ‘Is she?’ I ask Papa. When he nods, I say: ‘So that’s me in her belly?’ ‘Yes, you silly girl,’ he replies.

  Photo 4: Winter, 1949, A Studio on Kuznetsky Most, Moscow. At last I can see her face clearly. She is so beautiful. Her face is small and a perfect oval. Her hair is cut short and curled. She is wearing lipstick and I see that her lower lip is sensuously fleshy. Her nose turns up slightly. But Papa’s face lights up when he talks about her eyes. They were large and brown below neatly-curved eyebrows, he says. She is wearing a blouse with a frilled collar, short sleeves and a square neckline. Aunty Olga remarks that she looked very like Tatiana Samoilova, the actress who not only played the lead of a sexy, faithless woman in The Cranes are Flying but also won the prized role of Anna Karenina in the 1967 film. Aunty Olga is right. So why I am so plain and ugly? The only feature we share is our nose. ‘Is she really my mother?’ I ask. ‘Of course,’ Papa laughs.

  I don’t believe him.

  One evening after I returned home from my cello lesson, Aunty Olga called me into her room to show me what she had found. From an old suitcase she took a light cotton dress. I knew at once what it was: the summer dress my pregnant mother had worn in the photo. Instinctively I tried to find out if it still smelt of her. Of course it didn’t because it had been washed and dried and ironed since she had worn it.

  I went into my room, put on the dress and looked into the mirror. ‘A bit big for me, don’t you think?’ I asked, turning to Aunty Olga. She agreed. The dress was loose not only because I was fifteen but also because Tonya had worn it during her pregnancy.

  It took me a few months to ask Aunty Olga if it were true that my mother had been killed in an accident. I surprised myself. Until then I had been content to believe what I had been told. But in the previous few months a feeling of desolation mixed with a faint heartache, strangely more soothing than painful, had begun to grow inside me. Perhaps the photos of my mother were now starting to speak to me. My longing to touch and hug the woman in the photo had become incredibly real and urgent. I suppose it wasn’t a good idea to sleep the whole night in the dress. I should have put it straight back in the suitcase.

  Early one morning Aunty Olga asked me to go into the city with her. We took the red Sokolniki Metro, then walked along Teatralny Lane for a few minutes, passing on the way the Malai Theatre. At Dzherzhinsky Square we turned right and crossed the street to reach the imposing Polytechnical Museum building. On the street near the bus stop, Aunty Olga stopped to indicate a spot near a lamppost. ‘Right here Anna, my darling, Tonya was hit by a truck.’

  There was hardly any traffic on the street and the bus stop was deserted except for an old woman who sat with a white cat on her lap, patiently waiting.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ Aunty Olga said. She asked me to run to the café across the street and get her a glass of water. When I returned I found her sitting on the kerb leaning against the lamppost. I gave her the water, patted her arm and sat down with her. The old woman’s white cat looked at us and purred. ‘Shush,’ her mistress said, slapping her cat.

  After a while we got up, went across to the museum and found a bench to sit on. Gradually the traffic on the streets increased, as did the people around us. Buses came, stopped and drove away as if nothing extraordinary had ever happened here. A short plump women wearing a white apron arrived with her vending machine and a small group formed around her. She was selling pirozhki, talking loudly the whole time. Another woman, almost a copy of the first, came to sell sweet white coffee in small paper cups.

  I asked Aunty Olga if she wanted some refreshing coffee. She suggested we wait for the ice-cream woman, who appeared on cue, as if she had been waiting for Aunty Olga’s command. We bought two cones of chocolate ice-cream and sat down again on the bench. A young man with a tired face spread a tarpaulin on the ground a few metres away and began laying out books. ‘It’s going to be a wonderful day,’ he muttered.

  It was indeed turning into a beautiful summer day, with not a scrap of cloud in the sky and the light so bright it would soon hurt our eyes. Suddenly an image flashed before me: my mother standing at the gate in the dress, her hand resting on her swollen belly, caressing it.

  Aunty Olga began to whisper as if talking to herself. ‘One late afternoon in November, Tonya came out of the Malai Theatre after watching a rehea
rsal of a play in which one of her friends had a small part. She walked along the lane, the same one we came along, turned right and stepped into the street to cross to the Polytechnical Museum. She was going to a talk by one of our leading scientists on the origins of life. She was already in the middle of the road when she saw the bus speeding towards her. She ran to avoid it but failed to see an army truck coming from the other direction. It was snowing, the road was slippery and it was hard to see. The young truck driver slammed on the brakes and his vehicle slid, lifted Tonya off the ground and hurled her against the lamppost near the bus stop. She died at once, said the young militiaman who came to tell us what had happened.’

  ‘Where was I?’ I asked

  ‘With me at home,’ replied Aunty Olga.

  ‘And Papa?’

  ‘In Siberia.’

  ‘You didn’t tell him?’

  ‘Of course I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know where he was. It took time. Everything took time then. You had to wait, be patient and hope against all hope. Hope was the reason, the only consolation to live, to survive—’

  At home that afternoon, we made a pot of tea and sat in the kitchen sipping it, still talking in low voices. Even at home it seemed inappropriate to talk loudly, as if mere words would shatter the memory, scattering slivers and shards everywhere.

  After a while, Aunty Olga went and got a small leather bag from which she took a piece of paper, Tonya’s death certificate, and a short clipping from the Trud newspaper, 28 November 1952. I read the certificate and the cutting carefully and noted the date in my diary.

  My mother had been cremated the following day and her ashes scattered in the stream near the cottage in Soboleva.

  ‘Vot i vsyo (That’s all). What else is there to say?’ Aunty Olga got up and went to her room. She didn’t come out until the following morning.

  The following week when Papa returned from his field trip, he gave me two suitcases full of my mother’s things. I put them under my bed, after I took out a few keepsakes: a necklace, an Uzbek scarf, the remains of a lipstick, a hand-mirror and a songbook.

  In autumn the year after Aunty Olga had shown me the place where Tonya, my mama, had died in an accident, Papa and I went to Saratov to visit the village where he and Aunty Olga had been born. She didn’t come with us. ‘Bad timing,’ she explained, ‘I’m going to do the Pushkin walks around Leningrad. But don’t forget to visit Grandfather Karl, and remember to bring me a pot of blackberry jam and some honey.’

  We boarded the boat in Moscow and sailed down the River Volga to Astrakhan, the Caspian port town where the river flows into the sea. It took us seven days to reach Volgagrad, where we ended the journey. We would return to Moscow by train. Papa had wanted us to go to Astrakhan ‘to taste the juicy melons’ but in Volgagrad I came down with nasty flu.

  Our days were spent visiting towns and villages, while the boat moved on at night. Papa had brought his Zenith camera with a whole set of different lenses, and he showed me how to take perfect photos. At first I enjoyed taking them but soon became bored. ‘Don’t you like the camera?’ he asked. ‘I prefer my own eyes,’ I replied. When he pressed me I explained that my disenchantment was related to the photos in the family albums. At first they had seemed so real and my need so urgent that I couldn’t stop looking at them. But slowly they had lost their magic, as if an Ali Baba had cast a spell and a door to them had swung shut.

  I enjoyed being close to Papa and talking to him. We discussed how much he loved jazz, and he told me all about the book he had been working on for many years but which he was certain he would never finish. He asked about my school, my teachers and what I wanted to do with my life. I was most interested in history, I told him, especially the history of ancient nomads.

  He told me about our Volga and how it would be hard to imagine Russia without the great river. The name Volga had been given by the Finno-Ugric people who had settled the areas upstream. The word Volga had several meanings: white, light, wet, humid, long, big and calm. The ancient Greeks who used to trade along the river called it Ra. For the Maris the river was Yul, for the Chuvash Atal, and for the Tatars and the Bashkirs Idel.

  ‘Do you miss Mama?’ I remember asking him. Once this question had been posed we both knew that the rest of the conversation would focus on avoiding the subject.

  ‘Yes of course,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot then,’ he added after a pause, ‘but not so much now.’

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘What sort of question is that? Naturally. What do you think? I do even now, in a strange sort of way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We spent only a few years together, remember – just three or four. Then you were born and I was whisked away and—’

  ‘And?’

  ‘When I returned she was already dead.’

  ‘Did you write to her?’

  ‘I did, but most of the letters never reached her. They were confiscated, I think, and destroyed.’

  ‘Were you angry? Are you still angry?’ I realised that I had never seen him angry.

  ‘Angry,’ he mused. ‘Perhaps I was. But anger cripples, you know. It just makes life more difficult to endure. You know that Tonya was a Communist, an agitprop comrade. She was driven. She wanted to change the world, make it better for the poor and the downtrodden.’ He gave me a little smile. ‘You know, the usual words, so commonly used and so meaningless.’

  ‘It’s nice to see you angry, even just a little,’ I said. ‘Was it very hard in the camp?’ When he didn’t reply, I quickly added: ‘Of course it must have been.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a camp. In a way I was free, though not free enough to travel across the Urals. I was ordered to keep quiet and do whatever I was told, so that’s what I did.’

  Papa and I spent two days in Saratov. On the first we caught a bus and travelled to Komarovka, a kolkhoz village less than forty kilometres north. It didn’t take long to find the grave of Grandfather Karl who, like his son, had worked as a foreman in a ceramics factory manufacturing tiles and pottery.

  The untidy state of the cemetery didn’t upset Papa. He had expected it. The cottage in which he and Aunty Olga were born had been destroyed in the War, like most others in the street. In their place stood a large farmyard and a workshop with trucks, tractors and bulldozers parked outside.

  Papa knew the place where the cottage must have stood and guided me to it. It had stood near the present fence, looking down over a stream and fields of grassy tussocks. A power line now ran past the farmyard, across the stream and through the fields, four sagging wires stretched between wooden poles. Ravens sat on the wires, swinging slowly and steadily in the wind, as if silently contemplating their next short clumsy flight.

  A tractor was driven out of the yard by a young woman in a red scarf who waved to us. All the ravens flew off except one tiny leftover, who kept on swinging.

  Papa drew for me a sketch of the street and the cottage as it had been: a wooden house with a sloping tiled roof, a chimney and small windows, with a well out the back.

  ‘There used to be two apple trees not far from the well,’ he said. ‘One of them would flower every year but never bore any fruit, while the other was always heavy with apples. My grandmother looked after a row of beehives and taught Olga and me to collect honey. Our honey smelt of apples.’

  ‘Some of those grassy mounds,’ he said, pointing across the stream, ‘are the kurgans, the ancient burial mounds. Ploughing the fields we often used to uncover ancient coins and pottery shards, which I would collect. I’ve still got some of them at home in Moscow.’

  ‘So is it true that our family are Germans—I mean, Germans from the Volga?’ I abruptly asked.

  I knew that we were: Eisner, our family name; our love of classical music; the old German editions of Goethe, Hölderlin and Rilke on the bookshelves; the ancient maps of German cities like Hamburg, Berlin and Stuttgart; the German hymnbooks; and the etchings and the engravings of castles a
nd churches.

  So why had I asked? I suppose it was because I wanted to hear it from Papa himself.

  We were in the bus travelling to the village. The sun was descending, splashing the sky with colours. The jovial driver chatted loudly with an old lady in the seat next to him. Apart from her there were only two other passengers: a young woman with a red Pioneer leader’s tie and an old man with a ghastly tennis-ball-sized lump on the side of his head.

  ‘Do I feel German?’ he mused after a few minutes of silence. ‘I don’t know. You should ask Aunty Olga. She’s more worried about these things, although it’s true that I once tried to change our name to Eisnerov. There were many who went right ahead and gave themselves new names. I didn’t, but not because I didn’t consider myself Russian. I think it was the War that finally forced me to think about myself more seriously. The day I went to enlist I discovered the entry in my passport. I was shocked – no, not at the entry, but at my failure to notice it earlier. The entry had been there all the time. Now I don’t mind that there’s a bit of German in me, but somehow it hasn’t made me improve my German or go to Hamburg in search of my forebears. My parents’ grandparents are buried in that cemetery we saw. My journey begins and ends here. Is there any point in going beyond that, searching for the sake of searching? I suppose some people like to and want to, and I’m sure they have their compelling reasons—’ ‘And what about Tonya, my mother?’

  He didn’t reply straight away. I guess he didn’t know how to react to the way I used to say Mama’s name: ‘Tonya’ followed by ‘my mother’, the two separated by a punctuation mark: the first to open a gap and the second to throw a bridge across it.

  ‘Your mother,’ he replied, ‘was more Russian than any Russian I’ve ever met – which is strange, because her father was a Hungarian Jew from a village near Budapest. Her mother came from a prosperous family of Ukrainian Cossacks. They lived in a village near Rostov-on-Don.’ He gave me a big grin. ‘Now there’s a reason for you to travel and see the world.’