After Love

by Subhash Jaireth

  He looked away. The silence that followed extinguished any hope I might have had of continuing our conversation. When a moment or two later he turned again to look at me and smile, I noticed that he was really ready to cry. He took his glasses off and tried to clean them with his handkerchief.

  Then he put them on again and looked around, as if searching for Aunty Olga, his angel of a sister, to console him. He needs a hug, I thought and that made me both sad and angry.

  A year after the trip to Saratov I moved back to Moscow to finish high school. Now it was Aunty Olga’s turn to shuttle between Kiev and Moscow. Initially she was apprehensive about my decision, because she wasn’t sure how easily Papa, her dear Leynya, would adjust to my presence. But when I told her more about our trip together, she relaxed.

  It didn’t take Papa and me long to get used to one another. We both loved music and, whenever we could, we played together, he on the piano or saxophone and I on my cello, improvising jazz tunes or classical compositions.

  I didn’t enjoy my final year at school. My history teacher started picking on me, mercilessly criticising my reading and writing. She didn’t like my project work and never missed a chance to laugh at my serious devotion to my music.

  I didn’t say anything to Aunty Olga, scared that she would confront the teacher and make life even more difficult for me.

  One Friday evening in the winter of 1966, I felt the urge to rummage again through Mama’s suitcases. The night before, I had been woken by a strange dream. During the lunch break at school next day, I found a desk in a secluded corner and sat down to record the dream in my diary. However, as I began to write I realised that the dream had lost the vivid details which had besieged my imagination.

  Fortunately my friend Vera saw me in the library and asked if I wanted to go to her place. Her parents lived in a large well-furnished and comfortable apartment, because her father, an Armenian from Yerevan, held an important position in the Party branch of the Hammer and Sickle Factory. Vera loved chess and her coach, a celebrated Grandmaster, was convinced that he could make a world champion out of her. Vera, however, had other ideas. She was beautiful, with soft tanned skin, beautiful deep-set brown eyes and thick dark hair. She wanted to be a model.

  We sat for a while in her room turning the pages of East German and Finnish fashion magazines, and then Vera opened her mother’s wardrobe, pulled out some fabulous dresses, turned on some music and staged an impromptu show.

  There was a mauve summer dress of Chinese silk, light and soft, that made my heart jump. Vera noticed my reaction. ‘You like it, don’t you?’ she said and handed me the dress to try on. I refused. Vera insisted but I again said no. ‘Take it with you, silly, and try it on at home.’ She flicked the dress over to me. ‘And don’t worry about Mama. She won’t notice. She’s into diamonds these days.’

  I took the dress home. Aunty Olga had gone to spend the night with an old friend who was ill. I read her note on the kitchen table, heated up the dinner she had left me and sat eating and thinking about the two dresses, the one Vera had given me and my mother’s. I had put both of them on my bed, side by side.

  They looked so different. Was it because of the material, cotton against opulent Chinese silk, or the dots? The silk dress had tiny embroidered flowers all over it. I first put on my mother’s dress and then slipped into Vera’s. It felt so smooth and sensuous. I loved the way it caressed my body but I also wanted to get rid of it, as if its touch were contagious, as if by being in the dress I was about to betray Tonya.

  But I was sure that Mama would have liked it, and that she would have looked wonderful in it. I took it off and put on her spotted dress again. Aunty Olga had been right; the dress now fitted me well, as if it had been waiting for me to grow up a bit, and as if the sole purpose of my growing up was to be able to fit into it.

  I wore it for a while, and hung the silk dress in the wardrobe, where I avoided looking at it.

  The suitcase from which I had taken Mama’s dress remained open. The two leather straps which held the top together had broken, causing it to fall open and reveal a small pocket with a half-open zip. I noticed that something was stopping it closing. I stuck my hand in to remove the object and found a piece of glossy paper. I pulled it out. It was a passport-sized black-and-white photo, the upper left corner ripped from being stuck in the zip.

  I took the photo to the table, switched on the lamp and studied it. I turned it over and read the words neatly written on the back: ‘To dearest Tonya’, and underneath, ‘Paolo Prezzolini, March 1949’.

  Quickly I returned to the bundles of old photos in the suitcase. Suddenly the face in the passport photo, the face of Paolo Prezzolini, was everywhere. In one photo he was impersonating Il Duce, standing beside a pathetic-looking Fuhrer. The ‘partisan’ woman, tucked between the two and holding a gun, was Tonya. This must be one of Tonya’s agitprop shows, I thought. Paolo must have been an actor.

  There he was in another photo holding skis and smiling at my mother. She had her skis on, and was ready to move. In another photo I found the two dancing in a club, surrounded by other couples. Paolo held her close, his left hand on her waist and the right a little lower. Her head was pressed against his chest.

  I liked the next photo: in it Tonya is wearing the spotted dress, lying on her side, her head resting on her right arm. Through the v-shaped window formed by her elbow and her body peeps a bouquet of wildflowers. My mother’s legs are bent and her dress has slid up to expose her lacy petticoat. But it’s her feet, small, delicate and spotless, that catch my eye. I wanted to touch them, the feet of my dead mother.

  In the picture Paolo is sitting with his right hand resting on her hip. His left leg is bent and the right stretched against Tonya’s back. He is looking straight at the camera. It must have been a glorious summer day.

  ‘Who took this photo?’ I wondered. ‘Who else was there with them?’ And suddenly the world outside the photo came alive. The question broke the spell that the presence of Tonya and Paolo together in the pictures had created.

  I felt angry. Why were they together, Tonya and this Paolo, who looked so excruciatingly charming? Why didn’t I notice him before?

  Who was he?

  Questions rushed into my head. I went back to look at his picture more carefully. And that’s when I began to notice the similarities. I had always known that I looked different from Papa and Tonya, although if I tried hard I could detect a bit of Tonya’s nose in mine. Paolo’s face was so familiar: the forehead, the eyebrows and, strangely, the ears.

  ‘And guess what,’ I whispered to myself, ‘I smile the way the devil smiles. Is he my father then?’ I wasn’t really surprised. Now it all seemed so obvious.

  I opened my notebook and jotted down a few dates: my birth, Papa’s exile, Tonya’s death in the accident, Papa’s return. Of course I wasn’t absolutely certain. My hunch needed corroboration. Corroboration, from whom? From Papa and Aunty Olga? Why should they tell me the truth now? In fact why should I believe anything they told me? Hadn’t their silence implicated them? Implicated them in what? Perhaps they didn’t tell me anything about Paolo because there wasn’t anything to tell.

  Perhaps Papa was indeed my real birth father. But what if he wasn’t and I was the daughter of this devilish Italian?

  At that point the phone rang.

  It was Papa calling from Sverdlovsk. I didn’t tell him what I’d found that evening. To all his questions my answers were short: yes, no, I don’t know, that’s good, OK, right. He noticed my monosyllabic responses and asked if I was all right. ‘Sort of,’ was my brief reply. He asked me to go to his favourite second-hand bookshop and get some books for a friend who was working on the history of mining in the Urals. He asked if Aunty Olga had gone to stay with her sick friend. He soon hung up.

  I slept badly that night. The following morning I packed a bag and boarded an early morning suburban train to our dacha in Prudkino. Before I went I left two notes on the kitchen table, one ea
ch for Papa and Aunty Olga. I also left some photos of Paolo and Tonya.

  With me I took my cello, my one and only soul mate.

  I spent the whole of December and most of January 1967 at the dacha. Initially I did very little but gradually I willed myself to establish a daily routine. I played my cello, went for walks, wrote my diary, visited a woman in the neighbourhood who wove cotton and woollen wall-hangings, and spent time with Sergei who lived across the street. We had known each other for many years but had until then never really talked.

  Papa came to see me two days after I arrived. I was pleased to see him but couldn’t bring myself to discuss our situation. He understood why and didn’t torment me with questions or explanations. Instead he helped me chop wood for the stove and the fire. Before he left he gave me money for groceries. When I went to the station to say goodbye I felt sorry for him as I watched him go. He looked old and fragile and his limp was accentuated, as if from the weight of the sadness that had suddenly confronted us. He was frightened, he confessed later, that he would lose me forever.

  Before boarding the train he hugged me. I surrendered myself to the hug, his sloppy kiss and his ‘Please look after yourself.’

  Aunty Olga came to see me three days later. She was upset and didn’t say much for several hours. Her red eyes and puffy wrinkled face showed that she had been crying. When I asked her about her sick friend, she snapped that it was none of my business. Then she added that her friend had died three days ago and that she had come straight from the funeral. I hugged her. She didn’t resist and we hugged and cried, and cried and hugged.

  Soon some of the missing parts of my mother’s story followed. Aunty Olga stressed that she had never really discussed ‘these unfortunate events’ in any detail with Papa, and that she was telling me her own version of ‘the tragedy’.

  Did she hate Tonya for ‘getting into trouble’? My mother had starting going out with Paolo a few months before Papa’s arrest and exile. Paolo, the son of a locksmith from a village near Turin, had arrived in Moscow to attend the Party school. During the War he had been active in the Underground, and after the fall of Mussolini been sent to Moscow to train as an agitprop artist. He was handsome, lively and, most of all, made Tonya laugh. He was so different from the serious, always cautious, strangely burdened and irrevocably scarred Leynya.

  Tonya was smitten. There were few who could have resisted Paolo’s charm, said Aunty Olga, and perhaps that’s why the affair didn’t last. ‘I knew he wouldn’t be faithful. He didn’t know how to be loyal.’

  So did she try to discourage the relationship?

  ‘He returned to Italy a month before you were born,’ she continued. He had begged Tonya to go with him, but she wouldn’t.

  ‘Stupid Italian!’ Aunty Olga was angry. ‘Flew in like a whirlwind and ruined everything.’

  I wondered if Paolo knew about me. Why not? He certainly should have. He made my mother pregnant, didn’t he? And she must have told him. But perhaps she didn’t. She was proud, wasn’t she? She would have done her best to pretend that he wasn’t my father. She had her reliable Leynya in whom to take refuge, to hide behind.

  I felt so sad for Papa and Tonya. For Paolo Prezzolini I didn’t feel anything but indignation and contempt.

  How could my mother let this happen to her? Was it because the love she had for Papa was flawed from the beginning, doomed? Is it true that the seeds of our failures are planted in us at our birth; that the potential for disaster exists in all of us; that we live our lives fighting our demons; and that happiness is nothing but a temporary deferment of the final calamity? During that long cold winter of 1967, I remained alone at the dacha, slowly finding a way through my turmoil. Papa visited me every weekend, and Aunty Olga tried to spend as much time there as possible.

  By the time I returned to my room in Moscow, I had found a kind of balance. Still, the thought that my appearance in this troubled world had come about through some sort of a betrayal often distressed me. Of course I knew, and Aunty Olga repeated several times, that only time and my capacity to believe in the basic goodness of people would eventually help me live through this ordeal.

  I waited for Papa to tell me his side of the story. I knew he would eventually and didn’t want to rush him. The questions I needed him to answer were simple: Did he ever meet Paolo, and if so, why didn’t he protect Tonya from him? Why didn’t he fight for her? Why didn’t he fight for himself?

  Then one day after we had been playing together Papa, still at the piano, told me that he had never doubted I was his daughter.

  ‘But look at me,’ I said. ‘I look like him.’ He ignored this with a dismissive meaningless. What mattered most, according to him, was the voice inside him which told him that I was his daughter.

  He smiled and although I sensed that he wasn’t telling the truth, I believed him because that’s what I always did.

  Uncle Triple K

  Vasu

  Anna came to my room to help me translate a Russian article on Roman architecture and, seeing a photo of Uncle Triple K on my table, asked who he was. My father’s younger brother, I said. Both friends and foes called him Uncle Triple K. For his friends he was Kamrade Krishan Kakkar and his enemies used the insulting Kamrade Kana Kakkar. Kakkar was his surname and Krishan Lal his given name, often shortened to Kishnu, KL, Kisna or even Lalu.

  Kana in Hindi means one-eyed.

  Uncle Triple K was a Communist. I don’t know if he ever actually joined the Party but everyone in the family knew that he was close to its members. This was odd, because my father hated Communists with a vengeance. He hated them because they didn’t believe in gods or religion and he hated them even more because they wanted to make rich people like him poor and (he claimed) the poor even poorer.

  My grandmother used to call my uncle Kishnu and he was her favourite. Perhaps that’s why my father and grandfather let him stay on in the large family home.

  My uncle was the third child in the family of four children, small by Indian standards. My father was the first-born, the chosen one. My proud grandfather used to call him ghar ka chirag (the shining light of the family). Next in line was my Aunty Shanti, the invisible one. She was as quiet as a little mouse and did whatever was asked of her without fussing or fighting back. Her younger sister Radha was fiery and appropriately known as Phuljhari, the sparkler. She knew her value and didn’t hide from anyone that she was the Queen Bee of the family. Together she and my father ruled the household. To disobey them was not only unwise but dangerous.

  Uncle Triple K and Aunty Shanti were treated as outcasts. My aunt was given away in marriage as soon as she finished high school, and moved to live in Chandigarh. There she gave birth to four children in quick succession, which won praise from her in-laws because all four turned out to be strong and healthy boys. Her father-in-law pre-planned everything. Now he would have a doctor, a lawyer, a railway engineer and a businessman in the family. In his view this was the essential combination for success in any Indian family.

  Once Uncle Triple K realised that my father was going to be the sole inheritor of the family business, he began to concentrate on his studies. He did well at high school, won a scholarship to a good college in Delhi, and completed a PhD in French Literature and Philosophy.

  While at university he rented a small apartment in Kamala Nagar, a crowded suburb not far from the campus. It was on the second floor of a block next to a big shopping centre, and had two small rooms and a kitchen. One room contained a wooden bed, a chair and desk on which sat an old Remington typewriter. This was my uncle’s study where I used to spend most time with him. The other smaller room was occupied by Mala Didi, my uncle’s friend and secretary. To accommodate the visitors who frequently arrived, most without prior notice, the wooden bed was removed to the hallway to make room for mattresses and dharis.

  These visitors came from all over India. An old fisherman arrived once or twice every year from a village at the southern tip of the country, after tr
avelling thousands of kilometres on foot, and in buses and trains. He was spare and short and had pitch-black skin, but what used to fascinate me was his white-as-snow beard. We used to call him ‘the sadhujee from Kanayakumari’. He would tell me stories of the sea: the storms and the sacrifices the fishermen made on nights of the full moon to appease the angry monsters living in the dark depths.

  Another frequent visitor was a young doctor from the coalmining town of Dhandbad. He brought patients with him and sought Uncle Triple K’s help with finding doctors and hospital beds. I still remember a three-year-old girl, who came with him one day. Her face was swollen from a ghastly tumour in her right eye. The doctors were able to remove the tumour but made a mistake with the blood group for her transfusion. She died an hour after the operation.

  Visitors came to the apartment even when my uncle was away. They stayed for a few days, did whatever business they had in Delhi, then went home, soon replaced by new arrivals. Mala Didi looked after them. She was tall and thin and always kept herself busy doing something that seemed important. I liked being with her and often helped her with chores.

  She loved listening to music and songs on the radio, but I never heard her sing or hum anything herself. Although she looked after my uncle’s visitors well, most found her dull and severe. This was a misreading of her character because I knew she was kind and often forgiving. What made people withdraw in her presence was the sadness which used to cloud her lovely face.

  The secret of her eternal sadness was accidentally revealed to me by Jijee-ma, my older sister. Mala Didi, she told me, was born in Peshawar, seven years before the 1947 Partition of India, into a rich family of drapers and tailors who were forced to leave Pakistan as refugees. One night at the border of newly-independent India, the train was stopped and attacked by an angry mob. Mala Didi’s whole family was butchered in the train.

  One day just after my fourteenth birthday, Uncle Triple K took me to the tiny village of Rampur, a hundred or so kilometres north of Delhi. He wanted to show me the brick kilns and let me meet the workers, some of whom he said were even younger than I was.