We decided to go and spend the night in the open in our favourite spot, near Evans Lookout. We often go there to sleep in the company of stars. Mama pinches a bottle or two of wine from Milos’ precious cellar, and I fill the thermos with strong coffee. We sit up singing and playing the guitar.
That night we sat for a while leaning against the metal fence and watching the darkness creep up on us. The night was raven black; the tiny sickle moon dim against the glorious stars. They were slow to appear but once they decided that it was their night, they flooded the sky with such abundance that my heart ached with joy.
Then I heard Mama crying, quietly as she always does. I didn’t stop her. I wanted to hug her but I didn’t. ‘Let her cry,’ I said to myself. ‘She needs to let it all out. It will help her relax.’ That sounds silly, doesn’t it? But crying always seems to calm her down.
While I was waiting I started strumming on the guitar. Finally she looked up at me, smiling her lovely sad smile. I suddenly wanted to give her a big sloppy kiss. That was unexpected!
‘In the photo he looks like a boy,’ I said. ‘Does he still look like that?’
‘I bet he does,’ Mama replied. Overhead we heard a possum moving in a tree. She picked up the guitar, strummed it, and began to sing. It was her favourite song, about her lovely Staryi Arbat, an old part of Moscow.
‘She’ll never give up these corny songs,’ I thought to myself.
Soon, as usual, she asked me to join in.
‘Davai vmeste,’ she said and waited for me to begin. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the stars, the melody and her beautiful voice. We sang together, in perfect harmony.
‘Feels good, doesn’t it?’ she said after we finished. I knew that my dear lovely Mama was pining for her Russian home.
Mama once showed me a photo of a little girl with a ponytail sitting on the back of a wooden bench, leaning against a woman. ‘I was three then,’ she said pointing at the girl, ‘and that’s Tonya, my mother.’ Babushka Olga is touching Mama’s tiny shoulder.
Grandpa Leynya must have taken the photo. I have another picture, also taken by Grandpa, of me when I was three. I’m sitting in a boat on the lake in Gorky Park. Babushka Olga is beside me, holding me tight with her arm. Mama sits opposite, oars raised to row. The colour in the photo is fainter than it must have been on that beautiful autumn day.
It’s strange that I remember so little about my early childhood, spent shuttling between Moscow and Sydney. I do remember the stench of vomit on those long flights, all stuffy cabins and turbulence. I remember new schools and new friends and my vain attempts to create Rusinglish, a strange mixture of Russian and English words. I also remember Babushka Olga’s sweet buttery kasha and Grandpa’s nighttime stories.
But most of all I remember how lonely I felt. I was always missing someone. Mama would bring me to Moscow and leave me with Babushka Olga, returning to Sydney after a week or ten days. A few months later she would reappear to take me back to Australia, forcing me to leave Babushka behind.
I miss Babushka, my Olga from the Volga. She should have come to Australia and lived with us. We aren’t rich but we could have looked after her. It was hard for her to live in Moscow without Grandpa Leynya.
Mama laughs when she hears me pronounce the word ‘Leynya’. She thinks I talk like Babushka Olga. Do I?
Babushka Olga died alone in the Yasenovo apartment with no one except her Bogomateri watching over her. By the time we arrived she was already in her coffin ready for the crematorium. That time we stayed in Moscow for ten days, sorting out her things and finding a lodger for the apartment. ‘Who’s this young man? I asked Mama as we sorted through Babushka Olga’s things. She was looking hard at a small black-and-white photo of a spunky young man she had found in one of Babushka’s many handbags.
‘Misha Schubert, the violinist,’ mama replied. ‘He and Babushka went to the same music school and used to perform together. They were engaged to be married, but the War came and changed everything. Misha volunteered, was sent to fight at Stalingrad and was killed by a sniper and buried in a mass grave. That was it for Babushka Olga. She had some flings but never found another love. That’s why she didn’t marry. She committed her life to her little brother Leynya instead, and to me, his motherless child.’
‘We are truly strange creatures.’ These are Papa’s words, not mine. I would have said that we’re just human: sad and pathetic but often incredibly beautiful.
I met Papa for the first time at Babushka’s funeral in Moscow. Mama hadn’t known he was coming and didn’t hide her disapproval. She hadn’t realised that Babushka Olga had summoned him once she knew that she would soon die.
My fourteenth birthday was a week after the funeral. It was a very quiet day. In the evening we went to see Viktyuk’s production of Lolita at the Mossovet Theatre. Papa came with us and didn’t say much, but he had a happy smile on his face all through the performance.
‘Papa is very quiet, isn’t he?’ I said to Mama. This was a big mistake. She kept going on about it. She really hates him.
When I am with him on my own I call him ‘V’ instead of Papa. The letter ‘V’ stands for my middle name. For an Indian it must be hard to be called ‘V’ and not Papa – but really, he isn’t very Indian any more. He’ll get used to it.
It’s winter in Moscow now, dark and cold. The river will be frozen and the fish curled up in the water underneath. The humpy hills and the valleys in between will be covered in snow and horses will move gingerly, lingering to let out puddles of warm yellow piss that freezes straight away into knotty, beady strings. The cedar trees above have a strange oily, musky smell, and in dreams I sometimes imagine myself on a branch turned into a brown squirrel.
When I tell Mama about such dreams she laughs and says that in her dreams of being a squirrel she used to be on the look-out for handsome owls. How bizarre!
I found out about Vasu, my real Papa three years ago. Mama thought I’d be upset, even furious. But no. I didn’t cry, not for a minute. For a few days I felt numb and sort of lost, a black feather floating in the cold misty air. Yes, that’s right: floating without purpose. But right after she told me I just gave her a kiss and a hug and went for a long walk with my Walkman.
‘You are so much like your Papa,’ she told me a few days later. The resentment in her voice was sharp. Is it really my fault if I’ve turned out to be like him?
A few years before I found out about Papa, Mama got herself Milos, whose house we’ve been living in for the last six years. I knew this would happen eventually. I was just surprised that it took so long. Mama refers to him as ‘Milos, the wealthy Czech from Prague’. He’s a sculptor and while he works, Mama plays for him on her cello. She used to model for him too. To keep him interested – or at least that’s what she told me.
Milos wanted me to sit for him too – but nothing doing. I could see how desperate he was: the way he would look at me when Mama wasn’t around, walking up and standing too close, as if trying to smell me. He was like a hungry horny beast.
Now he doesn’t do that. Perhaps Mama has said something to him.
‘He’s a creep,’ says my friend Mandy. Perhaps he tried it with her, too. She said she was going to ask her older brother to teach him a lesson. I had to ask her to stop coming to our house. She didn’t, which was good. I don’t know what I would do without her. She’s my only real mate.
But now she’s in Perth with her father, who like Grandpa is a geophysicist with a mining company. Mandy tells me that her father knows about Grandpa and his work and has read most of his books and papers. Amazing or what? Bloody marvellous!
‘We need Milos,’ Mama often tells me. Of course she wants to convince me that she isn’t just interested in his money. I have decided that she probably isn’t lying. But why does she allow Milos to be so rude and offensive? Yes, he does speak Russian and we like the sound of Russian around us, but surely this isn’t enough to let him walk all over us. I wouldn’t put up with it. No way!
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br /> And why can’t Mama find herself a proper job? She’s so clever with all her degrees and qualifications, and she plays the cello like a professional. I wish she would stop pretending to be weak.
I remember how we watched the crowds in the streets and the reports of the coup in Moscow on the telly. Mama was terrified.
‘I’m worried about Babushka,’ she finally said. ‘I hope she hasn’t gone out to the barricades.’ We searched for her among the crowds. We couldn’t see her, but Mama did recognise some others. ‘Shurik,’ she mumbled. ‘I knew he’d be there.’ Then she saw Yasya and someone else.
She tried to get a copy of the tape from SBS, where she works occasionally doing subtitling. She knows a lot of the weirdos there, people like us. But she couldn’t get the tape. She even asked Milos to help, but for once he couldn’t pull any strings.
When we phoned Babushka after the coup she sounded fine, just a bit cranky, most probably from the pain in her knees and in her crook hip.
‘Why don’t you come over here and stay with us?’ I asked her.
‘I can’t,’ she replied. ‘I want to, but I can’t. It’s too far, my darling, too far.’
‘Slava Bogu (Thank God), the coup failed,’ she said on the phone. ‘Slava Bogu, the people walked away from the precipice and Slava Bogu, it ended without violence and bloodshed.’
Slava Bogu …. Slava Bogu …. I like the way these words sound.
‘My dear Maia/Maya,’ my Papa starts his letter and then asks me which way I spell my name. ‘If it is Maia I would assume that you are named after Maia Plisetskaya, the famous ballerina at the Bolshoi.’ He goes on to describe the ballet Anna Karenina, whose première he went to with Mama and Grandpa.
I’m planning to surprise him by letting him know that I have read the novel in Russian and that I didn’t like it. I didn’t like War and Peace either. Too many words. I like Chekhov more and enjoy Kuprin too, but my favourite is Leskov and his Lady Macbeth of Mtzensk. I doubt if he would agree with me, but I don’t care. I don’t have to please him. If he doesn’t like me, too bad. He’ll have to accept me as I am.
‘But if your name is spelt Maya, let me tell you that my mother’s name, your other grandmother’s, was Mayavati. It was often shortened to Maya.’ He writes that his mother died giving birth to him and that he was brought up by his older sister whom he used to call Jijee-ma. The word ‘ma’ means mother in Hindi, he says.
It was a fairly long letter and a bit all over the place, as if he were trying to defer the main point. Right at the end he made it.
‘I am thrilled to know about you, and I am so grateful to Aunty Olga for giving me your photo and address. Slava Bogu. May God bless her kind soul and may He bless your Mama and you.’
Slava Bogu. Those magical words.
A fortnight later came the phone call. I was expecting it. He had already warned me in the letter. He talked for a few minutes with Mama and then asked for me. For a man with such a boyish face he has a deep, throaty voice. I was amazed that I couldn’t detect any tension or unease in it.
‘That’s what he’s like,’ Mama said afterwards. ‘Always balanced and in control. It often scared me, that discipline of his.’
Papa and I talked mostly in English with only a few words and phrases in Russian. He apologised for his Russian being rusty. In Canada or India he rarely had the chance to talk to anyone in the language.
His first letter contained a bank draft for a thousand dollars, which was great. Mama and I had never had that much money at once. We were pleased but uneasy and didn’t cash the draft for a few weeks. Slowly, however, we got used to the cheques arriving each month and I started believing that I deserved them, that I needed to be looked after.
From then on I received something from him every week: letters, photos, drawings, books, little gifts like cassettes and scarves, and bigger ones such as shoes and even an elaborately embroidered Indian dress. But in my letters to him he still remained ‘Dear V’.
He called once a fortnight at the same time, often from different places. By then I knew that he travelled a lot. He once tried to phone me from Sydney Airport, but I was away on a school trip. During an Easter break he rang from Auckland. I would have loved to hop on a plane and meet him, but he didn’t invite me.
‘He would never ask,’ Mama told me, ‘not because he doesn’t want you to come and stay. No, he just doesn’t know how to say it. He’s waiting for you to ask. It’s not pride, not at all. He’s always loved children and I know he’s over the moon to have found you. He just doesn’t want to show that he needs you. He’s always been like that, keeping his feelings under lock and key. He’ll never pressure you to accept him. He’ll just go on waiting for you to ask and then do everything in his power to make you happy. He’s a stoic, like Grandpa Leynya.’
After Babushka Olga’s funeral he invited me to stay with him in Toronto. ‘Not alone. Your Mama can come too. The house is big and for most of the time it’s empty.’
Although I felt sorry for him, I said no. I didn’t want to leave Mama alone and I was pretty sure that she wouldn’t come.
‘I need more time to think,’ I told him.
‘Don’t you feel lonely?’ I remember asking Mama once.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘Who doesn’t? Even when you’re in love you can feel lonely, left out. To love someone isn’t easy. Often you have to pay a price and it can be high. Then you start looking for an excuse, any excuse, to escape. But escaping doesn’t set you free. You’re trapped by your own failure. That’s when you begin to appreciate the pleasure of being alone.
‘There is a word Toska in Russian. I don’t know the English translation but I remember one of Chekhov’s stories called Toska. One dark wintry evening in St Petersburg a coachman tries to tell his passengers about the death of his young son. But no one gives a damn about his loss, he soon realises. He whispers instead to a tired horse happily munching rotten oats from a bag hung round his neck. Snow falls, the horses move wearily forward, bells ring, the footmen shout, and an old woman slips and collapses. No one comes to help her either. That’s not in the story; I just imagined it.
‘Loneliness is bliss when you want to be alone but a curse when it’s thrust upon you. That’s when you feel abandoned, like Chekhov’s coachman.’
I wrote down this conversation with Mama in my diary. I miss her and although I’m in India with Papa, I feel lonely without her. I had asked Mandy and her boyfriend Patrick to come with me. We enjoy travelling together. Mandy is strong and very daring whereas Patrick makes us laugh, keeping our spirits up. They’ve gone to Bangalore and will spend a fortnight in South India. Then I’ll catch up with them in Jaipur and we’ll make a short trip across the desert, returning to Delhi to fly back home.
The long trek through Bhutan exhausted me. I’m still suffering from diarrhoea and a sore throat. A young girl called Malati, only a couple of years older than me, looks after me here in Delhi. She complains when I try to help her with the housework.
‘Your job is to give orders, little memsahib,’ she tells me, ‘and mine to follow.’ I enjoy being pampered but feel ashamed to be waited on by her all the time. She tells me that Papa usually lives by himself in this big house, calling on her only when he has guests. But she knows that I’m not a guest. She must realise that I’m his daughter. What puzzles her is my inability to speak Hindi. When I explain to her that I was born in Australia and that my mother comes from Russia, this confuses her even more. She laughs when I refuse to sit in a rickshaw and be pulled by old men, and disapproves when I give money to each and every beggar on the street.
‘It’s not right,’ she scolds me. ‘You’re spoiling them.’
I’ve travelled with Papa and met some great people. We went across the Siwaliks to the Doon Valley and then up to Mussoorie in the mountains. We spent three days walking and trekking.
Papa took me to a village where he has started a new project. The idea is to build ecologically sustainable houses f
or sugarcane farmers. The two main problems are no cheap fuel and no water you can drink. If the fuel isn’t cheap enough, they chop down trees. The alternative is to use dried cakes of cow dung. They’re free, but the acrid smoke in the little huts with no windows causes problems. So Dr Sharma, one of Papa’s colleagues at the University, has designed a new type of stove. It uses briquettes made of dried leaves. They burn really well and provide more heat.
‘Local technology for local problems,’ he said. He’s right. He’s also experimenting with a portable solar cooker which looks like an overhead projector and costs only a few hundred rupees.
At home Malati uses the same sort of cooker to make boiled rice and kidney beans. It’s dead simple. Two separate pots with rice and beans are placed in the cooker at around eight in the morning and by noon they are nicely cooked. Dr Sharma is convinced that cooking like this can reduce the use of electricity or gas by up to twenty-five percent.
He showed me some brochures. They’re too simple to attract buyers outside India. Here the cookers will sell well. They would also be great in Australia where the summers are long and sunny. But can we Australians be bothered? We laze around and go to the beach, consume a lot and waste even more.
In India, according to Papa, the main problem is water. Most of the water the villagers use is straight out of the river. Even after boiling, it’s not completely safe to drink. Sinking tube wells is the only solution. But the water from them is often contaminated with arsenic.
Papa has found a guitar for me in one of the shops in Mussoorie and I’ve written two new songs. One of them is about a little girl I often see in the park outside. She sits on the brick fence and watches kids her age play hopscotch. Her right leg is twisted from the polio she suffered as a child.
The other song is about Mama. Do I miss her? It seems I do. I used to think I could live happily without her around. Not true. My freedom from her lasted only five days. Of course I don’t miss her whining and whingeing, her endless pestering me to do this or that, but I do like her being around. I miss her voice and the way she walks, swiftly and softly.
After Love Page 21