Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  Everyone was silent. I felt injustice in these accusations. And suddenly, to my own surprise, I spoke out.

  “Why does our country have no chewing gum?”

  “Our country doesn’t have a lot of things,” Mum replied. “But that doesn’t mean you have to lose human dignity.”

  I didn’t forget that.

  As headmistress, Mum was the school’s representative of that prison system, and she had it hard. I know she shielded and saved the skins of many. Trying to do whatever possible, she rendered unto Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, and Pushkin unto the children. For several generations Pushkin was a secret code, the key to the preservation of the human in this bedevilled country. By then many already believed that the worse things were, the better, the sooner everything would go to pieces, but those like her strived to endow an inhuman existence with humanity. There was no saving her own skin, though—she got what was coming to her, and then some.

  By the time I was seventeen our relationship had deteriorated to the extent that I’d stopped talking to her. Completely. We lived in the same flat but I wouldn’t even say hello to her. I couldn’t forgive her being a Party member, nor our having to write essays on Virgin Lands and Malaya Zemlya3 at school. I thought that the struggle against the odious system must be waged without compromise—starting with yourself, your family, those closest to you. I wanted to live not by lies,4 but I didn’t understand then that I wasn’t a hero, I was just a little brat. My silence, too, I think, shortened her life.

  Now, no sooner have I written that I’d stopped talking to Mum than I sense that I’ve not written the whole truth, and have ended up lying as a result.

  Yes, I never even said hello to her, but not only because I’d read The Kolyma Tales and The Gulag Archipelago,5 which had inexplicably ended up in my possession around that time and changed much in my youthful conception of the world. Of course not. The conflict arose because of my first love. Mum didn’t like that girl. She didn’t like her at all.

  At school she was the all-powerful headmistress, she could quell an inexperienced teacher’s unruly class with a single glance, but at home, in her relationship with her own son, she turned out to be completely helpless. Of course the mother wished her son well. But she didn’t know how to do him good. And of course Mum was totally right about that girl. But I realised that only later.

  Disaster struck at Mum’s school when Andropov came to power. No one knew he was already mortally ill. Once again everyone got frightened of their own fear.

  The seniors wanted to organise an evening dedicated to the memory of Vysotsky. Mum’s colleagues tried to dissuade her, but she authorized it. The evening went ahead. The kids sang his songs, recited his poems, listened to his recordings. Someone informed on the headmistress.

  The school got an exemplary slap on the wrist to teach others a lesson.

  I’d already moved out by then. I remember how I came home and Mum told me how she’d been summoned, boorishly spoken to, yelled at. She tried to defend herself, to explain. No one was going to listen to her.

  She wanted to live out her life without losing human dignity. For that she got absolutely trampled.

  For the first time, I think, Mum burst into tears in front of me. I didn’t know what to say, I just sat beside her and stroked her on the shoulder.

  Suddenly I wanted to ask her forgiveness for not having spoken to her for almost a whole year, but I never did.

  Mum got kicked out of work, a blow from which she would never recover. School was her whole life.

  She fell seriously ill. First her heart. Then cancer. So began the hospitals, the operations.

  By then I was working at a school myself, at the no. 444 on Pervomaiskaya Street, and after lessons I’d go and see her. I spent hours in the hospital ward, doing my marking, fetching Mum something to drink, giving her the bedpan, reading her the paper, cutting her nails, just being close by. It we spoke at all, it was of trivialities. Or rather, of what seemed important then, but now, so many years on, seems unimportant. I kept meaning to ask her forgiveness, but somehow I never managed to.

  Later I described it all in The Taking of Izmail: her neighbour in the hospital who, bald from chemotherapy, never took off her beret, which made her look like a caricature of an artist; how bits of her nails, grown long on her gnarled toes, would fly all over the ward when I clumsily attempted to cut them; how I brought in some boards for her bed, because Mum couldn’t get to sleep on its caved-in wire frame.

  The novel, written a few years after Mum’s death, took its rise from Russian literature, containing as it does many quotations, associations and interweaving plot threads, but by the end I was simply describing what was going on in my own life. From the complex to the simple. From the literary and the learned to Mum’s foam-filled bra, which she wore after they cut off her breasts. From Old-Slavonic centos to her quiet death, which she so longed for to release her from the pain.

  There were a great many people at her funeral: teachers with whom she’d worked, former pupils. She’d accumulated a lot of pupils over the years. Only through your own life can you truly teach anything of any significance.

  I was stunned to see her lying in the coffin with an Orthodox chaplet on her forehead. I don’t know where it came from, Mum was anything but a church person. She was a completely sincere non-believer. That’s how she’d been brought up. So when I was born she didn’t want me christened. And not because she feared repercussions—at the beginning of sixty-one, when Stalin still lay in the Mausoleum, she was the school’s Party organiser. She just genuinely couldn’t understand: what would be the point? Grandma had me christened on the sly at the church in Udelnaya, where we spent the summer at our dacha.

  Even as a child, it was clear to me that church was a place for uneducated grannies, like my own, with three years of parochial school under her belt.

  Later I thought that the old go to church because they fear death more than the young. And I didn’t yet know that, on the contrary, it is the young who have the greater fear.

  It was only after Mum passed away that I sensed acutely how essential it is for close people to engage in one all-important conversation. Usually that conversation gets put off—it isn’t easy to start talking about the things that matter most over breakfast or somewhere in the metro. Something always gets in the way. I needed to ask Mum for forgiveness, but in all those years I never did manage to. When I began writing The Taking of Izmail, I thought it a novel about history, about the nation, about destiny, about the word, but it turned out to be that very conversation.

  Most likely, such a conversation cannot take place during life in any case. It’s vital that it should come about, but what matter whether it happens before or after the end? The important thing is that she heard me and forgave me.

  Between operations, during the time she had away from the hospitals, Mum would sort out her lifetime’s worth of photographs. She asked me to buy some albums and glued the photos into them, annotating each one with the names of the people it featured, and sometimes she’d write stories associated with these people into the margins. The result was a family archive—for the grandchildren.

  After her death I took the albums over to mine. And when I was leaving for Switzerland, I left them all with my brother. The albums were stored in his house near Moscow.

  The house was burnt down. All our photographs were destroyed.

  All I have left is a handful of childhood snaps.

  One of them, a picture of me, was taken, probably by my father, while we were still living in Presnia, though we moved to Matveyeskaya that same year. I’m in year four. I’m wearing an overcoat with a half-belt that’s out of the camera’s view. I remember that overcoat perfectly—it was a hand-me-down from my brother. I had to wear all his hand-me-downs. But here’s why the overcoat has stuck in my mind. Mum would often tell this story. It’s very short.

  To get to school from Matveyevskaya we’d take the no. 77 bus to Dorogomilovskaya
Street, where we changed to an Arbat-bound trolleybus, or alternatively we could take the same bus in the other direction to the railway station, and then on to Kievsky Station. That morning we went to the station. The first snow had fallen during the night. Thousands of feet had trampled the platform into a skating rink. When the train pulled in everyone dashed for the doors. You had to storm the already overflowing carriages, squeeze yourself into the jam-packed vestibules. Between the edge of the platform and the door was an enormous gap. I slipped and was about to fall headlong into it. Thankfully, Mum held me back by the half-belt.

  That, essentially, is the whole story—nothing extraordinary. But this incident held such significance for Mum that she continued to recall it even on the eve of death. She’d smile and whisper just audibly—she’d lost her voice by then, and could only whisper:

  “I’m pulling you by the half-belt and all I can think is, what if it snaps?”

  Maidenhair, written in Zurich and Rome, also actually took its rise from Mum, or more precisely from her diary, which she gave me before her last operation. A thick oilskin notebook, its yellowed pages covered with pencil notes—written not, I may add, in the “clinical” hand I was used to, but in a cosier, more girlish one. Mum began it when she was in her final year of school and continued writing in it for several years as a student. This was the end of the forties and the very beginning of the fifties.

  I remember her telling me about the persecution of the “cosmopolites” in her institute, during which its best professors disappeared. But there’s no mention of that in the notebook. It’s a most ordinary girl’s diary: yearning for someone to love, she listens anxiously to her heart—has the feeling already come over her, is it the real thing? And it radiates a great deal of happiness. From books she’d read, from girlfriends, from the sun outside the window, from the rain. Its pages are awash with the unthinking youthful confidence that life will give you more than you asked of it.

  It contains no traces of the fear that had gripped the country. As if there were no denunciations, no camps, no arrests, no queues, no penury.

  I read it then and marvelled at the naivety of that blind girl who could not see what she had fallen into.

  That girl was born into a prison nation, into darkness, yet she still looked upon her life as a gift, as an opportunity to realise herself in love, to give love, to share her happiness with the world.

  When I found out that Mum’s diary, too, had perished in the fire, I felt its continued grip on me. And at some point I realised: no, this was not the naivety and folly of a silly young girl who had failed to understand what was going on around her, this was the wisdom of the one who has sent, does send and always shall send girls into this world, no matter what hell we’ve turned it into.

  The world around is cold and dark, but into it has been sent a girl so that, candle-like, she might illuminate the all-pervasive human darkness with her need for love.

  Mum loved to sing, but knew she had no voice, and felt embarrassed. She’d sing when there was no one to hear her. Most often she sang what she used to listen to as a child. One of her favourite singers was Izabella Yurieva. My father had some old recordings of her romances, and would often put them on when we were still living together in the basement on Starokonyushenny Lane and in Presnia.

  I was convinced then that all these voices from old records belonged to people long since dead. Stalin and Ivan the Terrible were much of a muchness to me—the distant past. Then it suddenly transpired that Izabella Yurieva was still alive, her records started being re-released and she began making television appearances. You could even go and see her at the House of Actors. I never did get to meet her while she was still alive.

  When the singer died, I was staggered to learn that she’d lived a hundred years—she was born in 1899 and died in 2000—the entire monstrous, accursed Russian twentieth century.

  I wanted to write about what I had felt and understood thanks to Mum’s diary. I started writing about Bella. The result was Maidenhair.

  Little of the singer’s life remains—there are no diaries, no memoirs, leaving us with no more than a spare outline of her life story. In those years people were afraid of their own past—it was impossible to tell what might later put you in mortal danger. Danger might spring from any source: past meetings, things said, letters. People would destroy their past, would strive to rid themselves of it.

  I wanted to restore her obliterated life to her. I began writing her reminiscences and diaries.

  As far as possible, it was important for me not to fabricate anything. For example, I would pick out real-life accounts from the memoirs of people living in pre-revolutionary Rostov, restoring to my Bella her actual teachers at the Bilinskaya Gymnasium in Khakhladzhev House on Taganrog Prospect, the clerk in the Joseph Pokorny stationary shop on Sadovaya Street, where she bought her exercise books and quills, and that gymnasium porter who, having read “Kholstomer,” bequeathed his skeleton to an anatomical cabinet.

  Detail by detail, I restored her vanished life history to her.

  She never did anything but sing—like that grasshopper from the fable. Only in real life the survival of the ants building that Babelian ant-hill up to the heavens and turning into camp dust depended no less on her singing than on supplies for the winter. She was the proverbial candle that illuminated, however faintly, their darkness. She sang to the slaves about love. She helped them preserve human dignity.

  I was eager to restore her life to her, if only in a book—and there’s no other way in any case.

  Of course, much in the life of Izabella Yurieva wasn’t the same as in my Bella’s.

  But I know that when she and I finally meet, Izabella Danilovna shall forgive me and say:

  “Don’t worry yourself! Everything’s fine. Thank you kindly!”

  And now I return to the rest home on the Volga, where the woods are full of wild strawberries and everyone is still alive.

  I see images from that time:

  The herringbone brick path leading to the canteen.

  The defiled nearby forest, strewn with scraps of paper, bottles, greasy newspapers.

  The Volga in a downpour, white with frothy foam, as if there’s laundry being done.

  We’ve been mushroom picking in the faraway forest and are taking the track homewards, but our eyes still can’t stop searching, and rove about the track verges.

  And now, having gone for a morning swim in the Volga, Mum and I are coming back to our little house. We walk barefoot over the wet moss, dew seeping up between our toes. We climb the porch steps, already warmed through by the sun, and Mum draws my attention to our rapidly disappearing tracks:

  “See, I’m flatfooted!”

  Our room on a hot day: mushroom dampness, the curtains are held together by a pin, the wallpaper’s curling and bulging, and Mum closes the creaky cabinet door, sticking a piece of cardboard into the crack so it doesn’t open.

  And now I see the boozer in the nearest town—Uncle Vitya’s popped in for just a moment, and there we stand, Mum and I, waiting a good half hour for him in the heat, and still he won’t come out.

  I kept waiting for Uncle Vitya to ask me about Dad, but he never did, right up until the very last moment.

  The night before we left I woke up with the thought that someday Mum would die. I lay there in the darkness and listened to her puffing in her sleep, snoring herself awake, then, after much tossing and turning, puffing away once again. I remember this acute sense of pity which wouldn’t let me get back to sleep. It was strange somehow—she lay there in the bed next to mine, very much alive, and at the same time it was like she’d already died. Also, I really needed the loo. The houses had no toilets. During the day you had to go to a rather unpleasant establishment that stank to high heaven of chlorine, but at night I’d just find a spot somewhere near the porch.

  I got up quietly and went out, carefully closing the door behind me.

  Damp, mist, cold night air. The cusp of daybreak. />
  I stopped at the nearest bush. Steam rose from the stream.

  And suddenly something happened to me. As if I’d stepped from the unreal into the real. As if, like a lens twisted into focus, all my senses had been sharpened. As if the whole world around me had donned my skin, chilled in the August morning frost.

  I looked around and couldn’t understand what was going on: after all, I’d passed by this spot on so many occasions—and took notice of nothing; but now I saw, as if for the first time, that honeysuckle bush, and this rowanberry tree, and the towel forgotten on the washing line.

  In the silence, sounds came forth from the mist: the distant hum of a motorboat on the river, the barking of dogs from the village on the far shore, the anxious call of a night bird, the whistle of a train at the station. Hoarse profanities floated in from the main road, accompanied by a girl’s drunken guffaws.

  And I heard myself breathing, heard my lungs gulping in life.

  Suddenly I felt that I was no longer by a bush amidst the mist, but amidst the universe. No: I was the universe. That was the first time I experienced this remarkable sensation. And this was not only an anticipation of all my life to come. For the first time everything fused together, became a single whole. The smoke from an unseen bonfire and the wet rustling in the grass under my feet. Dad, who’d died no death, and Uncle Vitya, who’d asked no questions. What was and what would be.

  Everything is still unnamed, nonverbal, because words for this do not exist.

  And the Volga courses somewhere close by, swashing in the mist, but flows into no Caspian Sea.

  And Mum died and yet lives still. She lies in her coffin with an Orthodox paper chaplet on her forehead, puffing away in her sleep in that rest home.

  And everything melts into one: the half-belt overcoat, and Bobby Clarke’s toothless grin, and Robert Walser’s snowdrift, and that rickety 77 that never made it to Dorogomilovskaya Street, forcing us to splash our way through the puddles. And so, typing these words on my notebook, do I. As does the I now reading this line.